Institutional Oppression

Every day we are subjected to some form of institution or another each with it's own petty rules, rights and prejudices and everyday I question why we really have to do this. Do we really benefit as much from a compulsory education on subjects which for the most part we hate and cannot opt to drop? Why can't we simply choose which subjects we want learn specifically? Must we wear uniforms that degrade us and rape us of our individuality, uniforms that make us feel more like numbers than people? Why should we conform to this? Why should we, the future of this world, accept this tyranny imposed upon us by the state, by the school and by mainstream society? To proclaim ourselves as individuals should make it clear enough that as individuals we have the right to choose just how we go about our lives!

Every day however, conformity is preached to us and forced upon us, directly or indirectly by the popular media that labels the different as freaks, by the preachers who tell us to bow down and obey their theology and their rules, by the politicians who make laws to constrict us and force obedience to their platforms. In retrospect it seems to me that conformity to others rules is not in fact done for anyone's own good but to vindicate and enforce the power and authority of those that we conform to. I think it's obvious now that our educational system (state controlled), the religious establishment (theocrat controlled) and the popular media (corporate controlled) are not here to serve our needs at all, as much as they may claim so! The state uses education to mould us into "citizens" perfect, shining, happy slaves to it's unbending and oppressive will, we know for a fact that religious leaders use their influence to control us and screw us over with their divine lies and the popular media is one of the biggest examples of selective information in existence! They don't tell us all that is happening, they don't inform us of corporate corruption or the total amount of damage caused by capitalism's inherent greed system. Our schools don't tell us that for the last 64 years of Helen Kellers life she was a radical socialist. Do our history classes inform us that Gandhi had decentralist anarchistic ideas and that he wanted to devolve power in India down to the level of autonomous villages held together in union by federation and mutual agreement? (Even though India industrialised and centralised and is richer overall it now has the worst poverty it has ever seen.) They cannot possibly tell us things like this because it would weaken their power . It would prove that the state and it's lackeys, the corporations (or is that the other way round?) are not essential, that there are people who do not need them (i.e. all of us). Yet still everyday we are forced to conform, the jocks and the 'in' crowd will label you a freak if you're different, the preacher will call you atheistic scum if you don't bow to his/her religious lies and the politician will label you an enemy of the state. At least the politicians got it right!

Walk into an office, a classroom or a congregation and as an observer you can see that these people have been pacified, constrained, controlled, there is no longer any wild and creative spirit within them, that has been broken down by daily clockwork conformity and weak minded obedience. This is the very thing that we must fight! This muzzling of our minds must stop! The great Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin stated in his seminal work God and the State that man, ever since his first beginnings as primitive homo erectus, has always been instilled with two great faculties- "The ability to think and the desire to rebel." So let us come together, let us unify, let us think for ourselves, let us rebel! An institution is nothing without the people that fuel it, that feed it. Well we are those people, we are the food of the institution, the church, the government, our weak minded submission to it only strengthens it's hold over us, but if we feed it then without us it must starve. We can fight it because without us it is nothing, without our conformity it has no power, no hold, no grip on us.