System and Simulation: The Demon of Our Age

Real, total war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle electric informational media – under cold conditions, and constantly. The cold war is the real war front – a surround – involving everybody – all the time – everywhere.”
~ Marshall McLuhan

One: The Set and the Simulation

In 1998’s The Truman Show Jim Carrey plays Truman Burbank, a man whose life is – unbeknownst to him – a television show. His whole life has been in Seahaven Island, which is in reality a visible-from-space set complete with technology that simulates the weather and day/night cycle. The set is populated by actors – his neighbors, coworkers, best friend, wife, mother and father, actors all – who maintain the illusion of the community. Truman is kept in the town by fear – on the one hand, aquaphobia via implanted false memories of his “father’s” death in a boating accident; on the other, constant media messages about the dangers of flying, traveling, and generally leaving home.

Truman’s authenticity – “True-Man” – is the product, and the world is hungry for it. As the show’s creator Christof describes it, Truman’s real emotion and human behavior “brings hope and joy and inspiration to millions.” The show, broadcast around the world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is a hit and has been for nearly 30 years.

The show-runners’ control over their world is not total, but they have a variety of means – people, law enforcement, media, environment – to reinforce the truth of Truman’s experience. Early in the film, a studio light falls from the set’s hidden ceiling and crashes onto the street near Truman, who investigates it. Within moments, the show-runners inject explanation into the world with a radio alert claiming that a plane jettisoned cargo above the town. Over the years, extras had at various times tried to tell Truman that his life was a lie, including a woman whom he falls in love with – but they are all “disappeared” with just-so explanations.

Ultimately, Truman figures out that his world is not real in spite of the show-runners’ best efforts to keep him immersed. He slips out of the view of the cameras, braves sea and storms, and sails to the edge of his world – the literal, horizon-painted edge of the set – and finds an exit door. It is at this point that Christof “the Creator” injects himself into Truman’s experience and explains his existence:

Released a year later, the Wachowskis’ blockbuster The Matrix (1999) explores the idea of simulated reality from a different angle. The film is famous enough that I don’t need to discuss its plot or particulars. A veritable meme-machine, it popularized several ideas in a way that the more down-to-earth and philosophical Truman Show didn’t:

1. The way that people interpret – or even experience – the world – is a Simulation;
2. The Simulation is created by a System that benefits from the Unawakened remaining in the Simulation – the Unawakened are biofuel;
3. The System uses a variety of tools – Illusions and Agents – to ensure that people do not become aware of it or Awaken from it. If errors in the Illusion occur, the system scrambles to gloss over or provide shallow explanations for the error – but it never admits to error;
4. To Awaken from the Simulation requires conscious choice and incurs serious costs. E.g. you can take the Red Pill to leave the Simulation and therefore be targeted for elimination, or take the Blue Pill to remain within it and forget that it’s artificial;
5. Most people prefer to remain Unawakened due to the danger of the Truth and the comfort of the Lie;
6. Those who choose to Awaken become enemies of the System, the System’s tools, and those who remain asleep.

The two films tackle the idea of omni-simulation and fabricated existence differently, but both ask the same question: what is real, and how do you know it? Most people seem to stop there, but a second and equally important question is: Who creates the simulation, and why?

Two: The Cave and the Demon

The idea that there is a “false world” and that people might awaken to the “true world” has appeared in many places and indeed is foundational to most religions. Two famous representations of this idea in Western philosophy come from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (The Republic, Book VII) and Rene Descartes’ First Meditation: What Can Be Called Into Doubt?

In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato describes prisoners who have been chained to the walls of a dark cave since childhood. Their only “reality” is shadow puppets cast against the cave wall. In the Allegory, a prisoner is freed, forced out of the cave, and sees the world as it is; the process is painful (imagine leaving a movie theater and seeing bright daylight) but literally enlightening. The freed, enlightened man returns to the cave, hoping to gift his knowledge and freedom to his fellow prisoners – but instead of accepting freedom and truth, they resist him and kill him.

