SOCIETY
Eve, Darling — Give That Apple Back to the Nice Snake
Waking up to the truth can be a harrowing experience. Sometimes, ignorance is indeed bliss.
I bet they’re crawling the blue pill now. Cursing Eve for biting that sweet apple of infinite knowledge, the original sin. Why or why did you have to see through the veil?!
What if the whole Adam and Eve story from the Bible wasn’t some ancient mystical origin story or rebellion against God? What if it was a warning for us all? Warning of the hell we will unleash upon ourselves if we ever peek under the hood and see the truth?
We’ve been living in a bubble for the longest time. A bubble of ignorance.
This was our little paradise, the Garden of Eden. Somewhere along the line, an apple was eaten, and our eyes were open. Or, in modern terms, we took the red pill and saw behind the curtain. What we saw shocked us to the core, and unfortunately, there is no going back. You can’t unsee what you’ve seen.
That has been happening to a lot of people lately. At first, it was just the conspiracy theorist lunatics. Now, it’s almost everyone. Some people are still sleepwalking clueless zombies, but the eye-opening truth is spreading fast.
Waking up into a nightmare
- Waking up is nice unless you wake up and realize that everything you’ve ever been told, including the whole history, is almost certainly a lie. What the hell do you believe now? Not to mention — who?
- Waking up is nice unless you wake up to a reality where everyone is a bad guy. Who do you look up to? Who do you support?
- Waking up is nice if you wake up to a feeling of oneness and bliss, but not if you wake up to the realization that there is no purpose to your existence, no material reality, and you don’t exist in a sense you believed you did. What’s the point of living then?
- Waking up is nice if you have an actionable idea to improve your future, not a nightmare of a sinking ship with no hope in sight.
- Waking up is nice if you wake up in a quiet, comfortable bed with a loved one sleeping next to you, not in a den of starving wolves salivating over your face!
In reality, waking up from willful ignorance or a proper spiritual awakening is never pleasant.
It’s a profound shock to your system and leaves you paralyzed until you find a new way to make sense of yourself, life, and the world. Everyone wants to be awoken and embody “elevated consciousness” or know the truth of everything, but no one realizes what that actually means.
“You can’t handle the truth!” Jack Nickolson, A Few Good Men
Let’s put it this way — it was more pleasant living in the Matrix than being unplugged and facing the hopelessness of reality. Some would gladly give back the red pill and swallow all the blue ones, living life in absolute ignorance, bewildered by anything out of the ordinary. The alternative is hell on earth.
Sometimes, the truth should stay hidden
Imagine that you have a loving family. You look up to your father. He is an honorable, respectable man who loves you very much. One day, a stranger offers you a red pill, promising full awareness of the truth. You take the pill, naively thinking it will make you smarter and improve your life. You want the truth. You deserve the truth!
But with that pill comes the brutal realization you can never forget!
Your father is not your biological father. He kidnapped you, raping and murdering your birth mother. He’s also not an accountant but runs a pyramid scheme, robbing clueless people blind. The wench pretending to be your mother is a prostitute he pays to play the role. Your grandparents are just some random neighbors he threatened to murder unless they pretend to love you. He also has five orphaned kids chained up in the basement he abuses and tortures. No, those weren’t mice you were hearing at night.
Well, this is happening to people all over the world, metaphorically speaking, as they wake up to the reality of a world that is never black and white.
There are no good guys, only shades of grey — greater and lesser evil. In fact, there is no good and evil, only humans with their murderous genes just waiting to express themselves again and burn the world anew.
All they believed to be the truth: history, politics, science, economy, religion, turned out to be something else entirely. Even heroes are being revealed as shady actors at best, evil bastards at worst.
Everything was a lie — an illusion
Everything that they thought they knew was bullshit! Everyone they trusted betrayed them and was lying to them!
Everything is now questionable. What can they possibly believe? Who can they trust? What is real, and what is fake? The answer is nothing and no one. Not even their own eyes!
I bet they’re crawling the blue pill now. Cursing Eve for biting that sweet apple of infinite knowledge, the original sin. Why or why did you have to see through the veil?!
A lot of people are waking up right now. They’re waking up to a reality that is nothing like what they believed. They are realizing that if all governments, media, and future historians are telling us lies, selling one-sided versions of events that omit so much, what else is a lie?
No one seems to care about the truth.
Only narratives, propaganda, and profit. Why would we think it was ever any different? It’s safe to assume the only difference is that we are now able to recognize them as lies and see things from other perspectives, from other sources: a blessing and a curse of the internet.
Furthermore, every time we are convinced, we know what to believe, what the truth is, and who to root for, we end up realizing we know nothing. We stake our name for a just cause, or so we thought, but end up cheering for people, nations, and ideologies with more blood under their nails than their apparent aggressors.
Life was simpler when we believed there were good and bad guys. Us and them. Forces of light and darkness. But in this world of different shades of grey, we are confused. Our moral compass has lost its true north.
