The Astral Pilgrim

So, the summer holidays have come to an end, this week most children here in the UK will be heading back to school and for us here our daughter will be having her first experience of high school. For her a daunting and worrying time and for us much the same, yet all with that little hint of excitement at something new.

That said, secondary school here in the UK has always had a strict code of conduct in regards to uniform and various other factors and it has become quite clear that quite a high degree of control is placed upon the children, so much so that it seems to have gotten a little carried away. What schools are not realising is that they are strictly enforcing practices which are both sexist and discriminatory on a personal and gender based level.

Some examples of this are ones that I myself had to cope with when I was at high school. Boys are not allowed to have long hair (if it gets past the chin they demand it is cut) and boys are not allowed to wear ear rings under any circumstances yet for girls both of these are allowed, but with conditions. Girls can wear ear rings but only one in each ear and hair must be in a “simple and suitable style” leaving the specifics out to allow themselves more scope of control. The school even insists on the colour underwear that must be worn whilst at school, specifically for during gym sessions…..I would be interested to discover just ow they plan to check and enforce that one – lawyers at the ready!

Clearly though what is made evident to the pupils is differentiation. One rule for boys and one rule for girls, separate conditions for separate genders. Is this really how we should be influencing those who are so easily influenced? Of course it is, that is if you want them to grow in healthy members of a controlling social system that has inequality of pay and different treatment for men and women from the workplace all the way to the courtroom and back again. Another thing to ponder is this – in the UK, as a woman are you ever in your life going to wear a full suit with shirt and tie? The chances of anyone saying yes are very very slim, yet we insist that all school girls dress up like boys with full suit shirt and tie….erm….am I missing something there….hmmm

What starts as can or cant wear ear rings over time develops into an underlying acceptance of various other segregated levels of control. Why has unequal pay persisted for so long, and is still to this day not contested enough to actual cause much change? Because we are socialised to accept it.

What I like about this topic is that it is one that you can actively start to try and change – how do I plan on going about that. My name is down for the parent/teacher association and I plan on running for school governor as soon as elections open. I did the same at my daughters primary school and played an integral part in exposing and helping stamp out an disturbing and often overlooked problem – racism against white people (and yes for those who get their back up at this issue, it bloody happens and ignored because it is almost ASSUMED that white people will NOT be on the receiving end of racism which is flat out rubbish). Yes that was me shouting a bit there but that issue has affected my family quite a lot over the last 5 years at my daughters school.

So, if you have children at secondary school, take a close look at the “school rules” and have a think about just what kind of example they might be setting for your children – do you really want them to grow up repeating the same mistakes we are all making right now?

Many of us will have heard of things such as subliminal messaging – many of us will likely have some notion as to how it is done, with secret messages being flashed in-between two frames of an image. If you have ever watched the movie Fight Club you will realise that this is in fact total nonsense, the human eye is more than capable of seeing in a single frame difference from the flow of the image. That being said there are many who think that there are people, groups or institutions that seek to control us through subversive messages such these but the truth of the matter is – they don’t need to. For any media centric organisation be it the branding department of a company, an advertising company or any such similar, they are more than aware of what it takes to get you to buy their product – all they need is your ignorance.

What I mean by this is that whilst you are sat there watching television, once those adverts come on, if i sat there and said to you “Would you buy that product based upon it’s advert”, I imagine the common sense would kick in and you would say “probably not”. Yet when you are nice and relaxed your brainwaves shift into what is called Alpha, a state of absorption. Your thoughts retract from an active into a passive and receptive state. Alpha is those times when you are slouched and gawking at your television – and this is the exact time in which an advertiser can do it’s work. You see, when I said earlier that I would ask you if you wanted to buy something based on the advert, the fact you where directly addressed and I was expecting a response shifts you immediately into a state of Beta, active, logical thinking. In Alpha you don’t think, you just passively take in and store.

Relatively harmless you might think but what is happening is not so passive. Your brain stores the information thrown at it by advertisers and, even weeks later, it is when you are doing some shopping and reach a point of choice that the advert goes to work, (please note this does not happen when we predetermine what product we would buy such as what polish or detergent, these often come from habits already formed from either this same process or from other social trends). So there you are, in an isle in a supermarket faced with nothing short of a wall of different products from which you need to make a choice that you have not already predetermined, your brain enters a rigorous beta state trying to ascertain what to do and in so doing relies on the stored information it has on those products – so where does it turn? That nice big store of information constructed in a previous state of Alpha that was tucked away because your brain was in “I’m too tired to think now, i’ve had a hard day at work” mode. Now of course you will have seen multiple adverts for similar products and the way your mind narrows these down is very simple – colours, jingles, notable people – all the usual social elements that we use to decide whether we like something or not.  This is what an advertiser specialises in – making your brain passively like something to increase its chances in the Alpha lottery.

All this though is secondary to the ultimate goal of any advertisers, of any branding for a product. They don’t want you to “want” their product, they want you to “need” it – success stories of which include the mobile phone, where even pensioners have gone from “I don’t want one”, to “I need one” through that oh so familiar medium of fear. Our society is reaching that point of living in fear of being out of touch. We insure our insurance, we join social networks that update our other social networks so that we are connected.

This all stems from the media, from advertising and the pursuit of every growing profit and control of market share.

Want to stay connected? Then remember the basics and you can never go wrong. Hold a hand, give someone hug, accept a kiss, have sex or share some food.

I thought I would start adding an element to my blog entitled little drops of information. If you read my last blog you will appreciate I sometimes find it hard to keep people up with what I am on about and dropping little snippets of info helps keep things going.

Tax is illegal

Yup, and no it’s not just wishful thinking. Within the bounds of the legal system, there is not one law anywhere that says you have to pay tax. There is case after case in America being put forward to the courts from people who are not paying their tax to the IRS on the basis that there is no law that says the government is allowed to tax you. It is a social assumption. One of many.

The ironic part is….these people are winning these cases. The courts are going in favour of the defendant in these cases each and every time. The same applies to the UK. No law for it.

Heh…thought you might want to know.