Here are the two choices given us by the system: Either believe the lie, invest in the illusion, or pretend to do so and we will give you enough scraps from the table that you can survive in the world and trick yourself into believing that being a mechanistic part in the machine, a sheep, a parrot, or some hybridization of the three is the path to happiness, while in reality such a life is one of the living dead, the sleepwalkers, sedated and numbed from anything true. And when you so start to wake up to the truth, we have plenty of sedative methods to put you back to a peaceful sleep: television, medications, legal forms of intoxication, objects of affection and treasures of various forms. Or, you could reject the lie, recognize the true and the real, and suffer for it. You will struggle just to stay alive, just to keep your sanity in a world of the insane. We have lots of ways of dealing with you, but best of all: you simply won't fit in, you won't function as a working part in the machine. And then you won't have the resources to survive persistently. Fall outside of the mediocrity, the expected, and we have lots of labels lather you with and treatments to squeeze you, square peg, into the round hole of conformity... I gave the extreme categories on purpose; but these represent the two sides of the spectrum. And there used to be choices for those who didn't fit into the socio-cultural average. The path of the artist or musician, the path of the philosopher, the writer. There used to be places for such as these to go and use their gifts productively. But now, even these creative paths have been digested and enveloped by the monster of commerciality. Some of those were and are 'ill' in some way: they have suffered originating traumas which lead to deficits and incapacities of character. But an overwhelming number of these exceptionals recently and presently, more and more, are being pressed into the pathological category: whether someone is below the norm due to some form of illness or above the norm due to advancement or overdevelopment in some category is a distinction that has deteriorated almost to oblivion. We live in a world that medicates and pathologizes so many of the exception who need to be nutured and supported, even if in a different way than those who fall more comfortably into the norm, but not medicated, not rejected. And that is the problem: we live in a society whose education system is run on an implicit policy of laziness: once a child falls out of the norm and exhibits behavior that is seen as 'aberrant' psychopathology and medication are the first options that arise in consciousness. Not because its in the best interest of the child, but because its easiest, most convenient, for the instructors, and the society in which the child lives. Many school districts have as many as 50% of their children on Ritalin or some form of psychotropic medication. That is the moral equivalent of a holocaust as far as I am concerned. Sure, they aren't being tortured or killed, but such medications irrevocably alters the brain chemistry and physiology of a person, especially a child whose brain is still in the formative stages. Such drugs need to be handled with extreme care and dispensed as a last resort, but instead they are given out like candy, as a first resort. The law in any rational system of medicine should be the least invasive methods necessary for healing to occur. Our system operates in direct violation of this principle. But of course, healing isn't the primary goal. The primary goals are profit for the corporate entities and suppression of those that are off-center from the norm. It is the exceptional, those that operate in some way outside of the present paradigm or regime or norm that pull us toward a higher level of consciousness as a society. During the Rennasaince, it was the exceptional who initiated the scientific revolution which gave birth to a new age of thought and rationality in understanding. Initially, they were persecuted, had their work destroyed, even tortured and killed, by the prevailing regime of mythological-imperial religionists. The reason for this wasn't that they were wrong, but their work was dangerous. But it was only dangerous to those that were profiting to power so much from the reigning regime at the time. The truth is threatening. But only to those that prefer to profit through a lie than to live in reverence toward the ever-higher and wider truth. We live in a world where we place the highest value on that which possesses the least intrinsic value, money and material things. We treasure technologies of convenience when it is those very technologies that permit the continual addition of burdens to our lives to the point where we live as if ever-wearing a leaden cloak. We elevate celebrity and wealth and those who have achieved it to places of worship and then we indulge in being entertained watching them when they inevitably fall, for no person was meant to endure worship, and we justify such sickness by claiming that 'it comes with the territory of being a celebrity.' We value appearances over Quality or 'substance' or meaning. We operate through the methodologies of deception, both of self and other, narcissism, and sweeping things under the rug rather than confronting them. Self-awareness is barren and forbidden in society and when the wealth of lies and illusions and filth becomes so abundant that it pours out from the seams and it breaks us or our lives down, we sit and wonder what happened. Its time to wake up, and stay awake.