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The books 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 all back up your thinking in this piece. Each of them in their own way explore the concept of how human society can be captured by totalitarian governments. All of them use some combination of drugs, propaganda, fear and indoctrination to stupefy, pacify and mold our human behaviors.

Brave New World is my personal favorite because of it's characters and their struggles, I wrote a very long essay on it, but all of them seem to have failed to be adapted into movies...there is however Brazil by Terry Gilliam which is the best shot at dystopia a film has ever taken. Beware watching it if you're feeling down lol.

It's interesting in that all the reading about dystopias and communist states that I've done it seems to be that intelligent persons suffer a distinct fate--they have the mental acuity necessary to pierce the veil of the propaganda state and thereby discover what mankind has lost and from then on live a life alienated from humanity. The accounts of intellectual depression are epic.

In this mind I take no stock from Zuckerberg because his company is a murderous beast of consolidation that eats competitors alive all while never having innovated anything other than targeted advertisements to replace the market he murdered. Before him the internet was more pure and since him society has been developing brain cancer on a massive scale.

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My personal favourite piece of yours, Shifra.

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Such a power piece, Shifra. I’ve been struggling with the autonomy of my own mind these past couple of years. I had to step back and really ask myself, “Do I believe this, or is this something I’ve been told to believe?”

I find myself on two sides of the spectrum and now vehemently dislike being labeled or put into a box as it’s so simplistic. It’s frustrating when things are presented in either black or white, rather than the grey it truly is. The “you’re either with us or against us” binary choice doesn’t account for critical thought or self reflection. Like you said, it’s easier to simply succumb to an authority figure telling us how to behave rather than struggle against the tide of charting one’s own path.

Anyway, I sound angry in this comment but in actuality I’ve become somewhat indifferent. Focusing on my writing and my new publishing company has been therapeutic. Thanks for the post as I hadn’t known about that book. I’m very interested in the video but I’ll have to watch later before commenting further. Happy Tuesday!

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