Freedom Is Outdated

As the American of course Freedom is (or was?) essential. An ideal, in centuries past, one would die for.

Perhaps this explains the pit in my stomach half the time, but I think what I’ll deem as the “classical” interpretation of freedom no longer applies in our modernity.

Does this mean I now support tyranny, censorship? Gestapos? Certainly not… the trouble is that you cannot avoid them anymore. You can only choose their style of control. Tyranny, in our world, is inevitable, with a modified definition.

When one states Tyranny today so one conjures some brutality and starving, large armies, secret police and little if any hope remaining. Submitting to another’s whims can, in some cases, be worse than death. So we had these ideas of social contracts and justness and morality informed by the divine.

But power is absolute, and it found a way.

With such an interconnected world the gestapo no longer needs to terrorize you physically. It’s all mental now. All in your head, and your neighbors’ heads, and your family too.

“Manufacturing consent” is banally quoted, but the difference today is that it’s now automated and so potent it brings new meaning to the word “programming”. The amount of power and central control these social media outlets is hard to fathom and, if you’re a state actor, a little pulling of the algorithm this way and that and now you have a willing and ready assassin, no strings attached. Do you know what it’s like to program another human? With enough AI chat history you could learn.

One ethical question to raise is what about our stronghold, agency and free will. When does one gain agency? When does one lose it? It is a central question, a foundational check of ethics. But ethics no longer matters in the face of modern, absolute power. You can either have explicit tyranny, or whispers through everyone’s feed.

Those who now rule the world aren’t there because they have some abstract strength or calling or precedent: history shows otherwise in all suggestions. The kingmakers live because they know you, they know what you want, they know how to mold you, they know have to craft you, they have known you all of your life, all your anxieties, dreads, and with some strings, some unfortunate car crashes or other lifeplannings, they can have you in their pocket, the same as the crazed shooters you sometimes read about.

A superior mind can command an inferior mind effortlessly, and the inferior mind will be happy in the process. That’s the key: they shall suggest your world and reality in a way you won’t suspect. Helping you make sense of their seeming senselessness directions. Religions have waited centuries for their Messiah, and now they show themselves through whispers of the machine.

So this is why “freedom” no longer means anything, or has already been retired. With a superior enough mind and enough behavioral research, data collecting, and of course the most impressive mental control system devised in all of recorded history, we “talk” about freedom, but “freedom” is already gone. “Freedom” implies equal forces at play, meanwhile all of the checkmates in history past have been deprecated. “Freedom” supposes that it’s possible to defend, but unless you destroy your conception of self, you have mental backdoors with the right combination of words, associations.

Anyway, the masses of men follow desperately the orders and conception of world set about them. One cannot even begin to conceptualize a different configuration to their world, whether with more autonomy or simple possibility. Your habits are decided and locked. Dispositions are already picked off the rack, however much it congeals with your ancestral encodings. The very essence of your smoking sense of self shall easily loop another ring, or two, (why is it called The Lord of the Rings after all?) and you shall feel the tremors the same.

The stability of your mind is being hijacked, each day. The play goes on, and now you have to stand witness to those driven insane. Join in the chanting of our destruction.

So when I think of that sweetest thought, that you have the right to be left alone, well, I survey all the people left to their devices and they’re killing themselves. How can you leave alone something that is effortlessly reconfigured? Maybe one ought to accept this new “formless” freedom where you are tested to your limits on how much longer you can last when you are up against minds far more powerful and resourceful.

What are you to do when family member is pitted against family member, a tale so often spun, indoctrinated from birth because one could trust the school systems or the information networks?

How can you begin to discern which beliefs are best for you or which are most convenient for those that control you? You are seeping in the napalm, a hell raised through each home.

I want to “believe” in freedom, to suggest it’s possible. But it’s outdated — we must acknowledge.

Programming seems inevitable. You shall exercise your freedom to the extent you ascend to the mental arena the titans lord from. Key marker: make your own cult.