THE TRUMAN SHOW: Why not a radical test of reality?
ARE WE TRUMAN?
We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented. It’s as simple as that.
— Christof
Under a vast dome, visible from space, a production company simulates a small island utopia in the Norman Rockwell aesthetic: ‘Seahaven.’ It is populated entirely by actors save for one—unwitting—young man: Truman Burbank. An unwanted pregnancy and a dystopian legal system have combined to allow Production to adopt Truman and deliver him into a counterfeit life, televised to the whole world. The ultimate dupe. The ultimate reality-TV.
Truman is a slave.
The production company is directly responsible, but the human species is complicit—they’re all watching. Ubiquitous cameras (hidden in cupboards, car fixtures, actor’s shirts…) bring to the billions Truman’s every sigh, joy, grief, conflict, and snore (“We find many viewers leave him on all night for comfort.”) Insatiable demand for this pitiable dupe, the mark of this gigantic con, is what keeps him enslaved.
In the giant fabrication that is Truman’s life, he and only he is a ‘true man’ (Truman). He is attractively fresh: natural, unscripted, innocent—good for pranks. Yes, many tune in for the sweet sadistic pleasure of conning dear Truman.
There is also personality: he’s just very silly, and that’s a lot of fun.
As for action, there’s plenty. Viewers are routinely awed by the dashing exploits of the tactical troops—cast and crew—rushing at a moment’s notice with impressive ‘both and’ improv commitment whenever Truman’s curiosity may expose the grand deception (often). That’s edge-of-your-seat suspense. (WILL TRUMAN SEE US?)
What moves the story along are some hilarious—and of course, televised—events and circumstances by which Truman matures his suspicions about the world. His dogged scientific and even philosophical exploration of fundamental reality is heroically conducted against the opposition of literally everyone he knows—actors one and all, professionally committed to sustaining the con. But their increasingly desperate behaviors only serve to strengthen Truman’s suspicions of a grand conspiracy all around him.
Truman’s investigation of reality, and his fight for freedom, which are one and the same, climax with a radical—and brave—decision: He will test reality.
That’s my elevator pitch for The Truman Show (1998), a brilliant parable for everything we care about here at The Management of Reality. This film is an undiluted masterpiece that, all by itself, has earned writer Andrew Niccol and director Peter Weir a place in history. Camerawork, directing, acting, editing, music, humor, thought-piece, concept… Wow. Everyone here is at the top of their game. (Laura Linney…!) Candidate for the title: Most Perfect Movie Ever Filmed.
As you might expect from my hyperbolic accolades, The Truman Show—aging rather well as a ‘prophetic’ film—works on several different levels and has lots of profound things to teach us. But I will focus here narrowly on one question:
Why is it that Truman Burbank can conduct a radical test of reality but we cannot?
We need a grip on this, because our reticence to test reality gives a giant advantage to any narrative imposed by the bosses with their captured meaning-making structures (media and academia). We shouldn’t make things so easy for them.
The struggle to protect a democratic future for Western civilization—one with a real chance of success—will require, in my view, that democratic Westerners face this problem squarely: we dare not test reality.
I understand, of course, that a radical test of reality is a rather scary thing—I do. But we must swallow hard and do it anyways. And fast. The stakes—the future of Western civilization—are too high for us to simply let ourselves be manipulated again by the bosses.
I believe that we acquire some power over the forces that impinge on our psychology when we name and describe them (it’s a form of consciousness). Once named and described, the more we discuss these forces scientifically, the more power we acquire over them. We should therefore talk about and study this psychological phenomenon: our reticence to test the social ‘consensus reality.’ That’s how we begin to transcend it.
My approach, in this essay, is by way of immersion into The Truman Show, doubtless the most delicious exploration of the fundamental psychological challenge I wish to describe.
You should of course go watch the movie, but I can make you this promise on my authority as a Truman Show scholar: nothing below will spoil any pleasures from watching the film (if you haven’t yet seen it), because The Truman Show is at once so deep, so funny, and so beautiful, that you’ll savor it again and again, always learning something new or catching some erstwhile unnoticed, poetic detail.
Bon appetit.
