Christopher Falcon

Lest we forget the age of enlightenment

This has been a long time in the making for me; that being, the desire to be a writer and journalist. Being a principled man of integrity is something that I strive for on a daily basis. Much like the people for whom I have the utmost respect have alluded to, this will be an on-going battle until I draw my last breath. I only wish our leaders had the same inclinations.

The age in which we live has become a bit of a paradox. We have the ability to communicate with one another on a global scale, almost instantaneously, whilst the platforms on which we helped fund into existence with our tax dollars now have to ability to control, censor, and smear anyone that dares to stray away from corporate narratives.

Now the folks over a certain age, probably thirty-five or so, can remember when “getting the word out” about anything took a valiant effort, from stickers and flyers on light poles, to posts on real world message boards (as well as digital). We all looked forward to the day when information would spread beyond any corporate or oligarchic control mechanisms and intellectual gatekeepers. This was actually possible for a short period of time, even on platforms that now inundate the average person with so much propaganda that Orwell would clutch his pearls and scream from a mountain top, “I warned all of you 70 years ago!” This golden age of information sharing helped fill in expansive gaps of my own knowledge; I had never before been privy to such jarring and revelatory information. However, I have noticed that over the last decade, especially in the last five years, what once was a weekly online deluge of what national intelligence types would refer to as secret information began steadily slowing, until it virtually came to a stop. It was as if the spigot of information was slowly being turned off. This suppression of information by our news media and political class as mere misinformation or disinformation is what happens when any dominant force starts losing control over what they deem to be the inferior class. The cannon fodder of the world started using the tools of control and manipulation in reverse to spread useful information to one another. This could no longer be ignored by the Anglo-American Establishment.

The birth of the “fake news” narrative coincided with the election of Trump, not because Trump is some force of good in the world. Hardly. Donald Trump is just a representation of another power faction that turned against the tide, at least in the eyes of his supporters. He drained the swamp simply to find the worst of the worst in the establishment. Anyone that has been plugged-in to the larger picture of the grand chessboard over the last two decades saw this for what it was from the beginning: a ruse. Trump, whether knowingly or not, ushered in the age of technocratic censorship on a global scale. Currently, political opinions are not just being censored, they are overtly being attacked, deleted and, at the very least, demonetized by establishment tech platforms with the help of corporate mouthpieces. All of this has had quite a chilling and deleterious effect on freedom of thought, speech, and expression as outlined in the First Amendment. The fearless few who dare to run counter-narratives are being smeared and conflated with the darkest forms of freedom of speech: racism, authoritarianism, fascism and worst of all, being referred to as traitors to their country. To anyone that has read Machiavelli and Jung, this is easy to understand. The oligarchy has been protecting themselves with what Jung refers to as projection. For decades, they have done so via shameless and sociopathic proxies in the media and now in the social influencer space as well. If you stray from corporate orthodoxy, you are seen as the enemy of the people. Which people? Well, that depends on your political leanings. The worst nightmare of any established power structure is for people to realize that this Left/Right paradigm is a false one and that ideologies are ephemeral, and at their best are merely another form of thought control. Because once you align with a party, any party, there is an orthodoxy that becomes dogmatic and so rigid in thought it rivals religion. The main prerequisite is blind faith in leaders, and as history has taught us, this is extremely dangerous.

The age of enlightenment has taught us a few important lessons over the centuries; lessons that have constantly been under attack from would be despots and their counterparts ever since. Principles should be far more important to the individual, as well as the collective, as these are foundational understandings of what has led us to this point in human history. We need not forget the age of enlightenment and common sense as the oft forgotten Thomas Paine laid out so eloquently and anonymously in 1776. This explosive work, Common Sense, helped to ignite revolutions in America and France. It is these types of thinkers that have paved the way for individuals and humanity as a whole to be the authors of their own destiny. This same passion is alive and well today in millions, perhaps billions, of people; however, dogmatism, propaganda, and manipulation of individual thought patterns have made it seem like a distant dream of principled people in the world today.

If you are the type to question everything, believe it or not, you are a massive boon to humanity. Keep it up, as it is more important now than it has ever been in our history.