Why do Americans systematically vote against their own interests? It is because they have been brainwashed to perceive and believe that their conquerors' and subjugators' interests are "my" interests. To break free of self-destructive mentalities we have to challenge the truisms of the dominant worldview. We have to step outside the prison walls of the ruling paradigm and see a different version of reality.

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Rob asks us to think about, "What are the biggest lies and delusions that keep people voting against their own interests?" My broad answer is, American minds have been programmed from birth with a worldview that induces them to act contrary to their own interests. It is as if they have been infected with a parasite that possesses their brains and motivates the victims to do its bidding. Let me elaborate.

We are encultured. We are born into a family within a nation, and we incorporate the national beliefs, values, goals and way of life into the structure of our own mind. We become a member of the culture, sharing its beliefs and values and willingly participating in the ways of life that are consistent with those beliefs and values. A child born to American parents and raised in the USA grows up and becomes "an American".

Enculturation programs our brain with a worldview. We learn how to think, feel and behave like "an American". The worldview functions as an operating system for our brain. Our genetics and prenatal environment (womb) builds the basic firmware of our information reception and processing systems; builds our "neural nature". The operating system configures the firmware to determine how we will process information inputs to interpret and perceive reality. Neuropsychology explores how our perception of reality is literally configured by the worldview we have installed as the operating system in our brain.

Different worldviews produce different perceptions of "reality". The reality that we know is the reality that we perceive. Perception 'is' reality. Or at least it is the reality that is available for us to be aware of. Unless/until we consciously perceive some thing -- either as a sense perception or as an internally generated idea or image -- we have no knowledge that the thing exists. We apply our reasoning to the perceptions of reality that we know. We are simply not aware of all other realities that exist, but which we have never been introduced to via sense perception or logical inference or imagination.

Enculturation with a worldview determines the reality that you will perceive yourself to be living in. And unless you are one of the few who spend their lives exploring the inner space of their own and other people's brains/minds, you will believe your perception of reality is providing you with accurate information about reality as it is in itself. "Objective reality". You will believe you are perceiving, that you "know", objective reality.

As an unexamined and unreconstructed product of our nature and our nurture, our beliefs and values are manufactured for us. We are "made". Human products of a genetic and cultural manufacturing process. "Americans" are made by their parents and the American culture they were raised into.

We can unmake and remake/reconstruct our self. We can "change our mind". We can search, discover, examine, and modify or uninstall the beliefs and values that have been programmed into us. We can install alternate beliefs and values of our own choosing, and become a self-made person. But most people simply accept their encultured version of their life in the world as "normal" and "reality".

People who are like us -- fellow Americans -- share and confirm our beliefs and values and approve of our behavior and way of life. The confirmation reinforces our belief in the truth of our beliefs, the goodness of our values, and the rightness of our way of life. If we become aware of people from other cultures we find them strange, weird. If they disagree with our own cultural beliefs, values and goals we say they are wrong, because we are "normal" and our normal is "reality". Or at least our normal is the best version of reality. People who disagree with us are ignorant and/or evil, because everybody who knows and accepts the empirical and moral truths of reality is one of "us", or they want to be just like us. We are the shining city on a hill.

Most people never question their cultural programming: their preconceptions, conditioned emotional responses, moral and logical motivational structure. They simply accept it as is. Few people are able to step outside the box of their own worldview and recognize that they had been living in a box that they thought was "reality".

Stepping outside the opaque walls of the box into the unbounded light of day is called "enlightenment". Few people experience this enlightened perspective, so they think their box -- however narrow minded are the views it affords -- "is" reality. A bigger box that includes other cultures may enable a more broadminded perspective, but it is still a box. A true view of reality requires dissolving all the artificial walls that have been erected to constrain our seeing and thinking. But most people fear freedom and prefer the sense of security within walls.

People live: people prefer to live, in Plato's Cave; in The Matrix. People are fully convinced they are living in unconditioned objective reality, and they will fight to preserve this belief. People strongly resist any threats to the universal truth of their encultured beliefs, and the absolute moral goodness of their encultured values, and the motives, behaviors and way of life that are justified by these beliefs and values. If someone shows them their beliefs are false, or their values are evil, they will retreat to rebuild the sheltering walls of their worldview, or they will attack the person who is trying to "destroy the world" that they believe in. Almost nobody will interpret the corrective effort as "education" or "constructive criticism", and take the opportunity to "change their mind". Rather than embrace truth that changes their mind, people retrench and believe harder in their familiar falsehoods. We fortify the defensive walls of our own prison.