Rene Descartes’ 1641 Meditations similarly explores the ideas of knowledge and falsehood. Recognizing that in his youth he accepted many demonstrable falsehoods as true, and that his beliefs about the world are therefore suspect, he attempts to demolish his falsehoods-accepted-as-truth with doubt. In order to prevent accepting falsehoods as true, he decides to make a useful assumption: that he is, in all ways and at all times, being deceived by a powerful demon: “all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment.” Using this assumption, he resolves that even if he can’t say what is true, at least he will never affirm something that is false.

Both Plato and Descartes are concerned with finding truth amid a world of falsehoods. Like the worlds of The Truman Show and The Matrix, most people, they claim, live in a world of shadows, of “delusions of dreams” devised to ensnare their judgment. The whole project of philosophy is discovering what is true when everything seems so false.

Three: Our Simulation

At this point, you’re nodding along impatiently: “Yes, that’s all very interesting but what does this have to do with me, nerd?”

We’ll start here: put simply, the Demon is not hyperbole. There is a System, and we are trapped in its Simulation.

In my opinion, the most useful thing that Donald Trump did was to polarize us – I know, an unpopular take in our unity-obsessed time. By being a polarizing figure, he forced the System (not just the “Deep State”) to react violently against him and his Deplorable voters while it simultaneously struggled to maintain the Simulation – the illusion of legitimacy and “consensus.” In short, he forced a glitch in The Matrix.

Before Trump, despite cultural and political disagreements, there seemed to be a governing consensus about the legitimacy of the System we lived in. Arguing about the size of government, social welfare programs, military expenditures and expeditions, and tax rates seemed to make sense given that we seemed to have a government of, by, and for the People.

Over the course of Trump’s presidency, it became clear that the System – the ruling caste in government, the elites in the federal, state, and local bureaucracies, and the opinion-makers in academia and the media – behaved as a monolithic entity with its own agenda, its own priors and values, its own vision of the good and what society ought to be like and who ought to serve whom. Further, the System made it clear that the rubes, bigots, and simpletons who weren’t “in the club” or disagreed with it had no place at the table. However, despite its distaste for them, the System still needed the Deplorables to participate in society – just as long as they did so silently. Go along, continue to be productive, and for the love of God, don’t disagree out loud – but make sure to 1) work hard, 2) be taxed harder, 3) send your kids to public schools for indoctrination; 4) take on loads of debt for college for further indoctrination (“career advancement”), and 5) give your money to corporations and Culture-makers who hate you.

Trump, because of the media and officialdom’s obvious lies and hoaxes and doublespeak and double standards, helped make our System and Simulation – the ruling caste and the means by which they ensure our participation – easier to see.

Here are some recent examples of the Simulation in action. Feel free to scroll past them, as there are many:

