The Lie We Were Fed
Life can feel like one long, absurd convulsion of consciousness. A big cosmic gasp that never quite becomes peace. Just tension. Just pressure. Just this strange, humiliating ache of being awake inside a machine that keeps calling itself civilization. And what does it do to people? It splits them. Turns them into ghosts or nerve endings. Some people go numb just to make it through the day. Some of us feel everything so hard it burns. And in the middle of that, while people are trying to survive inflation, grief, rent, war footage, pills, propaganda, loneliness, and the daily insult of pretending this is all normal, we are still expected to sit politely and nod while some polished fraud tells us everything is under control.
That is the real sickness. Not pain. Not doubt. Not even anger. The sickness is the script. The constant script. The one that says the people above you know better. The one that says trust the leaders, trust the markets, trust the clergy, trust the experts they paid for, trust the smiling vampire on television with the dead eyes and the perfect teeth telling you the suffering is temporary and necessary and maybe even good for you. They wrap it in religion if that works. They wrap it in economics if that works. They wrap it in patriotism, housing policy, growth charts, moral panic, and national destiny. Whatever costume keeps the scam breathing. It is always the same beast wearing a different tie. And we are told to call that stability.
For a lot of people in my generation, especially those of us raised under evangelical fog and fear, the deepest wound is realizing how much of that script got poured straight into our blood before we were old enough to fight it. We were taught to call submission peace. We were taught to call confusion faith. We were taught to call silence maturity. We were taught that if the world was crushing us, maybe that was holiness doing its work. Maybe God was trying to teach us something through the boot on our neck. Maybe the cruelty was sacred because somebody with a microphone and a Bible said so. But that math does not work. It never worked. If the fruit is fear, shame, repression, control, hierarchy, and people walking around severed from their own humanity, then stop calling it righteous. Stop dressing up domination like it came down from heaven.
That is not God. That is human appetite wearing God’s cologne. That is free will pointed in the wrong direction, sharpened into policy, sermon, culture, and law, then handed back to the suffering as if it were some noble mystery. It is not a mystery. It is a con. It is people with power teaching people without it to doubt their own eyes. And I am tired of hearing that this is just how life is. No. This is how life is under systems built by people who benefit from confusion. This is what it looks like when greed learns scripture, when fear learns branding, when control learns how to speak in a soothing voice. So no, I do not believe all this decay is part of some divine master plan. I think it is us. I think it is what happens when people keep handing over their conscience to institutions that have long since mistaken domination for order.
And maybe that is the hardest part. Not that the lie exists, but that so many good people keep kneeling to it because they are exhausted, scared, broke, lonely, or desperate for meaning. I get it. I do. The lie is easier at first. The lie gives structure. The lie gives slogans. The lie gives you a villain, a savior, a checklist, a tribe. But truth is meaner than that. Truth walks in and starts breaking furniture. Truth says nobody is coming to think for you. Truth says your soul is not safer because you outsourced it. Truth says if something keeps crushing human beings while calling itself holy, responsible, inevitable, or mature, then maybe the holiest thing you can do is refuse it. Maybe the most faithful thing left is to look the machine dead in the face and say, no, I will not call this goodness just because you trained me to fear my own mind.