Thanks for putting into words some other observations and reflections I’ve been having over the past couple of decades. I am constantly reminded at how “very smart people” can be redirected to effectively and consistently. Of course the answer IS real life. Analog wins in the end, although it may not be in a very idyllic way….
You wrote: "Those who expose corruption are permitted to speak, but only within careful boundaries. Like any sophisticated confidence game, it works in stages: first gain trust through real revelations, then build dependency through exclusive "insider" knowledge, finally redirect that trust toward constrained outcomes. Watch how alternative media platforms follow this pattern: expose genuine corruption, build devoted following, then subtly shift narrative focus away from systemic accountability. Each revelation seems to lead deeper into a labyrinth of coordinated awakening."
This made me think of the latest revelation about the Means siblings:
When they first came on the scene I thought how cool that someone is talking about these important food related topics and I was taken in like everyone else. Then after hearing a few people talk about how they might be a well-timed distraction from the larger health issue of the mRNA bio-weapon harms and then watching the Danny Jones Podcast with Mary Talley Bowden, Dr. Jack Kruse, and Calley Means it seemed well founded that they are a Limited Hangout.
Dr. Bowden asked some key questions that made me realize how fooled I was.
How did they get a book deal so easily? Especially calling out Big Food. The publishers ties to The Rockefeller Foundation.
Why were these two unknowns so heavily promoted on all the popular podcasts (Tucker, Rogan) when so many others have tried and failed?
What are their family connections to government?
If they care so much about the health of people why are they not calling for the shots to be stopped? (mRNA platform is financial boon for the industry and Calley is an industry lobbyist - duh)
Why after 4 years of the worst crimes against humanity and the mRNA bio weapon that is still killing people everyday are we talking about the harm of seed oils and fruit loops? The processed food discussion has its place, but now, at this time, why is it being allowed? Convenient distraction.
After hearing Dr. Bowden ask those questions I was floored. How did I not see it myself?
Such an obvious distraction from the bigger issue - the mRNA platform is not fit for human use yet it's being deployed in all new vaccines and on the childhood schedule. There is no one protecting the children, but sure let's focus on fruit loops.
How to make sense of all the voices coming from all the directions and wanting to trust someone, anyone? It's maddening.
Astute observation. You're asking all the right quesitons.
I linked to something I wrote about the MAHA strife in the piece. FWIW, I know some people who are friendly with the Means siblings and believe they may be pure in their goals. Regardless, it's easy to see how these issues can get railroaded even by well intentioned actors.
I’ve spent the last 10+ years going down various rabbit holes and I’ve finally come to the conclusion it has been a matrix within a matrix, especially with so many “truthers” pushing synthetic antidotes which are turning out to be extremely harmful.
While I do think there are a lot of intentional nefarious players trying to derail well intentioned movements, I also think that on a very subconscious level that humans are magnetized to the level of truth that they can handle and equally share the level of truth that they can handle - ie they are not attempting to be co-intel, they are just magnetically drawn to lies because they are filled with that level of lies (on a heavy metal level or shadow level) - and so they perpetuate partial lies/ignore elephants in the room until they detox and face all the toxins within - this is just my working theory which I hope you enjoy 😊 some people like myself have been drawn to black pill content because I was not ready to deal with my own unhealed trauma and it became a sort of escape to “go down the rabbit hole” and find some valiant truth teller to protect me and peddle zeolite products to me lol. Once I faced my own shadows through somatic and nervous system healing, I stopped seeking “escape the matrix” boogey man stories from half truthers as much; as I was not magnetized to feeling helpless anymore.
I hope this makes sense. :-)
I am trying to assemble some friends in NY for the very reasons you listed!
Local connection is how we get out of this.
Thanks for your always resonant inspiring writing!
Josh, you have a real gift. Again, some of the best stuff I've read in a long time. It's all things I've known but am unable to organize and explain with such clarity as you do. Or, I sound insane when I try. Is a book in your future? Because it should be.
I keep thinking about the ways they elicit our compliance. Insurance is another one that comes up. It's virtually impossible to get needs met via the system without "working it" somehow. Coverage is deliberately conditional, forcing people to choose between financial and ethical compromise. As far as I'm concerned, strategy itself compromises us by putting us in the mindset of end goal and taking us off genuine learning curves.
Insurance is just another racket in the extraction economy - old guard parasites who've perfected the art of taking without giving. Pure superfluous middleman masquerading as service.
I love your insight about how they force us to play their game - either get financially bled or learn to work their corrupt system. And the moment we start strategizing within their rules, we're already caught in their web. Just like banking and healthcare, it's amazing how many of these dinosaur industries basically exist to shake us down while pretending they're doing important work.
"Those who steer the first matrix wouldn't leave the off-ramps unsupervised." YES, thus there is controlled opposition on every issue. It's kind of like funding both sides of a war, which they also do. I saw that you had MMT in your list of influences. They are controlled opposition to monetary reform, they defend the current system with a phony "theory" and becasue money is behind them they are able to dominate the public discussion and keep real monetary reform at bay. During Occupy Wallstreet they employed emotional attacks at any mention of it. I bet most people here don't know what I am talking about when I say monetary reform. In fact there is a history of controlled opposition to monetary reform, making Marx popular served that function, as Silvio Gesell pointed out in the 20s. The monetary history is the history of power, not the military histories. It was acknowledged 3000 years ago that the most vital prerogative of democratic self-governance was the sole right to issue money as an asset, not a debt. As Frederick Soddy wrote in 1934, To allow money to become a source of revenue to private issuers is to create, first, a secret and illicit arm of the government and, last, a rival power strong enough ultimately to overthrow all other forms of government. That is what we are up against. monetary.org Take a look, and keep up the good work, Joshua.
I appreciate your insights about controlled opposition and completely agree about the monetary system being at the root of our captured society. However, I think you may have confused me with someone else regarding MMT - it's my belief that our debt-based monetary system is the root of most evil- and the coming CBDC agenda represents the most formidable control mechanisms we've ever faced. Either way, thanks for the enthusiasm, Howard.
