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.
An interesting piece, to say the least!
Brilliant and unfortunately so true. There must be enough of us to change this. Thank you for your comments.
I love Atwood and have read most everything that she has published. I do not agree with her on abortion though I do understand her point of view. She is entitled to her opinion and we must respect each other or we will all go down in flames together.
It is interesting in these chaotic and warped and twisted times of Joe Biden, where men are now women and nothing at all makes sense, anymore, and words have lost their meaning, to see Yeats’ “The Second Coming” coming back around in here a little over a hundred years since “The Second Coming” was written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920 and included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer.
For those unfamiliar with Yeats and “The Second Coming,” Wikipedia tells us that the poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to allegorically describe the atmosphere of post-war Europe, that being post-WWI, a major conflagration where there were 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded with the total number of deaths including 9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians.
Keeping in mind that Yeats was Irish, the poem was written at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence in January 1919, which followed the Easter Rising in April 1916, and before the British government had decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland.
The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic which killed at least 50 million worldwide.
So what is “The Second Coming” about?
It basically predicts that time is up for humanity, and that civilization as we know it is about to be undone.
But what, pray tell, and especially in these weird and twisted times we find ourselves in today, is “civilization as we know it?”
In these times of Joe Biden, especially in criminal sanctuary cities like Democrat-controlled San Francisco, and Chicago, and Portland, Oregon, can civilization be said to even exist, anymore?
Which thought takes me to John Locke and Chapter II of “The Second Treatise of Government,” titled “Of The State of War” where Locke wrote as follows, to wit:
For by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred;
And one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion;
Because such men are not under the ties of the common law of reason, have no other rule but that of force and violence, and so, may be treated as beasts of prey, those dangerous and noxious creatures that will be sure to destroy him whenever he falls into their power.
In my opinion, it isn’t George Orwell who had the correct model, it is Aldous Huxley. Orwell may have what it feels like in the end but how you get there is plainly in Huxley’s wheelhouse. Hopefully, this comic picture posts well.
https://memolition.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/aldous-huxley-vs-george-orwell-14897-600×4789.jpg
As someone who has read both Huxley and Orwell, and “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells, I think both “A Brave New World” and “1984” can be incorporated into “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand, and the combination would describe to a tee where we are in this country today with Joe Biden at the helm and his State Science Institute which informs us that based on science, men are really women, and when it is freezing and you are scraping ice off your windshield, it is really global warming.
And not all of us are brainwashed, either.
As to Huxley, he was born July 26, 1894, Godalming, Surrey, England and he died November 22, 1963 in Los Angeles, California, U.S., so he was witness to the insanity of WWI, and the ravages of the 1918 flu, as well, as did Yeats.
As to “Brave New World” (1932), according to Britannica, it marked a turning point in Huxley’s career being like his earlier work a fundamentally satiric novel, but it also vividly expresses Huxley’s distrust of 20th-century trends in both politics and technology, with the novel presenting a nightmarish vision of a future society in which psychological conditioning forms the basis for a scientifically determined and immutable caste system that, in turn, obliterates the individual and grants all control to the World State.
As to Orwell, he was born June 25, 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, India and died January 21, 1950.
Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Wellington and Eton, and briefly attended the former before continuing his studies at the latter, where he stayed from 1917 to 1921, and the fates would have it, Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, so there is a definite connection between the two!
And Ayn Rand, original name Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, was born February 2, 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia and died March 6, 1982 in New York, New York,
As a student at Leningrad State University, she studied history and became acquainted with the works of Plato and Aristotle.
So we are looking at people whose views of life, including Yeats were formed based on events in other countries long ago, and it makes one have to wonder if they all were not possessed of prescient vision that they could see our times so clearly back then and describe them so accurately as we are finding them today!