What is The Matrix?, by Mike Belcher

originally written and posted on Mike Belcher’s Substack.

Originally Produced for Stand-Behind Underground Journal.

What if I told you that within your mind there were prisons of both minimum, and maximum security, and that these prisons were constructed and enforced in a partnership between society and yourself? What if the prisoners held captive were ideas?

Silly, right? But what of “trans” men are not men? What of climate change is religious dogma, and not science? What of the Civil Rights Act being the modern document that enshrined our affirmative racial discrimination regime? What of Israel appears to have equipped criminal world governments with the technology to enact police states against their respective citizenries?

If any of the above objective truths made you think twice, wince, elicited anger, or made you uncomfortable we have touched on a sacred cow: an idea that, per Frankfurt School neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse, must be censored so totally that one dare not even think it, let alone speak it. These mental prisons were erected along the lines of social tripwires of taboo, and are enforced by the feminine-type social (oft passive) aggression that we now often refer to as “cancel culture.”

It was defected KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov who made Americans broadly aware of the Soviet ideological warfare regime simply known as “demoralization.” This is the process developed by Communists – with substantial links to the social sciences – to separate minds en masse from the real world. As a consequence, the demoralized are unable to acknowledge a truth seen by their own eyes, heard by their own ears, or held in their own hands. This process produces a “pseudoreality” (Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language Abuse of Power) that, in the mind of the demoralized, is the unassailable worldview that exists adjacent to the real world. It is to this pseudoreality that morality is applied by those captured. This application of morality to a pseudoreality produces an externally nonsensical (though internally consistent) moral system mathematician, and Critical Theory expert James Lindsay coins paramorality.

To provide a brief example imagine that you are riding public transportation when you observe a man begin to sexually assault a female. It would be, in any healthy culture, a duty of any able man to intervene to stop the assault. But in a pseudoreality and paramoral framework wherein the race of the perpetrator of the assault is considered oppressed in the classic Marxian dialectic, and the female is of an oppressor race, this act might be reasonably considered a justifiable act of sexual reparations in which intervening would be the immoral act, and not the assault. As positively nutty this sounds this is exactly the way pseudorealities do, and always have, worked, and this scenario played out in a real American city in recent times, and the archetype has been playing on repeat for years now. This is how the horrors of the twentieth century played out as well. Who do you think the Kulaks were?

The effect of this paramoral system of apparently nonsensical ethics playing out in public is further demoralization, causing one to question his own ethics and first principles, and separating him from his capacity for moral outrage and righteous anger in the face of an expansive pseudoreality. This effect is bolstered by the persistent outrage and anger of the inhabitants of pseudoreality in asserting their false paramorality aggressively, thereby knocking the unprepared off their emotional base by eliciting sympathy for an offense that is assumed to be real but is not (looking at you Jeff Flake).

This formulation of “cancel culture” is, in its original German, “aufheben der kultur.” It was forged into a sociological weapon with which to wrest the Overton Window into radical territory by bringing hellfire down on any who would dare step outside it. In this regard people do not get “cancelled,” but culture itself does. The origin of these ideas was the origin of much of modern leftist ideology: GWF Hegel. The nineteenth century German philosopher was the link between the European continental ideas of Historicism, Statism, and hatred of Christianity, and the modern American left as seeded multiple times: first by the early American Young Hegelians (the “Progressive” movement), and later by the Frankfurt neo-Marxists. Interestingly, these separate ideological seedings explain the simultaneous instincts within the modern left to both bring about the perfected state through a bureaucracy of experts (Progressive), yet also to destroy culture totally such that violent revolution would be preferable among the masses to continuing on (neo-Marxist). Cognitive dissonance between these mutually exclusive strategies is avoided through the adoption of nihilism, relativism, and an assumed infallibility of the experts.

To these initiators of these un-American ideas the concepts themselves would seem second nature, but they would have used different words, and, indeed, different paradigms to describe them. These paramoral assertions of pseudoreality would be, to them, not merely lies, but spells. They use the subversion of language at the level of meaning to coopt the minds of their targets, and in doing they wield the hermetic language of magic words.

It is no accident that there is a utopian religious nature to their ideas: they are originated in dark-ages Alchemy. As the Alchemist sought to find the seed of gold in a base metal lead by sloughing off the bad in cleansing fire, and chemical reactions, these utopians believe that Eden exists as a seed under all the corruption of society, and the contradictions of the world. They believe that this utopia is reachable by eliminating the bad, and accelerating the synthesis of contradictions towards the end of History and manmade perfection.

Returning to where we started I am, in fact, telling you that these prisons exist in your mind, that they are enforced by social taboos, and that you yourself uphold them just as the Communists had intended: as Pavlov’s dogs salivated with the bell you have been trained to not just expect, but to bring about an internal anxiety upon approaching wrongthink. I also allege that you possess some degree of indoctrination into relativistic ideology. Here’s the proof: American culture and its Christian tradition and heritage is objectively superior to Islamic culture as exists in all Islamic nations, and as is guaranteed by any faithful interpretation and implementation of the Koran. Feeling uncomfortable yet? That’s relativism telling you that you’re not allowed to discern which is best, and that only bad people do that. It’s you telling yourself that you’re not allowed to tell a truth that may provoke offense.

We are now very deep into the belly of the beast. What we now require is to achieve something that no culture has previously achieved without substantial collapse: remoralization. We must begin the process of reconnecting ourselves to reality, and, equally important, of polarizing pseudoreality, and paramorality. We must begin first by confronting the errors that exist in our own minds and tearing down the barriers to the ideas were not supposed to think. We must expose these ideas – all of them – to sunlight, and we should interrogate them with reason, and hold them against first principles of Americanism. There can be no idea that is off the table.

As we come to discover these lies that we believe(d) we must confront them. I am sure there are many ways to do this, but I suggest we KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid): start by saying them out loud and writing them down. Repeat them as often as necessary to reconnect to reality. As you do this you will see the pseudoreality begin to melt away, and as you come to reconnect sufficiently to the real world you will regain your ability to get mad about being lied to and manipulated. This righteous anger you then cannot help but to feel, when enacted in the world, becomes the aesthetic by which others begin to question the paramoral and pseudoreal, as we positively, and unapologetically, reassert reality, morality, and Americanism.

Note that this is not a utopian project. Eden is not on offer in any capacity on this side of eternity. You will never achieve a perfect knowledge of the real, and you will always retain some degree of demoralization through deception, mistake, and subversion. The desired end state is simply this: do enough. You must do enough to adapt your mind to reality to first survive, and then to flourish. We must do enough to alter the course of our nation, whatever that nation is to look like geographically, to avert utter devastation by perpetual subjective revolution. Reality will win, ultimately. It will reassert itself. The questions that matter are how many lives it will claim when it does, and how we might affirmatively reassert it rapidly, and sufficiently to conquer the lies that now threaten all of our futures.