The Socjourn

In this article, I explain why I love sociology so much, and how sociology and its concepts and theories can be used to explain the world in which we live. note, it isHere you will learn about The System, what it is, how it operates, and the damage it has done to the human species. You’ll also read some of my thoughts on human nature and what our true human potential could be, if we got rid of The System and built a better world.

Table of Contents

• Why Sociology
• The Big Picture
• The System
• The Damage
• Summarizing the Damage

Greetings and Welcome

Greetings, my name is Michael. I’m a sociologist and I am here to help us understand the world we live in so we can use that understanding to create a better world, not just for a privileged few who benefit from the exploitation of the masses, but for everyone, regardless of gender, ethnicity, “race,” or whatever superficial characteristics you might use to divide the human species. My tool of choice in this radical and transformative work is sociology.

Why Sociology?

The System

The System is an intentionally designed institutional structure created with the express purpose of enabling the accumulation of labour value. To be specific, the System refers to the legal, political, educational, police/military, and ideological systems tasked with enabling the economic exploitation of the masses.

Before you get into the details, there are some basic resources I’ve developed which you can use to help wrap your head around The System. These include the video Money Moksha, the four-part video Series “Money” and my book Rocket Scientist’s Guide to Money and the economy. Reviewing these resources will help you understand this discussion of The System.

The System itself consists of three “branches” or areas of activity. These include the

Exploitative Techniques, which are the techniques used to extract labour value from the workers. According to Ruyle, these are the “precise instrumentalities through which economic surplus is pumped out of the direct producers: slavery, plunder, tribute, rent, taxation, usury, and various forms of unequal exchange.”

Mechanisms of Force, which are the physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual mechanisms of force used to coerce and enforce compliance of an exploited population. For example, in school and at home, shaming is often used by teachers to force children to act a certain way. In the adult world, jail, the police, and even the military might be used.

Ideological Institutions, which are the “special instruments of… thought control” designed to reduce elite reliance on force by creating a docile and compliant population.

According to Ruyle in his article, The Mode of Production and Mode of Exploitation, the particular form of each of these branches of activity constitutes a particular Regime of Accumulation.

Let us look at each of these in turn, starting with Exploitative Techniques.

Exploitative Techniques

The stock market is never obvious. It is designed to fool most of the people, most of the time. Jesse Livermore 1877 – 1940

Add link to presentation on The System

As Ruyle points out, exploitative techniques are those techniques used by the addicts to extract labour value from the workers. These mechanisms are discussed in the videos and books mentioned above, but it all comes down to a rigged system designed to extract as much of the value from your labour time as possible (if you do not understand this sentence, watch the videos mentioned above). Within this category are the typical mechanisms of exploitation, like slavery, plunder, tribute, and also the more “modern” mechanisms of rent, taxation, usury (lending money with interest), and various forms of unequal labour exchange. To this list, I would also add the stock market which, as Jessie Livermore, one of the respected value thieves of all time admitted, is a rigged system designed to take money from the naive and unsuspecting.

Mechanisms of Force

Watch Michael Jackson’s video for his song They don’t really care about us. What mechanisms of force does he talk about in this video. Who is being targetted by these mechanisms?

Mechanisms of force include the state-sanctioned and controlled methods of violence used to “coerce the exploited population” (Ruyle, p. 12). Mechanisms of force include things like the police, the military, and the legal system, all of which use various forms of violence to control human behaviour.

The following readings give you a view into the mechanisms of force used by addicts to suppress dissent and preserve their power and privilege.

• Donald Trump incites violence and hatred amongst the uneducated and then “aims” them at “liberals” and others who resist the elite agenda. Capital riots: Did Trump’s words at rally incite violence?
  • Note that Trump’s strategy is not new. Richard Nixon and other conservative actors used the War on Drugs to target and jail minority voters who are more likely to vote Democrat than Republican.
• Myanmar security forces kill 33 protestors – The military is called in when necessary to suppress dissent and control the population.

Note that it is not just the police, military, and legal system where we find force applied to enable and maintain The System. As we will see below, the family and the school system also use violence to enforce compliance and reproduce and maintain The System

Ideological Institutions

Ideological institutions are the political, economic, educational, and social institutions developed by elite actors tasked with controlling how people think and act in the world. Ideological institutions include institutions like religion (both in its esoteric and exoteric forms), education, and also corporate-led “mainstream” cultural (Disney, MGM Studios) and news (Fox, Bell Media, etc.) enterprises to control how people think and act in the world.

