Ideas & Story Concept

“Our best men, our economic experts, have accomplished the task we set them of drawing up a plan for the electrification of Russia and the restoration of her economy. We must now see to it that the workers and peasants should realize how great and difficult this task is, how it must be approached and tackled. We must see to it that every factory and every electric power station becomes a center of enlightenment; if Russia is covered with a dense network of electric power stations and powerful technical installations, our communist economic development will become a model for a future socialist Europe and Asia.” (Stormy and prolonged applause.) I. Lenin, Collected Work

After a great world power blackout, groups within a nation’s population gain the beginning of a new perspective on things. The power outage causes battles across the land for food and water but when people are able to obtain the essentials of life to get through the outage, they see the government in a new way. Electricity has fueled the one great power of the government, running the government’s distraction industry created from political parties and the entertainment, advertising and media industries.

Now, there is little distraction from looking at the government of the nation. It becomes viewed as a type of perpetual motion machine, whirring on as various political parties come and go, deceiving the populace that one party controls it. The government offers little help to the populace during the great blackout. The leaders retreat to a secret location in a western mountain. They have attempted to hide and disguise this retreat  but word has gotten out.

An amazing thing happens. In the darkness from the great power blackout, when the government has disappeared, a new enlightenment begins to spread over the nation and the nation’s warring factions start to come together. There is a growing discussion on the need for government. It was a discussion that crosses party lines. Groups meet at night in dark locations under candle light. For the first time, they talk about a society without government.

The narrator of the story is founder of one of these discussion groups.

* * *

When government was born and a new part of civilization, people were suspicious of it. As a result, government had to outwardly exercise control over people in these early days of its existence. it had to do so by using physical force. Over the evolution of civilization, millenniums, society has come to accept government as a ubiquitous medium of life, as inevitable as weather, taxes and death. More than a thing. Rather an “environment” humanity lives in, like the environment of water fish live in. As someone once said, “We’re not sure who discovered water but we’re sure it wasn’t a fish.” The same might be said for people who live under governments. Of these people we might say that “We’re not sure who exactly discovered government but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a person in a society controlled by this government.” Because government possesses the grand invisibility of environments, it has little need to exercise physical control over the population today.

Control is achieved by distraction. First, it was the distraction government created with the two-party political system from the beginning of American history. Now, it is the grand distraction created by digital entertainment media. Together they account for perhaps 90% of one’s free time in life. There are images and sounds and music from all of this consumes the daily life of the American no matter which side of the political aisle they are on. Within all of this, there are of course our modern symbols called productsand brands whether cars or people. Much distraction revolves around these symbols of needs in our culture.

This distraction is so effective, the government has little need to exercise its early hard power control over the people. The soft power of distraction is all that is needed to control over a nation in the modern world. Governments are weakened not because of the policies they exercise but rather when their distraction apparatus go awry.

* * *

Like it did with the world electric power outage from Asteroid 1070 that struck northern Russia six months.

Once this happened, there were no longer any distractions in culture. Everyone was focused rather on attractions rather than distractions. There was no time for distraction during those hard months. Getting food and water was the major attraction for all of us. Then, simply learning how to live without electricity. So many things none of us realized.

It was a terrible, tough few months. Many millions died. Some say that the government facilitated many of these deaths. But it is another one of those claims that no one is ever going to really prove. And, even if one does, so what?

* * *

During those six months when all the electric power was off in the world, the government could no longer employ their grand narcotic of distraction over culture. The power they used to distribute distraction was not working. They still had their images, their same policies. But now they operated much more in the open. Not of their own doing but because their beauty mirrors were down for this time and people saw them for what they really were.

Many were frightened at what they saw.

When the electricity went down, people seemed to wake up from a long sleep. Lenin knew about the power of electricity. It was going to be good for his factories (as he noted in the above quote) and his people. It would serve to create distractions for them. These distractions lead their attention away from government. Electricity was like a god to Lenin. Perhaps as close to a belief in a god Lenin ever got.

For government power depended on the electric power of distraction and not on the government being “good” or “bad” or one way or the other. It depended on the power of its distraction machine to distract the populace from consideration of the government’s power over their lives in the first place. In all of this, the words “good” and “bad” were used less and less. There was no good or bad anymore. Only the distraction fueled by electricity from even considering good and bad in the first place.

It was back in this dark time of the great blackout our little group was formed.

Maybe the story should begin here.

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Top 20 Diversion Tactics of Highly Manipulative People.