Whoever we think is on the right side ends up being absolutely horrible only a day later. Whatever we believe is a just cause ends up being lies upon lies, covering up a myriad of atrocities. Whatever breaks our hearts with visual triggers ends up being manipulated propaganda. Often displayed to trigger us using fake images, videos, and made-up data.
Victims are revealed as perpetrators of atrocities. Aggressors, while guilty of spreading violence and chaos, have proven to have just causes of their own. Good guys are bad guys, and simultaneously, bad guys are good guys.
In every conflict, we want to pick a side, but picking sides these days is like choosing your favorite monster! Only the naive and the uninformed can root for one side without reservations.
Oh, how we wish we were one of those again. Life was so much simpler then.
Even in the past, nothing is what we were taught.
No conflict was good vs. evil. No side is innocent and just. Only shades of grey in this nightmare of realizations. They all did horrific things, some perhaps for a good cause that justifies them. But then again, the horrors were always levels above the original atrocity.
Like a slap on the face, being revenged by burning the perpetrator’s family alive and his whole city in the name of deterrence. For a just cause! To prevent future slaps, so they say.
- Where is the line?
- How much fighting back is too much?
- When does self-defense become murder?
- When do good guys become genocidal maniacs?
- What is justified action, and what is an overkill?
It is said the truth shall set you free.
Yes, you are free from the illusions and thrust into the real world. A world of cause and effect. Action and reaction. Perspective versus perspective. A pragmatic world where nothing matters and no one is the good guy.
Not even the holiest of holy ideas, you may have clung onto for guidance. If you believe your God is the good guy, the epiphany of justice and love, you know nothing. You believe the superficial teachings but haven’t yet looked under the hood. You haven’t really read the message, seen behind the veil, or recognized the monster hiding behind the lofty ideals.
Once you do, the truth shall set you free, but it is a dark freedom. A horrible disillusionment. A cynical existence.
- How do we live in this new world full of disarming realizations?
- How do we stay civilized and restricted when we can’t believe and trust anything ever again?
- How do we know what is right and wrong when, behind every revelation, there is just more evil, suffering, and insanity?
- How do we find our true north, our moral guidance, when nothing makes any sense anymore?
We can see that we are struggling with these ideas today — all of us. The more you are informed, the harder it is to choose a side. The more you know, the more you understand that you know nothing.
After a while, you become a rebel without a cause, against everything and everyone.
Once you understand that the government has been lying to you, along with the media and everyone you thought was trustworthy, you don’t believe anyone ever again. It would be idiotic, and you’re no idiot. But how do you live like this? How do we function as a society?
You dig for the hidden truth yourself.
But you realize that you can never know the truth if there even is such a thing. You can never trust your sources, not even your own ears and eyes. Everything is fake. Everything is a lie. Everyone has an agenda.
There is no objective truth except the dark and cynical realization that there are no good and bad guys, no good and evil, no right and wrong, only perspectives.
- What is good for one side is bad for the other.
- What is justice for one is injustice for the other.
- What is white for one is black for the other.
- What is murder for one man is logic for another.
- What is love for your people is hate for their people.
- What is a terrorist for some is a freedom fighter for another.
- What is the national interest of one country is a detriment of another.
The knowledge and wisdom may have set you free, but you are now lost in the infinite ocean of fighting forces, opposing beliefs, and countless people sleepwalking into disaster. All believe justice is on their side, justifying the most horrible actions imaginable.
You take a step back and try to see the whole picture. You see nothing good.
Only patterns repeating, pendulum swinging wildly, nature of existence simply balancing things from one side to the other. No right or wrong. No justice. No truth.
You realize nothing matters.
There is no stopping humanity from killing each other. There is no stopping any of it. There is no getting to the bottom of it all. There is no truth to unravel and ultimate wisdom to discover. There is no one to save unless they choose to save themselves.
You have awakened from illusions.
You are free, except you still have to live with others on the same plane of existence. Some are fully asleep. Others are only half awake. Both are fully convinced they’re in the right. Both are wrong and cause nothing but more division, chaos, and suffering.
You see just how hopeless it all is. You want to run away from them, but there is nowhere to run. You are trapped in this sandbox with a bunch of self-righteous, murderous children, all praying to their gods, all protecting their selfish interests, all playing games they cannot win.
Being awoken to the truth, or whatever this is, would be good if we were all awoken together. This way, it’s pure madness, with various degrees of suffering. People keep saying that it’s a good thing that more and more people are waking up. Is it, though? Or are we just replacing false order for truer chaos?
It is tempting to leave it all behind.
To go into the woods and never come back. Isolated from the madness, shouting voices, and the noise of everyday life. Why bother if nothing matters anyway? I honestly believe this would have been my path had I not had a family to ground me in this world. Running away is no longer an option. I suppose that is a good thing. Running away never solved anything anyway.
And so you wish you could forget it all.
Fall back asleep. Give back the apple of knowledge and delete the understanding you possess, however flawed and limited it may still be. Life was simpler before.
Eve, back away from the tree, nice and easy now. Say goodbye to the snake, and let’s return to our little paradise of ignorance. I know nothing, see nothing, hear nothing, and life is good.
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