The above image was made by @amberjyang with Midjourney using the prompt 'flock of sheeple humans in the future.'
I recently posted a new installment of Free Mind Gazette on Substack. Titled "The Obvious Path Out of Digital Tyranny," the piece includes and expands upon my most recent post here. It suggests that abandoning legacy systems is the best path out of tyranny, which is something I find myself saying more and more.
Lately I've been grappling with a problem that's rarely named. As an alt media writer, I'm continually bringing things to light that the powers that be would rather keep in the shadows. Underlying my work is the idea that people would do better things if they had better information. Here the great enemy is ignorance, which can be defeated by enlightenment, leading people to make better choices.
Although this idea holds water, it's also true that even those with great information sometimes make terrible choices. And many Americans seem at this point to be under a magic spell that prevents us from understanding our shared circumstance. The control regime's programming is so deeply encoded into the psyches of most people that they literally cannot process true information that conflicts with this programming.
The problem I'm grappling with is how to acknowledge this challenge without writing these people off completely. In practical terms, they're enemies of freedom and supporters of corporate and governmental predation. Calling them foot soldiers of the control regime would be appropriate. But framing the issue in terms of enemies and soldiers is itself problematic.
Although the people comprising the control regime and those under the regime's influence do behave like enemies, the vast majority of them appear largely unaware that they're causing harm. In fact, most of them are certain that they're making the world a better place, even as their actions add to the dystopia consuming society. They don't imagine themselves ignorant. Nor are most of them unintelligent.
This group, which might make up the majority of the population, simply believes stories about the world that range from one-sided to flatly untrue. Each member of this group inhabits an individualized world assembled from these stories and cannot make sense of any reality beyond this individualized world. So they ruin our shared human ecology yet imagine that they're behaving sensibly.
It's morally dubious to consider these people enemies and intellectually lazy to write them off as sheeple. They're not sheeple. They're victims of a society-wide manipulation campaign. They've been fooled by government and big business every step of the way. We shouldn't feel sorry for them. Misled or not, they're still responsible for their actions.
I don't think most of the people supporting our broken status quo can be reasoned with. They can't be ignored or defeated in battle. Yet on a personal level, they can often be engaged constructively. And collectively, they can be treated like exactly what they are, a vast machine run amok.
Read Free Mind Gazette on Substack
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.
Those set of people have been fooled by the amount of money that the government has given to them. It’s just so painful that they know the right thing and see all what is going on but they choose to follow the wrong path
Yes it's troubling.
Love this!!! The most powerful parts of this post for me:
Something that's coming up for me as I read your post is that we're all mirrors for each other. As the alt media community gets more polarized and reactive in their approach, other factions (like victims of a vast propaganda machine) double down, and vice versa. We need some form of activist aikido. Enough resisting and reacting against the Other. It's just creating more violence.
And we also need time and energy. The oppressive economic conditions have led all of us to survive on minimal resources as we work our butts off to pay our bills, put food on the table, etc. We're too busy to spend time with each other, and to slow things down. That's a huge problem.
For sure. The question of how to create the right spaces for real progress to be made seems crucial right now.