UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship

by M.J. DeMarco

If you don’t know, let me break it to you: Slavery still exists. Except today’s contemporary slavery is called the SCRIPT—an implied social contract whereas a gilded cage is exchanged for voluntary indebtedness and lifelong toil, a price sacrificed by a non-redeemable fifty-years of Monday through Friday, an invisible servitude in which freedom is only promised by the arrival of life’s fading twilight.

THE DISSONANCE… IS SOMETHING WRONG?

How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30am by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? ~ Charles Bukowski, Author

Two miles and twenty minutes less from my life, I wonder, Is a sheep who drives a Mercedes to the slaughterhouse still a sheep?

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone. ~ Thomas Carlyle, Philosopher

Other whispers are weekly appointments with anguish: the arrival of Sunday night and its awaiting Monday feels like hide-and-seek with the grim reaper. Or perhaps the whisper is contempt salted with guilt: you hate your job, your boss, and your company, but damn, that paycheck is instant amnesia.

Every something tormenting your daily humdrum hints of a great deception. Clues to a ruse. An imminent awareness that only needs its confession: You’re living, but you aren’t alive. Your heart beats, but there is no pulse. Your mind is poisoned, but the toxicology is clean. Your soul has been stolen, but there are no thieves. Suspicion has swelled while the incongruity gnaws.

Your soul will resonate its desires and discontent when faced with quiet or minimal distraction; for example sleeping, showering, or during a massage. How are you responding to your soul’s voice? Is it denied? Ignored? Muzzled with the intense demand of meaningless work? Distracted by a television? Honored?

When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic. ~ Dresden James, Author

In the 1999 hit movie, The Matrix, Neo is given a choice: swallow the blue pill and continue living a mediocre ignorance, or swallow the red pill and jolt awake to a free but imperfect truth. Within the film’s dark dystopia, The Matrix represents the default operating system for the human species, a virtual reality enslaving us to a parasitic machine race. While comatose and imprisoned, the machines feed our minds with a simulation designed to keep us oblivious, distracted, and obedient to the system draining our humanity. Well… What if I told you that our world suffers from the same deception—a deception orchestrated not by artificial intelligence but by conventional intelligence? A deception of unchallenged and outdated wisdom, a dream-killing dogma tyrannized by stale traditions, narrow beliefs, and cultural conformity? A deception that represents the greatest con of the civilized world—a ruse that feigns freedom and comfort, when in truth, its sole purpose is economic slavery and human homogenization, a servitude system where you become an instrument, not of inspiration or aspiration but of perspiration and desperation. What if I told you that this deception has infiltrated your mind and embedded itself as your default operating system, an autonomous program shadowing your entire life, from cradle to grave, from career to companionship, a presumptuous, yet unwritten rulebook by which all decisions are weighed, regardless of consequence to heart or soul? What if I told ...

Sunday evening is the litmus test for a SCRIPTED existence—how do you feel about the impending Monday? Excited? Or dour and cheerless?

THE SCRIPT… ENGINEERING YOUR INVOLUNTARY SLAVERY

The problem is not people being educated. The problem is that they are educated just enough to believe what they’ve been taught, but not educated enough to question what they’ve been taught. ~ Author Unknown

The SCRIPT. It’s not an instruction booklet given at grade school or map stapled to your college degree. It’s not seen or touched, but it is there. Like the air you breathe, it’s invisibly omnipresent.

Forced awake, drag yourself out of bed; drive, train, or walk to a tolerated job; and exist on autopilot—eight hours a day, five days a week, for the next fifty years. Like a scuffed record repeating its track, today plays like yesterday, which will play exactly like tomorrow.

What few know is, we’ve been programmed for this existence, a willful modern-day slavery. You see, like an operating system on a computer, the SCRIPT runs the show. Give it life’s helm and accept my sympathies. It will command how you think, work, play, vote, save, invest, retire—and how you die.

“Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” Steve Jobs

Go to college and earn a degree, regardless of cost, demand, or economics. Finance your commodified education with an indiscriminate appetite for student loans, notwithstanding the five “preapproved” credit cards you’ve already accepted. Graduate with empty credentials and a useless degree making you no different from millions with the same degree. Leave the cloistered world of university saddled in debt—either yourself, your parents, or both. Get a job so you can officially join the privileged ranks of a time prostitute—trading huge blocks of your life’s time bank, five days of seven, in exchange for little pieces of paper called money. Slave all day, usually repeating monotonous tasks, so you can pay for the education you just finished, the clothes you just dressed, the car you just drove, and the apartment you just left. Use credit cards to live conveniently: Starbucks for breakfast, Chipotle for lunch, and Chick-fil-A for dinner. Party hard at the club. Buy rounds of drinks, trying to impress strangers and women out of your league. Buy overpriced bottles of vodka, hit the VIP room, and try impressing them more. Rack up debt unrestrained; after all, it’s celebration time—you graduated!

Spend to feel good, at least until Monday arrives or the bill that Monday must pay. Spend to fill a void you can’t explain. Feel cornered: by a job, a mortgage, a car, a credit card, and by an existence. Feel freedom drip away while medicating the truth with more distraction: more consumer debt and more fictional escapes.

Welcome to the SCRIPT… Manufactured by conventional wisdom… Distributed by institutionalized indoctrination… And swallowed with blind faith… Wake up…the product being manufactured is you.

Herds are organized for economic purposes: slaughter, shearing, milking. Herd with the crowd and you will get predictable results designed for the crowd.

The proliferation of SCRIPTSpeak is not random. It is either autonomically regurgitated by a compromised party or meticulously orchestrated by a prejudiced party. No matter who’s the parrot, you should listen to neither.

If I accept average advice from average people living average lives, can I expect to be anything but average?

With no explanation and no event to mark the shift, everyone encouraging your dreams suddenly changed their stories. Be realistic. Grow up. That’s impossible. Stop daydreaming about this and that. Reality became a picture painted by the brush strokes from everyone around you who lived in unremarkable mediocrity.

The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves. ~ Dresden James, Author

Here is the SCRIPTED OS decoded: THE SEEDERS: Like a torrent hosted within a computer system, seeders write and enforce SCRIPTED doctrine. As described earlier, seeders are compromised or prejudiced parties. THE HYPERREALITIES: The SCRIPT’s illusions, the hyperrealities reinforce your obedience and captivity through deception, distortion, or diversion. TEMPORAL PROSTITUTION: Seeders and their hyperrealities sanctify a criminal trade for your most precious asset: your time. THE LIFE PATHS: The illusion of free choice and deciding your slave owner: Door A, the Sidewalk; or Door B, The Slowlane. Both lead to the slaughterhouse. Neither makes you the boss of you. DISTRACTION: If you’re distracted, the SCRIPTED OS stays hidden. M.O.D.E.L. Citizenship becomes a foregone conclusion. M.O.D.E.L. CITIZENSHIP: You unwillingly become a SCRIPTED servant who is (M)ediocre, (O)bedient, (D)ependent, (E)ntertained, and (L)ifeless and who then becomes a seeder, a compromised party propagating the SCRIPTED OS.

We are not taught to be thinkers, but reflectors of our culture. Let’s teach our children to be thinkers. ~ Jacque Fresco, Futurist

In high school and throughout college, the SCRIPTED worldview targets its primary nemesis: critical thinking. Instead of exposing our kids to free thought, educational institutions are now full-fledged indoctrination camps pushing ideological agendas from ideological administrators. Critical thinking is being systematically destroyed where two opposing viewpoints are no longer debated. Instead, students are blustered with opinions and partisan doctrine presented as facts or established rules of normalcy.

