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Can We Escape Social Conditioning?
(left, Peter Offerman dropped out of school at age 14 and worked as a forest lookout.)
There is no collective salvation, Peter Offerman suggests.
Individuals can find liberation only by detaching from the herd.
“Building friendships takes time and effort and becoming your own
friend is no exception. Most of us never get the
opportunity to do
this.“
By Peter Offerman
(henrymakow.com)
At
68, I am getting on in years. I have lived a full life and have had
the time to reflect. My life has been exceptional because social conditioning
did not incapacitate me nearly as much as most people.
The
most destructive conditioning takes place in our schools, during our formative years when we are most vulnerable.
I quit school in Grade Nine at age 14. I felt I was being made dumber instead of smarter. My
parent’s response was, “if you don’t go to school we will not
support you.” I left home then and took responsibility for my
own life.
I
first spent a few years hoboing around Canada taking whatever work I
could find whenever I needed it. No job was too menial or too
challenging to accept.
At
17, I took on a job that turned my life around and led to my
shedding my conditioning.
This
job was as a fire lookout man with the British Columbia Forest Service. I worked and lived on remote
mountain tops by myself for four months each year. Spending that
much time completely alone, especially
during my youth had a profound effect on my perceptions
about life as a human being and how I fit into society….
Substantial
time on the lookout, without peer pressure, made me realize how
confining trying to fit into the crowd is. Most people don’t even
sense this pressure because it’s all they know. It’s like the air
we breathe. It’s just there until it isn’t, then we die; unless
we are prepared for an airless environment.
Most
people also don’t realize how much of their time and energy it
takes to be ‘social’. However being removed from ‘socializing’ is
enormously stressful if it is all you know.
Many
aspiring lookout men needed to come down off the mountains
prematurely because they could not stand being alone. Those that
adjusted to the isolation came to treasure the freedom of having just their own company. The
amount of time that becomes available for other more
worthwhile pursuits is substantial.
Building friendships takes time and effort and becoming your own
friend is no exception. Most of us never get the opportunity to do
this.
Our controllers understand that people who are
not comfortable with themselves are much easier to control because they are lonely and seek comfort and
friendship outside themselves.
Virtually
every sales campaign is designed to sell you a bill of goods
by convincing you that their product is going to become
your best friend.
While
we are thrust into the middle of intense relationships, the rest of the world passes us by unnoticed. We see the trees,
but are oblivious of the forest.
On
a lookout, becoming focused on each tree individually is
not productive and makes it impossible to see the whole picture. A
good lookout man scans vast vistas
without focusing on anything in particular. Taking this approach to
finding required data points, such as suspicious smoke, allows our
intuition to come to our aid. It always amazes me how glaringly
anomalies stand out when using this method.
It
works just as well in any other environment, including researching on
the internet. When surrounded by questionable ‘news/propaganda’
the fires stick out much more obviously when we also are aware of the
apparently unrelated surrounding information that is part of
webscape.
The ‘trees’ of propaganda do not distract us from
seeing the whole situation. If there’s no smoke, there probably
isn’t a fire. Our intuition can see the difference even though we
logically can’t. Following our intuition instead of remaining
focused on the propaganda leads us to the information that will then
allow us to make sense of the situation.
CONDITIONING
In school, the opposite takes place. We
are ruthlessly regimented to follow orders so that we become incapable of thinking for ourselves and become dependent on
the ‘boss’ to do our thinking for us.
If we cannot
think for ourselves, and only understand part of the puzzle (compartmentalization), we are
trapped and dependent on others.
I
have personally met a number of world class intellectuals who
are extremely brilliant in their own field, but figuratively can’t
tie their own shoe laces. This situation is not accidental. If only
the boss has the full picture, the boss becomes the only one who can
act effectively. Everyone else then becomes totally dependent on the
Boss. Specialization has its place, but having a well rounded toolkit
of life skills is essential to individual freedom.
Although
my prognosis of our situation appears very gloomy I am not
pessimistic. I see light at the end of the tunnel.
——
Peter Offerman’s web site is www.TwoIceFloes.com
Related – Makow – Escape the Hive Mind
Source: http://henrymakow.com/2014/04/Can-We-Escape-Social-Conditioning.html