Hi Howard. Indeed the private ownership of the money supply is the logical conclusion of Fascism. However, to your point about the public issuance of money as an asset, I see that when we look at money in situ, money is invariably and inherently debt-based. Twas ever thus. All agricultural societies are surplus societies that run year-on-year structural surpluses in order to persist. And surpluses represent the pulling forward of demand from the future via extractive mechanisms. And money became the utilitarian market-based proxy for those surpluses. Hence, the pulling forward of the demand for money is what makes money intrinsically debt-based; we borrow money when we want to pull our future demand into the present, whether we're a republic, a private business, or a private individual. And if we don't do it then someone else will, leaving us at a market disadvantage. And the holding money in a surplus society means losing money because structural surpluses are growth regimes that force monetary inflation. So in order to avoid losing money by doing nothing, we loan our extra money to a bank, which is a debt.
Even barter markets are debt-based. Goods are perishable, and seasonal, and have production lead times. My neighbor's chicks may be hatching during the two months or so when my milk goats are dried off, so one of us must be in debt to the other for a period of time if she needs to offload her chicks as soon as they are born.
That money must be a debt is a myth perpetrated by those who profit from it. There are examples throughout history of debt-free money. Lincoln's greeenbacks were issued not as a debt but as a permanetly circulating asset which is why the bankers hated them so becasue when issued debt began to dissappear from the economy as Henry Carey, Lincoln's economic advisor, described. Read what the bankers association said about them. The Bandbury Pound was another example. Money was an ancient innovation to pay debt, requiring debt to be paid with debt is a twisted abuse of monetary authority called usury, once banned by all religions before they were corrupted. The monetary history is the history of power. monetary.orgmonetaryalliance.org
Thanks Howard. I get that public banking is politically preferable to private banking. I agree with your recounting of the tug of war between public and private banking. I often recommend Bill Still's "The Money Masters" documentary as one of the most important documentaries for early-stage Red Pilling.
I just explained why money itself is a structural representation of debt. There's political theory of money and then there's situational, dynamic reality. It's like the difference between in vitro experimentation and in vivo reality. The academic field of study that deals with in vivo reality is classical cultural anthropology which is a systems theory of human ecology. I'd be happy to respond to any counterarguments you may have regarding money as structural debt.
"...a deeper conflict unfolds silently across the planet - a war for the freedom of human consciousness itself. This is what World War III looks like - not just bombs and bullets, but the systematic engineering of human perception."
Cheering from my keyboard that more people are realizing this. For me the biggest hit between the eyes was the same revelation you had about the Q-movement, that the managed expectation was to actually do nothing. That magic white-hats were supposed to swoop in and save the day at the last moment. Talk about Alice in Wonderland! They successfully diffused the red-blooded-American instinct of taking matters directly into hand, so I guess that is job well-done to the narrative managers.
Thanks for this brilliant essay it brought up thoughts of Hayek and CS Lewis writing.
Hayek,
Full of hubris, we believe we are “able to shape the world around us according to our wishes.” Blinded by this fatal conceit, the miracle of the modern world goes unnoticed. Few wonder what is “responsible for having generated this extraordinary order.”
To “plan” or “organize” the growth of mind, or, for that matter, progress in general, is a contradiction in terms. The idea that the human mind ought “consciously” to control its own development confuses individual reason, which alone can “consciously control” anything, with the interpersonal process to which its growth is due. By attempting to control it, we are merely setting bounds to its development and must sooner or later produce a stagnation of thought and a decline of reason.
The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends. It may indeed be said that it is the paradox of all collectivist doctrine and its demand for “conscious” control or “conscious” planning that they necessarily lead to the demand that the mind of some individual should rule supreme—while only the individualist approach to social phenomena makes us recognize the super individual forces which guide the growth of reason.
Individualism is thus an attitude of humility before this social process and of tolerance to other opinions and is the exact opposite of that intellectual hubris which is at the root of the demand for comprehensive direction of the social process.
CS Lewis
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
I am only making clear what Man's conquest of Nature really means and especially that final stage in the conquest, which, perhaps, is not far off. The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have `taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho' and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish
it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.
It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man's power to treat
himself as a mere `natural object' and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one's first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners.
For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting
“... carefully crafted narratives that keep humanity trapped in a matrix of perceptions.”
It is not the narratives that keep humanity trapped. It is humanity’s horribly misguided belief in those narratives and its willful surrendering of one’s personal power and agency. This is the debilitating and highly damaging process of personal self-misidentification that begins early in life with a very young child’s vulnerability and need to seek and acquire acceptance from parents (and then later, peers and others) where one learns to divorce his/her self from their true free and unbounded nature and forever chain themselves to the ideas, whims, desires, pathologies, ego-trips, and errors of others that one encounters for the entire rest of their lives.
“The system doesn't just create propaganda - it creates contained paths for those who see through propaganda... the second matrix: capturing awakening through sophisticated channels of inauthentic opposition.”
When one really understands that he/she is truly free and untethered to anyone or anything else (in other words, really grows up or has a personal awakening) – no amount of propaganda can or will ever have a lasting or meaningful affect on them. It can surround you for sure (like in today’s perpetual and crafted Matrix of State Media artificiality)... but all that will just sit in the room you occupy like a bad stink. You smell it. You know it is there. You may know who put that stink there. And all you care about it clearing your air and getting away from that stench to find good, breathable air again.
“Understanding these patterns of controlled opposition can feel overwhelming. Each revelation seems to lead to another layer of deception.”
Understanding patterns of controlled oppostion becomes easy when you fully incorporate into your thinking that Liars Are In Fact, Liars. When America’s State Media or your local doctor or your next door neighbor or your signiifant other has violated your trust and has exposed themselves as untrustworthy or plain liars – that trust you may have once placed in them is gone forever. They can then say and do whatever they please and it just bounces off you like rain off your raincoat while taking your morning stroll. You sense it – you know it's there – and you now laugh at it for being foolish enough to think that it can still have any affect on you.