Educational propagandists and their thought police, however, are not limited to just state-run institutions—they could be private or theological. Regardless, the war for your child’s mind has no safe harbor. Statistics reveal a whopping 72 percent of American colleges and their faculty promote a state-centric collectivism (over individualism) while stifling divergent thought.6 The university system, once an intellectual crossroad for ideas, is now the largest confirmation bias on the planet, where mass cast opinions are sheathed in “safe spaces” as undebatable truths.

Education’s final nail in the SCRIPTED OS is a disturbing ethos of victimology and the normalization of averageness, as if these things were virtues. Competitive drive is being suppressed and gagged. Our public schools (and some parents) are grooming our kids to be a dithering, over-medicated and over-coddled band of wimps who throw tantrums when their sippy cups go empty. Today, we protect feelings. We praise when no praise was earned. Because you simply exist, you are entitled. And if you’re not granted entitlement, you’re a victim. Firm discipline (where’s that Catholic nun with the stick when you need her?) has been replaced by “time out” and flowery negotiations.

Educational institutions and their SCRIPTED tentacles are now manufacturing entire generations of brain-dead adults who never failed in their entire life and have a wall of participation trophies to show for it. Their greatest accomplishments are caricatures in the virtual versus the real world. They’re brainwashed to believe that life is fair and it will protect your feelings. Hard work, optional. Competing, optional. Going above the call, optional. Many fear phone and face-to-face communication, opting for more impersonal methods, such as texting, Snapchatting, and Instagramming. Others hyperventilate and get “triggered” at the slightest criticism or divergent opinions that intrude on their preselected and prescreened world.

Sad, but college campuses have degenerated into expensive brainwashing clinics for SCRIPTED groupthink, a petri dish incubating mollycoddled adults ill-equipped to question their puppetmasters who thread their strings. Bottom line, not only is the SCRIPT teaching our kids to think inside the box of conforming mediocrity, but it’s imbuing them with the false expectation that they can plow through life doing the minimums: show up, text, post selfies…. Do so and you can win all that life has to offer. The awakening is, indeed, rude.

You see, the SCRIPT teaches our children that their popularity and “coolness” are driven by consumption: what they wear and what they drive.

Noam Chomsky once said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

There’s no money in hard truths, but fantasy buys eyeballs; it buys votes; it buys stuff emulating the fantasy; and most importantly, it funnels money into the Wall Street casinos. The SCRIPTED narrative is profitable to everyone in the chain, from stakeholders to the corporate advertisers to the governments that tax the activity and its outcome. As in the movie’s Matrix, your SCRIPTED life is integral to the machine’s survival. By chasing the next greatest gadget and the next greatest weekend high, you intravenously tap yourself into the belly of the beast. Yes, the rat race needs rats. The slaughterhouse needs lambs. Question is, are you willing to sell your soul for a weekend and television?

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses. ~ Plato, Philosopher

A dramatic life shift requires a dramatic mind shift. Right now, your lazy brain is a SCRIPTED ally. Once your RAS is nudged, the blindfold drops. SCRIPTED doctrine whitelists from your firewall, and suddenly actual reality becomes clear. This paves the way to rewriting injurious beliefs and social contracts not written in stone but written in reflective shadows.

Once your brain is exposed to the secrets behind a magician’s tricks, the appearance of magic disappears. As does the magician’s power to deceive.

You see, the SCRIPT is also a collection of shadows, simulations, and cognitive distortions—a collection of authentic fakes and mental alchemy designed to keep us chained in a cave, mesmerized by a pseudo reality. And instead of shadows cast by puppeteers, the SCRIPT has its seeders. The truth is, the SCRIPT, you, I, and the entire civilized world revolve around a web of wizardry called hyperrealities.