In his 1938 book, The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi describes the 19th century during which Western "culture" was replaced by "market economy". A culture incorporates many different beliefs and values, often competing with each other so that compromises must be made in our individual lives and in our national political life. Market economy replaces all that human diversity with a single value and a single motive: gain. Profit. Money profit and economic ownership, secured by the elevation of "property rights" over human rights. But in the 19th century this transformation occurred mainly within the minds of the elites, in response to the changing socioeconomic realities wrought by industrialization and the extension of finance capitalism from its home in the bond market (war finance) into private sector economic development.

Until the 20th century, Christian religion was the primary creator of the beliefs, values and goals of Western mass culture. We perceived ourselves as "a Christian nation, under God". Perhaps beginning with the WWI propaganda campaign that deliberately and skillfully transformed the opinion of the American masses from unwilling to get involved in foreign conflicts, to "kill the evil huns", Christian religion ceased to be the primary creator of America's homogenized mass mind. That role was taken up by state-corporate capitalism. The "nation" became the corporate state.

Edward Bernays and Madison Avenue became the new Vatican from whence the people's beliefs and values would be proclaimed, in service to the Mad Men's plutocrat, corporate and government paymasters, all under the guiding hand of their Wall St masters and collaborators. Worldview creating and behavior molding propaganda was professionalized into a highly sophisticated and psychologically effective art during the 20th century. It converted the American people -- and maintains them in this state -- from personally responsible adult citizens of a Christian nation to a nation of infantilized "consumers" who have the right to consume the advertised corporate baubles: paid for by income, entitlement, debt or whatever means come to hand. Advertising (and Hollywood) creates the needs, corporate capitalism provides the goods that (pretend to) satisfy those needs, and finance capitalism provides the money to produce and purchase them, so the people can participate in what John K Galbraith called in 1958, The Affluent Society.

America is no longer a Christian nation. America is now a capitalist state. The invisible hand of the marketplace has replaced God as the non-human force that guides human history. Capitalists would like you to believe it is "God's" invisible hand at work in the marketplace, but really (as Polanyi observed) it is the surreptitious hands of Wall St and international bankers (the bond market) who guide the destiny of nations under capitalism. Governments no longer fear inciting the wrath of God. They fear inciting the predations of the bond vigilantes and the currency traders.

God -- as depicted in the Judeo-Christian Bible -- is no longer the nation's final authority. Money is. Americans "can't afford" to be good to each other. They have to compete against each other. This is the iron law of declining sum $arithmetic, when all the money is issued as interest-bearing "loans" by commercial banks as a for-profit business that systematically creates more debt than it creates money; rather than money being issued debt-free and interest-free by governments as a public utility.

Like Revelation's image of the beast that is given power to speak and command, Money talks. Though it is the bankers' lips that move, channeling the voice of the god. So the people meekly accept the destruction of New Deal restraints on capitalism and the dismantling of social welfare, because Money says they must.

Money is the god of capitalist religion. Money is $numbers, which work by arithmetic. Money is issued as loans by bankers. The loans are debts, which are negative $numbers. Debts must be repaid with money, which is positive $numbers. Banks create money in the amount of loan principal, but they simultaneously create debt in the amount of principal plus interest. Banks issue more negative $numbers than positive $numbers. And bankers exercise a near absolute monopoly on the issuance of money. So debts cannot all be paid. But, DEBTS MUST BE PAID. This is the First Commandment. All other commandments are subsumed within this first. Religions specialize in making necessities of impossibilities, to keep us all in awe.

We are ruled by $Numbers that have been given power over our lives. Even the money-issuing bankers are subservient to, and stoop to serve, the impossible laws of $arithmetic. We live in service to non-human, inanimate, immaterial $Numbers. Money is a pretty crappy god. But it's "our" god. So we bow and scrape and serve as best we can. And we never commit the mortal sin of questioning the authority of its rule. Or questioning the bankers' monopoly on issuing the money.

