Every generation produces its heroes, its saviors, its symbols of salvation. In our time, figures like Elon Musk are elevated to mythic status, but beneath the spectacle lies a recurring pattern: the engineered hero, the curated narrative, and the weaponization of human psychology. This essay explores how symbols and myth are used to capture belief, manipulate perception, and divert attention from material reality, inviting readers to reclaim discernment in a world enthralled by spectacle.
Author: Trance
Artist. Writer. Truth seeker.
The electric vehicle has been elevated from transportation technology to moral symbol. Marketed as a solution to ecological collapse, it obscures the extractive realities, economic losses, and psychological manipulation that sustain its adoption. This essay examines the gap between the story we’re told and the systems that quietly benefit from our belief.
There comes a point where explanations stop clarifying and begin anesthetizing. Where models, once meant to orient us, quietly replace the living reality they were designed to describe. What follows isn’t an argument against inquiry, science, or structure — it’s an examination of how symbols harden into authority, how abstraction drifts into dogma, and how entire cultures forget the difference between representation and truth. This is less about what we believe, and more about how believing itself becomes a substitute for knowing.
There is a particular kind of decay that does not announce itself through violence or ruin, but through forgetfulness. It is the forgetting of how to listen inwardly, how to sit with uncertainty, how to sense truth without being told what to think. Over time, this forgetting hardens into habit — reliance on systems, experts, devices, and doctrines that promise clarity while dulling discernment. The events of recent years did not create this condition; they merely revealed it. What we are facing is not a crisis of information, but a crisis of mind, spirit, and attention.
This short essay explores how conscious attention to our inner image — the visions we hold of how life should be — can empower us to resist manipulation, reclaim agency, and shape reality. It examines the ways media, technology, and culture distort perception, and how cultivating a spiritual callus and deliberate inner vision can guide authentic action.