Truman smells a rat
As the film begins, a good thirty years of TV show have elapsed, and we meet Truman as a young married man. Yes, Truman is still everybody’s dupe. But is he entirely witless? Not quite…
Some years before, as we learn from flashbacks, it happened that Truman had noticed a girl (an extra), ‘Lauren,’ who was not intended for him in the chosen ‘narrative of Truman’s life’ that Production was manipulating him into. It’s love at first sight—both ways. She resolves to free him.
As Truman begins to flirt, ‘Lauren’ makes an abrupt decision and steals off to the beach with him—before Production can react. Once there, she urgently tells him: “We have so little time. They’re gonna be here any minute. They don’t want me talking to you.”
Truman has no idea what she is on about, and doesn’t (yet) care. “Then don’t talk,” he says, lady-killer style, and moves in for the first kiss. It’s brief because, right then, as predicted, a car materializes out of nowhere. On the beach.
As it approaches, she hurriedly explains:
“Truman, listen to me. Everybody knows about you. Everybody knows everything you do. They are pretending, Truman. Do you understand?”
What?
“Everybody’s pretending. My name’s not Lauren, it’s Sylvia.”
The driver of the car gets out and claims to be her dad (she denies it) and begins forcing her into the vehicle. She knows resistance is futile, but she struggles enough that she may continue urging her explanations on Truman.
“This—” she picks up sand and lets it drop in front of his eyes. “It’s fake. It’s all for you!”, she explains feverishly, as the man pulls her to the car.
What?
“And the sky, and the sea—everything. It’s a set. It’s a show!”
What? What?
She does sound completely crazy. And ‘Dad’ is explaining to Truman, as he shoves her into the car, that ‘his daughter’ is psychotic, that Truman is not the first, that she does this with all her boyfriends.
“Get out of here!”, pleads Sylvia from the car. “Come and find me.” Don’t bother, says fake Dad, getting the car in gear, “We’re moving to Fiji.”
And off they go.
End flashback.
Truman never saw her again. Yes, it all sounded completely crazy. But Truman didn’t want to love a lunatic, so he’d allowed himself to doubt. To doubt the world. To trust her (same thing). And that’s when he began noticing stuff.
All kinds of stuff.
One morning, for example, a big lantern falls clear out of what, to him, is the bright blue sky and nearly hits him. It has a label that reads “Sirius (Canis Majoris).” That’s the name of the brightest star in the night sky (“…the sky, and the sea—everything. It’s a set. It’s a show!”).
Truman gets in his car and the news immediately has a story about “an aircraft in trouble [that] began shedding parts” over Seahaven.
Hm…
He notices strange behaviors of the people around him. They often stop to make a celebratory comment about some product they are using, wearing, drinking, etc., and it doesn’t always seem like they are talking to him, nor does it always fit naturally into the conversation.
Certain people seem to have routines repeating in absurdly periodic and also verbatim manner.
One day it begins to rain in a tight radius around his own girth and nowhere else. A full storm soon develops, true. But still…
And whenever Truman says he wants to see Fiji, everybody tries to dissuade him! Uncanny.
Truman’s father, back from the dead
Then comes the slammer: on his way to work one day, Truman walks by an older homeless man who looks straight at him. Truman stops, turns around, walks back. He can’t believe his eyes. The man removes his hat.
“Dad?!?”
The entire production team jumps into action. A man and a woman whisk the homeless man away. A group of joggers accosts Truman as he tries to follow. Then a biker collides. You get the picture. His dad—for he is none other—is forced onto a bus that screeches to a halt for the captive’s huddle. And off they go. The next day, the news will claim that the city was clearing the streets of riffraff.
Truman is bewildered. What just happened? His dad is supposed to be dead!
I must explain. Production had given Truman a fake family, of course. But some years ago, in Truman’s early adolescence, they had decided to ‘kill’ fake Dad.
Why? Well, as perfect irony would have it, Truman wanted—more than anything—to explore the world! But the professional purpose and responsibility of every human in Truman’s reality was to keep Truman in Seahaven. So, one day, on a sailboat trip upon which Truman had insisted despite Dad’s loud misgivings about ‘bad weather,’ Production had staged a storm and simulated the older man’s drowning, thereby inducing in Truman, from his guilt over ‘killing Dad,’ a pathological phobia of water. And that was the entire point—to keep him in waterlocked Seahaven.
