Everyone kind of knows that our society is profoundly sick. You can sense it.
There are raging disagreements about what exactly it is that’s wrong, but everyone can feel that something freakish and unnatural is happening here.
The source of this sickness isn’t clear at first glance, so you’ll hear countless explanations for what specifically is giving rise to this sense of dis-ease within us. Some say it’s because we don’t have enough religion in our lives. Others say it’s because we have too much. Some say it’s because half the country has the wrong political ideology. Others say it’s because there are too many trans people or immigrants. Some say it’s because humanity itself is innately rotten. Others say it’s because our society is enslaved in a sinister conspiracy by Jews or Freemasons or neo-Marxist technocrats.
Everyone disagrees on the nature of our dilemma, but we can pretty much all agree that something is very wrong.
The reason it’s so hard to nail down the source of our problem is because every part of it is designed to be hidden. We are ruled by unelected plutocrats and empire managers who actively avoid being recognized as our rulers. These oligarchs work continuously to manipulate our minds using propaganda that’s disguised to look like news and trustworthy sources of information. This propaganda places ideas in our heads which we are tricked into believing we came up with on our own. These tricks work because they hook onto egoic tendencies within our psyches whose nature we are largely unconscious of.
This all works together to manufacture consent for a system which does not serve the interests of ordinary human beings, and most of it is hidden from immediate view. We find ourselves in a mind-controlled dystopia where we think, speak, vote, work, shop, spend and behave in more or less exactly the ways the rich and powerful want us to, all while believing we are free — because the mechanisms of control are hidden from us.
As soon as we are old enough to think and understand, our thoughts and understanding are shaped by the powerful using the most sophisticated system of mass-scale psychological manipulation that has ever been devised. We live our whole lives marinating in power-serving narratives about the world and our place in it. It’s all we’ve ever known, so we think it’s normal. It almost never occurs to anyone to question how their worldview got into their heads in the first place; to most of us it just looks like truth and common sense.
But because we live under a system that’s designed to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of ordinary people, we’re all acutely aware that the way things are isn’t really working. As the abuses and injustices inherent in capitalism become more and more egregious, this sense that something is wrong gets more and more widespread and acute. This discontentment is currently being funneled by the powerful into faux populist movements designed to herd the public into supporting the status quo while allowing them to feel as though they are waging a brave revolution against the establishment.
The public is becoming more and more restless and agitated because they can sense that something’s wrong but can’t say what it is, like a dementia patient with a urinary tract infection. This agitation is erupting in ways which range from the crazy to the very lucid, from hate crimes and racist movements to mass protests against genocide and an expanding awareness that a better world is possible.
Our job at this point in history is to try to steer this growing restlessness toward health and clarity. To help people understand where the real bad guys are, to highlight the manipulations and abusive systems at play here, to assure everyone that their growing sense that something is very wrong is absolutely correct, and to help them see exactly what’s causing it.
As we move into a new year, that’s what we should all be working on to help humanity find its way into a better future.
Author
Caitlin Johnstone, an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz or caityjohnstone.medium.com. You can read more about her project HERE. Read her Substack blog.
