Now here is a curious and rather interesting video on the subjects of perception, identity, and self-realisation that argues – quite persuasively, I might add – that virtually everything you do is an unconscious programmed reaction dictated by what you learned from the day you were born, to the age of 7 or so:

The philosophical side of that video strays rather too far over into Buddhist and Gnostic territory for my liking, and veers way too close to L. Ron Hubbard’s quite kooky ideas in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, but the basic premise is solid.

The danger lies in how you respond to this information.

Every philosophy and religion ever created by Man tries to explain the world around us in one way or another. Buddhism in particular postulates that all of existence is a mere illusion, created by your mind, and can be transcended so that you can see far deeper into reality. This, by the way, was also LRH’s philosophy.

The Gnostics reacted to the problems of evil and sin by arguing that the material world is utterly corrupted and broken, and that matter itself is sinful, and that therefore the way out of sin is to remove yourself from this world.

There are problems with all of those philosophies. The Gnostic approach, in particular, led to a spectacularly terrible heresy of Christianity known as Catharism, which eventually got so out of hand and ridiculous that it had to be put to death by fire and steel.

But the point remains that this world is full of lies and misinformation masquerading as truth, and you have to learn how to train your mind to see past them.

Most of us never do this at all. Those of us who try, usually do so quite poorly. There are a few who perceive what the rest of us cannot – and to us, they look flat-out insane as a result, because what they are saying is so shocking, so jarring, to our programmed responses.

It is for precisely these reasons that we of the Manosphere call the world around us “The Matrix”. It is an artificial construct of comforting lies that denies reality and tries to swaddle you in this warm, enervating blanket that dulls your sense and drips poison into your mind and your eyes. The poison tastes sweet and feels good, but it is poison nonetheless.

And, just as it was for Neo in The Matrix – the only good movie in the series, of course – the process of breaking free of the illusion that surrounds us is incredibly painful.

It is impossible to describe what it really feels like when the pretty lies are torn away and the veil over this world is lifted, so that you see humanity as it really is, in all of its horror and glory. And that is barely the first step along the journey. It is even worse, by orders of magnitude, when your own inadequacies and personal failings are revealed to you in brutal and summary fashion.

The world around you, as created by your parents, friends, teachers, and other influences, was carefully constructed to shield you from harm and to prevent you from seeing the world as it really is. Your ideas and beliefs came from your parents, and your community, and the way of life that you grew up to believe was normal and correct.

Challenges to that way of life clash immediately and harshly with the programming that you have been put through your entire childhood and early teen years. That programming never really disappears entirely, and it takes truly wrenching adjustments and some very severe beatings at the hands of a thoroughly uncaring world to make you realise that this programming is giving you bad outputs.

Nonetheless, that programming will stay with you for the rest of your life. There is no real way to shake it. You will end up passing it on to your children. The best that you can do, the best that you can hope for, is that your life experiences will “debug the bad code”, so to speak, with the hope that you do not do some of the same damage to your children that your parents did to you.

Now that is not to say that your parents did a bad job of raising you. If you grew up in a stable nuclear family, you likely had a boring, safe, and happy childhood, on balance. Yet no father and no mother is perfect, and at least one of their flaws will be expressed through you – because you don’t really have a choice. You will end up following the patterns established by your closest and most important familial influences, throughout your life.

And when it comes time to challenge that programming and explore the world for yourself, you are bound to become quite insufferable to those around you.

We older wiser grey-haired types call this “adolescence”, and those of you who have teenage children know exactly what I mean when I say that parents of teenagers understand perfectly well why certain species of animals see fit to kill and eat their young during times of stress.

Just sayin’, y’all.

Even so, the sooner that you shake off the faulty programming in your life, the better off you will be. That programming is causing you all sorts of problems that you don’t even fully realise are there.

Be warned, though, that when you do get rid of that faulty code, you will at first be possessed of the need to explain your newfound views to others, at great length.

You will be rejected, swiftly and brutally.

You will have to learn how to deal with this. One of the most astonishing and interesting features of the human mind is its ability to hold views and ideas that are literally opposed to reality. This helps explain why American conservatives can simultaneously believe that America is the greatest nation on Earth, and also that adding a million legal immigrants a year to the mix makes it greater, even though the new arrivals have absolutely nothing in common with the Americans who actually made America the greatest nation.

It also explains why progressives are… well, I was going to say “batshit-insane deniers of reality”, but that would be both redundant and stating the obvious.

This process of cognitive dissonance helps the mind protect itself from damage by malign outside influences, but it also prevents the brain from quickly and properly processing and accepting new information.

And this also means that those of us who have “unplugged from the Matrix”, so to speak, have truly epic problems fitting into society again.

We have rejected the program set out for us by the dominant culture. We have questioned its coding, and found it wanting. We have proposed better, simpler, more elegant solutions. But implementing those solutions would require a complete rewrite of the basic software, which is hugely expensive and painful to do – not to mention quite damaging to a lot of entrenched interests – so those who propose the changes are persecuted and hunted down by the agents of that Matrix system.

If you don’t believe me, just you try saying something like, “different races have different average IQs, and this by necessity results in different average levels of wealth, educational achievement, financial stability, and career performance, among many other things”.

Or, try saying, “there are only two sexes and transgenderism is a mental disease first and foremost” on any college campus – or in the halls of any Fortune 500 company, for that matter. You’ll be booted out the door faster than you can say “otherkin two-spirit”.

The reason you got smacked down – and fired, and thrown out of your apartment, and banned from all social media and payment platforms, and basically unpersoned – is because you questioned the program.

It is still worth doing, even though the cost is very high. The cost for speaking the truth always is, but you will quickly discover that living a life built on hard truths that match the world around you is far easier, lighter, and simpler than trying to force the world to conform to the lies that you were taught.