Child abuse.
Now, but what was Truman’s fake dad doing back in the show!? That was unscripted; this man had gotten himself hired as an extra under a false name in order to sneak himself back into the show. And why that? Because he missed his son.
It does make sense. Truman’s fake dad—the actor who played the role—was also Truman’s real dad in Truman’s subjective experience. And from the actor’s own point of view, he was also a real dad, an ‘adoptive’ one, because he’d fed, scolded, hugged, taught, cheered, kissed—in short, raised—Truman. Whatever else may have been fake, they did have a relationship, and the emotions involved, both ways, were entirely real. So Dad had objected to the storyline that got him booted from the show and severed from his son (same thing). Now, years later, he’d infiltrated ‘The Truman Show’ to see his kid again.
The encounter with his (supposedly dead) dad was brief but Truman knows that he did see him, no matter what anybody says. So now he begins to take very seriously what his ‘crazy’ love Lauren/Sylvia told him.
Truman doesn’t yet suspect, however, that absolutely everybody in his world is an actor. That’s (still) a step too far. He thinks powerful bad guys are duping innocent people and that his loved ones are dupes like him (because they can’t possibly be in on it). So, first, in utter innocence, he confides about his suspicions with his loved ones.
This automatic trust in those closest to him—all of them con artists—is so sweet that the implicit cruelty of Truman’s life suddenly slams you: he is alone. Every single person around him works to gaslight him. His ‘mother,’ his ‘wife,’ his ‘best friend’—they all try to convince Truman that he’s seeing things. They tell him he’s suffering psychological trauma from losing his dad.
That consistency almost convinces Truman. But then…
Truman tests reality
The next day, as Truman is driving to work, his ‘radio program’ is interrupted by a loud feedback screech and then:
“Wait for the cue. Wait for the cue. Stand by, One. Countdown to action. Stand by. He’s heading west on Stewart. Stand by all extras. He’ll be behind you in about ninety seconds.”
Stand by all extras?
Truman’s eyes open wide.
“Okay, he’s making his turn onto Lancaster Square.”
As he turns, Truman’s eyeballs leap out of their sockets to follow the street sign ‘LANCASTER SQ’ and he nearly runs over a lady with an umbrella.
“Oh my God! He almost hit her!” says the voice on his radio station. And then: “Something’s wrong. Change frequencies!”
Another feedback screech and everyone—everyone—in Seahaven, with perfect choreography, cringes and protects one ear. Then Truman’s normal ‘radio show’ returns.
’Twas but a few seconds of misfed audio. ’Twas enough. Truman snaps. He makes a fateful decision: he will test reality.
He gets out of his car and begins looking hard at… everything. A couple chatting in an open-air café, folks buying ice cream, others walking to and fro. He tiptoes like a cat around the town square. You can read his thoughts on his face.
What are these people really doing? Are their behaviors natural? Could they really all be actors? Could they be doing all of these mundane things—all that mindless peripheral chitchat, walking purposefully to places—just for his benefit? Can this all really be a show? Isn’t that insane?
Yes, it is perfectly paranoid. But Truman is committed.
On impulse, he steps out of his routine, does something unexpected, then stops abruptly to observe, trying to catch the presumed extras in a misstep—daring the world to keep up with him.
In his most dramatic test, he rushes into a random building and finds everyone alarmed to see him there. Why? What is this place? He will find out. He calls the elevator. When it opens, reality is suddenly peeled back: beyond the elevator’s incongruously missing back wall he sees a room with an entire production team preparing actors and moving props.
The obviously fake backing is urgently restored by staffers horrified to see Truman there. Security rushes to drag him out, calling him a trespasser—though insisting, at the same time, that it’s all nothing: they’re just doing renovations (“No you’re not!”, counters Truman, defiant). And they throw him out on the street!
Fishy stuff. What…?
But Truman doesn’t quite get it yet. So he confides about all these strange happenings, again, with the one person he thinks he can trust: his ‘best friend’ Marlon. Sitting at night on the edge of an unfinished bridge, their feet hanging over the water, they talk. “Just between you and me,” says Truman (to the entire world), “I’m going away for a while.”
