If We Could See Everything, It Would Radicalize Us All Instantly

It’s hard to wrap your mind around the abusiveness of the imperial status quo, partly because it’s all we’ve ever known, and partly because it’s too big to perceive all at once.

The statistics don’t show you the true human impact. The personal anecdotes just show you small snapshots of individuals suffering in their own lives. A working single mother crying in her car in a TikTok video because the endless toil necessary for survival is all-consuming and overwhelming. A news report about child labor in DRC cobalt mines. An Instagram reel about a father in Gaza carrying plastic bags he’s been told contain the remains of his daughter.

Individually, such stories are heartbreaking and enraging. But they are not merely personal anecdotes from separate individuals. These stories are unfolding all around the world, every moment of every day, affecting the lives of billions of human beings in different ways and to varying degrees.

If we could see it all, it would radicalize everyone against the empire instantaneously.

But we cannot see it all. We simply can’t take in all the suffering that is happening in all the ways it is being inflicted upon innocent people all around the world.

The most powerful weapon our rulers have is the fact that homo sapiens are incapable of perceiving everything all at once. If everybody could perceive all the consequences of the decisions being made by powerful people on a deep experiential level, most of humanity would rise up to overthrow the established order, and there’d be hardly anyone willing to defend it.

The only thing keeping the heads of the oligarchs and empire managers attached to their necks is the limitations of human perception.

Which of course is why they work so hard to maintain the present limitations of human perception. All the propaganda, internet censorship, AI shenanigans, algorithm manipulation and government secrecy we see from the capitalist empire is there to keep us from seeing too much, because unadulterated truth tends to have a radicalizing effect on the mind.

That’s why they’re scrambling to roll out police drones, AI mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems while doing everything they can to slow down our access to information and insight: it’s a race to get us fully locked down in a capitalist dystopia policed by militarized robots before humanity’s unprecedented ability to share inconvenient facts and ideas lets us see enough to awaken a revolutionary zeitgeist in our collective consciousness.

So in that sense there really is a kind of worldwide struggle between light and darkness — not in a religious sense, but in the sense that there is a direct ongoing conflict between the agenda to see and to know versus the agenda to keep things hidden. Humanity’s higher impulses are trying to bring things into the light of awareness, while those representing our lower nature are trying to keep things obscured in the darkness of ignorance and confusion.

I don’t know which side will win in the end. I just know it makes sense for every well-intentioned person to spend as much the time and energy as they can muster trying help make the abuses of the empire as visible as possible for everybody.

Reading by Tim Foley:

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/if-we-could-see-everything-it-would