The individual vs. the collective in the Matrix

The individual vs. the collective in the Matrix

by Jon Rappoport

September 5, 2015

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.)

In the 1950s, before television had numbed minds and turned them into jelly, there was a growing sense of: the Individual versus the Corporate State.

Something needed to be done. People were fitting into slots. They were surrendering their lives in increasing numbers. They were carving away their own idiosyncrasies and their independent ideas.

Collectivism wasn’t merely a Soviet paradigm. It was spreading like a fungus at every level of American life. It might fly a political banner here and there, but on the whole it was a social phenomenon and nightmare.

Television then added fuel to the fire. Under the control of psyops experts, it became, as the 1950s droned on, the facile barrel of a weapon:

“What’s important is the group, the family, peers. Conform. Give in. Bathe in the great belonging…”

Recognize that every message television imparts is a proxy, a fabrication, a simulacrum, an imitation of life one step removed. It isn’t people talking in a park or on a street corner or in a saloon or a barber shop or a meeting hall or a church.

It’s happening on a screen.

When this medium also broadcasts words and images of belonging and the need to belong, it’s engaged in revolutionary social engineering.

The very opposite of living as a strong, independent, and powerful individual is the cloying need to belong. And the latter is what television ceaselessly promotes.

This is no accident. After World War 2, psychological-warfare operatives turned their attention to two long-term strategies: inculcating negative stereotypes of distant populations, to rationalize covert military plans to conquer and build an empire for America; and disseminating the unparalleled joys of disappearing into a group existence.

When, for example, television promotes “family,” it’s all on the level of fictitiously happy, desperate, yearning, last-chance, problem-resolving, melted-down, trance-inducing, gooey family.

This isn’t, by any stretch, an actual human value. Whether it’s the suburban-lawn family in an ad for the wonders of a toxic pesticide, or the mob family going to the mattresses to fend off a rival, it’s fantasy time in the land of mind control.

Television has carried its mission forward. The consciousness of the Individual versus the State has turned into: love the State. Love the State as family.

The political Left of the 1960s, who rioted against Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, at the Century Plaza Hotel, and ended his hopes to run again in 1968…that Left is now all about the State and its glories and gifts. The collective.

A great deal of the television coverage of mass shootings is now dedicated to bringing home the spurious message: we all grieve together and heal together.

In the only study I have been able to find, Wictionary partially surveys the scripts of all television shows from the year 2006, to analyze the words most frequently broadcast to viewers in America.

Out of 29,713,800 words, including the massively used “a,” “an,” “the,” “you,” “me,” and the like, the word “home” ranks 179 from the top. “Mom” is 218. “Together” is 222. “Family” is 250.

This usage reflects an unending psyop.

Are you with the family or not? Are you with the group, the collective, or not? Those are the blunt parameters.

“When you get right down to it, all you have is family.” “Our team is really a family.” “You’re deserting the family.” “You fight for the guy next to you.” “Our department is like a family.” “Here at Corporation X, we’re a family.” “Above all, this is a community.”

The community, the group, the company, the sector, the planet, the family.

The goal? Submerge the individual and tie him inexorably to a group.

Individual achievement, imagination, creative power? Not on the agenda. Something for the dustbin of history.

All you need to do is fall into the arms of a group. After that, everything is settled. You can care exclusively about the collective.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World: “‘Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines’! The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. ‘You really know where you are. For the first time in history.’”

George Orwell, 1984: “The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.”

Television seeks to emphasize one decision: inclusion or exclusion. Exclusion is portrayed as the only condition that is possible if you aren’t part of the group. And exclusion carries the connotation of exile, excommunication, and criminality.

The soap opera is the apotheosis of television. The long-running characters in Anytown are irreversibly enmeshed in one another’s lives. There’s no escape. And with that comes mind-numbing meddling.

“I’m just trying to help you realize we all love you (in chains).”

“Your father, rest his soul, would never have wanted you to do this to yourself…”

“How dare you set yourself apart from us. Who do you think you are?”


Of the three elite network anchors, the one who fictionally conveyed the sense that “we’re all in this together” was Brian Williams (NBC), before his downfall. He was the number-one-rated anchor on the evening news.

Am I saying that no groups anywhere can achieve important objectives? No. I’m talking about a state of mind wherein the individual surrenders his own life-force.