On the morrow he tries to escape to Fiji, where he believes Lauren/Sylvia was taken, but…
No flights are available for a whole month, says the ‘travel agent.’ He gets on a bus but it immediately breaks down—can’t go. Etcetera. You get the picture. And so does Truman: he can see signs and symptoms everywhere of a vast conspiracy to deny him travel.
So Truman tries something else: he gets in his car and rushes spontaneously out of town, throwing the entire production team, in the film’s comedic climax, into a madcap frenzy of improvised somersaults to create the most unlikely coincidences, all contriving to keep Truman in phony ‘Seahaven.’ (I won’t spoil those for you; go enjoy them.)
Long-story-short, these experiences, rather than dissuade Truman, fully convince him that he has always been the mark of a giant, televised con game—what Lauren/Sylvia said. There follows a tremendous confrontation with his wife, Meryl, when Truman concludes that she, too, is in on it.
The hapless dupe is of course accused—by everyone—of suffering a psychotic break. And he does consider it. But he remains defiant.
Production can see the problem: game’s up! Strong medicine—in the Native American sense of that term—will be needed to bring Truman back on track. So Production pulls all the stops to convince Truman that he is indeed having a psychotic break. Desperate times… Marlon, trusted ‘best friend,’ is the strongest card.
Sharing again a moonlight moment on the unfinished bridge, a disoriented and shattered Truman tells his friend:
“I don’t know what to think, Marlon. Maybe I’m losing my mind, but… it seems like the whole world revolves around me, somehow.”
“That’s a lot of world for one man, Truman.” Marlon smiles. “Sure that’s not wishful thinking? You wishing you’d made something more out of yourself? C’mon, Truman, who hasn’t sat in the john, had an imaginary interview on Seahaven Tonight? Who hasn’t wanted to be somebody?”
“This is different. Everybody seems to be in on it…”
As those words exit his mouth, Truman grasps the full implication of “everybody.” He is staring at Marlon, and a terrible conflict has developed across his face. Production catches that and tries to get ahead of it. They instruct Marlon, via his earpiece, to reminisce about their childhood together.
“I’ve been your best friend since we were 7 years old, Truman,” says Marlon. And he launches into a couple of tender anecdotes. They laugh together. Then Marlon says: “You’re the closest thing I ever had to a brother, Truman.” He looks Truman in the eyes. Looks down. “I know that things haven’t really worked out for either of us like we used to dream they would. I know that feeling, when it’s, like, everything’s slipping away and …[sighs]… you don’t want to believe it, so you—you look for answers somewhere else, but…, well… The point is, I would gladly step in front of traffic for you, Truman. And the last thing that I would ever do… is lie to you.”
Marlon’s voice breaks. Truman is looking at him in horror.
“I mean, think about it, Truman. If everybody is in on it, I’d have to be in on it too.”
It has to be a psychotic break, Truman, because, if it isn’t, then I am a monster. Are you going to turn me into a monster? I’m your best friend!
This is bold.
And clever: it forces Truman to choose between his new conspiracy theory and his love for his best friend. To abandon Truman’s radical test of reality, in this bargain, would be loyalty.
Then comes pure cinematic gold (and how Weir and Carrey pulled this off, I don’t know). Marlon says,
“I’m not in on it, Truman, because there is no ‘it.’ ”
And as Marlon pronounces these words, the expression of horror frozen on Truman’s face gently …um… ‘hiccups’ (I just have no word for it) into one of heartbreaking tenderness. And you think: Oh… it worked! They got Truman back; Marlon convinced him.
But when you watch the movie the second time (which you absolutely should do), you realize that this interpretation is logically untenable. For Truman is by this point no longer recoverable for the Production narrative (though Production doesn’t know this yet). So something else is going on here.
I’ll tell you.
What happens here is that our hero is flooded with compassion for Marlon, his friend, his buddy. Because Truman, though trapped in a fake world, is at least himself, but Marlon, Truman suddenly realizes, has wasted his entire life, from childhood, faking his person to con Truman. The fundamentally corrupt nature of Marlon’s life has been exposed in the chilling words: “the last thing that I would ever do is lie to you.” Truman’s heart breaks for him—for his wasted life, and for the suffering now written all over Marlon’s face.
