Apart from our natural attachment
to the untroubled stress-free pastures
of a happily blinkered existence
coupled with our instinctive resistance
to take in views that would only induce
the disquiet of cognitive dissonance
and omitting for the moment
our verging-on-phobic reluctance to notice
our mostly cloaked inborn capacity
for staggering evil and casual depravity
atop the list of reasons for refusing the red
pill is the following cluster of fears:
a keenly repressed dread
of discovering we’ve been suckered for years
decades a lifetime of fealty to narratives
armies of establishment liars
spend their lives plying as true;
the fear of losing
our soothing carefully cultured worldview
our cherished illusions our treasured myths
should our sanctified paradigms
suffer the catastrophic shocks
of seismic psychic shifts;
the fear of losing faith in our beliefs
belief in authority trust in our chiefs
and the approval pride and prestige
we derive from our tribe;
of losing the luxury of blindly relying
on the autopilot of hive-mind bias
and the facile validation it implicitly provides;
of losing the ability to guiltlessly choose
authorized lies over unsanctioned truths;
to revel in less-than-ethical careers; fear
of losing the herd-conferred comfort
of groupthink-bolstered safety in numbers;
of being torn from the norm
should our so-far-assuasively-dormant
intellectual curiosity and honesty
be shaken awake and accorded
the sudden unimpeded freedom
to rove wherever the facts may lead
regardless of what fellow humans
and our feckless debased institutions
expect us to meekly believe;
the fear of not fitting in of standing out
by simple dint
of nothing more glaring than daring to doubt;
of succumbing to the stunning confusion
that sure-as-the-turning-of-tides would ensue
from learning the disturbing unsavoury truth;
a visceral fear of being forced to accept
that in fact we’ve been thoroughly duped;
of finding ourselves compelled
to acknowledge the folly of having embraced
misplaced loyalties and specious assumptions;
the primal fear of being stripped
of so much we identify with and to which
our senses of self self-worth and purpose
are inextricably linked;
of our egos getting crushed
the grisly instant we end up having
to admit we’ve been radically wrong
about so bloody much
we’ve been oh-so-learnedly babbling.
Just as we can always lead horses to water
but can’t make them drink
we can lead people to sources of knowledge
but we can’t make them see or listen or read
and we certainly can’t make them think.