Escaping The Matrix Part 1: The Media

We can never begin to grasp the truth, can never start to shape the world that needs to be, until we are willing to see beyond and reject the illusion our media has fabricated. We have to come to the understanding that they are not our friends, that they do not have our best interests at heart. It is not their job to educate or enlighten us but to propagandize, distract, and divide us. The primary concern of the media is not human beings but profit. They do not speak a human language but a corporate one, because that is who they are and what they serve.

The media is in the hands of a very wealthy few. Their interests are to increase profit, decrease cost, and make a system that works for the very wealthy appear to be the best of all possible systems. Everything else is secondary. Commitment to truth is secondary. Creating an educated and informed citizenry is secondary. Covering the most pressing issues of our day is secondary. Time and again it can be shown that the media covers issues that are not important but focuses instead on what is salacious and divisive. To them, Donald Trump was a Godsend.

The best thing the media can hope for is a sex scandal. Wars are nice but they have to do more work and be a little more aggressive in shaping the narrative. A good sex scandal has all the benefits of a war with none of the risk. Get a good sex scandal up and running and it will provide sufficient cover for the warmongers to bomb people overseas without the populace even noticing. Put some bimbo’s boobs on the screen next to a picture of a married politician and nobody’s going to care that children are being blown up by drone strikes.

As Russell Brand said, the people on the other side of the screens are not your friends. They seek to mold your opinions, want you to buy into the idea that money rather than human beings is what matters. Sure, there are many real human beings working to provide content, but as long as they are in the service of corporations for a paycheck, they are really no different than those who worked within the Nazi system: both subjugate their own humanity and connection to their fellow humans in order to further themselves in inhuman structures.

The media does not want you to feel powerful. They want you to subject yourselves to the authorities they promote. Their spokespeople, be it Rachel Maddow or Rush Limbaugh, are millionaires working for billionaires. They are paid obscene amounts of money to spread the opinions of the wealthy to the average American.

They want you to feel helpless so that you do not act to change things. They want you to feel helpless so that you are ready to accept the answers THEY provide, which you settle for even though you know deep down it is not what you need. They want you to feel stupid, so that you do not question authority.

And as the news outlets of the oligarchs preach to you the gospel of the sociopathically rich, so does the media attack you with their entertainment and advertisement arms. They have convinced you that their programming is therapeutic as an escape from a stressful and unpleasant reality, neglecting the truth that daytime talk shows and nighttime drama have the potential of helping create an understanding in their audience that would lead to making reality less stressful and unpleasant. The truth CAN set you free but the media is more concerned with ensnaring you in endless unreality (the ultimate unreality being what they call reality TV).

This is why the media will not show you pictures of homeless people freezing to death in the cold but instead shows you people drinking beer on the beach.

Billionaires, and those who seek to advance themselves by spreading the gospel of billionaires, have no interest in providing you with the kind of morals and context you would need to make the world a better place. The very fact that they have billions of dollars proves where their values lie. They do not wish to make you smart but instead want to keep you ignorant. Why would it be otherwise? Why would people whose primary goal is to extract from others whatever they can, do something that would endanger their self-interest?

No, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The media exists to block the way. The media exists to place in between you and human progress every impediment and distraction in its grasp, and its reach is quite pervasive. If we ever hope to get beyond our feelings of powerlessness, confusion, hopelessness, and division, we will have to see the corporate propaganda machine for what it is: a servant of the few and an enemy of the many.