You need to be ignorant to accept lies the State offers

Death worship is easily the biggest danger of our times. Almost without exception across the globe, we are becoming a cultic generation of death worshipers. For, the only assured thing in cults is preparedness for self-destruction, for the sake of the cult and its leadership. We are the dead. We of the 21st Century. Ruling over us are the gods of death. This is to say deities that rule over those who are dead, rather than gods who determine who should die, or when.

Ours is an increasingly xenophobic world full of fakery, falsity and in love with wooly materialism. Accordingly, the entire global community is easy prey to the gods of death. The starting point is a crossroads of the material appetite and the moment of death. The god of death, who is also the collector of the dead, arrives at this point. He connives to lie to you that the reason your appetite cannot be fed is a “camp” of outsiders. You must learn to passionately hate that camp, even as this god “walks you to salvation.”

The god of death kills all that is good and humane. Truth is the first casualty. We must kill truth and change the belief system. You believe only in what the god of death wants you to believe. In a sense, your faculty of questioning things dies concurrently with grasp of the truth. With this, the person who lives within you is dead. What is left is a walking and eating corpse. You have reached the stage where George Orwell tells us in Nineteen-Eighty-Four, “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.”

War is peace. Having a shared enemy brings about unity of purpose among us. We are, accordingly, at peace within the group. All that remains, to keep this peace going, is to be permanently at war with the common enemy. From the United States to Kenya, the world happily embraces terrible contradictions, because of intra-group harmony against “outsiders.”

Political leaders in government and in the Opposition alike have managed to break down the people’s individuality. An individual can’t think for himself. The only thinking that is possible is “group-think.” You cannot see yourself outside the group as a rational being capable of independent decision making. You accept and believe anything and everything they tell you. Hence, today, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) believe every lie that President Donald Trump places on Twitter.

President Trump is the global propagandist-in-chief of our times. He has perfected the art to the extent that those who support him are unshaken by the numerous narratives about him that would otherwise shock rational minds. Whether it is about paying women to keep quiet about sex matters, or whether it is about tax scandals in the family, his relationship with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, or whatever, it simply does not matter. He has got the people where he wants them – they are the dead. Their intellectual, moral and ethical fibers succumbed long ago. They worship death.

The African context is at the extreme, almost as usual with all things bad. We will not read through a draft constitution, “Because Baba has told us it is bad.” We don’t want a constitutional referendum, “Because our leader has told us we don’t need one.” I cannot oppose the handshake, “because our leader has said it is good. If he says run, we run. If he says take cover, we take cover. If he says about turn, we turn.” We can’t say the word “dictator.” We are afraid.

These are the worrying indicators of a global population on the brink of disaster. Everywhere in Europe xenophobia is becoming the order of the day. Ultra-right haters of outsiders are gaining popularity even in counties like Sweden, which have until recently been the closest thing to paradise. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Soon, it should not surprise us to see Ministries of Peace that provoke and oversee wars. Ministries of Truth are already generating and spreading lies and propaganda. They modify history on a daily basis to regulate the “truth” and how people live.

Freedom is slavery. If you elect to operate outside the cult you will be unsuccessful. You will be enslaved to poverty and failure. In the context of what philosophers call commutative logic; if freedom is slavery then slavery is freedom. Accordingly, if you want to be free allow yourself to be a slave. If you want to live allow yourself to be dead. Embrace ignorance.

And ignorance is strength. Some of my university students have shocked me by understanding the word “ignorance” to mean “that act of ignoring” or “refusal to notice,” rather than the correct meaning of “being unaware,” or simply “not knowing.” Yet, even they are right in the context that “ignorance is strength.” You need to operate at an amazing level of ignorance in order to accept the lies and contradictions that the state churns out daily. It is common, therefore, that citizens will avoid watching news on television, or to read newspapers because “they cannot take it anymore.” They find the strength to live on by consciously choosing to ignore, or to remain ignorant, about what is happening.

In the end, we are the dead. The war poet John McRae of “Flanders Fields” fame has told us:

“We are the dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.”

And Orwell’s Winston Smith says, “We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future . . . How far that future may be, there is no knowing.”

We can come around yet, if we will find the strength to know that ignorance is not strength, war is not peace and freedom is not slavery. For now, we are the dead. We worship deities of death in cultic shrines.

-The writer is a strategic public communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke