There is a strange exhaustion that settles over a civilization when too much noise, too much urgency, and too many competing narratives begin pulling at the mind all at once. Beneath the surface of daily life, beneath the routines, ambitions, distractions, and endless streams of information, many of us sense that something deeper is being shaped around us and through us. Not always by force, and not always with malice, but through the slow conditioning of perception, habit, fear, convenience, and consent.
. . .
You don’t have to be conspiratorial of mind to observe patterns, programs, conditions, and narratives in play on the world stage that demonstrate the persistent, wide-scale, multifaceted, and all-encompassing assaults, impositions, and disruptions that daily befall men and women of all ages, races, colors, or creeds.
On the ground level, it isn’t easy to pinpoint where it all begins because everything is in constant motion at all levels of life and across every stage of a lifetime. From conception, in the womb, through pregnancy and birth, through childhood, education, and the gradual inculcation into one’s environment; through the establishment of values, priorities, meaning, and purpose; into career paths, relationships, family formation, aging parents, and the ongoing cycle of life, it all unfolds as one continuous field of influence. I could outline a litany of insults, impositions, assaults, and disruptions employed by “the system” and its various machinations upon every human life, but the list would be daunting and extensive. I’ve explored dozens, perhaps hundreds, of them in over twenty-five years of reading, study, thinking, and writing.
Suffice it to say that wherever there is incentive to profit, manipulate, or control, it is practiced; people, regardless of intentions and ambitions, are extracted from, exploited, used, abused, taxed, and unduly stressed as they unwittingly slot themselves into some level of experimentation, some level of engagement and interaction with the machine matrix, the market, and the manifestations of capitalism, corporatism, and socialism. Today, we layer in the ubiquity of technocracy. It’s not the sociocultural, economic, or governmental panacea it’s advertised to be.
While there is an aggressive push to further centralize, automate, integrate, electrify, and infuse AI into everything, in my view, “they” are in desperation mode, exploring all kinds of billion-dollar patches in a futile attempt to plug the leaks and hide the cracks in a system that is crumbling and falling apart. The fundamental trust in what was and in the systems that are continues to erode, because the powers that be continue to drift away from reality and further into abstraction and chaos. There will never be enough bureaucracy to remedy the situation they themselves continue to generate.
No matter what angle they try to force upon and sell to the population — the outbreak, war, market crash or correction, governmental scandal, or other overused and repetitive narratives of the week — it would appear that fewer and fewer living men and women are buying into it anymore. I would further suggest that their version of the collective story will never fully play out in our reality, though it will reap financial and material rewards for the greedy, opportunistic, misguided, arrogant, and short-sighted — at least until class-action lawsuits and other remedies are exercised by those who are paying attention.
We live in an immoral world, so with that as a baseline, it doesn’t matter where you look. The damage is being done, and some of us are more capable than others of addressing it, discerning where they’re being exploited and abused, and mitigating their contribution to their own suffering and struggles. You and I will fall on or emerge from within different areas of the human experience spectrum, but the entirety of this earthbound story is capitalized upon, regardless of the so-called birth lottery and where we may have come again into this earthly story. So it falls upon us to not only be awake and aware of these nefarious factors that impress upon us regardless of where we live, what we do, who we love, and how we view this one short life we’ve been given to explore and experience.
Over the years, I’ve written about every kind of imposition or assault, psychic or spiritual manipulation, mind-control maneuvering, sociocultural messaging, or state propaganda we all have a part to play in and a part in disseminating, proliferating, and perpetuating throughout the human collective. While it’s easy to suggest that much of humanity is a captured audience, that most are asleep at the wheel, that many are swept up into the mob and groupthink of every manufactured crisis, that some are easily corruptible, and a few are entirely evil, how does that reality serve us in any meaningful way? Every lie falls apart under the weight of its details, and lies are everywhere around us, some of them dictating and determining our every choice, influencing our every decision, infusing our every action.
