Chains are polished to look like a libertyFreedom. Such a beautiful word, isn’t it? Short, simple, elegant. A word that has launched revolutions, justified wars, toppled empires. A word painted on walls, tattooed on skin, carved into monuments. The word they whisper into your ear while they pick your pocket, smiling as you thank them for the privilege. Freedom. How quaint. How utterly intoxicating. And how utterly false.You see, freedom is the oldest con in the book. The illusion so perfect that people defend it with their lives even as it slowly strangles them. You think you’re free because they told you so. Because your birth certificate has the right flag on it, because your anthem ends on a high note, because your passport allows you to travel from one cage to another without too much trouble at customs. But freedom has never been what you think it is. It is not liberty. It is not choice. It is permission. Conditional. Temporary. Revocable at a moment’s notice.Take your vaunted right to vote. You stand in line like a good citizen, clutching your ballot like it matters, as if the outcome wasn’t already written long before you ever touched the pen. Candidates are chosen in boardrooms, not polling stations. Elections are pageantry, theater for the masses. You are not selecting leaders. You are ratifying decisions. You are lending legitimacy to a process designed to convince you that your voice is more than a whisper in a hurricane.1/4
Or free speech, that sacred cow. They let you say whatever you want, yes. Post it, scream it, plaster it across your car bumper if it pleases you. And then they archive it. Every word, every keystroke, every call. Stored in some anonymous server farm in Utah or Virginia, monitored, indexed, ready to be retrieved the moment your noise becomes inconvenient. They don’t stop you from speaking because they don’t need to. Why silence rebellion when you can monetize it? Why suppress dissent when you can catalog it, feed it back to you in ads and algorithms until you can’t tell the difference between your rage and their marketing strategy?And let us not forget consumer freedom — that carnival trick of the modern age. You can choose anything you want, as long as it’s on the shelf. A thousand brands, all owned by the same five corporations. A thousand choices, none of them yours. Your individuality expressed through the color of your shoes, the size of your coffee, the logo on your phone case. You are told this is liberty. It’s not. It’s inventory management.The prison of modern life doesn’t look like chains and cages. It looks like convenience. The phone in your pocket, the card in your wallet, the camera in your living room — each one a gift, each one a leash. You pay for the privilege of being tracked, measured, molded. You refresh your feeds, you swipe your cards, you speak your commands to machines that smile back at you with cheerful voices, while silently they take notes. You’re not a citizen. You’re a data point. A customer. A product. And you think you’re free because they let you decorate your cage with emojis and wallpaper.2/4
The laws? They’re the punchline. Laws are never written to free you. They are written to manage you. For every liberty granted, two are restricted. They wave the flag of safety, of security, of order. It’s for your protection, they say. And like children, you nod along. You trade your rights for the promise of safety, never realizing that safety is the excuse of every tyrant, every despot, every bureaucrat who ever wanted more control. They don’t need to march in jackboots anymore. They just need to make you afraid. Of criminals. Of terrorists. Of each other. Fear is the most efficient jailer ever invented.But here’s the exquisite part of the illusion: you defend it. You police yourselves. You shame each other into compliance. You destroy reputations with hashtags, exile people from polite society for the wrong opinion, the wrong joke, the wrong word spoken years ago. Censorship doesn’t need a government ministry anymore. It’s crowdsourced. Self-inflicted. The mob does the work for free.And when the mob fails, the system still stands ready. The Patriot Act. The surveillance state. Cameras on every corner. Microphones in every device. Biometric scans at every airport. You march through it all, barefoot at security, arms outstretched for the scanner, shoes off, belts off, dignity off. And you thank them for keeping you safe. The illusion is complete.This is not freedom. This is permission with fine print. This is captivity dressed up with parades and fireworks. And the tragedy — the true tragedy — is that most people will go to their graves believing it. They will die clutching their chains and calling them liberty. They will boast of choices that were never theirs, celebrate victories that were scripted, and defend a system that never once set them free.3/4
So the next time you feel that swell of pride when you hear the word freedom, pause. Ask yourself — is it freedom you feel like it once really was? Or is it the sweet taste of the leash, sugar-coated, polished, and sold back to you at a staggering profit? Because the moment you ask that question honestly is the moment you’ll realize the truth: you were never free. Not once. Not ever since the day you were born. You were managed, cataloged, entertained, herded from cradle to grave. And all the while, you thanked your captors for the privilege. You called it liberty. You sang songs about it. You pledged allegiance to it. And yet it was never yours. It was theirs. Always theirs — disguised as yours. Those corporations have been in power for a very long time, quietly pulling the strings, branding your captivity as liberty, selling you the leash as if it were a crown.4/4Fin
>>106536216tldr; "you aren't really free, you've been conditioned and told that you are free. you are all dumb and the world will become a terrible place because of you idiots that keep screaming FREEDOM while supporting literal tyrants that want to take that freedom away because you never actually valued freedom in the first place kys nigger."
tru dat!
