Hijacking the Network: An Address

This is a response to Sleeping Giant's V for Vendetta and the Art of Brevity, which has fallen off the front page now and so I'm posting it as a new blog:

"My fellow human beings: I come here today not to frighten you, nor to berate you, nor even to try and teach you. It is much worse than that. I am here to free you.

"It is said that the truth will set you free and that's something we could certainly talk about. The corollary is that it is by lies that you are enslaved, and you have been lied to a very great deal have you not? You have been lied to so that you will buy more than you can afford and so are now living in penury, lied into wars you would not otherwise have fought and so now carry the guilt of war crimes and atrocities, lied into unfulfilling careers, dead-end jobs and useless degrees. You were lied into buying their empty hope and now we're all seeing the true face of their change. Let me assure you that as bad as it now looks the extent of the lies is deeper and far more serious than you can now imagine.

"The lies that have made us all slaves are too many to enumerate. You might perhaps start from the assumption that everything that you have been taught is a lie and that is certainly not far from the truth. However, if this is too hard for you to accept perhaps it will be easier to understand this: the leadership positions of our so-called civilization - be they political, academic, religious, corporate or financial - have been infiltrated by and at the top are completely saturated with members of a criminal network whose activities lie at the root of most every problem afflicting the modern world. These amoral deviants almost to a man suffer from what psychologists refer to as psychopathic personality disorder: lacking in all conscience and so able to commit any act, obsessed by wealth and especially power, dedicated only to the satisfaction of their own base and selfish needs. Terrifying as this is they are not to be hated and feared but rather pitied, for they hold the fires of hell within their minds.

"I do not tell you this with any expectation that many of you will do anything about it at all. For decades your minds, poisoned by anti-depressants, television and other drugs, have been polluted from birth onwards by propaganda of the most potent sort, and so now, here as the Apocalypse explodes into history, you sit there burping and befuddled, sensing perhaps that you have entered the slaughterhouse and are being led to the killing floor but, livestock that you have become, unlikely to mount any serious resistance.

"And so now, my fellow human beings, I wish to say this for it is more important than anything else I might say: I love you.

"For you see, when you hack away at the thicket of lies that have been used to imprison the modern mind, an activity I and some others have spent years doing, you eventually find that there is in this universe only one thing that is really true and that is love. Does this sound quaint, old-fashioned, trite, even unbelievable? I expect it does. It did to me.

"Despite the darkness in which our lives have been draped I am not afraid, for I have love, and love has me. Love is eternal. It is everywhere and in everything, if you know where to look.

"So it is that despite everything I am not angry with you. I extend my love to every single one of you, whether you are one of the psychopathic predators who initiated and guided the destruction of our beautiful planet, one of their millions of clueless minions in the corporations, bureaucracies and security forces that have witlessly carried out their dark will, or one of their billions of unfortunate victims who have sat passively by as their minds, health and lives have been consumed like the commodities they have become. You are as you are and could not be any other way, and for that alone, I love you.

"None of you are bad: you are simply sick. The primary symptom is your rampant foolishness, the root cause the flames of fear that rage in your little hearts. The cure is simple: love. I cannot and will not tell you what to do, I have no grand plan for extracting ourselves from the mess we have created. I can advise only this: to let go of your fear, and follow your love. Let all you think and do come from this and you will find that the tyranny that is crushing your souls into jelly evaporates like a morning mist in the light of the Sun.

"Thank you, humanity, for your time. May you use whatever time you have left in the best possible way. Good night."