this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2023
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Ever since the History channel only showed bullshit and create a more superstitious audience I really do believe promoting superstitions and expanding folk cults around crypthid, ghost, psychic, and promoting worldviews of supernatural over the natural prevents people from understanding the world and isolating them from the levers of power. Believing in impossibly strong governments and impossible to understand enemies leaves the working class dis-empowered and afraid. This effectively creates mass psychosis among the populous. Spree shooters are reacting to their loss of privilege and how they are misinformed that an individual with a gun killing people can somehow liberate the world from some impossible enemy. Actual gun violence only reinforces the horror and encourages people to disengage from knowing what is going on.
I suspect the US government is funding or subsidizing this psyop, but it could very well be the institutions of capitalism finding a way to scare people as a marketing ploy. But why would the government not try to make a profitable market to consolidate their power? It's self funding!
That also helps to make sense of why many of these superstitions (not just History Channel bs but alt medicine, new age spirituality, and the like) so often lead into far right political spaces. It's just another way to divide the working classes, and make money off people while they're at it. Lots of people go into these places very angry with "the system" and their lot in life, so it also heads off a lot of revolutionary potential.
What I find most interesting, or maybe ironic, is how (according to the oft quoted Caliban and the Witch) the ruling class at the dawn of capitalism used the which hunt around the Renaissance/enlightenment period to eradicate all of this type of superstition, magic, and folk knowledge. At that time such knowledge had exactly the opposite potential it does now, namely undermine the power of a bourgeoisie state to exploit the nascent working classes and force people to go along with the newfound scientific method of understanding, controlling, and shaping the world.