The Journey of a Million Deaths to the Truth

It is worth telling you, dear reader, what is going on. You, consuming these words. You, breathing, living, growing, failing, moving through life, now, this very moment, with death coming for you, for you and everyone you’ve ever loved, hated, bumped into, locked eyes with, competed against, admired. You are alive in this moment with a feeling that things have gone terribly wrong, like there’s something awful, evil, stirring somewhere in the universe, plotting, scheming, at your heels, won’t go away, won’t leave the good times alone.

That somewhere in the universe is nowhere but in your soul. In your mind. You know you must do something but there is no plan. Your parents will not save you. Your society will not save you. They are all struggling, anxious, fearful, barreling towards death and you – you who read these words and feel something major coming, greatness, rage, compassion, a fuck you to death, and you don’t know what to do with that feeling because that feeling is more powerful than anything you’ve ever seen. But it is real nonetheless. It creates memories that last for thousands of years. Jesus. Muhammad. Moses. Genghis Khan. Napoleon. Restless souls who saw the world, saw people lose their minds in the face of this force inside of them. Yet they embraced it. They said fuck you to death and looked upon their fellow man for who they are – afraid, running around like headless chickens, making stupid decision after stupid decision, living lives other than their own, doing what they can to preserve their image, running around obsessing over what others think of them instead of following their conscience, the one and only thing that has the plans, the answers, the path. What else would you place your faith in? But you haven’t and that’s when things go wrong.

Billions of people march to their deaths, slowly, happily, blindly, full of anxiety, low on self-worth, constantly measuring themselves against a phantom, against the image of a person that does not exist, ruthlessly judging themselves, and scarcely giving themselves credit for who they are. You, my dear reader, are alive and that’s good enough. It’s great, in fact. You have been one of the lucky ones, the chosen ones to open your eyes and behold a world that is endlessly magnificent. Instead you see a different world, where opportunity is limited. Growth is limited. Resources are limited. You are afraid. Afraid of what — you do not know. The fear haunts you all the same. Afraid of betrayal. Afraid that other people might judge you. Afraid that you’ll lose everything if you be who you are.

You are trapped. Trapped in a story that is not yours. Not really. You have been pushed to do things that were not meant for you. They were pushed onto you by others – your parents, people who want to sell you something you don’t need or even want, you just want it because others have it and you think you need it to be cool, to be liked, to be accepted and it never works because it was never you to begin with. You are living a lie. This is what it means to be lost.

You also have a sense that to find the truth the journey will be brutal. That you will die a thousand deaths before you reach clarity. There are a thousand layers, a million layers, of story and fear pulsing through your mind that tell you who you are. You believe that they are you and to let go of those things – your religion, your history, your profession, your status – is to die, slowly, in agony. To suffer. The truth does not care. It invites you on this journey. It’s the best thing for you. We all know it. We all want it. To live in truth. But we don’t so as to avoid the pain of losing all that we’ve built for ourselves when in reality it isn’t working for you. You do whatever you can to keep up the lie. You surround yourself with people who keep up the lie. And you hate the people who shatter your illusions because you understand what they’re doing. They are pushing you off a cliff and you’re not ready to fall into truth. You hate them. You love them. You just want them to go away, but when they do go away, then you understand how lost you are. Because who is left but those who view you as nothing but cattle to be controlled by your fear.

These men want control, and that is because they are the most afraid. They look out and see a world full of you, the fearful. You cannot trust the fearful. Their judgement isn’t sound. Headless chickens, right? Those who fear and are envious work to sabotage and do not speak the truth. They are living a lie, right? How can you trust them? You cannot. You can only trust their fear and that is what you must reinforce. So you must make them afraid. Very afraid. You show them a little bit of kindness and if you do not reciprocate, then, well, it’s not very pleasant for you.