Wikipedia defines hyperreality as the “inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies.” Furthermore, a “hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.”12 In other words, we are interacting with simulations instead of truths. For example, Las Vegas is a hyperreality. Each casino presents a hyperreal experience where you feel like a king, a pharaoh, or a sheik—at least as long as your money lasts. Unfortunately, SCRIPTED hyperrealities aren’t as obvious as Las Vegas. Unless you activate your RAS and train your brain to *see* hyperreality, the SCRIPTED shadows are perceived as real. Awareness gates the bridge to defiance.

Long ago, your first day at school birthed the hyperreality “named days.” Think “Monday through Friday” and what do you feel? Anguish? Maybe a little discomfort? How about the word “Saturday”? Or “Friday night”? Named days order the week by titles, Monday through Sunday, carrying with it the implication that Monday starts work and Friday ends it, while the weekend reserves play. The fact is, named days are a hyperreality, one the industrialized world has perfected to perfection. Beneath the named-days scheme is a man-made illusion your mind has made real—the illusion that your life’s limited and precious time must be systematically segregated by days, with each day’s title designating whether work or play is expected.

Consumerism is the myth that consumption can produce success or happiness. Despite that Vogue magazine, despite that Audi commercial, despite that banner ad, you are not what you own, but you can be owned by what you own.

If the SCRIPT was a jail cell, consumerism and the debt it creates are its bars of incarceration. That house with the thirty-year mortgage, that car with the seven-year loan, that boat, and that degree—all backbreaking expenses that can paralyze your existence. Consumerism, materialism, or “stuff” is the ubiquitous hyperreality that dominates the world’s economic engine, and it will dominate yours if you cannot pierce its shadow. Megacorporations spend trillions annually to create consumer hyperrealities—or in marketing speak, “brands”—all designed to communicate a fabricated perception. BRAND X says you’re wealthy, BRAND Y says you’re fashionable, and BRAND Z says you’re rugged. If you drive a Toyota Prius, the advertised perception is practicality or thriftiness. A Lamborghini advertises “wealth,” which may or may not be factual.

In the Lambo, I am presumed rich and noteworthy; in the Toyota, I wait with the rest of the proletariat. Reality is ridiculously distorted. My car changes nothing about me—not my looks, height, or the nine bucks in my wallet—but it changes perception.

Drop these prestigious brands in a post-apocalyptic world where survival is the priority and their influence is stripped down to utility. What’s left is a means for transportation and an uncomfortable height-enhancing shoe.

Consumerism’s job is to trick you into thinking utility is not enough. The off-brand jersey from Target won’t do—you need the Nike. Instead of safely driving from point A to point B in a Honda, you need the Infiniti adorned in triple-stitched leather. The SCRIPTED seeders are spending trillions brainwashing us that utility is for chumps; we must also cast a shadowy statement. Just because you bought the most expensive basketball shorts at the pro shop doesn’t mean you can dunk like LeBron. Consumer proxy doesn’t change reality.

The “college degree” hyperreality is two-pronged. First, it is the stale idea that intelligence and financial wealth require a college degree, regardless of cost, and more so, a life without one is forever underscored by underemployment and underachievement.

As for success and/or financial wealth, think about the last three items you bought. Upon handing over your cash, did you ask the sales clerk if the inventor had a college degree? And if he did, what if it was a philosophy degree and not an engineering degree? The last time you were at Walmart trolling the aisles and reading labels, did you look for a disclaimer revealing the manufacturer’s college credentials? How about the last book you bought at Amazon? Before you clicked “Add to Cart,” did you specifically check the writer’s college transcripts?

Your degree as a “backup plan” is as good as a shovel in your garage. Just ask the millions of unemployed and underemployed graduates who are waiting tables just how strong that safety net is—about as thick as the paper the degree is printed on.

The truth is, we’re sending an entire generation of kids to college to earn degrees they can’t use for jobs they can’t get. Meanwhile, student-loan debt tops a trillion, collegiate coffers have enlarged to the point where football coaches are salaried in the millions, and thousands of well-educated youngsters are lined up at the job fair competing for jobs they could have gotten fresh out of high school.