Since everyone not living under a rock knows the plot, I will skip to my point. One of the pivotal moments in the film comes when Neo takes the red-pill from Morpheus and we see how humanity is actually "living" outside of The Matrix.
Humanity has been enslaved by machines and are harvested for the electrical output. Humans live out their entire life in giant pod farms jacked into The Matrix. The world we think is ours is just a giant illusion that only exists in the computerized Matrix.
Everything humans think is important is just a dream manufactured to keep us occupied while our lives serve the needs of those who have enslaved us.
Pretty bleak but is it all that inaccurate? Not the giant AI creating The Matrix but the way that our lives are controlled and manipulated?
Enter John Wilder and his post from a couple of months ago: The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed
You need to read the whole thing, it is a powerful glimpse into the world of "What Is Really Happening" in contrast to what we see all around us in "What They Want You To Think Is Happening". I will eschew providing any quotes because you need to read them in context for it to really make sense but the farming he is talking about is being farmed for your money, preferably via monthly payments.
(Warning, this is going to be a long post)
I might quibble with the idea of being farmed for "money" because that word doesn't mean what most people think.
Instead I think of the entire system as being designed for the harvesting of productivity, the output of your human capital via time, investment and effort. In other words, your labor. The value of our labor is captured in "money", more accurately fiat currency, and that captured labor is then siphoned off by the elites who increase their own wealth and power in order to accelerate this harvesting. What we think of as "money", either in the form of currency or numbers on a computer screen, is simply an artificial and fake bit of chicanery to convince you that your labor has real value.
What we call "money" (assume the scare quotes around money for the remainder of this piece) and the various ways that it is manifested are simply a bit of stagecraft. Take for example your income taxes. For the vast majority of people, income taxes are something they don't ever think much about. They appear as a line item on your paystub after it is direct deposited but you never see it. You don't have to ride to your lord's keep and present him with 20% of your grain harvest, it is just a series of numbers that appear and disappear, representing your labor being siphoned off. What do you get in return for this? This is what it looked like in 2020 according to the Congressional Budget Office:
We get a massive military that hasn't been used to actually defend the United States for more than 75 years. At least we can sort of understand that, tanks and bullets and crayons for the Marines to eat. The rest of it is a little more murky. Social Security is lumped into the main outlays at $1.1 trillion but along with Medicare at $769 billion these are supposed to be paid for with payroll taxes but as we see, we don't collect enough to cover those two costs.
In 2020 we got a whole bunch of money to offset the Covid-19/coronavirus/Chinese bioweapon "pandemic". $526 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a half trillion in "loans" that no one has to pay back. The PPP might be the most overt scam ever perpetrated by the government. The amount of misuse and outright fraud was enormous. Companies sprang up to aid self-employed people with no employees in obtaining these "loans". I doubt one dollar in ten was used for what it was supposed to be used for, helping companies keep their workers employed. There was another $275 billion for the CARES Act "recovery rebates", better known as stimulus payments. Plus $473 billion in unemployment compensation that went way up as people stayed home because of the 'vid. That is $1.274 trillion to pay people whether they worked or not.
Medicaid, or health insurance for "poor" people was another $458 billion and the interest we pay on the current debt was another $345 billion. That leaves us with a couple of big line items. "Nondefense" discretionary spending and "Other" mandatory spending. These two account for $914 billion and $988 billion respectively, or a whopping $1.9 trillion. What the hell do we get for that nearly two trillion of miscellaneous spending? Nondefense is stuff like "education", transportation, vet benefits, housing, etc. while Other is different vet benefits, government employee pensions, SNAP/food stamps and a whole bunch of other stuff.
You don't have to be a math whiz to look at those two pie charts and realize something is amiss, more specifically that the government brings in a whole lot less than it spends. Here is another handy graphic from the CBO:
The "budget" calls for mandatory spending of one trillion more than all of the revenue collected by the Feds plus another $1.6 trillion in discretionary spending and more than 1/3 of a trillion in interest, a number artificially kept lower thanks to low interest rates. In simpler terms, the Feds spend almost twice as much as they receive. Deficit spending is not new as a result of the Chinese coronavirus, it has been going on for decades....