The goal of Christian people is to become rich in the goods of spirit. The goal of capitalist people is to become rich in money. The disparate goals motivate striving in opposite directions. Jesus put it starkly: No one can serve both God and Money. Being rich in money is "proof" that you are a virtuous servant of the money god Mammon. Capitalist culture will raise you aloft as a shining example to be emulated by all and sundry.

Nobody will say, "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he should lose his own soul?" Capitalist science says the soul -- the spiritual aspect of humanity -- is imaginary. Being rich in money and ownership is a visible, empirical "sign of election": you are being displayed as a chosen one of your god. The god has set you as commander of all that you own.

It doesn't matter how you "get" rich. "Being" rich is proof that you did it "right". Who are we to question the unknowable ways of the god? Being poor is proof that you have been found unworthy by the god. A sinner. An anticapitalist. It is written, There will be many anticapitalists in the end times. Or at least it is written now, for your entertainment and elucidation.

Why do Americans keep voting against their own interests? Because they perceive themselves as capitalists, living within a capitalist worldview, and they cannot see from outside the box that they are harming themselves. They can only see the shiny baubles and fantasies of riches that they have been taught to value above all else. Images of those desirables shimmer and flicker from the big screen hanging on their cave wall. They are captivated, possessed. They have incorporated the cultural beliefs and values and goals of capitalism as "my" beliefs and values and goals.

It was impossible to achieve the Christian religious ideals of moral goodness: only God's grace could elevate us to the highest heights. If it is impossible for most people to attain the capitalist ideals, they can still hope and pray that grace (and a lottery ticket) will dropkick them through the goalposts of life.

The masses were never aware that they were being culturally programmed. People thought their perceptions of reality, "were reality". This is true of both the Christian and the capitalist eras. Today many Americans try to reconcile their vestigial Christian feelings with their dominant capitalist motivations, reciting the prosperity gospel that God wants them to be rich. Nobody reads people's histories of the genocide, the wanton slaughter and working to death of vanquished peoples, and the violent theft of the North, Central and South American land masses that was the "primitive accumulation" stage of early capitalism. And nobody likes to know that financial exploitation of workers and nations -- combined with industrial plundering of the Earth itself -- is the source of the ongoing wealth of capitalist people. We are good people. Capitalism is the best system. We do not believe, and we do not want to hear, that we are party to such monstrous evils.

Many, most, of the constructors of cultures believe that what they are doing is true and good. Or at least "necessary". Most academics and intellectuals work within the paradigm, within the walls of the dominant worldview, rather than venture out into the clear light and report what they see from outside the box. They work within the bounds of the conventional, rather than expose and challenge the walls that artificially limit "the real" and "the possible".

The masses are unaware of their cultural conditioning that inculcates a worldview into them. America's capitalist masses thought they were just growing up and learning how the world is, or showing and teaching others how it is. Now they have learned and they 'know' how the world is, and they will fight to preserve their faith in the truth of their capitalist beliefs, the goodness of their capitalist values, and the rightness of their capitalist way of life.

They are incapable of getting outside the box of their own mind, and seeing an alternate version of "reality". They are unwilling to be removed dragging and kicking from their box into an fearful outside where communists and socialists want to "git me, and take away my wealth and liberties as an American". It matters not that from a perspective outside the box it is visibly apparent that they are ratwheel debt-serfs who have no liberties: they believe they have them. They are not defending their liberties. They are defending their delusory belief that they "have" liberties.

We have mental access to our perceptions of realities, not reality as it is in itself. We believe -- or withhold belief -- in ideas about reality. The ideas, and belief in the truth of the ideas, exist as mental perceptions inside our head.

Worldviews are made of beliefs, not realities. If the beliefs correspond to the realities, then the worldview is "true". If not, then the worldview is an ideology of one kind or another. Within the ideology the worldview "seems" true, so as long as you don't allow anything from outside the box to touch your mind and heart and affect your perception of reality, you can believe you are living in true reality. It is because contrary evidence is deliberately, forcefully excluded, that people can act against their own interests and be totally unaware that they are doing it, because they "believe" what they are doing "is" in their interest. And they will permit no evidence that fails to confirm their belief.

