Modern Delusions

I read an article just recently about 'The Truman Show Delusion.'

For anyone who hasn't read about it, the Truman Show Delusion is the belief that everything you do is being watched by someone - that's similar to the 'old' beliefs about being watched all the time - but the new aspect of this belief is that everybody is an actor, and that your life actually is some kind of reality show.

Based on my experiences and things that I've read, I would add something to this: the belief that people are betting money on what you will or won't do in some situation, and that people 'own' and 'buy' and 'sell' you - that you are a slave, a toy, a game piece, a puppet, or a useful tool to somebody.

I personally don't believe that I am on a 'show,' exactly. It's not quite like that. If it's a 'show,' that means that there is a large number of people watching only me and a few other people - it means a high ratio of watchers to 'show stars.' With ordinary television, there is a huge number of viewers, and a small number of actors/celebrities being watched.

My experience has led me to believe, instead, that EVERYONE is being watched and manipulated, but that maybe the watchers focus more attention on some particular person for a period of time. There is a huge number of 'show stars,' and a small number of watchers. Some people are ranked as more popular or more interesting to watch, and their popularity rises and falls. This has to do with the betting, the speculating, the marketplace trading, of human beings. I think that you're worth more money when your popularity is high.

But the watchers are reluctant to casually 'sell' their claims on people because they become attached to them, believing that it's some kind of 'relationship' they have with the target, like the target is their 'pet.'

This is only one of several theories/interpretations that I have about what happens to me. I don't always view it that way.

I don't know how they protect their claims of ownership in a person. In my experience, there are many different voices talking to me at all hours of the day, and they aren't necessarily 'all on the same team.' I used to think that was a trick - that they WERE 'all on the same team,' but just playing 'good cop, bad cop.' Talk to the target with a mean person, then comfort them with a nice person, to get them to confess whatever you want to hear. That's good cop, bad cop. But now I really think there are multiple groups and individuals speaking to me, and they are NOT all on the same team. And they do, in fact, have trouble protecting their claims of ownership on a person. Sometimes one group of people does something to me that another group doesn't like. Sometimes one voice doesn't seem to notice that another voice/attacker is doing a particular attack at some moment. They often act like they believe they themselves are the ONLY people attacking me, and are in denial about or not aware of the other people getting involved.

There is something I don't like about the Truman Show Delusion. I don't like anything that suggests 'everybody's in on it.' That belief seems dangerous. It is unbearable to walk around believing that everybody around you is evil and inhuman, and that they are lying to you about everything. And that they know the answers, and they're hiding those answers from you, no matter how much you beg for them to tell you. That would mean they don't care at all about your feelings, about your suffering.

I, and others with similar experiences, notice that sometimes the ordinary people around us, such as friends, family members, and co-workers, say and do things that make it seem as though they know about things we've been doing and thinking, privately, in our homes, in our minds. They might mention a very specific topic we've been thinking about but haven't said out loud, and it's so specific that they could not possibly have guessed it at random. And it happens again and again, so that if you thought it was random, it couldn't have been random thirty times in a row.

Whenever this happens, you start to believe that person must be spying on you. In the beginning, when these things started happening to me, I believed (like many other fellow sufferers have believed) that someone had installed a hidden camera in my house, and I had to find it and remove it. It turns out that actually, the situation is much worse - they are able to see through walls and watch you without hiding any cameras in your house.

When I learned about that, when I found out that this technology exists - and I don't know which particular technologies are being used to watch me, but I have read about a few things - I felt a lot less confused, a lot less 'crazy.' When you try to think logically, to figure out HOW some camera could have been in a particular location, such as an empty room with no objects, no nooks and crannies, no holes in the wall, nothing, it makes you go crazy trying to understand how somebody saw you doing or saying whatever you did there. It is actually a RELIEF (in some ways!) to discover that the 'cameras' aren't even inside your house, but that actually people are looking through your walls, from possibly a great distance away. Suddenly, all the impossible contradictions make sense. That explains how they saw you doing and saying so-and-so in a particular closed room with nothing in it. Of course, it's NOT a relief to know that you are this exposed inside your house and that you cannot hide from it. But you feel better when you can understand how things work.