Do you think the Western Tarot is a tool of spiritual wisdom? Think again. In my article for the Canadian Journal of Sociology entitled The Sociology of Tarot I argue that the tarot is in fact an instrument of ideological manipulation, a propaganda tool used by elites working in an ideological institution (i.e. Freemasonary) to help lubricate the transition from feudalism to Capitalism.

Notice “the wheel.” The wheel here symbolizes The System.

Ideological institutions use various instruments (like the Western Tarot, the modified Bible and or “sacred” books) and practices (like “secret” initiations, methods of behavioural control) to manage and control how we think and act in the world.

Ideological institutions are sophisticated, complicated, and difficult to explicate. This difficulty is compounded by the fact the operation of these institutions is obscured behind a veil of spin and deception. A news organization, for example, will not tell you they are providing concepts and ideas designed to enable and support the Capitalism Regime of Accumulation; they will say they are there to educate and inform. Similarly, an educational system that streams students into working, middle class, professional, and executive streams will not say they are shaping your children to assume certain work roles; they will say they are educating and preparing your children to take a productive place in society.

When it comes to talking about The System, it is easy enough to wrap your head around the exploitative techniques and mechanisms of force System Agents use to maintain and reproduce The System. The nature and function of ideological institutions is much harder to wrap your head around and for this reason, I’ll be talking more about it on its own separate page.

The Damage

The Regime of Accumulation (The System) that burdens us all damages us in profound and as yet poorly understood ways. The damage is multivariate. For example, The System is designed to enrich a few people while impoverishing the many. The impoverishment that many experience causes serious damage to the physical body. It is well established that poverty has serious consequences for the health and wellbeing of those who are victimized by The System. Poor people get sicker more often, have more serious illnesses, and live shorter lives than their privileged and empowered counterparts. The greater incidence of physical illness amongst the poor is related to things like stress, reliance on cheaper processed foods, lack of good information on health-promoting practices, class-based discrimination in social services, and racism.

The modern education system is designed to shape and control

Note, it is not just the fact that The System harms people physically, it also does serious behavioural, psychological, and emotional damage. For example, the primary and secondary education system as we know it today was created and supported not by humanists seeking to create a well-educated citizenry, but by factory owners during the industrial revolution. The new forms of industrial factory production that emerged during the industrial revolution created new types of jobs that required a new type of worker. The purpose of the educational system, as developed and supported by these early industrialists, was to reshape and train children so as to create new generations of workers that would “fit” in and accept the inhuman and exploitative conditions (long hours in routine, low pay jobs away from the home) that characterized industrial workplaces.

The Hollywood movie Les Miserables (the Miserable [working classes])provides a dramatic portrayal of the conditions of the working classes during the Industrial Revolution.

For previous generations, artisans and farmers mostly worked out of their homes and close to their families and communities. They set their own hours and wrote their own rules. Obviously, this sort of independence wouldn’t work in a factory setting. Factory owners needed someone docile and agreeable, someone who would show up on time, sacrifice their independence, follow factory schedules, listen to the managers, take orders from a person they didn’t know, and do the demeaning and fragmented factory and assembly line work that was required of them. People just didn’t give up their traditional lifestyles and step into these exploitative and demeaning relationships. Thus, in order to get people to work in factories, they had to be “reshaped.” Since children still in their formative years are the easiest to shape and train, early industrialists, thinking ahead, used primary and later secondary education to do this. It is interesting to note that this reshaping takes a lot of effort. It takes twelve years of daily indoctrination in the school system to properly shape a child and turn it into a “productive member of society,” that is, a slave willing to grind at the wheel.

Regulation and oppressive routines

How does this control and shaping occur? Through twelve years of repetitive routine, differential treatment, violence, and rigid binary gender socialization.

Part of the reshaping comes in the form of the rules and routines that govern the school day. When you go to school, you do not set your own rules and work your own hours, as families would have done in the past, you follow a schedule, just like a factory or office cubicle. When you go to school you are not mobile throughout your day, working in the home, in the field, on certain trades, in a flexible style, as is natural and proper for children and adults, you sit still and work quietly for long periods, just like in a factory or office cubicle. When you go to school, you do not follow the rules and traditions of your family and community, you follow somebody else’s rules, the rules of “authority,” learning to listen to and respect authority, just like in a factory.

