 Propaganda is the source of all our problems. Notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. We don't talk nearly enough about the fact that wealthy and powerful people are constantly pouring vast fortunes into manipulating the way we perceive our world and that this is the ultimate source of all our major problems. Democracy is a meaningless concept when the primary factor in determining how votes will be cast is the wealth that plutocrats have poured into mass-scale media sigh-ups to manipulate public perception of reality. People babble about freedom in a society where almost everybody's mind is in a cage built by the powerful. Caged birds singing that they can do whatever they want inside their cage. COVID could just as easily have been used to transfer wealth downward as upward. The only reason wealth has shifted to the wealthiest among us, instead of the most needful, is because we have systems in place which allow money to translate to political influence and policymaking. Without such vast wealth inequality, the public would have the money to crowdfund their own political campaigns, legislative initiatives, and media outlets. This is why the rich actively work to keep others poor. It's not so they can buy one more private jet. It's to maintain power. Because money is power and power is relative, the plutocrats have a natural incentive to use their financial clout to shape things so the majority remains poor. We have a system which makes you king if you are richer than the masses. If everyone's king, then no one is king. We're as angry as we ought to be, but because of careful narrative manipulation, our anger is directed at each other instead of the people at the top. People often have more emotionality towards someone expressing the wrong opinion about AOC or Iver Mectin than they have toward the oligarchy. The mass media could just as easily have spent this time framing the Afghanistan withdrawal as a good thing and applauding Biden for doing it. And if they had, Biden's approval would be soaring and everyone would think the withdrawal was great. These people control perception of reality. Invade a nation, kill hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants, stay for decades, accomplish nothing besides making war profiteers wealthy, drop everything and leave, then have your armed goon squad take PR photos with local infants so everyone thinks your military is awesome. Afghanistan has been captured by a tyrannical violent extremist group and I hear the group that's replacing them when they complete their withdrawal is pretty bad too. The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics will be split between news media reporters for their breakthrough discovery of the existence of women in Afghanistan. My neighbor attacked me when she caught me in her house at night going through her valuables. This proves she's always wanted to attack me in my home. I need to go fight her over there so I don't have to fight her here. Question, what is free speech? Answer, free speech is when war profiteers are allowed to openly lobby for more wars and the mass media are allowed to brazenly lie to us corporations are allowed to buy government officials and members of the public are allowed to say whatever they want as long as they say it quietly in the privacy of their own home. When poor people claim that spies are attacking their brains with high-tech ray guns it's called paranoid schizophrenia. When government officials say it, it's called Havana syndrome. The US military presence in Australia is an illegitimate occupation that was only made possible by CIA coups and intimidation. Being America's warmongering has come home whenever it abuses its citizenry is a bit dramatic. Get back to me when there are non-stop airstrikes on major US cities and depleted uranium in LA and military blockades on Texas are starving children to death by the thousands. Modern mainstream Western culture is just mass-produced propaganda for the idea that worldwide human behavior should be driven by the pursuit of profit and by consumption. The fact that spiritual enlightenment is a real and attainable thing is possibly the most under-discussed and under-appreciated political realities in our world because it has huge sweeping political implications since it could solve all our problems if collectively realized. But whether we discuss it or not, it might happen anyway as humanity approaches its adapt or die point.