The ideal subject of totalitarian rule, (…)
are the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds.
Hannah Arendt
Why do the people with the most access to real information about climate change pretend it is not happening?
Why do the same people build bunkers, acquire land in remote countries, obtain second and third citizenships in stable nations, and quietly move their families, while telling us everything is fine?
Why are we watching the collapse of the ecosystems that produce our food in silence? Why is the depletion of aquifers, glaciers, and river systems, the infrastructure of all human life, absent from every serious political agenda?
Why have so many governments across the world, representing vastly different cultures, histories, and political traditions, moved toward authoritarian styles of governance at the same moment in history?
Why is so much of the AI budget going to defense, surveillance, autonomous weapons, and war, and so little to solve real problems?
Why has the arms control architecture that kept nuclear war at bay since the cold war, been quietly dismantled, with almost no public debate?
Why was the most transformative technology in human history developed and deployed without any meaningful public debate or democratic oversight?
Why are we building detention centers? Why are we building data centers that consume more water and energy than entire cities need to survive?
Why does the same technology that is eliminating workers also eliminate consumers, and why does no one in power seem troubled by an economy that is eliminating its own market?
Why are education and health the two systems most transformed into debt instruments, ensuring the population remains financially dependent, too exhausted by survival to look up?
Why do the wealthiest corporations in human history pay less tax proportionally than the nurse, the teacher, the cab driver?
Why are we defunding the health systems designed to protect us from epidemics, at the exact moment that the risks are increasing?
Why are we living through one of the most severe mental health crises in recorded history, addiction, depression, suicide, despair cutting across every demographic, at the exact moment the system declares itself more productive and efficient than ever?
Why do we invade countries sitting on oil, and destabilize others that supply it to our competitors, and why is that pattern never mentioned in the coverage of those conflicts?
Why does the information environment amplify certain wars and bury others of equal or greater scale, and why does that selection follow such a consistent pattern?
Why is so much disinformation propagated that truth becomes unrecognizable, and who benefits from a population that can no longer tell the difference?
Why is the range of acceptable political conversation narrowing precisely at the moment when the questions that most need asking are the largest in human history?
Why has the capacity for sustained attention and critical thinking been systematically eroded, and why does the most profitable business model on the planet depend on that erosion?
Why do we bear witness to genocide and keep sending weapons to those who use them against civilians and children?
Why are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, whose stated purpose is the preservation of global peace, also the five largest arms dealers on the planet?
Why do the people who consider empathy a design flaw, democracy an obstacle, and most of humanity as NPC (non-playing-characters) irrelevant to the game they are playing, why do those people now have more power than our elected governments?
Why do we still organize our understanding of the world around good guys and bad guys when the evidence, consistently, everywhere, points to only different versions of the same bad guys?
Why are the people building our future also building their exits?
Why are we still participating, cheering, opinionating, voting, consuming, scrolling, tax paying?
Are you, like me, connecting the dots?
Do you see what I see?
PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by.
Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.
I guess it’s because Industrial capitalism is structurally cynical and programmed on a scarcity mindset. When you add to that the often “quoted fact” that the carrying capacity of earth is thought to be 1.5 billion and histrionically Armageddon is programmed into the Anthropocene, that people respond much better to simpler stories than complex factual relationships even while their bodies might know better, then you get a recipe for Orwellian sagas.
There is no non painful way through transformation and we are fully in one now. So the cultural babble creates toxic bubbles which reduce much of the social bodies of individuals into nervous system reactions to non-contextual dangers with no actual risk of present attack. The last 70 years of movies, marketing and attention misuse as daily practice has brought western cultures especially the USA to be unable to discern and to quick to react into conflict without awareness. There are other components but those are just a few that are being used to steer hegemonic practice and instill fear and lack of consideration.
As someone who spent some time in a cult, even though I was on the peripheral, the common denominator in everybody I met was arrogance. Narcissism. These people wanted more than anything to have “The Secret,” the special information that nobody else knew. Most of them were deeply insecure people, even though some of them were successful, the desperate need to have more information than everybody else took precedence over any possibility of logic and reason. Power and control, even when it came to secret knowledge was more valuable to them than truth.