How free are we? How free from conditioning by legacy media or subtle indoctrination by political/media talking heads? Or, even from self-imposed limits of everyday life where blissful banality rules? They come across as honest brokers don’t they? They are given utmost respect by interviewers on your TV. They are well-dressed and equally well-rehearsed. They wouldn’t hurt a fly, would they? After all, these are the defenders of free speech, human rights, democracy and all the western values we all enjoy. These are virtual saints are they not, the good guys and gals, those with the ‘right stuff’ to guard us all and keep us safe from those foreign savages ‘over there’. You are used to them and their ways, their sometimes rumbustious politics, their silly arguments, the to and fro of normal politics. It’s all just harmless normality, crude, sometimes contemptuous… but not dangerous. Not dangerous. Mostly harmless… Yet take a deeper look into the effects of such men and women away from the ‘Yah boo sucks!’ Punch and Judy show of everyday politics. Look at them in the milieu of the larger theater of their geopolitical ambitions, their global maneuvering and their ultra-serious determination to retain their power to manipulate, dominate, interfere in, undermine, bring war and chaos to and exploit nations far from their borders. That is where you will see these harmless “saints” for the criminal, and often totally murderous cabals that they truly are. In respect of a global theater of operations these elite westerners, these designer-suited, well-coiffured and apparently highly urban, liberal-minded innocents, take on the value-systems and degree of integrity found in confidence tricksters, psychopaths and mass murderers. You will find these people directing assassinations, engaging in plots to bring down presidents and prime ministers through manufactured scandals, you will find in this political cesspool, men and women creating non-governmental organizations to train activists in the art of bringing down governments, you will find them arranging black sites where torture can take place away from the scrutiny of human rights organization. In short you will find these western “saints” indulging in the most heinous and unconscionable acts of criminality imaginable. In spite of all the above and it being reported time and time again by those not in the pay or sway of these political chameleons most of you will be mesmerized by the large, black, rectangular frame through which the facade of their respectability is incessantly delivered right to your brain. The very normality of this process will corrupt and condition most of you to one extent or another. Your mind will revolt against the idea that these decent-appearing, normally-talking men and women can be anything other than what they appear to be. Nothing out of the ordinary will arrive through legacy media to disabuse you of this deeply conditioned belief. At least not while you are not motivated to, too tired or too uninterested to look deeper than what that thin screen tells you. Looking deeper can be an uncomfortable and in fact highly discomforting experience. The apparently normal and relatively cozy world where few questions are asked except for those most banal and commonplace, the usual fare, no challenge to the intellect in terms of any challenge to the accepted and acceptable norms of the average western life. Moving from that shallow but predictable, and highly reassuring life of the banal everyday, has risks that the average subconscious may well warn you against. What’s in it for you? Only more grief perhaps? Extra anxieties you hardly need when you have more than enough already in terms of your work or relationships? Perhaps it’s best to stay comfortably numb, plumbed securely in the land of blissful ignorance and avid consumption that the average western life consists of. Yet, slowly but surely the western way of life is unraveling. The headlines concerning social unrest, societal decay, violence, increasing chaos, anarchy, drug-taking and both physical and mental diseases are having their effect, disturbing your vicarious enjoyment of mind-numbing normality. Slowly but surely the decay outside is entering inside. Disputes within the home are becoming more frequent and solutions to family disorders of one kind or another are rising. Money is growing short, rents, mortgages and prices in general are rising. It’s getting ever harder to make ends meet. And all the while you feel sicker and sicker in both mind and body. Are your politicians taking care of you? Truly? Is the system of blissful ignorance still working for you? While you continue to suffer as one of the classes well below the level the political and media elites who manipulate you, these latter are in their element. Democracy has been transformed from something that once had some power of choice behind it for the elector is now a sham, a duopoly fix where your very limited intellect is guided and coaxed to choose between two extremely similar possibilities. You are being taken for a ride on a merry-go-round that is no longer merry at all but has become a fixed circular loop with no exit. Except to venture out of the mainstream mental institution where blissful ignorance has you in a strait-jacket. Until the day dawns as in the film ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ when the inmates get free (for a while) the criminals who run things in the West will keep giving you your daily dosage of reassuring banality and comfy distortion. The tranquilizers that have worked to mollify and sedate you until the day you broke free will now have no effect. On that day you will be TRULY free, not kept captive within the semantic mindtrap of what western politicians and media call freedom. You will be among the truly awoken and will never again be mesmerized in any way by the insistence that you be liberal, woke or a supporter of western wars. You will be free and on the outside. There, in a totally new mindspace you will see with crystal clarity that those you believed were ‘normal’, the very usual, smiling, semi-convincing political class who run the western asylum are just as manipulative, just as cold-hearted and just as criminal and desirous of seeking your perpetual imprisonment as Nurse Ratched in Ken Kesey’s book and Miloš Forman’s film starring Jack Nicholson, ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’. You may not be instantly happy at that point… but at the very least you will at last be truly free.