Christian compassion and generosity, mercy and love of others, is now portrayed as the work of the devil. How can they become ruggedly individual capitalists if you keep giving them charity rather than letting their suffering motivate them to greater efforts? Giving away material wealth to those who need it more than you do, rather than accumulating it to become personally rich, makes you a good Christian and a bad capitalist. Choose.

The American masses chase and embrace -- whether by choice or default -- material goods over spiritual goods. It doesn't matter if the capitalist masses fail to achieve the lofty heights of riches. Few Christians achieved moral sainthood. All that matters is this is what they believe they "should" be striving for. It is their beliefs that motivate their thoughts, feelings and behavior. As long as the American people believe in capitalism and vigorously defend their freedom to live as capitalism's deluded serfs, they will continue elevating Mammon-serving predators as their lords and masters and role models. And they will continue believing in -- and voting for -- people and ideas and values that are contrary to their own interests as human beings.

Capitalism is not about individual free enterprise within the kind of free market advocated by Adam Smith. Capitalism is about gaining monopoly control of entire industries to stamp out all competition and rule as a conqueror. Capitalism begins with primitive accumulation by conquest, genocide and vast thefts of entire peoples and nations and continents. Rising capitalist corporations -- enabled by bankers who literally enjoy the privilege and power to create the money they lend; and by corporate lawyers who legalistically circumvent all efforts to constrain monopolism -- buy out and subsume all their competitors to monopolize industries.

When JP Morgan created US Steel in 1901, for example, he subsumed over 200 "free market" steel producers into his new corporation. Frederick Lewis Allen's 1935 book, The Lords of Creation, chronicles the financial (money and stocks) and corporate legal manipulations by which ownership and control of the industrial and public infrastructure -- that was built up by American free enterprise -- was consolidated into the hands of a few monopoly capitalists.

Late stage capitalism (our era), having sucked humanity dry of money to earn as profit and having indebted the world to the bankers, becomes a financial casino where bankers create exciting new games of chance like "futures" and "derivatives". The games are zero sum: one party can only gain money if another party loses that money. Capitalism is a competitive power game that uses people and nations and resources as game pieces.

Ordinary people practice free enterprise, mind their own business, raise their own families, participate in their own communities, live and let live. Neurally incapable -- due to lack of or damage to the emotional wiring -- of feeling "normal" human feelings, thrill-seeking psychopaths seek to rule over everybody, make people do what they want, become gloriously rich and powerful, win the capitalist games. Psychopaths, giant-size egos, the avaricious, the power mad, delusions of grandeur, play at capitalism. "Normals" are buyout targets and grist for the fleecing mills.

We live in the world that bankers financed, capitalists commanded, and humanity produced. Most people think or assume or believe that the capitalist game is "the world". The normal world. Just how "people" are. Just how the world is. Yes, if human vices and pathologies are given free rein to rule, this is just how the world is. If human vices and pathologies are perceived as competitive advantages within a social Darwinist society, then people will "try" to become heartless psychopaths in order to "succeed".

So we get what Andrzej Łobaczewski, in his book, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil, called "secondary psychopaths" who emulate the highly successful primary psychopaths in order to be accepted and be promoted within psychopath-run organizations such as America's "full spectrum dominance" Imperial State. A profit-seeking bank or business corporation that seeks to serve only its own interest without regard to its effects on the planet or anybody else, is psychopathic by definition. Insofar as banking and the global economy are populated by profit-seeking corporations whose managers must act to maximize corporate profits and shareholder value; and insofar as governments serve corporate and financial rather than human interests; the world is being operated by psychopathic motives.

When we used to have a "culture" we had at least a small voice of Christian morality to counter the vicious logic of market economy. But now even that small voice has been tortured to make it squawk the prosperity gospel in support of the vicious logic. Corporate capitalism now bestrides the narrow world like a snorting equine colossus, ridden by a giant banker who conjures and pours out the intoxicating elixir of money. The victor. The conqueror of minds and hearts and bodies and souls of men.