This is a dictator. He does not care about your hopes and your dreams. He does not care about you. He does not want you to live your life. He wants to you live a lie. His lie. And in his lie he is the most special person in the world and you are meat at his service, his pleasure. Your only purpose is to obey — an impossible standard. You are, after all, at war with yourself. You cannot control yourself. Your soul shouts loudly every day to speak the truth and often times you lash out, at little children, at your friends, at your lover, at your family because you’ve tortured the truth so much and it is having its revenge on you. You are so arrogant that you believe you can contain what stirs inside of you. No dictator stands a chance. That is why he must have you distracted before he has you killed.

Ordinary men sell you a story about the evils of capitalists, Jews, Indians, Arabs, Muslims, Catholics, and Protestants to keep you busy, infatuated, infuriated and otherwise blind to the truth, which is that those dictators have all the money and power, gotten through the use of force, coercion and fear, driven by a bottomless cynicism about you because this is the view they have of themselves. They are obsessed with control and power because they are afraid every moment of their lives. Afraid that one day, you will wake up and see the terrible mess they’ve made of things, dragging millions of people into war, oppression and pain so that they won’t have to go through the painful journey of a million deaths to the truth.

The dictators study you. They test you and notice that you back down. You haven’t shown up to the fight properly prepared. You are living a lie and therefore are easy to knock down. To intimidate. You are afraid to lose your money, your status, your image, and they use it against you. You are corrupt and they make you even more so.

It’s subtle. The corruption is your resistance to your true self. Your resistance to chaos. We build societies and markets and products and hierarchies to blind ourselves from our truth, and the dictators know this about you. You’re in a box, fighting to keep your box, your cage, your limits, because what’s outside is too scary. Chaos. It only seems that way until you step inside of it. That’s for another day, the first day of the rest of your life.

Meanwhile the dictator grabs a hold of you. He’s in your living room. In your schools. In your buildings. Watching you. Making you feel like a traitor because you are. Nothing else is possible. His standards are impossible.

Thankfully you’re one of the really lucky ones. You live in a free society. Where the rules are set up to avoid these kinds of dictatorships. No man can be trusted with unlimited power. It’s too tempting. Parents know this. Their kids are unruly and disrespectful and pushing limits and boundaries that you run out of fucking patience sometimes and would prefer they stop behaving like pricks today because you are living a lie and are either trying not to do so for the rest of your life or you’re fooling yourself every day and you know it. There’s chaos in your mind and you just want your kids to behave, goddamn it, and the hell with all your noble virtues, these innocent bastards are going to feel the full force of your power – you pay for them, you care for them and they would be helpless without you and you know it, and they know it. Parents can be tyrants, and that is not a nice thing.

But at least they love their children. Dictators do not. They hate you. They have nothing but contempt for you, and are quick to let you know every time you disappoint them, which is always. There’s never enough power you see, because people don’t just listen. You are a mess. A fearful mess. You won’t listen to reason. You will listen to whatever keeps you safe from the journey of a million deaths.

The dictators knows this about you. He seduces you with material comfort. Status symbols. A nice salary. A nice title. Awards. He uses your image against you. He gives you those things so that you do his bidding. He understands the power of incentives and yours are severely fucked. A politician will accept millions from a dictator to then pretend to do good. A middle-aged man will accept a six-figure salary to manipulate millions of people on behalf of some corporation. A regulator will approve an unnecessary drug to please a boss who is paid millions by pharma companies. You care more about your image than you do about doing the right thing. It’s not that you don’t care about the right thing. It’s that you care more about what other people think of you. “Perception is reality,” is what people say. No. Reality is reality.

The amusing part is that none of them know what they’re talking about. Pumping your head with imaginary fears and irrational bullshit so that you don’t go on the journey of a million deaths to the truth. Because if you do it, it means they can do it too. And if you do it, it means they should do it too. And if they should do it, it means they must ask themselves why they do not. This is the start of the journey of a million deaths to the truth.

