T.H.E.Y. do their best to control the narrative, however truth is leaking out.
You can't hide lies for too long when everyone is talking to each other.

It is recently that we have people pulling apart the stories being told to us.
Crisis actors being spotted and called out.

Sun Tzu says, know thyself and know thy enemy.
The problem is we do not know the enemy.

As an example, our enemy are wizards of black magic.
So, we have the age old meme of white battling black.
But in today's day and age, T.H.E.Y. have convinced everyone that magic doesn't exist.
Thus we have the black wizards unopposed for the most part.
And a society that has no defense against them.

However, winning against evil is super easy.
Just ignore them.

The problem is we have generations of indoctrination that keep us from know which way is up.
We do not know which way is up, which way is towards good.
In fact, many people argue that there is no evil.
We allow "slut walks", when collectively, we should puke on the participants and then turn our backs on them.

We live in cramped cities with supermarkets being our only, tenuous, connection to food. And we think that is normal.

Anyway, knowing thyself is really the only rabbit hole you need to go down... but that usually includes journeys into why you believe what you believe, and that leads to conspiracy theories.