The next thing you need to understand is that they are able to make people say things. They can put thoughts into someone's head and suggest that they do or say something - and they don't need to install any chips or implants in you to do it. They do that with ordinary people, friends and family and everyone you know, so that these people mention whatever specific 'secret' they want to harass you about. The people who say it, the people who actually come up to you and mention your specific secrets to you, are INNOCENT. Always assume that those people don't understand the significance of what they're saying to you. They will always have some rationale for why they wanted to say that to you - it makes sense to them somehow, and they believe it was their own idea.

I've read Eleanor White's web page (www.raven1.net), and she mentions 'street theater.' I think that 'street theater' might be the 'puppets' phenomenon that I'm describing. She talks about people on the street, strangers, or people you know, coming up to you and saying or doing something to harass you. From the way she describes it, it sounds like she thinks those people are actually gang members and that they know the significance of what they're doing to you. Like they know who you are and they're getting paid to harass and attack you. (Or forced to do it - she talks about the people in the gang who know that they or their loved ones will be killed, attacked, or harassed if they betray the gang or refuse to do what they're told.) I think instead that most of those incidents involve innocent people who have been manipulated to do things, and they have no idea what it's all about.

The 'most people are innocent puppets' interpretation is a vitally important part of my belief system. It serves a protective purpose. When this first began happening to me, I got scared that I was going to be forced to go out in the street and shoot a bunch of random strangers. I didn't want to do that. But if you believe that everyone around you is an evil liar playing sadistic games with you, it seems more likely that you wouldn't mind killing them. In the beginning, when the attacks were the most severe, when my situation was barely tolerable, I used to lie in bed every night interacting with voices and working out a set of protective beliefs to hold onto so that I could comfort myself in this terrible situation. I was comforted by Julian Simon's book, 'The Ultimate Resource,' for instance, which helped me feel like the world wasn't necessarily going to be destroyed because of electronic mind control. (His book has nothing to do with mind control, but he sees everything from a perspective that says 'It's not the end of the world.') And the belief that most people are innocent puppets was one of the protective beliefs that I developed to prevent myself from doing anything destructive. I was committed to surviving this, no matter what. I still am.

Scott Adams just recently wrote about how marriage means that someone is a witness to your life. This means that somebody can vouch for you, in a way, that somebody else knows what happened to you, your complicated story, no matter what it is, and they know the reasons why you do what you do. Something might be impossible to explain, but your spouse was there and they saw it happen, and don't need the explanation.

I don't like to talk about this, but it is true, my experiences with 'the voices' are not entirely negative. Sometimes they feel like friends and they keep me company. The reason I don't like to say that is because it might seem to encourage them or to imply that it's okay to do this to people, which it isn't. But one of the things that they do is they serve as the people who saw whatever happened to me - for instance, they were watching everything when I had the ephedra contamination incident and went to the hospital. I can't explain that ephedra contamination to anybody - it seems impossible to believe - but 'they' were there all along seeing what happened. (With the negative interpretation, I sometimes believe that some of 'them' were responsible for giving me the idea to try to grow ephedra in the first place, but it's not really that simple. The reasons why I tried to grow ephedra, I think I might have written about in my myspace blog.)

It is difficult to tolerate the constant presence of other people in your head when you don't always want them to be there. I call it Stockholm Syndrome - you learn to tolerate them, to endure them, to eventually feel like they're your friends even though you originally hated them. My REAL belief is that nobody should be putting any voices or personalities into your head at all, unless you somehow could participate voluntarily or have a choice about shutting them off when you didn't want to hear them anymore. But when you can't avoid them, when they are with you all day every day, you don't have enough energy to constantly fight an angry battle that never ends. You don't have enough energy to fight against every single misleading belief that they give you, every single suggestion that they give you, every action they urge you to take. So sometimes, you do what they tell you to do, feel what they tell you to feel, believe what they tell you to believe, because the constant struggle is exhausting.

It's especially difficult whenever they ALMOST AGREE with you. When you interact with voices whose personality is almost like your own, it feels like you're being forced to be slightly different from yourself, and it's like interference. You don't want to just do the OPPOSITE of everything they say, because actually, you agree with it, up to a point, with some minor differences.