Controlled Opposition is just another flavor of Falsehood. Just more evidence of being in the presence of something potentially dangerous and harming to you – or just at the level of an annoyance like a fly that persists in bothering you.
The Bottom Line: Don’t look outside yourself for gurus or saviors or answer-men and women. Fine tune your own ability to detect lies and the liars who peddle them. Never surrender your power or the purity of your thoughts and belief to anyone or anything. Let ‘Them’ come at you with everything They’ve got - and then laugh in their face or give them the good-old two-finger salute.
This can be daunting at first. But it gets easier once you have freed yourself from the Prison that never was outside but only and always in your own mind. And once freed, it is done. You never have to free yourself again.
“The most powerful truth isn't a revelation - it's the recognition that consciousness can transcend their constructed boundaries entirely.”
Consciousness ALWAYS transcends everything else around it. Our Reality is nothing but Consciousness. The outward-appearing World isn’t even really there but is a display of dancing energies that instantly flash in-and-out of existence as Quantum Physics has revealed. We are that Consciousness – the Seer who is above and beyond any particular manifestation of it. It never narrows one inch. It could not if it tried.
What does change is in how one chooses to use and wield that precious consciousness – and who is its boss or slave.
Boss, or slave. That is always our choice. Simple, profound. And the most important decision we will ever make in our lives.
Appreciate your warrior passion, RS, but you are new-aging the reality. Consciousness is not a religion. The neopagan elevation of consciousness over energy such that Free Will finds itself in a fantasy world of Untethered Will -- Absolutist Will -- amounts to nothing more than taking the Neo character in The Matrix movie a lot too literally. You are not Neo and I am not Neo. We don't get to 'play God,' so to speak, and wave away the bullets that fly at us. And we don't get to pretend that we don't need to alternately learn from others and teach each other. You are not an island and I am not either. Evolutionarily we are small-to-large pack mammals. Our brain architecture is a deeply-worn social pattern that emerged from 4.2 billion years or whatever of the interplay of Cause and Effect. We don't get to pretend that we're better than that and expect to truly, deeply excel in accomplishing a well-rounded life.
Consciousness and energy are egalitarian together. They are symbiotic in Life. One cannot exist without the other in light-based reality; that we call it light-based references the fundamental, coequal importance of energy.
We're talking holism here. The We are biology inhabiting a dynamic, closed energy system. While consciousness and energy are symbiotic, the coequal thermodynamic and electromagnetic aspects within energy are also symbiotic. Closed, dynamic energy systems such as this universe -- and we can reason that characterization of it even though we can't observe the whole universe because that is how it behaves -- necessitate competition. And competition is as true under natural law as cooperation. If your neighbor lies to you it is probably because he or she doesn't have to cooperate with you on any meaningful level because the State has enslaved you both under the requirement that you obey the State first and last. The State sets you and your neighbor against each other by ensuring that you can't have free relations. Yet you act out the neopagan warrior fantasy that the State has no say over you.
The State outcompeted all free societies by killing all free persons that were willing to fight to the death for their free peoples' freedoms, and then assimilated all of those formerly free people that weren't willing to fight to the death, and all of us alive today are directly descended from the latter group. But fortunately for recessive genetics. the warrior spirit is not fully extinguished.
"It is not the narratives that keep humanity trapped. It is humanity’s horribly misguided belief in those narratives and its willful surrendering of one’s personal power and agency."
Josh was correct and your quoted material, here, is a miscorrection. The Matrix narrative is but a reflection of the physical and psychological prison planet that the Elites have built. You don't have the choice but to not surrender a large swath of your personal physical agency. And neither do I no matter how much I would like it to not be the case. Our physical choices are threefold: play by their rules as truly/conscientiously as we can, be homeless, or be imprisoned/killed.
Josh's excellent essay is discussing the path to true mental freedom such that we can maximize our physical freedom within this State prison. We're talking Applied Philosophy here. Adults don't get any more mature than this.
Really great essay, Josh, thank you. Matrix Reloaded baby! The truth is always buried two layers deep. :)
I would submit that the CBDC expectation is also a misdirection play. A benevolent one, even, insofar as the structural collapse of this civilization puts the Elites in the same boat as common folk like us. I know that they got their hunting reserves and ranches in the Southern hemisphere and all that but they're still in the same planet boat as 8B savages. In fact their whole non-public Degrowth Agenda is geared towards exceeding everyone's rock bottom political expectations so as to partly offset everyone's collapsing material standards of living. Smart. Takes the heat off of them. And that's why we hit political rock bottom in the first place, because they drove the politics there in order to make exceeding political expectations a sure thing.
I pattern that the CBDC architecture that they have been setting up -- and in the US that means the rollout of FedNow a couple years ago and its linking to Treasurydirect.com -- is actually in service of the post-Federal Reserve digital greenbacks national public banking populist regime that they have planned. Everybody's wet dream. A 24/7/365 online payments system backed by a restored US Treasury-issued currency. Fully encrypted. And they will not do away with cash. On the contrary, we'll be in a severely deflationary economy and they will encourage black markets because thriving black markets will mitigate the deflationary official economy that will be able to do nothing about because money is but a proxy for energy surpluses and economic collapse is always and everywhere a function of a collapse of energy surpluses. The new administration is riddled with folks wanting to end the Fed. And it just so happens that the Fed is currently busy ending itself.
Well, Mr. Stylman, each new article in this series, reinforces it as quite a tour de force.
Tangentially, I would add that the reversion extant after revelation of deceit, is scalar. We can observe the same mechanism of action within localized organizations. It appears to be a matter of incentives. A reasonable prior is that each pursues their own self-interest. Systemically, this places revelation of deceit and corruption within a peculiar niche reserved for statistical outliers.
When a system is properly designed, instantiated and initiated, it is axiomatically self-correcting. This appears to be the result of atomized incentive structures. More concisely, perverse incentives render deceptive practices "profitable."
