The Poor-Man's Guide to Modernity - Independent Media Center

hand in glove with creating specialized narrow-gauged morons with advanced university
degrees who can very patriotically “United We Stand” for the common good while staying
productively engaged in narrow specializations in the economy.
Kept perpetually too busy to either think independently from the herd even when capable of
doing so, or to pursue knowledge outside of their narrow-gauged spheres of specializations by
the sheer demands of time and the endless debt-bills in pursuit of their endless “American
Dreams”, statecraft today relies on inflicting exactly The Fable of the Bees upon man for its
own functioning as an empire. In this scheme of things, vast amounts of useless information
has been recast as knowledge, and parrots have been turned into learned savants. While
wisdom and commonsense have been driven out from the acumen of men and women
“content to labor hard all day long ... forced by necessity.”
That pursuit, by its very nature, promotes holding only facile world views among the dreamers
of the 'American Dream'. The more one is invested in one's American Dream, the more averse
one automatically becomes to losing that dream if one wakes up to “ilm”. Natural psychological
forces do the rest, by automatically bringing to the cognitive surface incessant rationalizations
and self-delusions to maintain status quo in order to suppress the discomfort of cognitive
dissonance. (See Leon Festinger's study of mental gymnastics for harmonizing dissonance.)
The end result is that one prefers to maintain only a nodding acquaintance with “ilm”,
remaining mostly content with what's salutarily written on that piece of decorative parchment
necessary for becoming an economic widget. The devil's apprentices building their palatial
heavens right here on this earth, have further ensured that the very nature of participating in
modernity also only permits the hardworking bees just sufficient time and inclination for either
very superficially-broad, or very narrow-gauged specialized acquaintance with “ilm”.
We have already seen above that without “ilm”, striving for “haq” is impossible. Thus, between
self-deception, deception by Machiavelli, and full time engagement in bread and circuses, one
automatically becomes a captive audience to one's ignorance in all important matters which
occupy the elites enjoying all that common good from the work of those “content to labor hard
all day long.” This diabolically induced state of ignorance makes one easy putty in the rulers'
cold calculating hands. The cumulative impact of this to society is exactly as presaged by
Brzezinski in Between Two Ages – a must read ode to legitimizing the tyranny of the elite in
the Technetronic Era (subtitle of the book). The era of global scientific dictatorship.
The proof of this is the empirical evidence that the most industrialized, most powerful, the
The Poor-Man's Guide to Modernity 190 / 334 Zahir Ebrahim