• The Fine People Hoax, in which Trump was said to praise neo-Nazis when he demonstrably said the opposite;
• The Grievance Studies Affair, in which various academic journals published hoax-papers designed to show how the academic publishing industry is an idea-laundering system for bullshit in the technical sense;
• The Covington Catholic Hoax, in which a MAGA-hat-wearing boy’s awkward smile was made to seem like a violent confrontation between a white nationalist and a brave Native American;
• The Kavanaugh Gang-Rape Hoax, in which a Supreme Court nominee is accused of being a vile gang-raper, the rise of # BelieveAllWomen, and the admission that one can believe Tara Reade while also voting for her accused rapist anyway;
• The Russia Collusion Hoax, in which the Clinton Campaign funded shoddy opposition research on Trump, fed it to the Federal Government, and knowingly falsely passed him off as a national security threat for four years;
• The publishing of the 1619 Project, which seeks to “reframe” America’s founding around slavery, the proliferation of 1619 and related Anti-Racist instruction in schools, the pushing of neo-racism as a cure for racism, the declaration that “critical thinking, logic, and demanding evidence” are constructs of white supremacy, and the “disappearing” of counter-narratives as “deeply flawed and bigoted”;
• Covid-19 being used as pretense to cancel life as we know it, grind the economy to a halt, and bludgeon Trump for “failed leadership” – even as the ‘experts’ repeatedly demonstrate that they have no idea what’s going on, the worst outcomes in the country are from Democrat-run states, the local and state leaders demanding lockdown loudest break their own lockdown rules, and relief is held up until after the 2020 election despite the vaunted urgency, and the people are told that they cannot return to normal life even after they are vaccinated;
• The “mostly peaceful protest” of summer 2020, during which cities across the country burned, innocent people were murdered, black neighborhoods were destroyed by white protestors (in the name of social justice), George Floyd and other criminals were sainted, and people were led to believe that police are slaughtering unarmed blacks in the thousands each year;
• The Hunter Biden Laptop being memory-holed by the media and social media companies as “misinformation” only to be verified by the DoJ, post-election, as an actual thing being investigated – with the claim they didn’t want to interrupt the misinformation that the story was misinformation because they didn’t want to affect the election;
• The supposedly democratic election, by the most people ever, of a dementia-addled career liar, who will obviously be replaced by the least popular candidate in the Democratic primaries, who ended her candidacy with not one delegate to her name, who accused her running mate of racism and “believed his accuser” about allegations of sexual assault, who plagiarized Martin Luther King Jr with a fake story about “fweedom”;
• The overblown description of the January 6 riot at the Capitol as a “violent, armed insurrection” and the fabrication of a story by mainstream outlets about Trump supporters murdering a Capitol police officer by smashing his face in with a fire extinguisher;
• The admission in a Time article (Feb 2021) that the “most secure election in history” was “saved” by a shadowy cabal of activist and corporate interests;
• The banning of Trump and other conservatives on Twitter due to “violations of community standards” even as child pornography continues to be shared, seemingly unabated, on the platform;
• The coordinated deplatforming of Parler by Apple, Google, and Amazon in the name of stopping hate speech and coordinated violence, though Facebook is where most of the January 6 rioting was coordinated;
• The Establishment’s use of QAnon to justify the ongoing militarization of DC and the turning-inward of the war against terror – “domestic terrorism” – when just about nobody has heard of QAnon or anyone who actually believes it;
• The sudden creation, flourishing, and deletion of Blue-Anon (left-wing conspiracy theories being peddled as truth by the Establishment) on Urban Dictionary;
• The news that heroic New York Governor Cuomo’s Covid policies not only led to the premature deaths of thousands, but that his aides fudged the numbers – and allegations that he has sexually harassed multiple women;
• Dr Seuss books are declared racist and cancelled, while Mein Kampf is widely available;
• And finally, the conversation between a formerly-royal celebrity, her husband, and a billionaire talk show host, at their $15 million dollar mansion, about how they’re the real victims.

These all happened within the past couple years – most within the past one. But here’s the thing: none of this is new. The hegemonic system, the corruption that it entails, has always been here. What seemed like a governing consensus was window-dressing. We’re just more aware of it now.

We are, at all times and in all ways, awash in storytelling and deceit – a Simulation – that legitimize a parasitic ruling System which requires our contentment, complicity, and goodwill to survive. Most people are unaware of the means by which the System parasitizes them; they confuse the System with Society, having been raised to believe that the System is good and necessary for order and flourishing. The Postmoderns, whatever their faults, described the tools of hegemony, the way the Simulation works. Their mistake was not so much in the what but the therefore – “we live in a hegemonic system, therefore we should strive for political and economic justice with ‘better’ statism.”