I didn't read this whole book, I just skimmed it, but in John Stuart Mills' book 'On Liberty' (I think that's what it's called - I'd have to go hunt for it), he mentions this problem: is it 'morally virtuous' for an alcoholic to walk down a street full of bars, and resist the temptation over and over again to walk into the bar - is he being virtuous merely by being tempted and resisting these temptations over and over again? Is that productive somehow? Is that all there is to being virtuous? Merely being tempted and then resisting temptation, over and over again all day long, is exhausting and wasteful of your energy. Your mind could be focused on more useful things. You would have been thinking about some entirely different subject. You would have been using your energy for something which could have been virtuous in a different way. It could be more virtuous to build an orphanage or donate money to the poor, but instead, you were walking down the street being virtuous by resisting the urge to go into all the bars. He explains that there is a big focus on merely resisting temptations as a way to be morally virtuous.

This is like what I experience. What other things would I have done or been thinking about, what would I have experienced, felt, said, what would I have noticed or observed, if I had not been talking to the voices in my head all day long? What if I didn't have to use my energy deciding whether to agree or disagree with them all the time? The subject matter, the content of my thoughts and actions, would have been entirely different.

Actually, that's one benefit of the communities that shield their members from certain temptations, like the Amish community. You're not even tempted to go watch television, because there isn't even a TV in your house at all. You don't have to figure out how to resist that temptation. You don't have to think about how many hours a day would be an okay amount of TV, or which shows are psychologically healthier for you, or how to argue against negative messages and beliefs in the shows and advertisements. Your energy is spared for other activities.

Peace lets people be productive. In countries or cities where you can't walk down the street without being shot at, you can't spare the energy to create new ideas and plans, or enjoy your relationships with people. You always have to worry about how you are going to protect yourself.

(This is the moment when I realize I've been writing for a long time, and the blog is getting too long for people to read! I wrote a list of subjects I wanted to talk about and I have barely even begun covering them.)

I've been reading about community - about what it is and what purposes it serves. I've hardly begun to write all my thoughts about that subject. I know that I'm not happy with the particular community that I live in - that I feel like most of the people around me don't understand what my life is like, don't know how to help me, or are actively working against my values and beliefs and my needs. This is how you feel when you tried to tell people that something bad was happening to you, and the whole community has a taboo on that subject, so that no one is allowed to talk about it, believe it, or do anything about it. Most of the people around me still seem to believe that all talk of electronic mind control and nonlethal weapon attacks is all a delusion. I 'fell through the cracks' in that community and became isolated when nobody was able to help me or talk about the voices and the attacks, without asking me 'Are you taking your medication?'

This situation, of being isolated and separated from a sense of community, from friends and from everyone, is involved with one aspect of my particular 'delusion.' I was originally writing about the Truman Show Delusion. That article also mentioned delusions involving people on the internet - I have that phenomenon also, because 'the hackers' were central to the experiences I had from the very beginning.

There is a new belief I have now: the belief that perhaps phone calls, email messages, and even my blogs, might be redirected or censored, so that my target audience, or my friends, or whoever, cannot read my words or communicate with me at all. This belief is reinforced the more that I read about how the government and the military are now more and more active in manipulating cyberspace for their purposes, for disinformation, for total control of the computer systems. I don't know whether, for instance, my blog might not be visible to everyone, or whether maybe certain words get changed, or some things are hidden from particular people, and if they try to send me emails, their emails get lost and never reach me. Eleanor White also said this. She cautioned that if you wrote her an email, it might not ever reach her (something to that effect).

So if that's true, please don't take it personally or think I'm ignoring you. That is something which 'the voices' have been asking me about just recently. I have, indeed, experienced communication problems. I have no way to know what's true, or how to interpret things. I've decided to think that people have a reason for whatever they do.

Many years ago, for some reason, I was thinking about the concept of 'pure, absolute evil.' I used to wonder whether I myself was 'evil.' I'm sure that this had something to do with philosophical questions from Objectivism. Nathaniel Branden explained that Ayn Rand called people 'evil' too often and too readily.

I have a personal experience with being seen as evil: my old friend Rachael got married, withdrew from all contact with friends and family, and began interpreting everything I said and did as something with questionable, suspicious motives behind it. I'm sure all the rest of her family experienced the same thing. The last time I managed to talk to her on the phone, she kept asking me why I called her, and when I explained that I just wanted to find out how her life was going and just keep in contact with her somehow, she interpreted a 'hidden evil motive' behind it all - it could not possibly be just a mundane, human desire to stay connected with my old best friend who was central to my life for over a decade - and she refused to communicate and she wanted to avoid starting the friendship with me again. In a way, I can understand that: she wanted to protect her belief system from conflicts with my belief system. But being on the receiving end of that rejection, I knew exactly how it felt to have somebody interpret your every action as something suspicious and evil.

