To weaponize a people

To weaponize a people, you must first carve them hollow.

This eon has promised immortality in exchange for submission, that happiness is but a grasp away if you do the right thing and live the right way.

So you design them in moulds and make them in factories, and draw a line around them and clip their wings if they should stray.

And when your machinations falter, you subtly change the inflection. You juxtapose the dignity of the individual with the impulses of the aggregation, and you supplant affliction with volition.

Success, you tell them, is one’s triumph over their circumstance. This is the age of Heroes, of “Grand, Godly and Godlike” men, in whose mighty shadow even our failures are hallowed, so long as we follow.

From the seeds of anxiety reaps loneliness, from loneliness, isolation.

Now there is a pit their guts, as the future that is promised turns to ashes and solid ground to prison.

Now the embers of frustration burn within them.

Now you have primed them to be pitted against their fellow men, and to a social institution.

Now you tell them, something wicked this way comes. After all it is always easy to blame the status quo, women, enemies faraway, immigration.

And it’s away easy to close your eyes and capitulate to emotions.

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the ones with conviction, but a people who’s lost distinction between truth and falsehoods, fact and fiction.