Caitlin Johnstone

The Empire Is Built On Our Closed Eyes: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article: ❖ They can’t work toward peace in Ukraine because it will serve Putin. They can’t work toward peace in Yemen because it will serve Iran. They can’t end the occupation of Syria because it will serve Assad. They can’t stop military expansionism because it will serve China. Or,…

Caitlin Johnstone
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Listen to a reading of this article:

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They can’t work toward peace in Ukraine because it will serve Putin. They can’t work toward peace in Yemen because it will serve Iran. They can’t end the occupation of Syria because it will serve Assad. They can’t stop military expansionism because it will serve China.

Or, maybe they’re just warmongers.

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It’s actually very concerning that the US empire is now escalating the war in Ukraine by crossing many lines it said it would not cross at the beginning of the war, and justifying those escalations by basically just saying “Yeah well we decided that we want to do that after all.” Recent examples include greenlighting Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian territory, providing Patriot missiles to the Ukrainian military, and the revelation that British marines have been conducting dangerous covert ops on the ground in Ukraine.

The empire drew a line ruling out these escalations at the beginning of the war due to fears of uncontrollable outcomes in confronting a nuclear superpower. Now it is crossing those lines without really providing any robust explanation for why it is now considered safe to do so.

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I have said it before and I’ll say it again: if you’ve been finding yourself growing concerned about “communism”, it’s because we’re in a new cold war and that’s what your rulers have been propagandizing you to feel. You’re being manipulated into blaming the problems that are being inflicted upon you by your own rulers (including those you voted for) on a country on the other side of the planet, and on a highly marginalized and completely powerless political ideology in your own country.

Even if you believe communism is bad, communists are nowhere remotely close to having any sort of power in or over the English-speaking world. It’s like spending your life being terrified of tigers. People are just falling for these four delusions:

  1. Thinking communists are anywhere remotely close to having power or taking power in the English-speaking world.
  2. Thinking entirely capitalist things like the Democratic Party and the WEF are “communist”.
  3. Thinking China is a threat.
  4. Confusing the concepts of “communism” and “authoritarianism”.

Absolutely authoritarianism is growing in the west, and it must be opposed. But can’t you see that the growing tyranny in our capitalist countries has nothing to do with communism, and that confusing it as such gets you shaking your fist at China due to oppression being inflicted upon you by your own rulers?

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In case you missed it, a recent DC swamp party for US officials, journalists, think tankers and diplomats at the Ukrainian Embassy was officially sponsored by the US arms manufacturers who’ve profited astronomically from the war in Ukraine, with the logos of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Pratt & Whitney appearing on the actual invitation.

Are people not yet tired of having their intelligence insulted?

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One thing to keep in mind about the Twitter Files exposition of the overlap between Silicon Valley and secretive government agencies is that the overlap is almost certainly worse in Google/YouTube and Meta/Facebook/Instagram. Twitter has historically been the least awful major platform when it comes to resisting resisting government influence.

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Most forms of spirituality serve only to sedate people and help them hide from reality, others do the opposite and awaken you to reality. The former is the “opiate of the masses” which creates a sedentary populace; the latter is the sort that’s useful in creating a healthy world.

I used to hang out on spirituality forums focused on enlightenment, and even with a singular emphasis on awakening it was remarkable how many members used spirituality to hide from reality. From their abusive and unsatisfying relationships and lifestyles. From their trauma. From themselves. In exactly the same way, spirituality has always been used to cover up reality, often in power-serving ways. Before it was glorifying poverty, meekness and obedience; now it’s McMindfulness and other practices to mask the sting of oppressive capitalism.

In the same way most mind-altering drugs serve only to sedate and escape from reality while the psychedelic variety does the opposite, most forms of spirituality facilitate unconsciousness while authentic spirituality facilitates awakening.

Authentic spirituality doesn’t seek to give you new beliefs, nor to give you spiritual practices to make reality less abrasive and confronting, but to uncover what’s hidden and stare reality right in the face. It means squarely interrogating all our assumptions about what’s true. Authentic spirituality entails no indoctrination, sedation or escapism, but a curious and sincere exploration of one’s own experience. It seeks to discover what’s true: what’s true about one’s conditioning, about consciousness, about the self, about the way life is experienced.

There are all sorts of ways authentic spirituality can show up, and within all official branches, schools, factions and iterations of spirituality you’ll see some authentic exploration and lots of inauthentic escapism. A sincere dedication to what’s true happens where it happens.

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You don’t live in a free country. And no, it’s not because they make you pay taxes or that time they made you wear a mask or whatever. The real reason you don’t live in a free country is much, much bigger than that: you don’t live in a free country because the minds of your countrymen are imprisoned.

Westerners think they’re free because they can say whatever they want and vote however they want, but what they want is controlled by mass-scale psychological manipulation. Being able to speak and vote as you wish is meaningless if the powerful control what it is that you wish.

Westerners think they’re free because they can speak their minds, and sure, it’s pleasant to be able to do that. It would be pleasant to have your body trapped in a vat with your brain plugged into a blissful virtual reality world, too — but it wouldn’t be freedom. It would be prison disguised as freedom. And that’s what we have here: prison disguised as freedom. The science of modern propaganda has been developing alongside all the other sciences for over a century, and it has advanced just as much as the others have. And now it’s at a point where it can control our very desires.

It’s generally harder to recognize psychologically abusive relationships than physically abusive ones, because the abuse isn’t as overt, and because the psychological faculties you would normally use to assess situations have been twisted and warped. That’s what’s happening here: people are being psychologically manipulated at mass scale into thinking, speaking and acting in a way that serves the powerful, and their minds have become too propaganda-addled to recognize that this is happening. We’re not free, and most can’t even recognize how unfree we are.

And that’s our real problem: very few of us understand how profoundly unfree we are. Just how much our minds are being squished down into these teeny tiny boxes to prevent us from expanding and realizing our true power and our true potential, and the kind of world we could have. Our slavery is so pervasive that few can even see the full extent of it. Many will say they don’t feel they live in a free country, but if you ask them to explain why, they might say something about drug laws or government regulations on their business or whatever. The abuse is too big for them to truly perceive how bad the whole thing is.

So we march along to the drumbeat of our rulers, thinking, speaking, shopping, spending, consuming, scrolling, viewing, listening, voting and behaving exactly how they want us to, and mistaking all this for freedom, because we’ve been manipulated into wanting to do those things.

We won’t ever know true freedom until we find a way to end this. To un-jack our minds from the propaganda matrix they have built for us and begin perceiving reality clearly. Our world. Our country. Our society. Our own minds. Our own authentic desires, free from manipulation.

Our task, then, is to help awaken as many people as we can to the reality of how unfree we truly are. To be voices whispering in the matrix, beckoning the dreamers toward the real world in as many varied and creative ways ways as we can come up with. To coax those eyes open.

If we can get a critical mass of people waking up from their propaganda-induced comas, the primary control mechanism holding our enslavement in place will have been shattered. The primary obstacle to a healthy world will be removed.

An entire empire has been built upon our closed eyelids. When we finally snap them open, it will have to fall.

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