There is an indissoluble link between the artifact called “we” and “limited context.” This is precisely what television news gives to the public. With each story that fails to explore the deeper elite players and their motives, the news speaks to a collective consciousness, which is to say, the sharing of a fabrication.

What “we” shares is foreshortened perspective, lies, misdirection, and superficial gloss. Those qualities are built for the group, and the group digests them automatically.

For some people, “we” has a fragrant scent, until they get down in the trenches with it. There they discover odd odors and postures and mutations. They find self-distorted creatures running around doing bizarre things with an exhibitionist flair.

The night becomes long. The ideals melt. The level of intelligence required to inhabit this cave-like realm is lower than expected, much lower.

Perceptions formerly believed to be the glue that holds this territory together begin to crack and fall apart, and all that is left is a grim determination to see things through.

As the night moves into its latter stages, some participants come to know that all their activity is taking place in a chimerical universe.

It is as if reality has been constructed to yield up gibberish.

Whose idea was it to become deaf, dumb, and blind in the first place?

And then perhaps one person in the cave suddenly says: I EXIST.

That’s starts a cacophony of howling.

People dimly wonder whether, beyond this night, there is another whole world where individuals live, where individuals finally separate from the sticky substance of coordinated defeat.

The “we” that television gives us is a fiction designed to make the independent individual extinct. That is its job.

In the aftermath of the 1963 assassination of JFK and the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the covert theme was the same: a lone individual did this.

A lone individual, detached from the group, did this. “See what happens when the group is rejected? Lone individuals are really no different than individuals. They are people who left the fold. They wandered from the communal hearth. They thought for themselves. This is what happens when individuals assert their independent existence. They become killers. They lose their way. They break the sacred bond. They are heretics who fall away from the collective.”

In 1995, after the Oklahoma City Bombing, President Bill Clinton made a speech to the nation. He rescued his presidency by essentially saying, “Come home to the government. We will protect you and save you.”

He framed the crime in those terms. The individual versus the collective.

The strongest argument against the free and independent and powerful individual, and in favor of the collective is, simply: the collective has advanced to such a degree that there is no going back; the individual can’t win; the battle is over.

But the liberation of the individual has existed as an aim since the dawn of time on this planet. That aim will not vanish.

Why? Because underneath all the programs for mind control, there is, obviously, something to control. Otherwise, why bother? The deeper you go in discovering what “must be controlled,” the more freedom and power and imagination you encounter in the individual.

It may not seem so. It may seem that all the propaganda about the inherent weakness and smallness of the human being is accurate. But that is a false dream.

The reality is far different.

A million psyops won’t change that reality.


power outside the matrix


Here is a 1980 quote from author Philip K Dick. He is writing poignantly about another titan of science fiction, Robert Heinlein. The relevance of Phil’s words to the subject of this article? Here are two powerful and independent individuals who, despite all their differences, find a common sharing. This is what that sharing looks like and feels like:

“Several years ago, when I was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him—one of the few true gentlemen in this world. I don’t agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn’t raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me. I think a great deal of him and his wife; I dedicated a book to them in appreciation. Robert Heinlein is a fine-looking man, very impressive and very military in stance; you can tell he has a military background, even to the haircut. He knows I’m a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love.”

Here is one more from Philip Dick. I don’t agree with the “motive” part of the quote, but everything else? Perfect.

“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”

The question is, in gaining freedom from these pseudo-realities, does the process happen for everyone at once, or is it one individual at a time? The answer is clear. It must be one individual at a time—and that tells us a great deal about the illusion of the collective.

The history of human struggle on this planet is about the individual emerging FROM the group, from the tribe, from the clan, from ethnicity and race and skin color and from all outward signs of collective existence.

The history of struggle is not about the individual surrendering and going back into group identity.

That is the psyop.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

7 comments on “The individual vs. the collective in the Matrix

  1. Reblogged this on John Barleycorn and commented:
    Thought provoking article.

  2. From Québec says:

    “The soap opera is the apotheosis of television. The long-running characters in Anytown are irreversibly enmeshed in one another’s lives. There’s no escape. And with that comes mind-numbing meddling. “ (Jon)
    ———————————————————————–

    Not really, Jon! The characters are very much all hardcore individualists. They break every rule there is, and they only do as they please, no matter what the family or friends think. This is why it is so exciting to see this constant rebellion against just about everything.