It is not just about the routines that are imposed in school. As Henry Giroux notes, “When you put children into a series of rows and tell them that they cannot talk and that they have to listen to you as teacher, the Hidden Curriculum that is being transmitted is that they do not have the right to talk, that they do not have the right to be part of the way of educating. When a teacher gets up and says that they have the authority in class and that nobody can question that, they are not saying that they are teaching them to be passive and not demand responsibilities of the powers, but that the hidden curriculum is very clear. If you examine what is really being taught there, you see that education is a way of silencing.”

Different strokes for different folks

Pink Floyd’s song “The Machine” is a disturbing portrait of the alienation that occurs when musicians enter “The Machine,” which is the band’s metaphor for a depressive and dehumanizing music industry focussed on money and success, rather than integrity and idealism. This metaphor resonates with us all, since we are all, at one point or another, welcomed into “the machine.” [lyrics]

As indicated, the industrial primary and secondary school system is all about teaching children to fit the routines required by the capitalist workplace. In addition, as Giroux points out, primary and secondary education is about silencing. Over the course of twelve years or so, children are shaped into cogs suitable for insertion into “the machine.” However note, not everybody experiences this shaping and insertion in the same way. As Jean Anyon discovered in her seminal research on the Hidden Curriculum, the income and social class of your parents, where you live, and the type of school you can afford, has a major impact on the type of work you are likely to do.

As Anyon points out, if you go to a working-class school, they shape you into compliant assembly line cogs and teach you how to engage in rote, assembly-line style activities. If you go to a middle-class school, they train you for administrative and middle-management work. It is only if you go to an upper-class school do they train you to be independent and critical thinkers. This practice of training one class of students to do one thing and another class of students to do other things is known as streaming. You don’t always have to go to different schools to do it. My children went to a school that had multiple streams, one for working-class kids, and one for middle-class kids.

The normalization of violence

Recall that one of the “arms” of The System is its use of force, i.e. violence, to control how people think and act. Schools, along with parents, play a critical role here, not only in the normalization of violence, but in the actual application of violence to force children and adolescents to conform to whatever expectations are set out on the table.

When you think about it you can see clearly, schools and families normalize violence of all forms, physical, emotional, psychological, sexual, and spiritual. When violence is normalized, we come to expect and accept it as a “normal” part of life.

Because violence is such a normalized aspect of our lives, it can be very difficult to see just how violent our world is. This “How Toxic is my World” survey helps you think about and assess the level of violence in your life.

The normalization of violence occurs as a consequence of two intersecting trends. On the one hand, violence becomes normalized for us because, as children and adolescents, violence is modelled to us. We see our parents engaged in physical, emotional, psychological, and sometimes sexual violence towards each other, and others; in turn, we are subjected to violence from parents, teachers, and other adults. The violence we witness and are subjected to comes in many forms. When I was a child I was exposed to physical violence (strapping in schools, spankings and whippings at home), psychological and emotional violence (parent and teacher name-calling and shaming), and spiritual violence where I was told the spiritually violent and emotionally and psychologically traumatizing lie that if I did not conform to rules and expectations, I would burn in hell for all eternity. Your experiences may vary, and you may have been trained to downplay the severity of the violence perpetrated by “authorities” during your childhood and adolescence, but almost certainly, you were exposed to chronic violence at the hands of parents, teachers, and other Agents of Socialization. This constant exposure to violence at family, at school, and in the media, normalizes violence.

On the other hand, violence is normalized because parents and teachers euphemize it as “discipline,” downplay its severity, lie about its consequences, and justify its use. Violence, euphemized as “discipline” builds character, we are told. If you “spare the rod” you will “spoil the child,” they say. The violence you experience as a child “toughens you up” and “builds character.” All that violence I experienced as a child “made me what I am today,” we have been trained to say. The end result of all the modelling, the experience, and the euphemization is that violence is normalized. It is all around us, we are subjected to it every day, but we accept it as a normal part of our life.

I have to say, all this violence is not a good thing. As I elaborate in this draft article entitled Toxic Socialization, even single experiences of physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual violence can cause profound damage to your physical unit.

Binary Gender and the intellectual and emotional destruction of humans

Schools and families do a lot of damage to human children. They limit expression, shape behaviour in the interests of capitalists, normalize violence and hierarchy, and emphasize a disconnected and isolated individuality. In short, schools and the families that support them train people to spend the majority of their lives at work for the simple reason that the more you work, the more labour value can be extracted from you (if you don’t understand this, watch my video series Money and then come back and re-read that sentence).

