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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
People who still believe that the news media tell them the truth and that their nation and their world work pretty much the way they were taught in school are just as brainwashed and deluded as any QAnon cultist. The only difference is that their delusions are much more widely shared, and that the mechanisms used to brainwash them are much more high-budget and sophisticated. The mainstream worldview is really just a mass-produced artificial psychosis.
It’s actually difficult to wrap your mind around the scale and pervasiveness of the mountain of lies upon which this dystopian civilization is built. You think you’re starting to get a read on things, then you gain more knowledge and insight and realize it goes so much further than you thought. You start pulling on one thread, maybe some obvious lie about Iraq or Palestine or whatever, and the whole thing just keeps unraveling and unraveling and unraveling. Before you know it you’re staring at a society that is not just riddled with untruth, but actually woven entirely from the fabric of untruth.
Everything. How your nation really works. How the world really works. How capitalism really works. What politics really are. What the media are really used for. What laws are really used for. What wars and militarism are really used for. What ideology is really used for. What religion is really used for. What culture is really used for. What rules and etiquette are really used for. It’s all made-up narrative all the way down, and all of those narratives are made up by the powerful, in the service of the powerful.
You can tell someone’s still playing in the shallow end of the pool of political insight based on how much time they spend freaking out about a dark dystopian future, because it shows the extent to which they fail to perceive how profoundly unfree we are right here and now. Right wingers, ideologically prohibited from considering the possibility that what they’re experiencing under capitalism isn’t real freedom, spend their time freaking out about a neo-Marxist future where everyone’s trapped in 15-minute cities and forced to take poisonous vaccines and eat bugs. Western liberals, ideologically prohibited from considering the possibility they live under the world’s most tyrannical power structure and that everything they were taught is a lie, spend their time freaking out about a future under a horrible Trumpian dictatorship.
If you’ve really got your eyes open, you understand that as a whole we could not actually be more effectively enslaved to the will of the powerful than we are right now, even if we were all wearing chains around our necks and had mind control computer chips in our brains. As a collective we’re always thinking, speaking, laboring, spending, living, acting and voting exactly as the wealthiest and most powerful people in our society want us to, our entire lives completely dedicated to the service of their continued power and profit while our information systems keep pummeling us with the message that we are free.
We are indoctrinated into believing we live in a free country unlike those poor suckers in Iran or North Korea, and we are indoctrinated into believing everything else our tyrannical rulers want us to believe as well. We sing of our freedom while marching in unison to the beat of the imperial drum, our minds so fully subjugated that we don’t even realize that we are marching.
“We are free!” we cry. “Free to sell our labor at extortionate rates to the capitalist class. Free to pay rent to professional land-hoarders or mortgage payments to banks for the privilege of having shelter on the planet we were born on. Free to choose between ten thousand different kinds of toothpaste and two warmongering capitalist political parties. Free to vote in fake elections for fake candidates who will never change anything. Free to think however we were trained to think and say anything we’ve been trained to say. Free to live exactly how we’ve been programmed to live by our owners.”
And sure there are a few of us who manage get our minds unplugged from the propaganda matrix, but our numbers are kept so few as to be inconsequential. Everyone else is told we are paranoid conspiracy theorists and victims of Russian propaganda and disinformation in order to inoculate the mainstream herd against infection from our wrongthink, while the volume on the imperial indoctrination machine is simply cranked up a notch.
The good news is that there’s no way this is sustainable. There’s only so much depravity you can sweep under the carpet with the broom of deception before people start noticing the lumps on the floor. There’s only so far you can stretch and twist the human mind before it snaps. The empire is a house of cards resting on a closed pair of eyelids, and at some point those eyelids are going to flutter open. At some point everyone’s going to start noticing the loose threads in the fabric of all this, and keep pulling and pulling until they see through the entire scam.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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