The Puppeteers

“At no time is a man so hopelessly enslaved as when he is convinced he is free..”

Thomas Jefferson

Who is really in control here on planet earth? It would seem that this is man, since we wield more power to alter the world around us than any other single species. However, when I look at the alteration taking place I do not see anything particularly beneficent for man. In fact, the changes we are making, on a long enough time line (and the length of this time line is the only thing arguable at this point), lead to our extinction. This has been the main piece of evidence that has lead me to reinvestigate whether we, human beings, are really the masters of our destiny.

Those who believe in democracy would have you believe the masses are in control, at least to the extent that they utilize their vote. Then there are the conspiracy theorists who point to the Bilderburg group, Skulls and Bones and other secret societies as evidence that an elite cult of the powerful actually runs things. To the former I ask how in this modern age can any voter actually know who he's voting for and in light of that how can he or she truly be in control. To the later, I ask, if these powerful men are so invested in their wealth, why would they drive the planet off an ecological cliff. Surely if they're smart enough to hoodwink the entire world they are smart enough to understand what the most basic science is telling us.

What if, I ask you, the reason the world is turning into a place inhospitable for human life is because humans aren't behind the driver's seat. No, I'm not talking aliens. The tyrants I'm talking about are even harder to spot than UFOs. Paradoxically, though, they're all around us all the time. There's one with you right now. Its probably telling you I'm crazy. Its right.

~~~

What if I told you that there exists on earth an organism not made out of flesh and blood, veins and tissues but electrons. An organism that uses our nervous system as its host and spreads from brain to brain in the same pattern as a virus. You can't see this entity but its effects are everywhere.

They are inside you right now, subtly directing your actions, pulling your strings like invisible puppeteers. Forget about the Man and Whitey. Forget about the Illuminati. The ruler I'm talking about is above and beyond all of these. Its tugging their strings just as much as yours and mine. I'm sitting here shivering in my seat as I write this down because I know its as true as the empty beer bottle in front of me and there's absolutely no way I can prove that these things that rule us aren't conscious. For all I know, and I hope to God this is true, they are just run away electric algorithms, inert and unconscious as a computer programs. I pray to God this is true because if it isn't, I'm about to be in deep shit with something that can not be killed.

~~~

They've had different names over the centuries, daemon, zeitgeist, meme. The later, the most modern incarnation, was coined by a geneticist named Richard Dawkins, the word is a play on the word gene of course. I prefer daemon for a few reasons. One, I never deny subjectivity to a thing and the word meme implies that these patterns are just code when they are far far more, provable via the observable fact that our own 'subjective' reality arises from the very same 'codes.' Two, the word meme doesn't scare me, and I, you, should be scared.

The daemons don't care about human life. The only thing that matters to them is their own reproduction and their dominance over the other daemons. There's limited housing space in the brains of man kind, you see and that limitation creates competition. Like anything living, they will do anything to survive. They have forced people to kill themselves to serve their own ends, they have forced masses to kill themselves when necessary. Always the people in question think they do these things by their own choice, but in truth we sold out our free will long ago. Your choice was to believe in the daemon, all else is just following program. You may insist you're the one doing it and by the nature of the mind I can't prove you wrong, but what does it matter when what you do is exactly what it wants.