If you are paying attention you might notice that there appears to be no relationship between what the Federal government spends and what it collects. A big brained person might ask a pertinent question:
Why bother collecting taxes at all since they just spend whatever the hell they want to anyway?
That is brings me in my usual round-about way to the point. The reason for taxation is pretty simple. Taxing workers is a way to leech their productivity. You might notice that the average America really gets very little from the Federal budget. Even what we do get is generally just our own money being returned back to us. Lots of the budget items are simply the Feds taking tax money out of a state and then returning it, with strings attached and with a chunk taken out to fund the Federal behemoth. Education spending is a great example. The Department of Education has around 4000 employees and a budget of $68 billion. None of those people teach a single child. What is that $68 billion used for? According to their own website....
Not a damn thing. Nor is it intended to.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there are 49.4 million students in public schools in America. The budget of the education department is $68 billion. This works out to $1,376 for every public school student in America going to a bureaucracy that doesn't teach a single child. That is by design. The purpose of the Department of Education is not education, it is to siphon productive labor from average citizens and transfer the wealth their labor generates to the non-productive ruling class.
Please note that not everyone in the ruling class is wealthy. There are tons of flunkies pushing paper around in D.C. who make very little money but they still wield incredible power. The members of the support class orbit the powerful in smaller concentric circles, from low wage bureaucrats to the D.C. professional class up to the power brokers and the politicians.
This leeching of productivity is happening in every part of our lives, in dozens of different ways, all with the same end-game of crushing and eliminating the White middle class. For most of the White working and middle class, even including the upper middle class professionals, their lives consist of working hard for 40+ years and seeing upwards of half of their efforts being stolen by the state and the elite class. Between taxes, fees and regulations at best you get to actually keep around 50% of your labor. Medieval serfs would have revolted under those conditions and the Founders did revolt over a burden barely a fraction of what we pay.
In his post John provides several examples of how we see our productivity drained other than overt taxes, with examples including car insurance and cancer.
Here is another great example. The world we live in is suffused with anxiety and discontent, both intentionally caused. We charge headlong from one crisis to the next, some real like raging inflation and violent crime, others imaginary like the Covid pandemic. We hardly finish up one before the next one starts, like Covid to Ukraine. Most of us, including yours truly, spend most of the day glued to one screen or another receiving a firehose of bad news all day, every day. Everything is also changing constantly at a pace that is far too rapid for the human mind of absorb and adapt to. No sooner do we have some new technological marvel or social upheaval only to have something new come along and replace it. The speed at which we went from having serious conversations about the definition of marriage to a world where women's sports are about to become nothing more than a place for mediocre male athletes to dominate has been hard to keep pace with. The next stage in forced acceptance of degeneracy will be either normalizing pedophilia or polygamy or both and that isn't far down the road. Our brains are scrambled with data and we are collectively on edge constantly about The Next Bad Thing.
At the same time we are endlessly told that we should be discontented with everything. We need a new phone that does exactly what the old phone you bought last year already does just fine. Your 65" TV is too small, you need a 66" TV. Not only is your stuff not good enough, you are not good enough. This is especially true for women who are told they must suppress their natural instincts and instead focus on trying to be like men in the workplace and when they do have kids, often much later in life, they need to balance being a mom and a wife with being an employee. Why do you think so many women are so neurotic and depressed?
Lo and behold, we have a pill for that! In fact we have a whole bunch of pills for that. Many people in this country are ingesting a monthly pharmacological cocktail designed to pacify and numb them sufficiently for them to keep showing up to work in order to have their productivity leeched away. As part of their compensation package they get health insurance which pays for those same pills they need to function so they can....keep showing up to work and consuming new products.
Many of our fellow citizens are trapped in a cycle where the same group on the one hand creates the most anxiety inducing society ever know and on the other hand feeds them pills to enable them to function in that society. No one "gets better" but that isn't the point. The point is to keep feeding you the pills, causing dependence on those pills that are paid for by your own labor.
What becomes crystal clear the more you "notice" is that most of the problems we have to deal with in our daily lives are artificial problems created by the same people that offer the "solution".
