Why does reality seem unreal these days?  The short answer is this: we are all being dragged into a government-controlled matrix.  In the blockbuster movie that popularized that concept twenty years ago, Keanu Reeves's character discovers that his mind is "living" in a virtual reality neural network while machine overlords keep his physical body comatose and imprisoned in a pod.  A lot of powerful people apparently watched that story and decided that the machines were actually on "the right side of history."

Whereas the film championed the ideas of liberation and free will over submission and control, in the real world today, it is subjugation and authority that are championed over freedom and individual rights.  Governments, corporations, and a small global oligarchy are working diligently to put us into our pods, shut us away from reality, and hook us directly into the matrix they've created to keep us under their total control.

Depending on your age, life experience, and level of cynicism, this truth is either obvious or preposterous.  When you accept it as fact, however, then the world doesn't look chaotic at all.  It looks exactly as one would expect if the machines had just begun rounding up humans for their forced hibernation.  

The goals of our overlords are indistinguishable from those of the machines they emulate: (1) eliminate personal sovereignty, (2) elevate absolute government control, and (3) track all human activity.  How are such goals accomplished?  By teaching humans that individualism is bad, that government coercion in the name of the "common good" is ideal, and that privacy hinders "progress."  How do you teach these lessons?  Through indoctrination and behavioral modification.  

Consider the most important doctrinal issue for Big Government over the last half-century: planetary extinction from the use of hydrocarbon energy.  These energies are responsible for saving more people from poverty than any other resource in human history, but they also led to a natural population explosion that frightened the traditionally powerful.  More people with more wealth mean more freedom and less centralized, authoritarian control.  So how have our machines responded?  By calling for the strict regulation of all energies.  And how is regulation accomplished?  By creating a religious fanaticism predicated on the worship of "green" idols, the demonization of hydrocarbon energy, and the revelation of apocalyptic visions prophesying the end of the world.  For people who have been proselytized, all human activity must be regulated because all human activity involves the use of hydrocarbon energy.  Freedom is eliminated by the "need" for governments to monitor everything.

Of course, promises of planetary doom depend upon dates for a coming apocalypse that are sufficiently distant that they don't come and pass as unceremoniously as Y2K.  There's the rub for our machines.  A date too soon, and the con is exposed.  A date too far off, and it becomes more difficult to convince the rabble to voluntarily return to life as it existed during the Bronze Age, just so the descendants of some "woke," genderless Gaia-worshiper can enjoy further Bronze Ages two centuries from now.  For all the global hysteria directed toward brainwashing the masses with visions of a dying planet, too many people simply refused to get into their pods.  This has made our machines mad.

So what to do?  Aha!  You move the date of the apocalypse up to the present by scaring the bejesus out of the world with a mysterious pandemic caused by a threat unseen.  Unlike with tales of planetary destruction, the more invisible the enemy, the more intimidating it becomes.  It could be anywhere!  On that grocery shelf, on your office stapler, on the familiar face you always kiss — look out!  What a winning formula: fear of death fear of the unknown = a population screaming at the government machines to tuck them safely away into their pods with dreams of a better world before the viral nightmares attack.  And our machines have giddily obliged: "Step right in here, we'll keep you safe, don't worry about a thing."  

Abracadabra, welcome to their matrix.  

Of course we'll wear three masks, kind machines.  Of course we'll dutifully watch our loved ones die from a distance through many walls of glass.  Of course we'll stay locked inside, spend all our savings, isolate from friends, and destroy our futures.  Of course we'll embrace censorship, mandates, and coercion.  Of course we'll allow you to digitally track us for the rest of our lives.  It's for the "common good," right, machines?  Anyone who protests is a selfish individual!  There can be no personal freedom when lives are at stake!  Follow the Science!  Science is good, it's settled, and it's absolutely worth obeying!  

"My goodness," says one machine to another.  "We were right all along.  Fear of death does cause humans to welcome their own enslavement.  We just had to find the right monster."

Is it any surprise that, except for President Trump, no world leader ever called for steady calm or rallied people to face the China Virus with bravery and fortitude?  Instead, the order of the day has been, "Panic!"  Can you imagine trying to survive the great plagues and wars of the past if leaders everywhere were demanding that people be afraid?  I don't know if I'd go over that hill, if I were you; if all the barbed wire doesn't get you, the machine gun nests certainly will.  Yet here we are fighting a disease that would have gone relatively unnoticed by previous generations, and leaders all across the West can only exclaim, "We're all gonna die!"  

When "fear" is being sold by the same governments that in the past would have encouraged "bravery" during much darker times, is it not time to take a step back and ask what's really going on?  Does it not then become clear that we're not fighting a virus at all, but rather fighting a complete takeover by government of the personal sphere?  And if that thought awakens one to the possibility that government leaders are currently in the business of not protecting, but subjugating their populations, then doesn't it become obvious that the last two years have had nothing to do with public health and everything to do with public control?  If so, then you might be willing to accept that you're living in the government's artificial matrix.  

The oligarchs might call it the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" or the "Great Reset," but when you're the one being imprisoned in a pod under the machines' supervision and direction, it is their free will, not your free will, that is flourishing.  Next up comes a techno-religious opiate for the obedient — the introduction of mass virtual reality, so that those under real and total control can experience fake and illusory freedom.  If television and phone screens made vegetables of some, widespread virtual reality will surely strain them into vegetable puree.  And ironically, even in the artificial worlds being constructed for our amusement, freedom must remain regulated enough that the slaves never learn to rise against their real-life masters.

The good news is this: no authoritarian has ever succeeded in completely extinguishing the human desire to be free.  That indomitable spirit does not reside in a few distinct bloodlines but appears in unexpected places from one generation to the next.  Like a game of whack-a-mole, every time governments believe they have succeeded in snuffing liberty out, new voices grow louder and multiply once again.  That's why our overlords and their matrix are doomed to fail.

Rome fell when enough Goths, Vandals, and Huns decided to make their own world.  Something similar happens when we break free from our suffocating pods and recognize the government's matrix as the mental prison it really is.

Image via Pixnio.