Christianity -- the spiritual teachings of Jesus (confirmed by other spiritual avatars) -- is not "religion". It is the battle of the higher human spiritual person over the lower human animal person. I think of it as spiritual evolution: our personal (and cultural) evolution from an animal-person to a spirit-person. The battle rages within each of us, until it is won by one side or the other. But we never fully conquer the defeated nature, never truly kill it. We are embodied spirits, and we cannot escape the existence of both of our natures, animal and spiritual.

Market economy -- capitalism -- recognizes only the base material parts of reality; and discounts our spiritual nature and spiritual values as imaginary. If all we truly are is animals, then capitalists are right and spirituality is delusion. Capitalism transfers ownership of the Earth into the hands of the craftiest and most ruthless acquisitors, who then cage humanity like half-starved enslaved rats. Then when conquered, robbed and oppressed humanity acts like rats in cages, capitalism presents that as "proof" that humans are really just nasty animals.

But if we do indeed have two natures, and if Christianity is our Western cultural expression of our spiritual nature, then the triumph of capitalism over Christianity is the triumph of the lower animal over the higher spiritual aspects of our own human being. We allow ourselves to be ruled by vicious predators because we believe all we really are is competitive animals, and the predators are the "winners" of life's games.

To counter the self-damaging delusions of capitalism requires reanimating our spiritual nature. Recognizing -- insisting on -- its equal reality with our material animal nature. Despite the claims of anti-humanists claiming to represent 'science', there is ample empirical and theoretical evidence that our spiritual consciousness is objectively real, as I explained in my The Physics of Spirit OpEdNews article, and my book of the same title.

Within the box of the capitalist worldview, social Darwinism is logically necessary given the limits of the Earth's resources and the desire of the winners of capitalism to enjoy their ownership of a living green Earth and the labors of a remnant of working class humanity -- who will be required to worship the capitalist victors as "nobility" and "gods". But allowing or causing a mass human die-off, a deliberate mass "cull" of humanity, is an unthinkable evil from a Christian spiritual perspective.

So there it is. Either we are animals living in a capitalist reality. Or we are embodied spirits who have spiritual interests that often compete with our material interests. I don't see how any force other than a spiritual renewal; a revival: bringing back into "reality" our spiritual consciousness; can be capable of countering the catastrophic logic of competitive animal capitalism.

Animal-people worship, fear, emulate, elevate, elect, cunning predators who 'succeed' unburdened by normal human feelings and moral constraints. Spiritually aware human beings -- whose mental and emotional perception and reasoning is not corrupted by a capitalist neural operating system -- are not mesmerized by these charlatans displaying their sordid images of 'success'.

Authors Bio:

I spent my working life as an independent small business owner/operator. My academic background is in philosophy and political economy. I began studying monetary systems and monetary history after the 1982 banking crash that was precipitated by the Mexican default and rendered 7 of America's 8 biggest banks, and 4 of Canada's Big 5, technically insolvent. They were quietly bailed out then as they are being loudly bailed out now. After the 2008 banking crash I started blogging about monetary system reform, in the tradition of Irving Fisher and CH Douglas who were prominent voices for reform during our last systemic collapse in the 1930s.

I also write about the wide divergence between perception and reality in matters of public opinion, and the central role of mass media propaganda in moulding perception and manufacturing consent, a role identified by Walter Lippman and perfected by Edward Bernays and Madison Avenue. Financial, industrial, and military-industrial corporatism is increasingly usurping the functions of government in America, Europe and elsewhere, replacing elected republican and democratic forms of government with unaccountable plutocracies mascarading as "free enterprise". Plutocracy is a neofeudal tyranny of lawless power, serving the interests of wealth rather than democratic justice. Responsible government with the power to legislate and enforce laws and control its own monetary system is our only bulwark against concentrated corporate power, which is why plutocrats are intent on destroying the credibility and power of elected governments leaving the new feudal masters free to abuse and plunder the masses of serfs at their leisure. The money issuing function is a most fundamental feature of government sovereignty, and America's government transferred that power to private bankers in 1913, placing the effective government of the nation in the hands of the money power. It may not be possible for the people to take back control of their government from the plutocrats. But it is some consolation to be able to read and write about the truth of what is currently happening to our once free countries.