More and more humans are suffering from empire psychosis.
People who can’t go ten minutes without checking their phones, losing hours a day to social media and mindless scrolling.
People talking to chatbots, learning about the world from them, learning about life from them, making friends with them, forming relationships with them.
Binging on podcasts, binging on streaming services, binging on video games, binging on apps, binging on vapes, binging on treats delivered to their door by underpaid workers from bombed-out countries.
The bread was designed in a lab to be furiously addictive, and the circuses track your preferences to serve you up all your favorite performances.
Empire psychosis keeps us in a constant state of distraction and escapism, always scrambling to avoid the here and now like we’re trying to climb out of our own skins.
It’s a frenzied discontentedness. A persistent delusion that satisfaction exists right around the corner after the next restless squirm. It’s an artificially manufactured mental disorder. And it’s worth trillions of dollars.
In the capitalist empire, there is no value to be generated by contented people. Our minds must be continually prodded and diddled to manipulate us out of our natural serenity so that we are in a constant state of toil and dissatisfaction, at all times reaching for the next fix of the next product. Clever manipulators have figured out how to generate vast fortunes by harnessing the restlessness they deliberately stir up within us.
We are psychologically hammered with advertisements and consumerist messaging from mainstream culture to convince us that we need more than we have and that we aren’t okay the way we are. That we’re not beautiful enough, not stylish enough, not successful enough, not abundant enough. The products are designed to be dependence-forming so we need to buy them, and they’re designed to quickly become obsolete so that we need to keep buying more.
They trick us out of our natural state of contentedness and then sell it back to us. They deceive us into leaving our home and then charge us an admission price to come visit.
Something went wrong. Humanity went off course. They enclosed the commons, colonized the new world, constructed a tiered society of haves and have-nots, and now we’re all living like space aliens on our own home planet.
We do not have to keep suffering from their man-made madness. We can do the inner work necessary to come back to our own contentedness, and we can do the outer work necessary to take back what the manipulators have stolen from us.
We don’t need to keep consenting to this abusive relationship any longer. A healthy world is our birthright. We will tear down the madness machine and stand at peace in the soil of the planet we were born on.
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I can step away from the destraction and escapism to a large extent. What I am finding very difficult to absorb right now is that those stupid idiots, those greedy capitalist pigs, those people who cannot see past their bank accounts are now gloating over all the money they can make from war and more war. In Europe, Ukrainians who have left to avoid being soldiers, are being abducted from the streets of cities such as Berlin and sent back to fight in Ukraine. They are forcing people to fight. Men and women. This is what "distracts" me. This is what scares me. This is what I am afraid is going to be the lives for my grandchildren and their friends. I don't consent to this crap now and I have never consented to it. We are all being bullied and made afraid. This is not mere "distraction".
"Empire psychosis keeps us in a constant state of distraction and escapism, always scrambling to avoid the here and now like we’re trying to climb out of our own skins."
You kill me, Caitlin.
Please keep it up.