Nothing About This Dystopia Feels Natural

Reading by Tim Foley:

Nothing about this dystopia feels natural. We all sense it deep in our marrow. We all know something has gone terribly wrong.

If you lived in an alternate reality without wars or poverty, where everyone had enough and governments did what’s in the interests of the people and the ecosystem, it would never occur to you that there was anything odd about it. It would feel completely normal. Things would be more or less how you’d expect them to be.

You can’t say the same about the present status quo. The whole thing instinctively scans as weird and counterintuitive. The more you learn about the way the world works, the more insane it all looks to you.

Have you ever had to explain war to a young child? It’s terrible. If you’re actually honest with them about what war is and why it is waged, it completely shatters their understanding of the world. They look at you like they’ve suddenly been transported into a strange alien universe where everything is backward.

Their reaction is correct. That is the sane and normal way to look at war. All the freakish mental contortions we do to try and normalize it is what’s crazy.

Everything about this dystopia is like this. If you could see it all with fresh eyes, you would scream in horror. The only reason anyone finds any of this tolerable is because we have become desensitized and accustomed to the madness.

Seeing somebody sleeping on the sidewalk should feel like a punch in the stomach. Seeing children killed by bombs on your social media feed should stop your whole world.

The fact that there are plutocrats profiting from war and militarism.

The fact that billionaire corporations are integrating surveillance technology into every facet of our society.

The fact that we’re destroying our biosphere and driving families into poverty to maximize shareholder value.

The fact that oligarchy has turned democracy into a sham where our votes don’t make any real difference.

The fact that there are people in the global south who are living like slaves so that those of us in the imperial core can have cheap bread and circuses to keep us docile and distracted.

We all know deep down inside that these are intolerable abuses, but they’ve been so normalized and compartmentalized in our psychology that it all just fades into this kind of eerie dissonance in the background of our attention.

The more conscious you become of what’s going on in the world, the more that dissonance moves into the foreground, and the less tolerable this dystopia becomes for you. As Terence McKenna said, “The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”

And that’s a good thing. Injustice and abuse should not feel tolerable. We should allow our discomfort with this intolerable situation to drive us to action and resistance.

And as uncomfortable as it can feel to stare into the unmasked face of the empire in all its beastly fury, this clarity also brings with it a degree of relief, because when it comes online you finally understand why nothing has ever felt right about this civilization you were born into. You understand that your intuitive discomfort and revulsion you felt as a child at the madness you were being indoctrinated into accepting was one hundred percent accurate, and that everyone who taught you to accept the unacceptable was wrong.

Trust that childhood intuition. You’ve always had the truth inside you. Let it guide you as you read and inform yourself to help your mind catch up with what you already know in your heart. Let your heart inform your mind, let your mind inform your actions, and let your actions help awaken humanity to the truth we’ve been hiding from ourselves all these years.

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