“George Orwell’s ‘1984’ is supposed to be a warning, NOT an instruction manual.”

– Elon Musk

China’s Orwellian control of its people, ostensibly for their own safety via Xi’s zero covid policy, should send a chill down your spine. It should also feel oddly familiar.

We all experienced, and in some ways continue to experience — especially those unfortunate enough to live in blue states — more or less the same thing with all the ludicrous lockdowns, rules and mandates that were also enacted in the name of public safety.

Coincidence? You know I don’t believe in coincidences.

Never mind that we now have essentially a state-controlled media, what with the FBI telling big tech what social media accounts and information to censor and a click-hungry media that marches to the drumbeat of power-hungry politicians in Washington.

We’re even locking up people indefinitely without due process because some Americans decided to protest inside the Holy House on capital hill J6. That’s another story for another day.

If you’re old enough to remember the nanny state, political correctness and the green movement and still possess the increasingly rare ability to think for yourself then you can easily draw a direct line from those seemingly innocuous trends to where we stand today — at the precipice of a dystopian existence that only the otherworldly minds of Ayn Rand and George Orwell so presciently predicted.

We the people have become nameless faceless drones to be controlled by our elite overlords who know, not what’s best for us, but what’s best for them, which is to keep us under strict control while they go about their lives as they will and enjoy the freedoms they strip from us.

What was once a democratic republic has increasingly come to resemble a socialist empire led by an elite class whose words are lies and actions contemptible hypocrisy.

Question is, how can this be happening in the land of the free and the home of the brave?

I mean, it’s sort of obvious why some people get off on controlling others, but why would everyday people give up their freedoms so readily?

“The force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.”

– Obi-Wan Kenobi

Two words: survival instinct.

We are herd animals who live in families, communities, cities and nations for a reason. Our age-old limbic systems prioritize safety in numbers above all else. Millions of years ago being ostracized from the herd meant certain death. Today we still march to the beat of powerful neurotransmitters that reward us when we feel safe as part of a pack.

Think you’re above all that? Well maybe you are but probably not.

Funny how we all spew terms like confirmation bias, echo chambers, tribe behavior, pack animals, status quo and controlling behavior as if we’re talking about everyone but ourselves.

Turns out it takes a combination of strong will and intelligent thought to overrule those instincts that are constantly reinforced by a subconscious limbic system that’s far more powerful than any of us realize. And the fact that we are behaving more like mindless drones every day proves that both our will and intelligence peaked somewhere around the creation of Web 2.0 and has been in steep decline ever since.

Truth is, some of us are compelled to control and the rest of us are built to be controlled. As advanced and civilized as we think we’ve become, we are operating according to a playbook that was written millions of years ago. It took a medium as powerful as the internet to exploit our brain’s age-old encoding and make it possible to reverse the advancement of civilization.

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

– Ben Franklin

The founding fathers foresaw this, and they designed the U.S. Constitution to avoid a tragic future that befell every great civilization in human history. And if you’re noticing a growing erosion of our constitutional rights by ever-more-power-hungry politicians and a complicit media — an erosion that seems to be gaining momentum by the day — then you’re witnessing a once mindful and intelligent populace willfully give up their inalienable rights to mindless instincts that were born well before our cave dwelling ancestors began to develop frontal lobes.

In short, we are willingly giving up our real freedoms in the name of perceived safety. And just as Ben Franklin warned, we deserve exactly what comes of it.