Dear Fellow Inmates,

I have spent much of my life in a waking trance, completely oblivious to the structure of the world around me and then, over a very short period of time, I became aware that things might not be as I thought they were.
I was introduced to the concept of naivé realism, essentially the ontology of children, 'the world is as I see it, my senses are a perfect sensory reconstruction of the actual concrete environment around me'. This is patently absurd, for a start our senses are limited, we cannot, for example, see radio waves or hear sounds outside of a very narrow wave band. Likewise we all have some experience of optical illusions, acoustic abnormalities and drug or alcohol related changes in perception and, as such, we are all aware that we cannot always trust the evidence of our senses.
It follows from this, therefore, that the information that we gather from our real environment; information that is interpreted by unreliable senses and mediated by our less than perfect brains, presents us with a holographic representation of the reality that exists around us rather than an actual concrete experience of that reality.
In this sense we are contained within a virtual reality construct of a theoretical real world, a construct bounded by perception, which, in turn, is shaped and modelled by experience, peer pressure, advertising and many other causes that I shall attempt to address in the fullness of time. What matters, for the moment, is to explain the idea of the reality tunnel.
Each person inhabits, or, perhaps, in some sense is a reality tunnel, a self contained reality model shaped by the perceptions, views and neurosomantic model of the subject. Clearly in this outlook all experiential information is subjective and, by extension, human interactions, at least human ontological, existential, and philosophical discourse, function by means of a series of social, semantic and symbolic transactions in which the persons concerned attempt to define some form of consensus agreement about the reality that they inhabit. Within this model we can, I hope, accept that most cultural reference points, political systems, religions and opinions are essential short-hand for certain pre-arranged existential, perceptual and ethical constants that have been co-opted into the reality tunnel in question.
Obviously, at this point, a serious question arises:


Are we free to choose our reality models?


From the very earliest days of human history the great majority of humanity have toiled and slaved to ensure the wealth, comfort and luxury of a secretive ruling elite. Whatever the system of social organisation the outcome has always been the same. Whether one chooses to look at feudalism, capitalism, fascism, communism, theocracies or communes, the same is true, the majority work to benefit the elite. That elite may call themselves kings, barons, MPs, party officials, fuhrers, sturbanfuhrers, CEOs, shaman, healers, but the situation is identical, they comprise the ruling elite.
In this sense things are the same as they have ever been. We are owned by a small elite group of rulers, most of whom hold some sort of hereditary grip on wealth and power. It is these people who, with their complete control of the mainstream media and centuries of successful social engineering in place, are able to utilise the human race as a vast, ethnically compartmentalised slave-labour force by convincing them that they are free.
"But we are free!", I hear you bleat.
Allow me to relate to you a short anecdote concerning a friend of mine who decided to follow his dream.
My friend, who, for the point of anonimity, we shall call 'Dave', won the lottery. It was a reasonable jackpot and he had to split it with several other people who had the same numbers but, once the money was his, he realised that he had enough money to buy a little cottage in the country and pursue his dream of self-sufficiency.
He found a small cottage in the west country and proceeded to renovate the house. He also bought solar panels, solar heating, wind turbines, even a water wheel to put in the stream he had on his land, he was a man going to meet his dream and I wished him on his way with much smiling and back-slapping amongst those present.
It was six months until I saw the pseudonymous Dave again and on this occasion he was a different man, a broken man. It seems he had spent six months fighting the local planning committee over any and all alterations he wanted to make on the house. Solar panels, re-opening the well, establishing anything that would be considered a move towards self-sufficiency and away from the loathsome "norm". In the end he wasn't able to do a thing with the place and ended up selling it so that he could buy a Dutch Barge. A generally reliable guage of the level of coercion in a society is the degree of difficulty that you encounter when attempting to remove yourself from participation in the said society.
In contemporary western society we are free to rebel along very strictly sanctioned lines. For example, it is perfectly acceptable for posturing, ineffectual, middle-class teenage rebellion, but when, like punk, that trend escapes the middle class art students and is adopted by genuinely angry working-class youth it becomes much more of a threat and has to be dealt with.
It is in dealing with dissent and preventing the slaves from realising the absurd horror of their situations that the ruling elite utilise the centuries of social engineering that have put in place by their forebears. The Protestant Work Ethic; the notion of noble toil and the honesty of suffering, are obvious social control mechanisms, as is religion and it's modern replacement consumerism. Selective reporting and effective paradigm management with the media along with the ever present fear of observation, from an ever-growing army of CCTV cameras, or physical punishment from Police and security forces are a most effective way of controlling the population.
The most effective means for control is each other. With social manipulation as deeply entrenched as that at work in our society the sheer of force of peer pressure becomes an enormous social adhesive. We can certainly see the way that ridicule is used to attack dissidents but we must also consider not just the political and sociological effect of such intense conformity and peer-pressure but also the perceptual effect of living in a society that uses intimidation and coercion to engineer a homogenous and skewed perception of the world around us.
We have all been enslaved. We spend our days toiling for our masters, so that we might buy food and pay rent or mortgages. Are we to believe that humans, distinct among all species on this planet, regard food, shelter and warmth as luxury items that must be earned, rather than essential components for our lives. Thus we are made to work for our basic human needs to be filled and then forced to work even more to buy scores of baubles and status defining totems, our free time, our very notion of being free, has been taken from us over generations of slavery. And we imagine that because we are paid money we are free and somehow so very different to the unpaid slaves taken from Africa and Ireland.
We are at the mercy of a reality which has been stage-managed for centuries to create the most efficient slave-labour force and the most efficient way of doing this is to construct a system of finance which provides both a means of social control and an effective perceptual barrier between the slaves and the reality of their day to day lives.
I have declared these elite rulers, the society that they have built, their whole absurd game of manipulation and deceit, my enemy and I will stop at nothing to defend my autonomy.

The Resistance begins.

Prisoner23