Sorting this profitability is a function of understanding prerogatives within command-and-control structures. Within private industry, fraud is profitable on an individualized scale. In organizations without a profit motive, fraud preserves reputation, which is the foundation of institutional power.
But you knew this already.
Where wealth and influence concentrate, predators and parasites congregate. The selection criteria for pivotal command and control structure emplacement, incentivizes expression of traits correlating with that congregation.
Some predators and parasites are born, others are made, both categories find their metier within incentive structures.
Many thanks for yet another thought-provoking exposition. Hope you consolidate this series into a book; I'll scrape together a sufficiency of the filthy lucre to obtain a copy, should you do so.
I'd argue that the system isn't broken - it's working exactly as designed. The concentration of wealth and power, the selection for predatory behavior - these aren't bugs, they're features.
As for the book - I've thought about it. My friends and family are getting tired of my schtick so I decided to start publishing to see if anyone else might be interested - I'm glad you are :-)
It's your unique perspective that provides the value. The various aspects have their own body of literature, but correlating those aspects requires a certain..... delicacy, shall we say?
That delicacy is a function of verification and avoidance of the more hyperbolic assertions extant within the conspiratorium. It isn't obvious how to refine the correlation credibly into fundamental patterns of human personality traits and behaviors.
I would say that you're one of a small handful of analysts and writers today, that can walk that tightrope. At least, so it seems to me thus far.
Timing, also, is of the essence. Public interest in this type of writing, is at an all-time high. Strike while the iron is hot, would be my recommendation. The book writes itself, as a natural outcome of the essays.
Thank you. You have so clearly articulated these patterns behind ongoing perception-management and control.
The area in which we debate is continually defined by the same sources leading us to - of course - their solution. The illusion of choice. Over and over.
And yes, we watch movements like 'Occupy' start out with real energy and organization only to dissolve into fragmented and ineffective remnants.
Eventually the realization hits. Individually and then (we can hope) collectively. For those who can see it - rather than resisting what's being imposed, rather than a 'No' we do what's right for us, (an intrinsic yes) and take actions that support that. We redefine our agency in a positive and practical direction. Rather than against the matrix-machine, we act as advocates for ourselves. It may seem a subtle distinction but it's crucial.
The whole current set-up places us as unempowered victims to 'their' system. In fact we are already free and obviously have power - they wouldn't have to work so hard at deception if we didn't.
We act out of that recognition.
What does a free person do? Grow food. Avoid being poisoned voluntarily. Spend time in nature and align to what is real. Find ways to exchange with others outside the system offered. Yes, that will become more challenging, but what is being planned won't hold - too many are already seeing it.
That's for laying it out so clearly. An important gift you are sharing. Best
Oh, as for the Whitney Webb topic regarding the security state going after the Islamists now instead of the Russians, I see it as a very clever 'two birds with one stone' play by the Elites because the Islamists that they will target will be CIA assets, so in taking out the requisite assets they will, to
resounding cheers by all of us lol, also have to be cleaning house at the CIA and the FBI and wherever else. And I really do think that the ISIS-Al Nusra-Al Qaeda purge will extend to the House of Saud which is also Islamist. I think when the 9/11 files are released with perfect timing now that Tulsi Gabbard is becoming the Director of National Intelligence, she will go ballistic at the House of Saud's role in 9/11. Of course the House will just be the patsy, the fall guy, to us pissants in the peanut gallery who are two layers deep into the truth, but the bottom line is that the Elites know that the incredibly wasteful and elitist House of Saud have to be deposed during Collapse just like the incredibly destabilizing Likud Party's brand of Zionism also has to be deposed because the ME has by far the best quality and most affordable remaining oil on the planet and the Elites can't afford to have tens of millions of young Arab men with nothing left to lose seeing these two minority factions repressing the entire region and controlling the resources. Populist regimes loyal to the Elites' covert Degrowth Agenda need to be installed throughout the Middle East, too.
Interesting, I thought you were in favor of public banking. I appreciate, though, that you apparently also see at least some of what I have been patterning of the future for several years now. That's a rarity for whatever that's worth.
I wouldn't say that the Elites have an agenda of the pissants owning nothing per se; the owning nothing meme harkens to The Great Reset red scare misdirection play, and a neo-marxist banking scheme is not at all the same thing as a public banking return to Greenbacks, which as I mentioned in another comment, is what I pattern as their true goal for Phase 2 (of 2) of the now 5 year old non-public Degrowth Agenda (DA).
Their agenda is a republicanist unity populist politics. A conservative left-libertarianism. MAGA is a bridge over to MAHA, and now that we finally have MAGAMAHA in power, that transitional dynamic should start becoming easier to pattern. Republicanism, btw, and structurally speaking, is the agrarian forerunner to the industrial politics known as national socialism. In other words, national socialism is the sociopolitical heir to agrarian republicanism, the latter which was most famously represented in American history by Jeffersonian agrarianism. National socialism as a structural politics -- when stripped of all the noise surrounding the Third Reich -- is a syndicalist ideology of fiscal decentralization (as decoupled from private capital) and environmental concerns. That's the more enlightened future that the Elites have in store for the next decade or so until they really just don't have that much control over collapse anymore. And the only reason that they are taking the enlightened tack is because this is a nuclear civilization that they have to defuse and they put their pants on one leg at a time just like us. The nuclear power industry's cooling systems are completely grid dependent and a chaotic collapse of the grid threatens possible extinction across the northern hemisphere from all of the spent fuel pools going critical and exploding. Nuclear power was a true Pandora's Box and I'm of the opinion that the anti-nuclear activists were the only rational political activists that have ever existed.
The whole purpose of the enlightened DA is to set the stage for dealing with certain nuclear catastrophe by decommissioning and disposal of the global accumulation of spent fuel rod assemblies before the wherewithal is lost.
Thanks for putting into words some other observations and reflections I’ve been having over the past couple of decades. I am constantly reminded at how “very smart people” can be redirected to effectively and consistently. Of course the answer IS real life. Analog wins in the end, although it may not be in a very idyllic way….