Murray Rothbard’s 1974 pamphlet The Anatomy of the State describes the hegemony from a non-Marxist angle:

1. The State and the People are not the same thing;
2. People, in order to survive and thrive, must use their minds and energy to turn resources into goods, which they can voluntarily exchange with each other – and by this means build wealth;
3. It is immoral for one person to seize the fruits of another’s labor – by violence, plunder, or enslavement;
4. The State, which does not precede the productive efforts of a People and cannot exist without their labor, monopolizes the use of force and violence in a given territory;
5. The State imposes itself on a People and systematizes, in a relatively peaceful way, the immoral actions identified in #3 – that which is immoral for you to do to your neighbor (e.g, threaten to beat him if he doesn’t give you his stuff) is made moral by the magic rituals of “political process”;
6. In order for the State to survive (how long will a People let bullies with clubs keep taking their stuff?), it must convince the People of its legitimacy, of its rightness to rule and pilfer – “the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives”;
7. To accomplish this, the State enlists the intellectual and cultural elite to mold “mainstream” beliefs about the rightness of the regime, in exchange for a permanent cut of the take.

The System is a parasitic caste that predates upon a People; the Simulation is the means by which they convince the People that this is how it is supposed to be.

Four: Awakening

At the end of their films, Truman leaves the set and the show ceases broadcasting; Neo takes the Red Pill and gives his life fighting the Matrix. The European Enlightenment climaxed with the Revolutionary War, in which a People – some poor, some rich, all of them backwards – saw the cracks in their Simulation and decided to throw off the yoke of their System. There’s an irony here: the Revolutionaries’ system of limited, constitutional government, established solely to protect the individual rights and freedoms of the Sovereign People, has given rise to the largest and most totalizing System the world has ever known. Roman emperors did not know the power that our Rulers have. Even so, the System is hungry for more. In modern times, we have run out of ocean and wilderness to which we might flee – and Mars is a long way off. So what does it mean for us? How might we resist the System’s ever-gaping maw?

Rothbard said that “the greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.” It turns out that “why” and “according to whom” and “with what evidence” are devastatingly powerful tools. Athens, the birthplace of philosophy in antiquity, put Socrates to death because he questioned ceaselessly and encouraged others to do so too. In our time, independent criticism is scoffed at by the expert and bureaucratic class: asking “why” is met with “trust the Science;” you are cancelled if you question the prevailing elite orthodoxy regarding social issues; if you go out without a mask on, whatever the data says, you’re a Neanderthal – ahem, you are behaving like a Neanderthal.

We might take Descartes’ advice to himself: if anyone tells you to accept something that doesn’t make sense to you, on the basis of popular consensus or expert opinion or tradition – if anyone tells you that it is “bigoted” to think critically and demand evidence, that to be “inclusive” means merely to “believe” – think of him as the Demon and begin with doubt. Do not fear to ask questions – embrace the feeling of foolishness when an issue seems too complex for a layperson like you to understand – scoff at anyone, expert or not who demands that you simply accept because who do you think you are that you would question your betters?. Ask questions, and encourage others to do so, too, despite the overwhelming pressures of propaganda and group-think. If enough learn to think and doubt and ask questions, if enough people begin to seek truth instead of comfort and conformity – we might yet throw off the yoke of the absolute State. We might rediscover what it means to be a sovereign people. But that requires bravery. “The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie,” said Solzhenitsyn. “One word of truth outweighs the world.”

And as Ludwig von Mises, Rothbard’s mentor, put it in his magnum opus Human Action:

“Economics [ie, the science of human action and social cooperation] must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man’s existence. … There is no means by which anyone can evade his personal responsibility. Whoever neglects to examine to the best of his abilities all the problems involved voluntarily surrenders his birthright to a self-appointed elite of supermen. In such vital matters blind reliance upon ‘experts’ and uncritical acceptance of popular catchwords and prejudices is tantamount to the abandonment of self-determination and to yielding to other people’s domination.”

You have a choice – leave the Cave, or watch as the System destroys those few who do; take the Red Pill, or take the Blue; believe the lie, or seek the truth.

Wake up. Do not let yourself be dominated. Question the Simulation – and reject it – and throw off the System.