conspiracy theories..

It's hard to blame people for believing dumb conspiracy theories about the powerful, considering the fact that proven conspiracies by the powerful are usually a lot worse. The conspiracy of the US power alliance to slaughter children in Yemen and lie about it is far worse than all the QAnon stuff, for example.

Corporate media propaganda is another example. Wealthy elites and government agencies are indeed conspiring to manipulate the thoughts of the entire population; this is a fact that has been studied and documented for decades. It happens in a mundane way, but it's a huge, creepy conspiracy. I mean, just think about it: powerful elites are engaging in mass-scale mind control to justify murder and genocide around the world. This is a fact. The only reason it doesn't give people the thrill of 5G nanobot mind control conspiracies or whatever is because we're used to it.

If everyone could just truly see the empire and what it does with fresh eyes, just the verified facts that we know about, they'd tear it all down bolt by bolt. That's why so much energy gets poured into ensuring that they don't see it.

People keep waiting for a big reveal, for some investigative journalist or leak to expose the abusive dynamics of the powerful. Thing is, that already happened: there's enough public evidence already. It's just that people can't see it with fresh eyes. That's what we need to change.

The big reveal already happened. If there was some massive WikiLeaks drop or whatever ripping the veil off all the ugliest secrets of the empire, we'd still have what we have now: a propagandized populace ignoring all the mountains of evidence for horrific acts of the powerful. The problem isn't getting the information, the problem is getting people to actually look at it. That's what I place my emphasis on: finding new ways to get people to look with fresh eyes and really see the ugly monster that's right in front of their face.

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Our priorities get skewed by the way the powerful think in global mass-scale terms while normal people don't. Even well-intentioned people think police violence is more of a problem than war, or that lockdowns are more dangerous than brinkmanship with China, because it's something local that can affect them personally.

This is just a product of normal human psychology. If I'm a store clerk I'm unaffected by things happening on the other side of the world, so I don't think about them. If I'm a war profiteer or empire architect those dynamics affect my bottom line, so I do think about them.