You wrote: "Those who expose corruption are permitted to speak, but only within careful boundaries. Like any sophisticated confidence game, it works in stages: first gain trust through real revelations, then build dependency through exclusive "insider" knowledge, finally redirect that trust toward constrained outcomes. Watch how alternative media platforms follow this pattern: expose genuine corruption, build devoted following, then subtly shift narrative focus away from systemic accountability. Each revelation seems to lead deeper into a labyrinth of coordinated awakening."
This made me think of the latest revelation about the Means siblings:
When they first came on the scene I thought how cool that someone is talking about these important food related topics and I was taken in like everyone else. Then after hearing a few people talk about how they might be a well-timed distraction from the larger health issue of the mRNA bio-weapon harms and then watching the Danny Jones Podcast with Mary Talley Bowden, Dr. Jack Kruse, and Calley Means it seemed well founded that they are a Limited Hangout.
Dr. Bowden asked some key questions that made me realize how fooled I was.
How did they get a book deal so easily? Especially calling out Big Food. The publishers ties to The Rockefeller Foundation.
Why were these two unknowns so heavily promoted on all the popular podcasts (Tucker, Rogan) when so many others have tried and failed?
What are their family connections to government?
If they care so much about the health of people why are they not calling for the shots to be stopped? (mRNA platform is financial boon for the industry and Calley is an industry lobbyist - duh)
Why after 4 years of the worst crimes against humanity and the mRNA bio weapon that is still killing people everyday are we talking about the harm of seed oils and fruit loops? The processed food discussion has its place, but now, at this time, why is it being allowed? Convenient distraction.
After hearing Dr. Bowden ask those questions I was floored. How did I not see it myself?
Such an obvious distraction from the bigger issue - the mRNA platform is not fit for human use yet it's being deployed in all new vaccines and on the childhood schedule. There is no one protecting the children, but sure let's focus on fruit loops.
How to make sense of all the voices coming from all the directions and wanting to trust someone, anyone? It's maddening.
Astute observation. You're asking all the right quesitons.
I linked to something I wrote about the MAHA strife in the piece. FWIW, I know some people who are friendly with the Means siblings and believe they may be pure in their goals. Regardless, it's easy to see how these issues can get railroaded even by well intentioned actors.
This is so spot on to where my mind has been at.
I’ve spent the last 10+ years going down various rabbit holes and I’ve finally come to the conclusion it has been a matrix within a matrix, especially with so many “truthers” pushing synthetic antidotes which are turning out to be extremely harmful.
While I do think there are a lot of intentional nefarious players trying to derail well intentioned movements, I also think that on a very subconscious level that humans are magnetized to the level of truth that they can handle and equally share the level of truth that they can handle - ie they are not attempting to be co-intel, they are just magnetically drawn to lies because they are filled with that level of lies (on a heavy metal level or shadow level) - and so they perpetuate partial lies/ignore elephants in the room until they detox and face all the toxins within - this is just my working theory which I hope you enjoy 😊 some people like myself have been drawn to black pill content because I was not ready to deal with my own unhealed trauma and it became a sort of escape to “go down the rabbit hole” and find some valiant truth teller to protect me and peddle zeolite products to me lol. Once I faced my own shadows through somatic and nervous system healing, I stopped seeking “escape the matrix” boogey man stories from half truthers as much; as I was not magnetized to feeling helpless anymore.
I hope this makes sense. :-)
I am trying to assemble some friends in NY for the very reasons you listed!
Local connection is how we get out of this.
Thanks for your always resonant inspiring writing!
Josh, you have a real gift. Again, some of the best stuff I've read in a long time. It's all things I've known but am unable to organize and explain with such clarity as you do. Or, I sound insane when I try. Is a book in your future? Because it should be.
I keep thinking about the ways they elicit our compliance. Insurance is another one that comes up. It's virtually impossible to get needs met via the system without "working it" somehow. Coverage is deliberately conditional, forcing people to choose between financial and ethical compromise. As far as I'm concerned, strategy itself compromises us by putting us in the mindset of end goal and taking us off genuine learning curves.
Insurance is just another racket in the extraction economy - old guard parasites who've perfected the art of taking without giving. Pure superfluous middleman masquerading as service.
I love your insight about how they force us to play their game - either get financially bled or learn to work their corrupt system. And the moment we start strategizing within their rules, we're already caught in their web. Just like banking and healthcare, it's amazing how many of these dinosaur industries basically exist to shake us down while pretending they're doing important work.
What a great read! I find myself trying to address these ideas constantly with others, but with nowhere near the clarity that you've provided here.
"Those who steer the first matrix wouldn't leave the off-ramps unsupervised." YES, thus there is controlled opposition on every issue. It's kind of like funding both sides of a war, which they also do. I saw that you had MMT in your list of influences. They are controlled opposition to monetary reform, they defend the current system with a phony "theory" and becasue money is behind them they are able to dominate the public discussion and keep real monetary reform at bay. During Occupy Wallstreet they employed emotional attacks at any mention of it. I bet most people here don't know what I am talking about when I say monetary reform. In fact there is a history of controlled opposition to monetary reform, making Marx popular served that function, as Silvio Gesell pointed out in the 20s. The monetary history is the history of power, not the military histories. It was acknowledged 3000 years ago that the most vital prerogative of democratic self-governance was the sole right to issue money as an asset, not a debt. As Frederick Soddy wrote in 1934, To allow money to become a source of revenue to private issuers is to create, first, a secret and illicit arm of the government and, last, a rival power strong enough ultimately to overthrow all other forms of government. That is what we are up against. monetary.org Take a look, and keep up the good work, Joshua.
I appreciate your insights about controlled opposition and completely agree about the monetary system being at the root of our captured society. However, I think you may have confused me with someone else regarding MMT - it's my belief that our debt-based monetary system is the root of most evil- and the coming CBDC agenda represents the most formidable control mechanisms we've ever faced. Either way, thanks for the enthusiasm, Howard.