When all institutions, industries, governments, reality frameworks, and living infrastructures of our existence are in some way at the whims of parasitic or predatory forces, subjected to manufactured and artificially induced egregores, seemingly inescapable and ever-present, reappropriating, stealing, and siphoning our limited resources of vitality and time, it’s only too easy to default to a sad, cynical outlook, to reductionist viewpoints, to totalizing perspectives, and to a general apathy and hopelessness that sits just below the surface of everyday living.
If we are here to learn, why is it that we so easily forget? Slow, deliberate, grounded, considered learning and lived experience are quietly subsumed into technological advances, industrial progress, and today repurposed and reconfigured as “sustainable development.” Cultural stories and traditions are subsumed into social engineering, consensus belief systems, and socialist paradigms. It’s not so for everyone, but for the majority, the multitudes who get swept up in the stories of better, faster, cleaner, more profitable, more stable, just more… The ideas of “global citizenry,” “we’re all in this together,” and “for the greater good” come to the fore, as the “spread of democracy” proves only to be a metastasizing blend of fascism, socialism, and communism.
Grand ideas we have no real concept of beyond what we read about, and are unconsciously shaped by, in propaganda-infused news stories, popular literature, what we ingest on screens, in TV shows, and learn about “based on a true story” in films. It’s a cycle that endlessly repeats, the historical evidence of which is itself contentious, divisive, open to interpretation, curated, redacted, revised, and always incomplete.
Are we willing, perhaps complicit participants in another stolen civilization? Why is it so easy to fall into the same traps and pitfalls, time and again, cycle after cycle? Is it as simple as introducing a little chaos, injecting uncertainty and instability as early and as often as possible, to weaken the body and condition the heart, mind, and spirit into what eventually develops into learned helplessness, fear of the other, and the belief that there is never enough; that we are in some way contributing to our own demise; a false and coerced storyline passed down to the next generation, and the next, and the next, until a civilization becomes so confused, conflicted, divided, and internally fractured that the only perceived option left is some kind of systemic reset?
We are a living paradox upon this plane. Today we have more wealth, abundance, and apparent liberty existing concurrently with endless conflict, war, scarcity, slavery, and abuse of basic “human rights.” The yin-yang, positive-negative, feminine-masculine duality plays itself out in every possible configuration across the realm, and most of us are caught up in it in one way or another. We need that tension, the friction, the stressors that are designed to strengthen, maintain, and train our minds, bodies, and spirits. We need an element of pushing, pulling, stretching, and contracting, or there wouldn’t really be much reason for our existence. And the world around us takes full advantage of this.
Perhaps this is all by design, and nothing about life on earth as we know it is really out of order, so to speak. It’s merely one iteration of one cycle of one civilization, one that hasn’t been before and will never be again. If it’s true that we were designed for this place, and it was designed for us, can we learn to find solace in that realization? Can we afford ourselves the true freedom of ceasing the endless seeking, so as to better savor the moment, the present, and live fully into and extract all we possibly can from the split-second of our human existence?
It would seem to me that the only kind of “enemy” that exists in our realm is one we’re more than capable of contending with, and is in some way a mirror of something unacknowledged within, a mimic of our hidden selves that will have its day in the sun regardless of how much we resist, defer, or ignore it. The evil forces of this world seem to be tireless and endlessly adaptive, and yet they never win it all, never enjoy any kind of victory without inevitably destroying themselves in the process. All lies and distortions will come to light and be exposed before long, even if another is already there to take their place. This would appear to be our earthbound dance, the paradox of the human expression. So, as much as we want and need to point fingers and are desperate to know who, what, and why we’re under a seemingly endless barrage of insults, impositions, and assaults of every variety, it would seem also that we’re more than capable of knowing it, naming it, and dispelling its effects.
Lux et veritas
Written by Trance Blackman. Originally published on tranceblackman.com on 22 May 2026.