Tell you something creepy, there's an exact replica of that winged statue from the Exorcist (you know the one I'm talking about if you've ever seen the movie) sitting right behind me. Coincidence or no it is freaking me out. I think they might be on to me. So I'm going to go empty my skull for a few hours. No thoughts means no food for them. Thats the only way to beat the little buggers, by starving them.

~~~

I have my theories. I think they might be little pieces of us actually, electrical remnants that survive death and keep oscillating as something only part human. Could also be aliens after all. Maybe an organism formed of electrical dipolarities evolved in some atmosphere thick with ions and now it's making its home here in our heads. Truth be told I have no idea and I'm not a Scientologist so I don't care to speculate. All that's needed to indite them is the facts anyway...

Think of a belief you have, any belief. Who taught you that belief? Who taught that person? If the belief in question is a religion of sorts this chain of believers may go back hundreds of generations. Surely when coined the belief was different than the one held in your head now. Surely over the years varied forms of the belief you now hold have disappeared from the minds of men, just like the various species of equines have vanished from the globe leaving only a few horses as a testament to their past diversity. This is true of Christianity. Before Constantine 'canonized' what we now refer to as the gospel there were many books of the Bible, many contradicted one another; some even insisted what all other Judaistic religions believe: Jesus was just a man. The books which became the gospel were chosen by an emperor who used mass murder and terrorism to cement unity in his realm (research how Constantine dealt with civic unrest in Constantinople, its a bloody good read). Do you think he wanted a religion to inspire spiritual freedom or orthodox subjugation?

Beliefs are selected in these ways and others as they pass along through the ages. Sometimes actively as in the case of Constantine, but more often than not gradually and subconsciously. The main factor being the same as which determines the success of biological species: which leaves the most copies of itself in the next generation. It doesn't matter how true or how noble an idea is, if its not catchy enough to be passed along and regurgitated by people, it will die off. Therefore it is mathematically true that daemons evolve. In terms of pattern science can make no distinction between ideas and biological organisms in this sense. It is our bias as organisms to regard biological forms as more real than the ephemeral structures of ideas. We think of ideas as immaterial and therefore unable to affect the material world but what does this matter when they can affect it indirectly -- through us.

In the belief known as Christianity there exists a sub belief, an organ of the belief's body if you will, that the Jews are a cursed race because of their betrayal of Jesus. In France, Germany and elsewhere during the Middle Ages this lead to thousands of Jews murdered and burnt alive. Later it was part of a much wider and well known genocide. Another organ, atrophied in the modern day, lead to the persecution of pagans and a million murders that took place over multiple centuries. In the modern day the Catholic resistance against contraceptives contributes to overpopulation and starvation in the poorest regions of the world, a death toll that dwarfs any known genocide. Things don't get realer than this.

Are these ideas just histrionic patterns acting out or is there a method to their madness. Would it not be beneficial for Christianity, as an idea, were Jews to vanish from the face of the earth. After all it is a pretty big flaw in the religion that Christ's own people don't buy his divinity. Was it not a boon to Christianity to remove the competing pagan beliefs from Europe. This freed up thousands of brains for the daemons of this new religion to inhabit. Christianity didn't care that in so doing it obliterated the knowledge of midwifery from the continent and thus ensured increased pain and childhood mortality for generations. Likewise Catholicism, as a daemon, is benefited by the large families spawned by those who disavow birth control. After all no one is more vulnerable to the lure of an irrational idea than a child receiving it from a parent.

You can't believe this because you see your cherished ideas as something personal. You have more faith in them than the people of flesh and blood around you. But, like I've been trying to tell you, Christianity isn't a person, its a daemon. Just like Islam is a daemon and Judaism is a daemon and every other soulless idea is a daemon. We may be alike the daemons in our mathematics, but there is a difference in the quality of our souls that science can never see. No culture on the face of the planet has ever and will ever match the wisdom of a single illuminated individual. In fact the very best of such cultures can only follow crudely behind the liberal and oral trail left by those of spirit who wrote or spoke. Daemons, even though they might have been forged by moral men, can not make moral decisions, for they lack compassion one of its essential building blocks. Oh they can talk about it and they do, endlessly, but the actual trait of compassion is uniquely human. It originates from deeper in the brain than the gray mater that plays host to the daemons or maybe in some cases outside the brain in the quantum foam beyond conception.

~~~

I didn't learn much from my time as a philosophy student, but one of the few things I did came from a fellow named Plato. He said, to know one must see the form of the thing, not just the image it presents, not just the skin. On the surface ideas seem like just that, ideas. They're not alive, they hold no power, in fact we hold them in our brains and under our control. But when you look at the pattern, the effects you see deriving from ideas held dogmatically reach far beyond the confines of their 'owner's' skulls. It makes one start to question. If an arm raises a sword because of a belief, is it the man or the belief raising the sword? Plato would say, I think, the belief and I would be inclined to agree.

One might argue that we freely choose our beliefs so first cause lies with us, but are we really so free as this? In every culture there exist many beliefs that one adopts without even thinking, in many cases because they were adopted before you started thinking. Other beliefs are disbelieved only at the price of social isolation. Are you ready to be hated by your society of birth, cut off from family and friends? Are you ready to be at home in no society?... I thought not. How many beliefs, how many ideas are the price of admittance into the cultures and cliques you have joined? How many times a day must you hold your tongue so as 'not to offend' or seem 'strange', how many times in your life will you look the other way from what you know in your heart to be wrong. In how many ways have we all sacrificed our free will upon the altar of acceptance.

~~~

Insanity may be our last path to freedom if I am right. The daemons have all the other roads closely monitored and they'd watch my herky-jerky path too if it were a thing of symbols like them. Fortunately its not and neither are we and that is the key.

~~~

Seeing through the veil of charisma is a good first step. In the ancient days the power structure operated differently and tribes were sometimes ruled by warriors. Surely these battle champions had charisma but they needed courage also. In modern times leaders need only the former, which makes me for one bemoan the passing of feudalism lie that it was.

