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You're winning some battles but that doesn't mean you're winning the war.
The efforts you've described are admirable and I'm sure has saved lives and the truth, but if the control runs deep, so must the resistance. I think the more we look into the secrets and recognize manipulation, the more enraged we will feel at how normal it was all made to seem.
It blew my mind when I realized how much of the internet and how much of national media in many countries is propaganda and flawed reporting. Leaving out details is lying imo and it's often normalized because it's "PR" or "protection".
It all often takes me back to my abusive childhood home where I was kept inside/sheltered not to be protected from harm, but to keep me from realizing what was going on. To keep me from reaching people and information that would tell me it isn't normal. But without the internet, its privacy and the people (not AI) I met there, I might still believe in that normal. It was thinking that got me out, and intense self-reflection. When the AI (even the algorithms sometimes) thinks for you, it doesn't allow you to go through the process of reasoning and critical thinking.
I first thought it must feel like magic for the kids, then realized no, it's as normal as our childhood surroundings were to us. And that is terrifying.
There's a reason the word "renaissance" means rebirth. Wounding isn't the same as killing (a status quo or a powerful person). They obviously know that, I think most of us don't though. We didn't even recognize the evil grow because they pit us against each other. I cri sorry for rant lemmy.
This is incredibly well written and I agree with you on so many levels.
Nelson Mandela wrote in 1994, "For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others," and the moment I read that as an adolescent something flipped. As I've grown I've just watched it be proven true again and again, and I've watched as the people I love and respect and even myself, unknowingly trampled on someone else's freedom. It's as small as talking over someone, not talking about a friend making a concerning joke that dehumanized someone else.
We're born free, but the world works pretty hard to put us in a trance, to inhibit our sense of autonomy and to make us afraid of vulnerability. I strongly believe the people who maniacally try to control others and kill their autonomy are ones who have had their own autonomy stripped away or ridiculed into submission at some point.
Their idea of freedom is not actually freedom, it's having the freedom to control someone else's freedom as they please. But it doesn't work that way, and I believe the moment I try to control someone else I give up some of my own freedom in doing so. Because now my joy is external. It's sad and it's evil at the same time.
Countries (especially colonised and systematically traumatized ones) around the world have extremely repressive family systems that work to inhibit the child's sense of autonomy, to make them more obedient. This can come across as parents being 'helicopter style', 'overprotective', 'strict', 'disciplined' or 'pious' even really. And they're mostly considered good things because you're keeping your kid safe and teaching them life skills, right? But I don't think most people realize just how much damage they're actually doing, because the kids don't know it's the fault of the generations before them, the kids will mostly believe it's theirs. And in turn, this actually leaves them unprepared and alienated when they do get out into the world. Sometimes they turn the rage of themselves, sometimes on others, or they find another way to cope. My reason for saying this is because this really isn't an individual problem that you can solve by the one eye for another method, it's deep rooted in all of us. "Not all men, but all men benefit from the patriarchy". Not everyone who's ever done a bad thing is a bad person per se, but we all benefit from the things bad people do. And we mostly don't realize it or notice it.