As a boy, my ability to cry and express emotions was violently and viciously suppressed by adults and peers who hit me and shamed me whenever I acted outside of the narrow gender box I had been assigned. How many times I heard things like “man up and don’t be a girl,” or “don’t be such a baby” growing up I cannot say. But I do know it severely damaged my emotional responses to the point where I am still trying to heal to this day.

A particularly pernicious form of damage inflicted by the Ideological Institutions as they shape and control the next generation of workers is the damage inflicted by the forced imposition of strict, binary gender models of human thought and behaviour. And make no mistake, binary gender is forced. As I explain a little bit in my article “An Introduction to Sociology,” Children are not left to find their own idiosyncratic, gender-free expression; from the moment they are born, they are brutally and mercilessly coerced and tricked (as the little girl in the first video suggests) into conforming to binary gender roles. And if you think that the words “brutally coerced” are unreasonable and inflammatory, think again. Coercion begins before birth in so-called “gender reveal” parties where adults are signalled about the gender of the baby. The coercion continues at birth when children are assigned a pink or a blue blanket, depending on their genitals. It continues on through childhood and adolescence where adults, signalled by things like gender reveal partners, force and reinforce standard gender roles. The violence we experience during this gender-socialization process is real, palpable, and not subtle or difficult to miss at all. As the children in the following videos clearly demonstrate, even children get it. It is only as adults, after we are thoroughly brainwashed and controlled, that we come to accept binary gender as “natural.”

Boys and girls talk about gender socialization

Where you socialized in a binary gender mould? Have you experienced gender socialization violence? If so, consider sharing your experience in this online survey. Your responses are anonymous but responses will be shared publically. Only share if you feel comfortable with that.

The videos below show children talking about gender stereotypes, the violence used to impose these stereotypes, and the impact it has on them. There is a lot you can learn about binary gender and the violence of gender socialization from these videos but for me, the most striking thing is that these children are more aware of the violence and impact of binary gender socialization than many adults. Why do you think that is?

• Boys and Girls on emotion and the violence socialization which suppresses mail affect

• Boys and Girls on Stereotypes

Young people take note, young men of dating age, couples in new relationships without kids, often report egalitarian attitudes towards domestic labour and childcare. However, that often changes when kids show up on the scene. When that happens, couples often default to standard gender roles with the women taking time off from careers, ending their jobs, or working a “double shift” without pay to ensure the children are properly cared for.

Why does The System impose a binary gender model? It has to do with the labour force requirements of Capitalism, specifically, the need to produce the next generation of workers as cheaply as possible. The cheapest way to produce the next generation of workers is to get women to do it for free. The argument is simple, women should stay home, get pregnant, and raise babies not because capitalism needs a fresh generation of workers to man the mills and staff the cubicles, but because women “naturally” love that kind of thing. It is part of their nature. It is what God designed them to do. They shouldn’t ask for money for this, because that would “cheapen” the process. They should do it out of the love in their hearts. Of course, many women these days reject this stereotype and enter the paid labour force. However, this hasn’t ended the binary gender model which facilitates the exploitation of women’s unpaid labour. Even though they work, women still remain primarily responsible for the domestic and child care labour in the home. They work a “double day”, “second shift”, or “double burden.” In addition, migrant workers, particularly Filipino domestic workers, are used as a cheap labour source to fill the gap in homes where both parents work.

For a great overview of just how rich the rich are, and how they have used things like free domestic labour of women socialized into a binary gender mould to enrich themselves, take a look at the Inequality.org website. Given how rich the rich have become, don’t you think instead of avoiding taxation through the numerous loop holes in tax policy left for just this reason they should pay a fair share of taxes, and don’t you think a portion of these taxes should go to the people staying home and raising children? It seems only fair.

Does the idea that capitalists force women to raise the next generation of workers for free by using binary gender to indoctrinate women into providing free reproductive labour for the system sound weird? If you have watched my videos on money, then you know that capitalists accumulate labour value (money) from workers who work. A worker who works for fifty or sixty years in The System generates a lot of value for capitalists. Without someone to raise that worker, the capitalist class, i.e., people like Bezos, Musk, and so on, could never hire all those thousands of workers. Once you see the connection between the reproductive work of women and the mass exploitation of workers by capitalists, you can begin to assign proper value to the “women’s” work in the home. When you consider just how rich capitalists have become, and how poor the rest of us have become, doesn’t it make sense for the people who benefit the most from the reproductive work of women, i.e., capitalists, be required to pay for that work?

