information
Information, by definition, informs, educates, and ultimately empowers us. As a highly evolved social community, educating ourselves to our full potential would have been an assumed and natural prerequisite for our survival. But that was before the advent of ‘civilisation’, the moment when education and knowledge became the preserve of the privileged.
All hierarchical arrangements can only exist if those who inhabit the upper echelons have exclusive access to essential information and ownership of resources. Maintaining their status is therefore only possible by deliberately denying others the opportunity to be as equally informed as themselves, and to obstruct any prospect of the Earth’s bounty being fairly distributed. As an instrument of control, the suppression of information has been employed for thousands of years, and is the consistent strategy that the ruling elites are contingent upon for their continued position of power.
Religions’ ongoing cultural dominance and influence are achieved by imposing restrictions on people’s exposure to alternative narratives, ensuring they remain ignorant and intellectually repressed, also unconditionally loyal to irrational and puerile beliefs. This dissemination of false information (fake news), and the wilful exclusion of people’s right to benefit from established information, is immoral.
The business of governments is conspired behind tightly closed doors, and well beyond our scrutiny or engagement. The information that we do receive from the authorities is a carefully managed mélange of biased opinions, attention grabbing trivia, unsubstantiated sound bites, sensationalist gossip, and emotive subjective sentiments. These distractions become the substance of our social banter, which is the full extent of our participation in supposedly directing our affairs. This controlled deprivation of information guarantees our ignorance, leaving us vulnerable to being satiated with inane and irrelevant preoccupations. Yet, while we dutifully satisfy that given role, somewhere in our peripheral understanding, we know that we’re being played.
Information should be neither property, nor a weapon, but the foundation on which reason and consensus are built, for the benefit of all.
An obvious, but tragic, feature of many societies is the unchallenged acceptance of patriarchy; an offensive violation of our natural humanity, where men assume control over women’s lives by forcibly denying them the right to an education, along with prohibiting many other accepted liberties. Patriarchy is a euphemism for enslaver, and religions are culpable for instigating and perpetuating this oppression.
Knowledge is power, this is true, but power is also abuse. The bottom line is that we either die together or survive together. The latter necessitates us working together, the former, exploiting one another. We’ve tried exploitation, enslavement, abuse, and control, and it’s literally going to kill us.
Information is our most precious resource, and it should belong to us all. Like we refer to a map, or an instruction manual, we should put all our differences aside, and really start responding to the sum of our collective knowledge.
May 2023
Information is key to our survival. We should take our direction from ideas that are supported with evidence and substance, and which have a coherent objective that is consistent with our betterment.
Our current authorities, be they religious or secular, do not care what happens to us or the future. It is time we relied on information, rather than putting our trust in fairy tales and self-serving megalomaniacs.
