"Time flies. The older you get, the faster it goes."
That's something my old man told me the entire time I was growing up. He was right.
There are times where I look through this blog's archives and shake my head in bemusement. There are things I'd forgotten I'd written. There are things I've blogged about that I can't believe I used to think like that. There are other things for which I laugh when I realize I wrote in 2007 that I could have easily written today, other posts, wishing I could take it back. Bah.
In any case, re-reading my own writing over a span of years has been an interesting journey into the continual effort in gaining a true education in how life really works in our Brave New World Order.
Every day, somebody new discovers teh MAndrosphere on teh Interwebz. Every day, we see comments of folks who've taken the red pill and choked it down and faced the ugly truths of how each and every one of us has been lied to by our schools, churches, media, leaders and most everyone else. Many folks can't even begin to fathom the lies they are living, because that is all they've ever known.
I write that from the perspective of having been one of those guys for quite a long time. This blog is one, long documentation of a process of deprogramming and truth seeking.
Sometimes, it gets repetitive, and I log on to this blog and stare at a blank "New Post" page and realize that what I'm trying to write, I've already written. Other times, I'll even write a full length post, than re-read it and simply delete it. Too redundant. What's left to say that I haven't already said?
That's when I log off and go read elsewhere. Sometimes, someone, somewhere in these fringes of teh Interwebz writes something that inspires the muse. I get writer's block often. But when the muse comes, the posts almost seem to write themselves. Other times, I read someone else's blog entry and get inspired all over again.
Like today.
I've been a long time reader of The Vigilant Citizen. He's changed his blog layout, format and content a lot since I first came across his site, but I never clicked on his "about" page until today. I usually don't look at most bloggers About pages anymore. Back in the early days of the emerging MAndrosphere, I used to, but now we just have too many blogs to read. (This is a good thing.)
Only so much time in the day, and time flies!
Anyhow, reading Vigilant C's About page was the inspiration for this little bit of nostalgia I've been indulging in with this post. VC doesn't use the Matrix Allegory - red pill | blue pill device which is essentially the MAndrosphere zeitgeist. Nevertheless, what he describes is what we are all familiar whenever we see newcomers who find these fringes of teh Interwebz:
I remember when I first learned about the “Truth” and it wasn’t pretty. I remember learning about how the mass media lie to our faces on a daily basis. About how the educational system only teaches the youth what they need to become obedient workers. About how politics are merely a puppet show and that, regardless of who is in office, the same Agenda will be going forward. About how our rights and freedoms are being revoked. About how the masses are purposely being dumbed-down. About how simple values are rejected from popular culture and replaced by shallow materialism and glorification of immediate fulfillment of impulses.
Learning about these things was overwhelming and, to be honest, it really pissed me off. I remember being depressed for days, repeating to myself “Everything I was ever told was a lie”. I was disgusted by the world I grew up in and the people I used to look up to. That was an awful phase. But, looking back, I realized that it was just a phase – one that all seekers of truth eventually need to go through. It is shocking, disheartening, confusing and totally not cool. But necessary.
As I pursued my research and as I gained a little wisdom and experience, that nasty feeling eventually went away. Gloria Steinem famously wrote “The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.” That is certainly true. But after the “pissed off” phase, better understanding our world leads to an extremely valuable reward: Knowledge, wisdom and happiness.
Although I do not consider this site to contain all of the “Truth”, simply a small part of it, I nevertheless hope its contents is insightful enough to prompt in some people a “thirst for more”.
I could have written that. Indeed, I pretty much have. That's what the past 5+ years of blogging here has been all about. Gaining an awareness of truth, and aligning my life in accordance to it. Many of these things have become automatic. The development of critical thinking and analysis.
After a period of time of actively seeking the Truth through research and questioning, discerning what is real and what is illusion becomes an easy task. Instead of mindlessly absorbing everything that is communicated through mass media, a truth seeker will have the ability to say “Wait, this is BS. I do not believe it and I reject it.” The erection of a gateway that controls the acceptance of messages in our minds, also known as “critical thinking”, is one of the main benefits of truth seeking. This site focuses on mass media because its multiple outlets are used to sell illusion and delusion to the masses. They also define what is acceptable, what is desirable and what is not.
This is where the THEY LIVE glasses metaphor is so apropos.
Watching a few hours of MTV programming is enough to understand that its contents promotes a specific set of values to the youth, notably the importance of materialism, the cult of celebrity and fame, the glorification of appearances and of the superficial, the sexualization and fetishization of everything and so forth. A young person that has not developed the ability to think critically will absorb this information, integrate it and, ultimately, live by it. However, an educated mind will realize that all of these values are artificial constructs and deceiving illusions.
Now you know why our Public Education system was deliberately dumbed down...so that the masses would fail to develop critical thinking skills, so they can be told WHAT to think, not HOW to think. To make minds malleable to the subversive influence of the Tell-A-Vision. Public School education is a factory, an infernal assembly line, churning out young minds ready to be molded by mass media indoctrination, so that we follow the script THEY have written for us all.
So what's the point of it all? Why The Mandrosphere? Why this continual beating of a dead horse with the "red pill | blue pill" Matrix allegory?
This realization also leads to a new appreciation for the simplest things in life that are, coincidentally, the most important things in life. Spending time with loved ones, appreciating the world’s beauty and becoming a better person cost absolutely nothing, yet they are keys to true happiness.
That is the point of all this truth seeking on teh Interwebz! Not to form a movement or support some political party or try to "fix the system." There's no fixing it, because it's not broken. It's doing precisely what it was designed to do.
Our current System is looking to lead us away from these values because they create people who are not dependent of the System. The System needs us to crave and want, and to live for the crap that is sold to us. It needs us to spend our paychecks, to load our credit cards and to take on ridiculous mortgages in order for us to replicate what we see on TV. Our debts are the chains that link us to them and we willingly chain ourselves.
What is more profitable to them? A strong family based on morals, values and traditions or a shallow individual who looks to fill the gaping hole in his/her life with appearances and consumer products? Who is the easier to influence toward a specific idea or agendas? Our current System is a giant wheel that needs each one of us pushing in order for it to advance. Without us, the wheel goes nowhere.
This is why Christianity had to be subverted, marginalized, feminized and expunged from the public discourse of mass media society (are you ready for the upcoming Rabbits and chocolate eggs day?!?!). Christianity promotes family as the foundation of society.
Happily married folks make happy families that breed too many children.
Happy people surrounded by family and friends, and who live a life in which they embrace faith in a higher power, don't buy things they don't need with money they don't have, to try and fill that hollow emptiness inside. They don't look to the Government to provide them with cradle-to-grave direction, sustenance and subsistence.
The effects of rejecting what is fake and embracing what is real is the equivalent of eradicating a cancer that slowly eats away the spirit. But before curing an illness, one must identify it. So, despite the doom and gloom, knowing the ugly truth should not lead to unhappiness. Quite to the contrary, learning what we should avoid also leads to learning what we should embrace. These wonderful things are within our reach and always will be.
That, I believe, is the only real point to this all. Learn what to embrace and find true happiness in this life. That is all there really is to it.
Ka 'imi pono i ka Interwebz! lozlzolzolzolzol
A hui hou.