And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere. The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. – WB Yeats, The Second Coming
It is a sad joke, all of this stupidity we have to endure. When you really think about it, the ones that make the rules do not care anything about you–not your sexual orientation, how you identify, or what your pronouns are. They do not care if you own an AR-15 or a Daisey Red Rider BB gun. A woman’s right to choose is not even acknowledged. Whether you are racist, sexist, ageist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic or fatphobic, they don’t care. Here’s the rub: the key is to keep you thinking, speaking, working, consuming and voting in ways which keep them rich and powerful; while keeping us poor and powerless. They love the visceral public debates, they want us hating and fighting each other as intensely as possible about the things they do not care about. That way, we don’t notice the things they do care about.
The news media, films, books, magazines continually lobotomize the ordinary people. We are all brainwashed by propaganda without even knowing it, where everyone thinks, acts, votes and shops exactly as their rulers want them to, all while thinking they are free. People worry about technocratic escalations like digital IDs and CBDCs while foolishly thinking that this bleak, technocratic dystopia would look a lot different from the dystopia they are in right now.
People imagine an Orwellian dystopia as some Christopher Nolan dark future, but we are already there. They exist in a bubble of imagined freedom because we can choose what to buy at Target and watch football games on Sunday. There is no Illuminati that can subtly force us all to do as they wish. We are doing exactly as they wish. It really can’t be improved upon. There’s no meaningful political opposition, no antiwar movement, no anti-capitalist movement, very little critical thought — the control mechanism is already in place.
Margaret Atwood, whom literary critics call the “prophet of dystopia,” recently defined dystopia as when “[W]arlords and demagogues take over, some people forget that all people are people, enemies are created, vilified and dehumanized, minorities are persecuted, and human rights as such are shoved to the wall.”
Atwood’s dystopia is brilliant fiction, but dystopia, the one we are living in now is much more benign. We drink our beer and engage in a design that cloaks the sinister into the every day and madness into the mundane. This design is meant to funnel profit into the coffers of the oligarchs and power into the hands of the imperialists and War Dogs, and all efforts to resist and change these funneling systems have been successfully quashed by a social tech media machine that accomplishes psychological manipulation on a mass scale.
This totalitarian dystopia resembles a slightly abnormal euphoria. It will look a lot like freedom because they let us more or less do what we want. At the same time, we are controlled in what we want to do, a control fueled by easy access to our addictions. They further bolster this by creating systems where what we do has little or no meaningful effect. We all move in concert with the will of our rulers, without questioning whether we are not free.
The tools won’t be the things of Phillip K. Dick nightmares…not surveillance, police robots, digital IDs or digital currencies — the primary weapon is propaganda. The system of mass-scale psychological conditioning is a technological education and media-based tapestry.
No need to worry about a revolt. The herd has been psychologically conditioned to not even think about it. This is an insidious level of power and control. Propaganda is the base algorithm of this control.
Sadly, even if you show them, most will be happy with the status quo. The conditioned behavior and its propaganda laced euphoria is too comforting to release.