Disempowerment Systems

According to Ray of The Affirmation Spot, the three disempowerment systems that drain collective human empowerment are:

Political Tyranny
Religious Dogma
Ideological Conformity

If you don’t want to wait for my rewrite or comment of this excellent piece, you can see full article at The Affirmation Spot.

Political tyranny – tyranny happens in the political realm when the many give away their innate dignity and freedom to choose to a political/financial elite out of fear – often manipulated or perceived fear. Two scenarios are common:
A strong leader such as a Hitler or Mussolini comes along promising a return to greatness and initially playing on peoples’ innate desire to achieve. Slowly, the dictator accrues more and more power to himself, using the ultimate goal as the excuse. There is often a cult of personality that develops around the leader. This proceeds until no one can question the leader.
Tyrants often find it effective to have external threats or internal crises (real or manufactured) to help them unify the people against something big and scary and consolidate power.

Religious Dogma – we should be clear that religious dogma is not religious faith or spiritual practice. Dogma rules the spiritual realm when we trade an ever-living relationship with our spiritual core or the divine for a system of static rules and tradition administered by an elite religious hierarchy. The hierarchy place limits on the human beings under their control by positioning themselves and their rules as a false intermediary between the individual and God. Most people on the planet believe in a divinity and an after life in one form or another. The fear factor when people believe religious elites hold eternal fates in their hands, is very high. People obey for fear of losing their eternal souls. It’s a ready source of control and manipulation. Generally, these systems seek to discredit all other means of worship and sometimes even counter the basics of their own teachings to support or actively participate in attacks on believers in other systems.

Ideological Conformity – ideological conformity is a kind of modern, more sophisticated synthesis of tyranny and dogma. It incorporates formal conditioning with “the cool factor”. People are more concerned with what is perceived as cool than what is right or what makes sense. It was not really possible until the age of mass media. It is perhaps the most pernicious because it uses modern advertising and mind conditioning techniques to encourage the masses to place mental and sometimes physical shackles on their own hands, feet, and minds. Modern advertising and psychology have the methods for mass manipulation down to a science. The completely systematic pattern in this system is to take a legitimate concern such as terrorism or environmental degradation, blow it completely out of proportion to its reality, and then condition, condition, condition until people willingly buy into the ideological elite’s solutions to the problems. This usually involves a loss of personal freedom, the imposition of self-policing of the ideology, and an ever-present burning crisis that makes the whole system necessary.
Ray- The Affirmation Spot