Hi Howard. Indeed the private ownership of the money supply is the logical conclusion of Fascism. However, to your point about the public issuance of money as an asset, I see that when we look at money in situ, money is invariably and inherently debt-based. Twas ever thus. All agricultural societies are surplus societies that run year-on-year structural surpluses in order to persist. And surpluses represent the pulling forward of demand from the future via extractive mechanisms. And money became the utilitarian market-based proxy for those surpluses. Hence, the pulling forward of the demand for money is what makes money intrinsically debt-based; we borrow money when we want to pull our future demand into the present, whether we're a republic, a private business, or a private individual. And if we don't do it then someone else will, leaving us at a market disadvantage. And the holding money in a surplus society means losing money because structural surpluses are growth regimes that force monetary inflation. So in order to avoid losing money by doing nothing, we loan our extra money to a bank, which is a debt.
Even barter markets are debt-based. Goods are perishable, and seasonal, and have production lead times. My neighbor's chicks may be hatching during the two months or so when my milk goats are dried off, so one of us must be in debt to the other for a period of time if she needs to offload her chicks as soon as they are born.
I don't like money. It's unsustainable.
That money must be a debt is a myth perpetrated by those who profit from it. There are examples throughout history of debt-free money. Lincoln's greeenbacks were issued not as a debt but as a permanetly circulating asset which is why the bankers hated them so becasue when issued debt began to dissappear from the economy as Henry Carey, Lincoln's economic advisor, described. Read what the bankers association said about them. The Bandbury Pound was another example. Money was an ancient innovation to pay debt, requiring debt to be paid with debt is a twisted abuse of monetary authority called usury, once banned by all religions before they were corrupted. The monetary history is the history of power. monetary.org monetaryalliance.org
Thanks Howard. I get that public banking is politically preferable to private banking. I agree with your recounting of the tug of war between public and private banking. I often recommend Bill Still's "The Money Masters" documentary as one of the most important documentaries for early-stage Red Pilling.
I just explained why money itself is a structural representation of debt. There's political theory of money and then there's situational, dynamic reality. It's like the difference between in vitro experimentation and in vivo reality. The academic field of study that deals with in vivo reality is classical cultural anthropology which is a systems theory of human ecology. I'd be happy to respond to any counterarguments you may have regarding money as structural debt.
"...a deeper conflict unfolds silently across the planet - a war for the freedom of human consciousness itself. This is what World War III looks like - not just bombs and bullets, but the systematic engineering of human perception."
Cheering from my keyboard that more people are realizing this. For me the biggest hit between the eyes was the same revelation you had about the Q-movement, that the managed expectation was to actually do nothing. That magic white-hats were supposed to swoop in and save the day at the last moment. Talk about Alice in Wonderland! They successfully diffused the red-blooded-American instinct of taking matters directly into hand, so I guess that is job well-done to the narrative managers.
Thanks for this brilliant essay it brought up thoughts of Hayek and CS Lewis writing.
Hayek,
Full of hubris, we believe we are “able to shape the world around us according to our wishes.” Blinded by this fatal conceit, the miracle of the modern world goes unnoticed. Few wonder what is “responsible for having generated this extraordinary order.”
To “plan” or “organize” the growth of mind, or, for that matter, progress in general, is a contradiction in terms. The idea that the human mind ought “consciously” to control its own development confuses individual reason, which alone can “consciously control” anything, with the interpersonal process to which its growth is due. By attempting to control it, we are merely setting bounds to its development and must sooner or later produce a stagnation of thought and a decline of reason.
The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends. It may indeed be said that it is the paradox of all collectivist doctrine and its demand for “conscious” control or “conscious” planning that they necessarily lead to the demand that the mind of some individual should rule supreme—while only the individualist approach to social phenomena makes us recognize the super individual forces which guide the growth of reason.
Individualism is thus an attitude of humility before this social process and of tolerance to other opinions and is the exact opposite of that intellectual hubris which is at the root of the demand for comprehensive direction of the social process.
CS Lewis
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
I am only making clear what Man's conquest of Nature really means and especially that final stage in the conquest, which, perhaps, is not far off. The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have `taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho' and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish
it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.
It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man's power to treat
himself as a mere `natural object' and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one's first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners.
For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting
and impious.
I thought the initial quote was written by Frank herbert perhaps I’m incorrect
“... carefully crafted narratives that keep humanity trapped in a matrix of perceptions.”
It is not the narratives that keep humanity trapped. It is humanity’s horribly misguided belief in those narratives and its willful surrendering of one’s personal power and agency. This is the debilitating and highly damaging process of personal self-misidentification that begins early in life with a very young child’s vulnerability and need to seek and acquire acceptance from parents (and then later, peers and others) where one learns to divorce his/her self from their true free and unbounded nature and forever chain themselves to the ideas, whims, desires, pathologies, ego-trips, and errors of others that one encounters for the entire rest of their lives.
“The system doesn't just create propaganda - it creates contained paths for those who see through propaganda... the second matrix: capturing awakening through sophisticated channels of inauthentic opposition.”
When one really understands that he/she is truly free and untethered to anyone or anything else (in other words, really grows up or has a personal awakening) – no amount of propaganda can or will ever have a lasting or meaningful affect on them. It can surround you for sure (like in today’s perpetual and crafted Matrix of State Media artificiality)... but all that will just sit in the room you occupy like a bad stink. You smell it. You know it is there. You may know who put that stink there. And all you care about it clearing your air and getting away from that stench to find good, breathable air again.
“Understanding these patterns of controlled opposition can feel overwhelming. Each revelation seems to lead to another layer of deception.”
Understanding patterns of controlled oppostion becomes easy when you fully incorporate into your thinking that Liars Are In Fact, Liars. When America’s State Media or your local doctor or your next door neighbor or your signiifant other has violated your trust and has exposed themselves as untrustworthy or plain liars – that trust you may have once placed in them is gone forever. They can then say and do whatever they please and it just bounces off you like rain off your raincoat while taking your morning stroll. You sense it – you know it's there – and you now laugh at it for being foolish enough to think that it can still have any affect on you.