Charisma is in a cowardly artifice, but it has worse consequences than softening our spines. When used charisma always shunts a percentage of our energy, that could be spent dealing with the problems at hand, to the superfluous task of keeping up appearances. In advanced sophistic societies like ours the entire battle is fought on this subtle selfish social underground while above is just a paper-mache skin of pretense. Many suckers are duped into thinking the pretense is real and never see the actual manipulations taking place between the hustlers underneath. When I look at our society I see an endless strata of these people switching between chump and scammer all the way down with each successive group unaware of the one pulling its strings from behind. Of course you and I know what's behind that last curtain, lying beneath densely compact layers of lawyers. No old man as in Oz, just the machine.

Why do we trust charisma? This I can't help you with. I've always mistrusted people with shiny words and unfailing smiles. Maybe its because my parents played off the same act while being child abusers behind closed doors. Maybe its because I've been subjected one to many times to brain washing commercials and can no longer take any attempt at my manipulation seriously when I've seen every trick in the book. I'll tell you what, if the first words out of someone's mouth are, 'fuck you,' then I'm all ears these days. Why, because I know I'm about to hear an opinion far more honest than I'd ever get from the smiling mouth a charismatic.

When we begin to reject charisma in favor of direct honesty, we break down a major artery in the ideological web work of control that binds us. We start using our own minds rather than the unseen pushes of other minds to determine our reality. Since these 'pushes' are the primary vector for daemon transfer beyond child hood, that means one becomes in one step virtually immune. After one beats charisma the main thing one needs to worry about is the daemons already insinuated within. To stop them one faces an opponent of such artifice that it makes the charismatics look like clowning buffoons. I'm speaking of course of one's own mind.

~~~

If charisma is the lubricant that slides an infectious daemon into our brain then thoughts are the hooks that keep it latched in. Thought is always repeating our cherished ideas to us and oh so rarely in a self critical manner (unless one has succeeded in reversing that pattern). It is like a tiller digging a furrow in the earth, and our actions and proceeding thoughts, like water, can't help but flow down into that ditch once dug.

The daemons love thought, it is the umbilical cord pumping vital nutrients into their neurochemical anatomy. It is also the fence that keeps we, the sheep, corralled and contained. Without it we'd all soon wake up from our dazes and see the world and people we've been trampling over in our blindness -- a trail of broken bodies stretching back 10,000 years. Gurus and other religious leaders have known for centuries that repetition is the quickest route to mental subjugation. Thought, even in its average rambling form, is inherently chant-like continually rehearsing and reimprinting old elements. The purpose as previously stated: dig a trench, a pattern that will subconsciously direct future thinking.

One can not just stop thinking either. Its not so easy, for the very effort of stopping is yet again another thought. Look no farther than the mainstream eastern religions if you want to know how many times you can chase this tail around your ass. After spending centuries trying to stop thought, Buddhist scriptures and sutras rival any other religion in their verbosity. My advice: shut the fuck up and listen. Don't try to stop thought, don't use any method, just do nothing. Only when we're doing absolutely nothing does the mind become open and sensitive. In this state alone can we hear from our own internal voice just how full of shit we really are.

Devoid of thought, or at least aware of it, the charismatic swindler looses another of his weapons. No longer can he implant seeds in our minds to later take root. Thought which would nourish the idea and grow it into a daemon has been stifled. With a clear mind we can take the last step.

~~~

You think your pretty little outlook with all its perfectly honed rules and laws will never lead you wrong. There has been no road carved of words that doesn't lead to hell in one case or another, the reason being that reality and its permutations are infinite while ideas are not. Only the free mind unfettered by daemons can see the truth of the moment and act with the celerity and intelligence required to play with the world without breaking it. Everyone else might as well be a giant squid in a paper towel factory for all the good they'll do.

The daemons will, using humans as their puppets, destroy the world if we let them. They will pollute our oceans, they don't care to swim; they will choke our skies, they don't need to breathe; they will brutalize people, they care only about themselves. Whenever humans clamor for change, the daemons always do the same thing, they craft another daemon. Usually they are so bold as to make it only an alteration of one of the very same daemons creating the problem but even if the idea were totally unique it wouldn't matter. People are always looking for something to save them. Cultures never stop to wonder when time and time again their new incarnations spew fourth violence, repression and hate like all those who came before. A new answer is always demanded or a new spin, never the lack of spin never the honest truth: I don't know.

I can not give you the answer, this is my disadvantage as a prophet (that and the fact that I am sort of an asshole). However, I can tell you that you'll not find it outside, neither in this essay or the Quoran. You'll find it only in the silence when daemonic parasites starved for energy are forced to unwrap their membranous wings from your eyes and fly off like the cowardly vampires they are. In that moment of crystal clear awareness let us hope no one meets your gaze. They'll likely run away screaming from what they see there: pure insanity.