Don’t be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart.
– Roy T. Bennett, author
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When I was a young kid, two or three books scared me a lot – more than the usual horror books where things went bump in the dark. They were books of a dystopian future where people did horrible things to other people just because they had more power over them.
What was scarier is that people who had the horrible things done to them allowed it – they gave power to the greedy autocrats because they were soft and gullible and too comfortable. Too comfortable in the lies they wanted to hear, too comfortable in the supposed opium of little gadgets and toys and ‘advanced technology’ they thought was making their lives better, or too shortsighted to see beyond the short-lived euphoria of both the powers that kept infusing into their veins to realise they were walking into a trap.
The books were Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people are numbed to the loss of their humanity and basic rights, in an ‘ideal’ society controlled by a variety of forces such a genetic engineering, indoctrination and drugs. Where babies are farmed in labs and are given roles to play as adult humans, where ‘everybody belongs to everybody else’ and ‘everybody is happy nowadays’ it sounds a whole lot like our WEF’s Klaus Schwab’s New World Order which is being pushed where ‘you will own nothing and you will be happy’.
It is just that Brave New World was written in 1930s as a warning to where humanity will end up if we allow authority to get fascist, and here we are. The similarities are bizarre.
Another book that scared me was George Orwell’s ‘1984’ written in 1948, where he predicted a world where humans are commodities and technology so advanced that they are now constantly being watched under surveillance by Big Brother.
Your thoughts are policed. You have to maintain only the narrative that is given by the powers that be. You are not allowed to think for yourself. It was a statement of the risks that technology can pose in the hands of those who benefit from controlling them – to warn readers of the dangers of totalitarianism.
It shows how information control and blatant disregard for the truth by the ironically named Ministry of Truth of an authoritarian government can distort reality from the masses. Since no other sources are available, there is no way for this governmental body to be fact-checked or questioned. By ‘correcting’ past information to reflect what the government wants it to say, the propaganda machine is being used to rewrite history into a false narrative.
By making everything so expensive and giving an illusion of scarcity when there is actually a reality of abundance, people are kept in a state of poverty and required to work to exhaustion to prevent them from being able to organise or resist, making them too tired to fight back against the lies being fed to them or to try to improve their circumstances.
I look around at how fast the world seems to be deteriorating over the last three years and I see so many of what these two books warned us happening to us. That is, if you actually read between the lines of most of the narratives you get, and you read extensively and you look at everything that you read with an open mind.
The thing is, people have their ability to question the status quo removed from them. We just accept what is there, as if we are programmed slaves to the system. Yet we give ourselves airs that we are superior thinkers to other creatures we share the earth with because we can think for ourselves.
I am beginning to realise however, that we no longer think for ourselves. We have allowed society, media, medical authorities, fancy ‘global entities’ that are fully funded by big corporations who have their own agendas, to do the thinking for us.
And that’s the sad part. We give away so much, for so little. For creature comforts, for useless validation from people who don’t matter. We repeat everything in fear, not realising that it’s our very own fear that allows shackles to be put on our wrists. And so we crawl into our pretty crystal cages, turn the key in the lock and stay there for an eternity, feeling safe and smug and pleased with that little bit of space we have just because someone feeds us birdseed once in a while – while looking at birds flying outside in total freedom and thinking how sad their life is. How rich we are, and how poor they are. That is the reality we have been fed alongside our birdseeds.
It’s time to be fearless and open that cage door.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune. Feedback can reach the writer at beatrice@ibrasiagroup.com