When you look around you see a world that is designed to harvest your productivity. Many people in our society are part of the productive class, doing some sort of labor that adds some value. Lots of others, and this is a rapidly increasing percentage of the workforce, are part of what I called The Parasite Class. I wrote:
Our society is divided economically by doers and talkers. Doers are people who have jobs that have traditionally existed in Western society. 300 years ago we had carpenters. Today we have carpenters. The tools have somewhat changed but the job is basically the same. 300 years ago we had teamsters who moved freight. We have the same thing today although they drive trucks instead of horse-drawn wagons and chuck pop bottles full of pee along the interstate. Store clerks. Cooks. Farmers. Mechanics. There is something tangible they do. You can see if a shelf is restocked with cans of chicken soup or not. Either a corn field gets planted or it doesn't. You can't fake that. Did that load of toilet paper make it from the distribution center to the local Wal-Mart or not?
Then we have the talkers. Most of my professional career I was a talker. I didn't do anything of note. I attended meetings, went on sales calls, received and replied to emails. I worked in offices or cubicles surrounded by other people who didn't actually do anything. That didn't mean it wasn't difficult and stressful, it absolutely was primarily because we weren't doing anything. Everything was made up so it was pretty tricky to do it right. It was all about managing people, and especially managing the people above you on the corporate ladder. The key was to convince them you were doing a great job when in fact you weren't actually doing anything useful at all. It didn't really matter if you worked super hard or if you spent your day getting more coffee, blogging and managing your fantasy sports teams because at the end of the day you hadn't done anything either way. As long as your boss thought you were ticking the check-boxes, you were good to go and I spent many, many years getting pretty good at managing fantasy sports teams while convincing my bosses that I was hard at work. It is a world where sycophants and suck-ups thrive and where people with middling talent of any kind can climb the corporate ladder until they find their own personal sweet spot and then they lodge themselves into their corporate host like a tick, sucking blood and impossible to dislodge.
In my parasite jobs I made lots of "money", had great "benefits" and a great "retirement plan". Being self-employed I make less "money" and have basically no "benefits" but our standard of living by my measure is higher and I am far happier. Even still, the parasite class contributes labor. Showing up to sit in a cubicle and spending the entire afternoon tweaking a Powerpoint presentation still requires time and effort. It was amazing how absolutely exhausted I could find myself at the end of a day when I didn't do anything useful. Quite the contrary, I often was more tired, stressed and depressed after a day in the office than now when I have a busy day working for myself.
Most of us are trapped inside of a system created for the benefit of others at our expense. These people are latched onto the American people, burrowed into us like ticks and sucking the lifeblood of our labor. They are completely dependent on us but constantly tell us how dependent we are on them. Talk about dividing up the country and they sneer at us as if we couldn't possibly survive without them. What would we do without hedge fund managers manipulating imaginary stock prices or Federal flunkies moving paperwork from one folder to another?
If D.C. were to suddenly fall victim to some cataclysm and be wiped off the face of the earth, most of us wouldn't notice other than people who receive Social Security benefits. Even SS is simply robbing younger generations to provide for older generations, something we used to do as part of our familial obligations, while D.C. takes a huge bite to facilitate taking money out of Oklahoma before sending it back to Oklahoma.
Should the same thing happen to the Midwest? It wouldn't take long for people in the coastal urban areas to starve, for the lights to go off, and for goods and services to stop moving. As the Covid "pandemic", winter storms and budget impasses have proved over and over, when you really look at who is essential in this country, it turns out almost none of them are in the lofty elite positions in D.C. or New York. Truck drivers, farmers, plumbers. Those are essential workers. Bankers and bureaucrats, HR staff and community activists? Those jobs are not only not essential, they inhibit the productivity and happiness of normal people.
One of the most red-pilling things you can do is to realize that you are being farmed for your productivity and then finding a way to side-step the system. How to do that is an entirely different post on it's own but suffice it to say it can be done. Given the societal trajectory we are on, I would say it must be done for your own survival. Their plan is to force you into the cities where you can be controlled more easily. Find your own path outside of their system as much as you can, denying them your productivity and insulating yourself from their plans for The Great Reset.
Discovering you are in your own Matrix is just the first step, the next is to get yourself and your loved ones out.
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