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Reprinted from caitlinjohnstone.com
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Talking about Russia's invasion of Ukraine without also talking about the ways the US empire provoked and benefits from this war is the same as lying.
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One of the main differences between myself and other commentators who talk about an elite conspiracy to implement a totalitarian dystopia is that the others warn that we are being pushed toward this dystopia, while I insist that we're already there and have been for generations.
When I say we're in a totalitarian dystopia a lot of people assume I mean things like vaccine mandates or gun laws or paying taxes, but I actually mean something far, far bigger than that. I mean we're all in a psychological prison built by the powerful to control how we are.
The Orwellian dystopia isn't some danger that exists in the future; it's here presently. It just doesn't look like what Orwell imagined. Our rulers are getting everything they want out of the current dystopia, just as much as they would in societies envisioned by dystopian novelists.
It is true that we are seeing more and more overtly tyrannical measures rolled out in areas like surveillance and suppression of speech, but those are not means of getting us into the dystopian prison, they are means of keeping us there. They're just tightening the bolts on our cage.
You can tell we're in a psychological prison because everyone's getting crazier and crazier. Mental illness and addiction are soaring, there's a mass shooting epidemic in the United States, and everyone's feeling increasingly miserable and alienated. This is because we're all propagandized to the gills. We're acting like victims of psychological abuse because that's what we are. We've spent our whole lives having our minds systematically pounded into a shape that makes us think, speak, act and vote in a way that benefits our rulers.
Because they control the way we think with mass scale psychological manipulation, their control is total. It's as total as it would be in the civilization laid out in Orwell's 1984. We won't be doing anything they don't want us doing while our minds are locked down like this. What we have is actually far more effective than an overly tyrannical dystopia, because it looks like freedom. They let you do more or less what you want, while using mass-scale psychological manipulation to control what it is that you will want to do.
What's harder to escape than a maximum security prison? A prison where the prisoners don't even know they're in prison.
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Sometimes it feels like our rulers make up culture war topics on the fly, just to win bets with each other.
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