Controlled Opposition is just another flavor of Falsehood. Just more evidence of being in the presence of something potentially dangerous and harming to you – or just at the level of an annoyance like a fly that persists in bothering you.
The Bottom Line: Don’t look outside yourself for gurus or saviors or answer-men and women. Fine tune your own ability to detect lies and the liars who peddle them. Never surrender your power or the purity of your thoughts and belief to anyone or anything. Let ‘Them’ come at you with everything They’ve got - and then laugh in their face or give them the good-old two-finger salute.
This can be daunting at first. But it gets easier once you have freed yourself from the Prison that never was outside but only and always in your own mind. And once freed, it is done. You never have to free yourself again.
“The most powerful truth isn't a revelation - it's the recognition that consciousness can transcend their constructed boundaries entirely.”
Consciousness ALWAYS transcends everything else around it. Our Reality is nothing but Consciousness. The outward-appearing World isn’t even really there but is a display of dancing energies that instantly flash in-and-out of existence as Quantum Physics has revealed. We are that Consciousness – the Seer who is above and beyond any particular manifestation of it. It never narrows one inch. It could not if it tried.
What does change is in how one chooses to use and wield that precious consciousness – and who is its boss or slave.
Boss, or slave. That is always our choice. Simple, profound. And the most important decision we will ever make in our lives.
Appreciate your warrior passion, RS, but you are new-aging the reality. Consciousness is not a religion. The neopagan elevation of consciousness over energy such that Free Will finds itself in a fantasy world of Untethered Will -- Absolutist Will -- amounts to nothing more than taking the Neo character in The Matrix movie a lot too literally. You are not Neo and I am not Neo. We don't get to 'play God,' so to speak, and wave away the bullets that fly at us. And we don't get to pretend that we don't need to alternately learn from others and teach each other. You are not an island and I am not either. Evolutionarily we are small-to-large pack mammals. Our brain architecture is a deeply-worn social pattern that emerged from 4.2 billion years or whatever of the interplay of Cause and Effect. We don't get to pretend that we're better than that and expect to truly, deeply excel in accomplishing a well-rounded life.
Consciousness and energy are egalitarian together. They are symbiotic in Life. One cannot exist without the other in light-based reality; that we call it light-based references the fundamental, coequal importance of energy.
We're talking holism here. The We are biology inhabiting a dynamic, closed energy system. While consciousness and energy are symbiotic, the coequal thermodynamic and electromagnetic aspects within energy are also symbiotic. Closed, dynamic energy systems such as this universe -- and we can reason that characterization of it even though we can't observe the whole universe because that is how it behaves -- necessitate competition. And competition is as true under natural law as cooperation. If your neighbor lies to you it is probably because he or she doesn't have to cooperate with you on any meaningful level because the State has enslaved you both under the requirement that you obey the State first and last. The State sets you and your neighbor against each other by ensuring that you can't have free relations. Yet you act out the neopagan warrior fantasy that the State has no say over you.
The State outcompeted all free societies by killing all free persons that were willing to fight to the death for their free peoples' freedoms, and then assimilated all of those formerly free people that weren't willing to fight to the death, and all of us alive today are directly descended from the latter group. But fortunately for recessive genetics. the warrior spirit is not fully extinguished.
"It is not the narratives that keep humanity trapped. It is humanity’s horribly misguided belief in those narratives and its willful surrendering of one’s personal power and agency."
Josh was correct and your quoted material, here, is a miscorrection. The Matrix narrative is but a reflection of the physical and psychological prison planet that the Elites have built. You don't have the choice but to not surrender a large swath of your personal physical agency. And neither do I no matter how much I would like it to not be the case. Our physical choices are threefold: play by their rules as truly/conscientiously as we can, be homeless, or be imprisoned/killed.
Josh's excellent essay is discussing the path to true mental freedom such that we can maximize our physical freedom within this State prison. We're talking Applied Philosophy here. Adults don't get any more mature than this.
Really great essay, Josh, thank you. Matrix Reloaded baby! The truth is always buried two layers deep. :)
I would submit that the CBDC expectation is also a misdirection play. A benevolent one, even, insofar as the structural collapse of this civilization puts the Elites in the same boat as common folk like us. I know that they got their hunting reserves and ranches in the Southern hemisphere and all that but they're still in the same planet boat as 8B savages. In fact their whole non-public Degrowth Agenda is geared towards exceeding everyone's rock bottom political expectations so as to partly offset everyone's collapsing material standards of living. Smart. Takes the heat off of them. And that's why we hit political rock bottom in the first place, because they drove the politics there in order to make exceeding political expectations a sure thing.
I pattern that the CBDC architecture that they have been setting up -- and in the US that means the rollout of FedNow a couple years ago and its linking to Treasurydirect.com -- is actually in service of the post-Federal Reserve digital greenbacks national public banking populist regime that they have planned. Everybody's wet dream. A 24/7/365 online payments system backed by a restored US Treasury-issued currency. Fully encrypted. And they will not do away with cash. On the contrary, we'll be in a severely deflationary economy and they will encourage black markets because thriving black markets will mitigate the deflationary official economy that will be able to do nothing about because money is but a proxy for energy surpluses and economic collapse is always and everywhere a function of a collapse of energy surpluses. The new administration is riddled with folks wanting to end the Fed. And it just so happens that the Fed is currently busy ending itself.
Well, Mr. Stylman, each new article in this series, reinforces it as quite a tour de force.
Tangentially, I would add that the reversion extant after revelation of deceit, is scalar. We can observe the same mechanism of action within localized organizations. It appears to be a matter of incentives. A reasonable prior is that each pursues their own self-interest. Systemically, this places revelation of deceit and corruption within a peculiar niche reserved for statistical outliers.
When a system is properly designed, instantiated and initiated, it is axiomatically self-correcting. This appears to be the result of atomized incentive structures. More concisely, perverse incentives render deceptive practices "profitable."
Sorting this profitability is a function of understanding prerogatives within command-and-control structures. Within private industry, fraud is profitable on an individualized scale. In organizations without a profit motive, fraud preserves reputation, which is the foundation of institutional power.