    Plus, there are always numerous additional characters that pops-in for a year or two and then disappear and new ones comes in. Some die, some are born. Some moves to other countries to work and come back occasionally. They also travel a lot, to France, Italy, Dubai… you name it, they are not stuck like you say in a little town.

    The dialogues are very good, and the imagination and creativity of the writers are mind blowing. Never a moment of boredom. Compared to the real world, where most citizens live a monotonous life, soaps are full of surprises (good and bad), many defeats, many victories, many miracles. Everything is possible in soaps. That’s what makes it so exciting. Everything in real life could also be possible, but people will not use their imagination to turn things around.

    Compared to soaps, movies are very boring. All inspired by the Elites:
    Wars, robots, end of the world, cataclysms of all kinds, the whole shebang of destruction and tyranny.

    • gokmencakal says:

      TV is the last piece for a collectivist who is bombarded all throughout his-her day out there on the street. First off, TV is a billboard, for him-her to put up on his livingroom so he-she can cut off that last piece of individuality at home. So they can turn their own space to a street which have billboards on, or to bus stop which they wake up every morning to go to work and catch a bus while looking at the latest advertisement.

      Your words “people will not use their imagination to turn things around”, yes, and they don’t want to also. TV is a collective imitation of lifeforce itself like all images pumped out there on streets via advertisements, images, etc.. so, someone who puts TV in his-her livingroom and stands it by can easilly be summed up by that movie:

      “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be! We know things are bad – worse than bad, They’re crazy! It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone!’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone!”

      so, howard beale or some x-man which been bitten by a spider then turns out to a giant spider.. they all part of the collective. It’s a tv show, genre is entertainment. “We will all wake up the next day, going to our jobs, paying out taxes etc..lets have some wild entertainment tonight on this tube”.. you see? thats the idea.

      • From Québec says:

        “We will all wake up the next day, going to our jobs, paying out taxes etc..lets have some wild entertainment tonight on this tube”.. you see? thats the idea”

        ———————————-

        I agree with that statement. I shut down the television eleven years ago, when I finally decided to get a computer and found Infowars.com and the Alex Jones Show. . It opened my mind to all the programming we get out of the nightly news, the entertainment and all the advertizing,

        Now, I get real news from the alternative media. After reading articles on this site and on Infowars and others I listen to the 3 hour (now 4 hours since last week) of The Alex Jones Show and I also listen to the Infowars Nightly News.

        Since all that huge information is quite heavy and let’s say it, a bit depressing, II registered 2 soap operas that I like, and watch them in my bed before going to sleep. It sort of balances everything:

        – The never ending misery of the real world revealed in Alternative media.
        – The numerous and great possibility of the soaps.

        The soaps keeps my imagination and creativity alive. And, that is good, because if we ever want to get out of all the tyranny in this world, we better start developing our imagination and creativity before it’s too late.

  3. Greg O. says:

    From blogger Kurt Louder at boredpanda.com:

    “Studies by researcher Herbert Krugman have shown that within thirty seconds of watching television, brain waves switch from predominantly beta waves—indicating alert and conscious attention—to predominantly alpha waves—indicating an unfocused, receptive lack of attention.”

    http://www.boredpanda.com/generation-nonsense-over-entertained-under-educated-and-distracted-2/

    Allan Watt speaks at length on this very subject (Jon, I’m sure you’re aware of his teachings). Sorry that I don’t have the link, but awhile back on YouTube I watched him tell a fascinating story about a small village somewhere in the United Kingdom in the late Fifties or early Sixties. They were very social, a lot of communing in the local markets and park, etc.. Everyone knew each other. As soon as TV came to town, within weeks, it all ended. In a few years they became like strangers to each other and lost a valuable an REAL sense of community. I’m sure this was a common story across the world, but it was shocking to hear just the same.

    Television is an amazing technology, but it has done way more harm to society than it has done good.

  4. From Québec says:

    This is one example of what one man alone can do against a group:

    Great article… must read:

    Why Obama and Hillary Must Stop Donald Trump at All Costs
    http://www.infowars.com/why-obama-and-hillary-must-stop-donald-trump-at-all-costs/

Comments are closed.