I try to draw my personal philosophy from many sources and allow it to grow and change over time. One of my favorite philosophy discussions or lectures is from Stefan Molyneux in which there is discussion of the nature of the cage and I've probably read/heard it a hundred times or so at this point, but I always find it fascinating nonetheless. If you are unfamiliar with this lecture, I encourage you to check it out here. So today I'll share my thoughts and takeaways from this particular lecture and I welcome discussion about it below.
Molyneux describes the evolution of human society as one that was basically manipulated to operate based on fear and scarcity mindset. The general gist is that we've been born into a cage that is put into place by society and while I find his explanation of how this happened as relevant and very eye opening, personally I don't think the why or how matters as much as the idea of what to do about it. If we have been born into a system fundamentally designed to make us lose so that others can win, recognizing fear based tactics for control and manipulation is, in my opinion, the best way to escape the cage.
The biggest problem I've seen with learning to recognize these behaviors is realizing how we actually perpetuate the cycles. Barring extreme examples, most of us are born and raised into the system by people that are already complacent to it. Sell your life away for money so that you can have things and some illusion of control. The fear is based on the inherent and implied violence that underlies our very inclusion inside of this system and the fear of exclusion that we put on each other. You should pay taxes because everyone else does, it's not fair for you not to, if you don't then Big Brother will come for you, if you aren't doing your share then you expect me to pay for you, but what if all of these ideas are really just forms of thought control to keep you operating within the guidelines of the system?
To make matters worse, at some point many of us adopt these beliefs and ideologies as our own. Pressure from society and our peers to comply with the system and compete with each other in a never ending cycle of one-ups-manship, all the while we can't see that we're actually doing this for beliefs that were never our own. It's so ingrained that people get violently offended and it take it as a personal insult when you reject the system that they use to keep their own lives in check. That illusion of control while really being controlled is an addiction that we were born into and have to learn how to break free from for ourselves if we so choose.
If you have ever seen the movie Inception, there is a scene where one of the characters describes an idea as the most insidious virus that you can inflict on someone. Once that seed is planted in someone's head, there is no escaping it, because if we recognize it as truth and accept it, we believe it to be so. Our own beliefs and thoughts create the reality that we exist in and only we can break down our own thoughts and beliefs to truly be free. If we think about all of the times we've let others put an idea into our head and adopted it as our own, it starts to become clear what the cage actually is made out of, and it's not some impervious metal, there is no ball and chain, you aren't hardwired to it, the cage is your own mind.
It's a scary concept to actually accept that statement at face value. We are born and grow into a cage that is actually our own mind and the only person that can ever let us out of that cage is ourselves. We can't wait for someone to walk around with a key and let us all free, there is no Neo coming to unplug anyone from the Matrix, there is only self and self must free itself. The only way to do that is to question our own beliefs and thoughts and be free if we want to be free. Some people prefer cages and some people prefer illusions of controlling other people in cages, but some of us do prefer to be free and it is possible. Whichever role we choose to play, from my perspective, seems to always be a self fulfilling prophecy. Namaste.