The dictator knows you won’t do it. Yes, you live in a free society. The dictator does not care. He is coming for you. This is why millions of people feel something is very wrong with the world at this moment. Endless wealth, technological marvels, AI, the internet, smart phones, airplanes, hardly any manual labor, the decline of wars and senseless violence, billions lifted out of poverty in record time and yet everything feels like it’s coming apart. The universities, the media, the business world, the tech world, all threatened by what the dictator knows about you. That you can be bought because you don’t trust yourself to survive the journey of a million deaths to the truth, let alone come out stronger than ever. It’s such a strong illusion that it stays with you for your whole life and you march to your grave kicking yourself, never knowing what you knew deep down to be true. That the journey of a million deaths is the best thing you can do because it leads you the truth and there’s nothing stronger, there’s nothing more stable, there’s nothing more powerful than the truth. It’s yours for the taking, now and forever. You refuse the gift you already possess.

The dictator’s need to control knows no bounds. Everyone is a threat, and therefore the whole world must be conquered. Hitler wanted to control the world and build a 1,000 year empire on top of it so that no one would find out that he was a liar and a failure and a fraud. A myth that the German people were desperate for because they had been so humiliated. They had bled and fought and were let down because they fought for stupid causes and the egos of small men, and they hadn’t the strength to redeem themselves until someone showed up who said what they felt – anger, shame, rage – and they loved it.

He spoke magic words about what they were feeling. People misunderstand history when they blame Hitler for the atrocities of World War II. It was a twisted dance between the German people and Hitler, where he spoke, they cheered him on, and his pronouncements kept getting crazier, and the ovations louder, until they had encouraged the worst parts of one another that the Nazis robbed, assaulted and murdered Jews without the express order from Hitler, and Hitler invaded countries and had millions killed without the express consent of the people. No one challenged this because the system had its own logic. Everyone was feeding off one another.

Hitler loved that they loved it because finally, someone, many people in fact, recognized his genius. He promised people a utopia based on a lie, which was that he was divinely competent. “Perception was reality.” Actually, he wanted to be an artist but his drawing was mediocre and he did not put in the proper effort to get into art school. He considered architecture, but again, he was lazy. He believed geniuses are born. They are not. Ordinary people put in extraordinary effort and become them. His genius was rage, and his timing was perfect.

For a while, anyway. Hitler saw how weak the men at the top were, until one came along, a man of towering strength, who said fuck you to death and stood tall against this maniac. Churchill knew that Hitler could not be trusted. He had proven that time and again in the late 1930s. He knew the lengths such a man would go to to hide the truth of his fraudulence. The deaths of millions would never be enough. The whole world had to recognize his genius for rage or they would die. It was that simple. He was the Fuhrer and all that mattered was his lie.

The same madness lives in the halls of power in Moscow. In Beijing. In Tehran. In Doha. In Ankara. In Pyongyang. In Ramallah. In Gaza. In Beirut. In Kabul. You just don’t see it because the timing is not right. But the madness is plotting. What you feel, the order of the world turning to chaos, the strands of your sanity pulling, fraying — this is a plan. The dictator knows his army is not strong enough to fight an army that is united under something far bigger than one man. A man is imperfect. God, the universe, life itself is eternal and loving. It is not power that unites but love, and the dictator wants all of that for himself and more. It is never enough. He must destroy that before he attacks. He must destroy the West, America, Israel, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, everything that gives meaning and structure to billions of souls. He is not man enough to fight it head on because he knows he will lose. But if he succeeds to turn everyone into a headless chicken, or I should say, keep all of us in that state, then we will do the job for him, and a 1,000 years may indeed go by before someone finally finds the courage to say enough is enough and I don’t care what the price is, you can kill me and my family and my friends and they can all get mad at me, and they can all hate me, but all that anger will be misplaced because I am not the oppressor, I am not to blame, I am the only one with the balls to stand up to this monstrosity that uses your fear against you, and yes, it will kill me and it may seem pointless to you all, until one day you will see what I’ve done for you and you will know that the journey of a million deaths to the truth is the best thing that you can do with your time.