I saw a 𝕏clip going around from the Netflix series “1899” where a woman discovers a crack in the screen of what she had taken to be her world, causing her entire understanding of reality to crumble before her eyes.
Someone had captioned the clip, “Every awakening begins with a fracture in the lie.”
Yeah. It does tend to happen like that.
You start pulling on one thread and then the whole thing unravels. Maybe you start with the Iraq war lies. Maybe 9/11. These days for a lot of folks it’s Palestine.
You keep pulling on that thread, uncovering more and more uncomfortable truths, until eventually you discover that pretty much everything you’ve been taught about your world was a lie.
Every war. Everything about how your government really operates. Everything you’ve been told about nations and how they work. Everything about capitalism and communism and how your society is structured. It was all lies, fed to you by parents, teachers, preachers, pundits, politicians and news men from the moment you were old enough to process complex thought.
It can feel scary. It can feel like the end of your world, because in a sense that’s exactly what it is. Your sincere pursuit of the truth leads to the unraveling of everything you thought you knew, and you find yourself plunging into a great abyss of uncertainty about what’s real.
And a lot of people do get lost at this juncture. They plunge down too many rabbit holes with too much paranoia and not enough critical thinking, and they wind up replacing all their old indoctrinated belief systems with new beliefs that are just as crazy and power-serving as the first ones. There’s often a gap between letting go of your old worldview and assembling a new one where it’s easy to get confused and misled.
But if you remain sincere, careful, relentlessly self-honest and dedicated to the truth while ensuring your critical thinking faculties remain operating at full power, you eventually emerge from this chrysalis phase with the wings of a truth-based worldview. You can now not only see through the old lies, but can understand what’s really going on in the world.
And what’s really going on in the world is a lot less pleasant than the fictions you were fed as a schoolchild. You can see that we are ruled by a transnational alliance of plutocrats and government agencies who manipulate world affairs to maximize their power and profits at the expense of ordinary working people around the globe, and you can see that those same powerful abusers are responsible for constructing the fictional power-serving worldview you just freed yourself from.
And when you see how unpleasant the truth is and how hard you had to work to realize it, you understand why relatively few people have awakened to it. From the perspective of the ego, it’s a whole lot of effort and discomfort without much in the way of payoff. Forming a truth-based worldview is something you do for its own sake, and if you’re not the sort of person who views truth as its own reward, then you’re not the sort of person who’s likely to pursue it.
But more and more people are choosing truth. More and more people are spotting a loose thread labeled “Gaza” or “Epstein” or what have you, and giving it a curious tug. Despite the discomfort, despite the required effort, and despite the great cost of having to sacrifice the world they thought they knew, they’re pulling that thread, and they keep on pulling. We’re seeing it more and more every year.
And that gives me hope. I don’t know where this is headed or whether we win in the end, but I’m seeing enough movement in human consciousness at mass scale to continue holding out hope for a better world.
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