('No longer evil,' they whispered just now.)

I've been in abusive relationships where I did and said crazy things in order to survive, when I could not know what to believe, what to trust, what was reality. I would have been seen as evil during those times.

The concept of absolute evil never worked out. No matter how I thought about it, it always seemed as though the person had some reason for what they did. I learned a little bit about psychology and a little bit about illnesses that can cause people to do terrible things. The brain is a physical organ like every other part of the body, so it's able to have mechanical malfunctions just like everything else. I think I mentioned this somewhere else, but a good example is the Hatfields and McCoys feud. It turns out that there is some genetic disorder that gave one of the McCoys (I think) a tumor on his adrenal glands, so that every time he got the slightest bit angry or afraid, he would overreact in some horrible way, like grabbing a gun and going out to shoot somebody. Supposedly this genetic disorder still runs in the McCoy family today (from the article that I read which I will never find). Anyway it's that kind of thing that makes me think there is no such thing as absolute evil, but instead, that everybody has some combination of physical, psychological, and environmental circumstances that cause them to do what they do.

It seems like what they call a 'flat character' in a story, if you describe someone as being absolutely evil, and never explain why they did what they did. Flat characters seem fake and unbelievable; they have no motives, and they never change, make progress, develop their characters, or learn anything. In fact, I think I was trying to write a story with an 'evil' character in it, at the time when I was wondering about the concept of pure evil. I did actually write fiction stories a long time ago, but they are all unfinished. I didn't know how to solve the problems that the characters were experiencing. They just kept wandering deeper and deeper into disasters. The stories in that way mirrored my own life in adolescence when I was 'crazy.'

This is one of the last topics I jotted down and it's not very connected with the other topics. I was thinking the other day about how my particular version of atheism is intended to protect me against destructive actions and beliefs. A voice was commenting to me that it seemed awful to imagine that a God would refuse to tell you the true nature of reality, that you were living in some kind of 'Matrix,' a system surrounding you and giving you an illusion of a world (again, that was mentioned in the article about the Truman Show Delusion), and that the only way you could understand the world, or see it from outside the Matrix, was to physically die - it seemed unthinkably cruel and sadistic that the God would put you in that position. You couldn't know whether to trust God until after you were dead, and only if you were lucky enough to reawaken, discover that you were now still existing in some kind of afterlife, and could say, 'God was telling the truth all along - I understand, I see it all clearly now.' I was thinking of the hijackers who flew the planes into the Twin Towers. They believed that they were going to reawaken in an afterlife where they would be rewarded as heroes. My belief system is intended to protect me against doing anything like that. You could waste your life prematurely, get killed and never do any good by it, and instead do something terribly destructive, and then never actually go to heaven afterwards. I just don't feel that I can trust any concepts of God or the afterlife that I have ever seen - I can't trust those ideas enough to feel that I'm going to be safe if I get myself killed.

My approach to death is more like existentialism: death is something that happens, and it's cold, and sad, and painful, and scary, and this is something that's an ordinary part of life, something we have to accept and get used to, and you simply can never really get used to it or lose your fear of it (unless you're on mind-altering drugs).

But I like the idea that if I die, the rest of the world will go on without me, and I like to imagine that the world is going in a direction I would be happy about, or that other like-minded people exist out in the world, and they will continue to do the things that I would have been doing if I had still been alive.

On a happy topic, to avoid ending my blog on the subject of death, I will mention that I'll soon be uploading photos to flickr. They are mostly practice pictures: a lot of flowers, bees, trees, skies, and so on, as I'm learning how to operate the camera and how to set up the composition of the image, as in, where to place objects so that they are in certain positions relative to each other and the sides of the photo. (I only know one thing about composition, which I was taught years ago in high school: the rule of thirds. I also know that I like having some kind of object close to me in the foreground if I am taking pictures of a faraway object, so that it feels like you're 'in' the picture when you look at it - for instance, you might be looking through the leaves of a tree or some flowers to see the pond in the background.) I'm working on technical things like operating the focus, the colors, the number of megapixels, and finding out what all the various buttons and menus are for. (I've learned that my skin color looks horrible when I take a picture of myself with the flash - I didn't know how to turn off the flash at first, but now I know how.) I'm learning how to change the settings on the camera so that it does what I want it to do. So most of the pictures are not all that interesting, but in a way, they're happy pictures. I might work on that project a little bit tomorrow.