But you knew this already.
Where wealth and influence concentrate, predators and parasites congregate. The selection criteria for pivotal command and control structure emplacement, incentivizes expression of traits correlating with that congregation.
Some predators and parasites are born, others are made, both categories find their metier within incentive structures.
Many thanks for yet another thought-provoking exposition. Hope you consolidate this series into a book; I'll scrape together a sufficiency of the filthy lucre to obtain a copy, should you do so.
Thanks, Ted.
I'd argue that the system isn't broken - it's working exactly as designed. The concentration of wealth and power, the selection for predatory behavior - these aren't bugs, they're features.
As for the book - I've thought about it. My friends and family are getting tired of my schtick so I decided to start publishing to see if anyone else might be interested - I'm glad you are :-)
We are interested and starving for truth. Write the book. 🙏
It's your unique perspective that provides the value. The various aspects have their own body of literature, but correlating those aspects requires a certain..... delicacy, shall we say?
That delicacy is a function of verification and avoidance of the more hyperbolic assertions extant within the conspiratorium. It isn't obvious how to refine the correlation credibly into fundamental patterns of human personality traits and behaviors.
I would say that you're one of a small handful of analysts and writers today, that can walk that tightrope. At least, so it seems to me thus far.
Timing, also, is of the essence. Public interest in this type of writing, is at an all-time high. Strike while the iron is hot, would be my recommendation. The book writes itself, as a natural outcome of the essays.
Soooo good. And exactly what I've been thinking about!
Great post.
"The way out of their matrix is with eyes wide open and feet planted firmly in local soil."
🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯
Thank you. You have so clearly articulated these patterns behind ongoing perception-management and control.
The area in which we debate is continually defined by the same sources leading us to - of course - their solution. The illusion of choice. Over and over.
And yes, we watch movements like 'Occupy' start out with real energy and organization only to dissolve into fragmented and ineffective remnants.
Eventually the realization hits. Individually and then (we can hope) collectively. For those who can see it - rather than resisting what's being imposed, rather than a 'No' we do what's right for us, (an intrinsic yes) and take actions that support that. We redefine our agency in a positive and practical direction. Rather than against the matrix-machine, we act as advocates for ourselves. It may seem a subtle distinction but it's crucial.
The whole current set-up places us as unempowered victims to 'their' system. In fact we are already free and obviously have power - they wouldn't have to work so hard at deception if we didn't.
We act out of that recognition.
What does a free person do? Grow food. Avoid being poisoned voluntarily. Spend time in nature and align to what is real. Find ways to exchange with others outside the system offered. Yes, that will become more challenging, but what is being planned won't hold - too many are already seeing it.
That's for laying it out so clearly. An important gift you are sharing. Best
Oh, as for the Whitney Webb topic regarding the security state going after the Islamists now instead of the Russians, I see it as a very clever 'two birds with one stone' play by the Elites because the Islamists that they will target will be CIA assets, so in taking out the requisite assets they will, to
resounding cheers by all of us lol, also have to be cleaning house at the CIA and the FBI and wherever else. And I really do think that the ISIS-Al Nusra-Al Qaeda purge will extend to the House of Saud which is also Islamist. I think when the 9/11 files are released with perfect timing now that Tulsi Gabbard is becoming the Director of National Intelligence, she will go ballistic at the House of Saud's role in 9/11. Of course the House will just be the patsy, the fall guy, to us pissants in the peanut gallery who are two layers deep into the truth, but the bottom line is that the Elites know that the incredibly wasteful and elitist House of Saud have to be deposed during Collapse just like the incredibly destabilizing Likud Party's brand of Zionism also has to be deposed because the ME has by far the best quality and most affordable remaining oil on the planet and the Elites can't afford to have tens of millions of young Arab men with nothing left to lose seeing these two minority factions repressing the entire region and controlling the resources. Populist regimes loyal to the Elites' covert Degrowth Agenda need to be installed throughout the Middle East, too.
Indeed, degrowth, public banking and rejecting money all serve the elite's agenda of our owning nothing.
Interesting, I thought you were in favor of public banking. I appreciate, though, that you apparently also see at least some of what I have been patterning of the future for several years now. That's a rarity for whatever that's worth.
I wouldn't say that the Elites have an agenda of the pissants owning nothing per se; the owning nothing meme harkens to The Great Reset red scare misdirection play, and a neo-marxist banking scheme is not at all the same thing as a public banking return to Greenbacks, which as I mentioned in another comment, is what I pattern as their true goal for Phase 2 (of 2) of the now 5 year old non-public Degrowth Agenda (DA).
Their agenda is a republicanist unity populist politics. A conservative left-libertarianism. MAGA is a bridge over to MAHA, and now that we finally have MAGAMAHA in power, that transitional dynamic should start becoming easier to pattern. Republicanism, btw, and structurally speaking, is the agrarian forerunner to the industrial politics known as national socialism. In other words, national socialism is the sociopolitical heir to agrarian republicanism, the latter which was most famously represented in American history by Jeffersonian agrarianism. National socialism as a structural politics -- when stripped of all the noise surrounding the Third Reich -- is a syndicalist ideology of fiscal decentralization (as decoupled from private capital) and environmental concerns. That's the more enlightened future that the Elites have in store for the next decade or so until they really just don't have that much control over collapse anymore. And the only reason that they are taking the enlightened tack is because this is a nuclear civilization that they have to defuse and they put their pants on one leg at a time just like us. The nuclear power industry's cooling systems are completely grid dependent and a chaotic collapse of the grid threatens possible extinction across the northern hemisphere from all of the spent fuel pools going critical and exploding. Nuclear power was a true Pandora's Box and I'm of the opinion that the anti-nuclear activists were the only rational political activists that have ever existed.
The whole purpose of the enlightened DA is to set the stage for dealing with certain nuclear catastrophe by decommissioning and disposal of the global accumulation of spent fuel rod assemblies before the wherewithal is lost.