Marlon has conned Truman so many times before, over the course of a lifetime, that he is overconfident, and misreads what is happening on Truman’s face. He thinks Truman’s broken face means that Truman has been broken—broken in, like a free horse that once galloped on skepticism. So Marlon presses his presumed advantage and moves in for the sales kill: “You were right about one thing, though,” he tells Truman. “The thing that started all this.” And he turns Truman around. On cue, approaching from behind for a dramatic hug, is Truman’s dad. “I found him for you, Truman.”
Truman loses himself in a tearful embrace with Dad while Production adds, for the billions, some mournful strings overlaid on piano notes and an overfly angle.
Of course, this’ll need a backstory. They’ll tell Truman that the storm, back in the day, had washed Dad up on some shore—but with amnesia. Hence his absence of so many years.
If Production can make Truman accept all this, and also that he had a psychotic break triggered by seeing his dad, then they can explain everything—they can bring Truman back into the reality that Production intends for him. Once again, they’ve jerked the poor slave’s emotions around to ‘reset’ him.
This time, they fail. The question is why? What has allowed Truman to defy the world? But I get ahead of myself.
Moral philosophy, and the management of reality
The whole business of force-wedging Truman’s dad back into the narrative, plus the effort to convince Truman that he is psychotic, has emotionally jerked around not just Truman, but also the fans of ‘The Truman Show’—the fans, that is, of the TV show depicted in the movie. After all, these fans are all invested in Truman; they are rooting for him. They need therapy.
Conscious of this, the haughty and reclusive Christof (Ed Harris), genius creator and director of ‘The Truman Show,’ agrees to explain himself in a rare TV interview. And voilà: here comes the philosophical climax.
“Christof, let me ask you,” inquires the fawning interviewer, “Why do you think that Truman has never come close to discovering the true nature of his world until now?”
Shrugs Christof: “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented. It’s as simple as that.”
Blam!
Moments later, Truman’s exiled love Lauren/Sylvia calls in to the show to denounce Christof as a “liar and manipulator.” He is, she accuses, Truman’s warden, his enslaver. Since these accusations are being transmitted to millions of people, the show’s host offers to hang up. No—Christof wants to reply. Cut to Sylvia’s TV, where Christof, looking straight at the camera, mocks her for getting 15 minutes of fame by flirting with his star and for her “politics.” Cut to Sylvia, and we see a ‘Free-Truman’ poster on the wall behind her.
Now Christof delivers the body blow: Truman is complicit!
“If he was absolutely determined to discover the truth, there is no way we could prevent him. What distresses you, really, is that, ultimately, Truman prefers his cell.”
Christof is wrong about Truman, of course. But the film, I think, is here really speaking to us—challenging us. And it makes this claim: the human psyche will always, in the end, actively chase away radical doubts concerning fundamental reality.
Whatever world is presented to us, we will accept.
No! As viewer, I rebel. I won’t take that from the bad guy—from this pedantic mad artist who enslaves poor Truman! After all, I’ve been defying his claim all along. I’ve been cheering Truman—as his TV fans in the movie also do—to go ahead and test reality. I want him to break free.
Yes, but it is here, precisely because we do cheer Truman until he does break free, until he risks his very life to break free, that the film, in a deliciously subtle implicature, makes what is (for me) its most interesting point. Because, think about it: we wouldn’t cheer Truman’s behaviors in anyone else.
Only Truman gets our cheers.
What makes him special? Nothing. We are special. We are omniscient, like the filmmaker, and hence we know that Truman is in fact a slave. So we cheer his struggle to break free.
By stark contrast, in our daily lives, where we are not omniscient, we don’t cheer anyone behaving like this. If we encounter someone who, à la Truman, goes about conducting radical tests of reality, what we do is this: we call a doctor. I’ve written about that here:
Christof is right: accepting reality is coercive; testing it is taboo. And we dare not challenge this taboo.
Why don’t we dare test reality?
I’ll tell you why.
Whoever adopts the radical reality-testing stance has decided to stand on the apex of a mental pyramid, ready to slide down one of its four sheer faces.
Each of these four faces represents one interpretive possibility for anyone who decides to conduct a radical test of reality.
On Face 1, you conclude (Truman-like) that you’ve been, all this time, the victim of a gigantic lie—the whole world’s sucker. This will make you feel like a complete idiot. And it will scare you witless. That’ll feel just awful. Who wants to go there?
