Trigger warning! No seriously, if you are not a free thinker and you have been too indoctrinated to accept only the “education” of those who own the information, you might not want to venture too much further than this sentence. Consider this the red pill versus the blue pill moment that Neo had to contemplate before deciding if he should go deeper into the rabbit hole of discovering truth. Do not say you have not been warned if what you read after this paragraph sets off cognitive dissonance or induces a need to viciously react against an opinion which smacks against an accepted ideologies.
Public education is nothing more than mass indoctrination. At that sentence, some were repulsed and instantly felt the need to throw out an insult before swearing off the Ghion Journal for an eternity. Others promptly wanted to place me in a box and label me a conservative as if the entirety of this world only exists between the Republican/Democrat duopoly. Those on the conservative side are probably feeling their oats at this moment thinking that they have won over yet another adherent. Let me assure everyone though that I am not about to sign up to one dogma or another. I divorced myself from liberalism a couple of years ago; I did not gain freedom ton imprison myself to yet another bankrupt doctrine. I rather enjoy being able to think for myself instead of being wedded to the ideologies of the powerful.
This new found freedom—the liberty to disconnect from the Matrix of sort—made me reassess everything that I have been “educated” to accept. I mentioned cognitive dissonance earlier, let me explain that concept real quick. We all view this world through our own prism. In that way, the Matrix really does exist because 90% of what we think to be true is nothing more than perception. Alas, there comes a time in all our lives where a set of information intersects with the notions we already hold to be fact. It’s actually not an intersection, it’s more like a violent crash where some event or incident induces a severe discomfort in our minds as we are all the sudden confronted with an existential question. Is what I knew untrue? This question is the first symptom of cognitive dissonance.
When this happens, we have a choice. Either become even more ardent in our belief that what we knew to be true is in fact true and disregard the catalyst that caused us to rethink our views. Or the opposite happens, we decide to shed all which we once accepted and switch our minds to radically depart from perceptions we once held. This is what is meant by the zealotry of a convert. Imagine, if you will, a man who was an avowed racist and thought people from certain ethnic group are all dumb. This man has a heart attack and it is a doctor from that specific ethnic group the man thought the lesser of who saved his life. When the bigot comes to, he finds out that the doctor who saved him is from the very ethnic group he detests. Cognitive dissonance sets in, either he disavows his racist past and becomes a champion of equality or he says to himself “this guy is the exception” and becomes an even bigger bigot in order to compensate for the nagging incident that interrupted his blanket of ignorance. Cognitive dissonance is a life altering experience.
It will take a cognitive dissonance of the harshest kind to get us as a people to understand that almost all levers of society have been positioned in a way that keeps the vast majority of humanity shackled as slaves of the system. Everything from our political system, churches to civil societies are lined up to take from us pounds of flesh while they give us back pennies in return. Add to this list the public education system; up until the Industrial Age, the upper crust of society and those who wielded power discouraged education and sought instead a nation of field hands. The majority of Americans were either de jure slaves or indentured servants—the former got paid zero while the latter got paid slave wages.
The age of industry and the subsequent service era changed the equation. Plantations shifted to corporations; what businesses needed were not field hands as much as they needed programmable robots. Men like Carnegie Mellon, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan pushed public education as a means of “training” a work force capable of handling new technology and complex machinery. In order to make sure that students were being programmed to a certain standard and in a way that best fits the corporate agenda, the Department of Education was stood up in order to push a uniform standard of “knowledge” upon the broader public.
True enough, there needs to be some standard by which we gauge knowledge apart from ignorance. But when that standard is based on lies and state propaganda, education ceases to be edification and instead morphs to indoctrination. In all honesty, I agree with conservatives when it comes to this one facet. It’s just too bad these same conservatives insist on pushing their morality on others instead of keeping judgment to themselves. You see, centralized control sucks and federalism is nothing more than amassed power that gives birth to abject corruption. This is why our government has become the most corrupt institution in the world, so much power has been hoarded in Washington DC that our elected officials only care about keeping power instead of serving the people and the Constitution they swore to uphold and protect.
Turf protection is the name of the game as every gutless politician in DC and those connected to our federalized system of governance care only about maintaining and enhancing their power. The feces from there rolls down hill; all of us are dependent on this debauched system of greed and graft—we have let paychecks make slaves of all of us. Teachers thus teach to a standard instead of teaching to enlighten, they either unwittingly or knowingly pass on historical lies as truths. Christopher Columbus, a lost adventurer on a quest to travel to “India” is credited with discovering America. That’s like me getting lost on my way to Virginia and Tweeting that I just discovered Iowa. Likewise they indoctrinate us with the provable lie that the Civil War was fought to free slaves when Lincoln himself said in his speech “A House Divided” that his cause was not about abolitionism.
The lies are one too many to count. Not even “African-American” teachers are brave enough to actually talk about why the continent once called Ethiopia was renamed to Africa as a means to honor a Roman general named Scipio Africanus. Everyone wants to get along for the sake of getting along. To question the very lies we have been sold requires courage for those who speak out against conventional wisdom and question accepted orthodoxy are treated to the worse of cuts. Mostly, it is us, the very people who have been indoctrinated by the system, who rise up and figuratively stone ANYONE who dares disturb what we have been programmed to accept as fact.
Harriet Tubman once said “I freed a thousand slaves in my lifetime, I would have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves”. Slavery never ended, it just morphed as the chains became debt and the shackles changed to the public education system. We are a society of institutionalized parrots who go around echoing what we have been conditioned to believe while concurrently thinking that we are Imhotep reincarnated. Physical enslavement is at least easy to identify for the irons are right on the hands and feet. But enslavement of the mind is wicked! Those who are in bondage don’t even know they are imprisoned by the information imposed on them by others.
My people, please stop protesting and marching and begging for someone else to free you. The struggle is within for they planted a virus in the hearts and minds of our ancestors a long time ago and that virus keeps getting re-birthed and refortified with each subsequent generation. The only way to break this system of global injustice is to free ourselves from the indoctrination of public education and question everything they have been force feeding us to believe. Doing so will induce a virulent form of cognitive dissonance. But that which does not kill you makes you the freer, the redemption on the other side of dissonance is worth all the discomfort that the truth brings. Or you can choose the red pill and stay enslaved by the indoctrination of the powerful. The choice is simple; the decision is CRUCIAL. #InstitutionalizedMatrix
“I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.” ~ Morpheus
If you appreciate the message behind this write up and feel it’s important for others to read it, to be given the option to take the blue pill, share this article on social media using #InstitutionalizedMatrix
Here is another red pill versus blue pill moment, watch this video and if you stick it out, if you see it through, you just might start the journey of freeing yourself from the indoctrination of hateful labels and might see at the end of the video how the brilliant playbook of divide and conquer works.
Speaking of disconnecting from the system, how about you stop following Corporate State Media and give us, those of us who write to speak truth to power instead of getting paid by power, a try. Join us June 29th - July 4th, for #IndepenedentMediaWeek (click HERE or picture below to find out more).
Teodrose Fikremariam
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