A System Agent

Incidentally, the fact that binary gender is used to exploit women explains why right-wing System Agents start the gender indoctrination so early, and why they are all so ridiculously hostile towards more fluid conceptions of gender. Fluid conceptions of gender undermine the strict labour force castes created by binary gender. Seeing men who are more “feminine,” i.e., who love children, and who are caring and empathic, and seeing women who don’t love children and who don’t want to be bothered with domestic work and children, raises questions about the validity of the binary gender model. Once you start to ask questions, it doesn’t take long to figure things out. Once you figure things out, it is a short step towards complete rejection of the binary gender caste system. In order to prevent people from figuring it out, System Agents work hard to repress and suppress people who don’t fit, to force and reinforce binary gender, and to try and make it all look natural and God given.

The Destruction of the Human Family

“While some radicals have advocated changes in the family unit, it was capital that carried out the abolition of the family as it had been known up to the Industrial Revolution. The early industrialists demolished the ancient extended family by forcing children, women and men into industrial servitude in factories, mines and mills, where they were treated worse than the machinery they served.” David Lazarus.

For a more detailed look into how capitalism has destroyed the ancient family institution, read Capitalism: No. 1 Enemy of the Family

It is not just that schools, families, and the media teach humans how to accept and appreciate long hours, how to handle a lifetime of routinized work, how to stay silent and obey authority, and how to conform to the gender-caste system, these Ideological Institutions and the System Agents that work in them also participate in the weakening and destruction of family attachments. This destruction began with the imposition of industrial capitalism which used compulsory schooling not only to shape worker thought and behaviour, but also to undermine family loyalty and remove children from the direct influence of elders. As David Lazarus notes, “Under capitalism, compulsory schooling became increasingly a means of undermining family (and other) loyalties by gaining the “hearts and minds” of the younger generation to the service of capital.” By breaking kids away from their parents early, children could be socialized in the capitalist system, turned into active consumers, and turned out as compliant workers. Instead of listening and learning to respect parental and elder authority, children could be taught to listen to authority figures, or the mass media. Instead of looking to older generations for information and advice, children could be taught to listen to system agents and others working to perpetuate and reproduce The System To do this, Ideological Institutions break attachments.

encouraged to leave the home and enter workforce early. sooner get into workforce, sooner the labour extraction can begin. sooner you leave home, sooner you have to duplicate your household, home, furniture, kitchen stuff, bed stuff, all supports consumer capitalism by activating next generation of consumers as early as possible.

Summarizing so far – Toxic Socialization

summarize and introduce concept of Toxic Socialization. capitalist socialization toxic for two reasons.

one, because it privileged accumulating worker, overlooks ignores seven essential needs.

two, because intentinally damages individuals. undermines potential

image link to colonial education system here

link to residential schools as Toxic Socialization in a box. display all classic characteristics of toxic socialization

Consequences of Toxic Socialization

Destruction of critical family attachments

Attachment to the family is a critical component of healthy human development. Attachment to the family group, connection to the family group, provides support, helps with resilience, and provides a resource for resisting the imposition of The System. Older adults may have understanding of The System beyond and can help with analysis/awareness.

Mental and emotional illness

Atrophied/Distorted Brain Development

new evidence suggests brain continues to develop into thirties and forties. “The prefrontal cortex is the region at the front of the brain just behind the forehead, and is an area of the brain that undergoes the longest period of development. It is an important area of the brain for high cognitive functions such as planning and decision-making, and it is also a key area for social behavior, social awareness, for empathy and understanding and interacting with other people, and various personality traits” add to this known fact that stress and strain damages/rewiring brain. marry, break attachments, leave home early, set up independent household, throws adolescents and young adults on their own into complicated life situations before brain development. compounded complete.

wonder exactly what the damage is. very hard to determine this scientifically since capitalist model of the family and adulthood throws everyone out early. no present model for what. planning, decision, empathy. reasonable question to ask to to what extent is people’s, planning, decision making ability hampered empathy damaged by toxic socialization process that ejects into the world too early?

Religion and the suppression of human potential

As I have gained knowledge and seen others share their visions with me, I conclude that our ancestors lived in a strange condition in which they were in touch with the spirits constantly, and I see that as a goal for our present activities. Vine Deloria- God is Red

What is required to turn people on to their own need to heal and emancipate so they can actualize their full potential, individually and species wide,

what healing and emancipation might look like, and how we may develop the necessary tools and therapies to enable emancipation of the human race.