On Face 2, at least, you can feel superior, because here you conclude that everybody else has also been living the same lie, but you at least have figured it out. Yes, very smart of you. Congratulations. Except now you—you alone—are on the outside looking in. They, everybody, on the other hand, are still dupes, because you haven’t even begun the work of trying to convince them—your just fresh from figuring it all out yourself. Oh boy… You can see the problem now: until recently, these people were your community and source of all pleasure and meaning; now you are cut off and alone, unable to relate. You can feel ‘superior’ in the privacy of your bedroom all you want, but as soon as you step outside you are ‘crazy’ to all of them. So long as you remain in this interpretation of reality, you won’t recover your community unless and until you can convince them that you are the sane one. How likely is that? Clearly, this interpretation will make you feel pretty awful too. You wanna go there?
On Face 3, you conclude that it is you, personally, who is insane. Paranoid, really. And all by yourself. That’s why you’ve been doubting reality, as everyone who’s been witnessing your ridiculous tests will tell you. But does it feel good to be paranoid, and therefore crazy, surrounded by sane people who pity you and wish to control you (in order to restore you to health)? No, it doesn’t. This interpretation feels awful too. So how is this option any better?
On Face 4 you are back to your familiar place: you conclude that you were wrong to doubt reality, after all. Everything is really what it seems. What a relief. And you can accept this without difficulty because, look, you are not paranoid, evidenced by the fact that you no longer question reality. This interpretation, at long last, feels pretty good, doesn’t it. What a relief. And everyone agrees with you. Why did you ever move from here?
Do you see it now?
Even if you thought you had strong evidence to doubt fundamental reality, could you really crawl up from Face 4, stand on the Archimedean point, glimpse the other three possibilities, feel the nausea, the vertigo, and then slide anywhere but down Face 4 again? No, you couldn’t.
Only Truman can.
And why? For one simple reason: If Truman can find enough evidence to slide down Face 1, he’ll clear Sylvia—she won’t be nuts. And then Truman can find love! But this powerful incentive is usually lacking. Barring a small minority, most of us find it beyond our emotional strength even to contemplate a radical test of reality, let alone carry it out.
Christof is right: “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.”
It ain’t stupidity, and it ain’t dogmatism—that vertigo we feel, when we do no more than briefly consider the idea of testing reality, that’s an adaptation.
In the small societies in which humans lived for the longest time, and which therefore selected for our psychology, anyone prone to conducting radical tests of reality was, on average, at a serious disadvantage. That’s because, in small societies where everybody knows everybody and everything, the probability of finding yourself in a thoroughly managed reality is very close to zero, so that anyone conducting radical tests of reality will be 1) provoking anger, ridicule, or both, thus risking ostracism or worse; and 2) wasting energy on unproductive behaviors. Natural selection therefore favored that we accept the consensus reality presented to us, as Christof says.
But this stance, once so advantageous, may be a problem now. Because we no longer live in very small societies (you knew this was coming). In our modern—largely anonymous—societies of millions of people, modern mass media and academia have the power to construct our ‘consensus reality.’ And a few rare humans do exist who can afford the requisite investments to clandestinely manage Big Media and academia whilst preserving the surface appearance of free markets for knowledge and information.
But have the bosses been doing this? Do we actually live in a managed reality?
ARE WE TRUMAN?
This is a question worth asking. Because, as it happens, we have good historical documentation to establish that some such rare humans with uncommon resources have invested large amounts of money to investigate how to do precisely that—manage our reality—with the help of a clandestinely controlled media and academia. At MOR, we have articles on that.
And large-scale clandestine operations to corrupt media and academia have in fact been documented. We have articles on that too.
And yet, despite all this documented history, including some political scandals that emerged from it, Westerners have not surfaced as a society—as a civilization—from the managed mirage. I conclude, therefore, that we are oppressed not only from without, but also from within, from within our own stubborn minds, from our own bias against conducting radical tests of reality.
This bias cooperates nicely with the heavy-handed media and academic campaign to label all skepticism of officialdom ‘conspiracy theory,’ and to equate all such ‘conspiracy theory’ with nonsense.
We need to stop cooperating with all this, and recover the powers of skepticism that are part of our natural endowment as rational beings.
We need to stop making things so easy for the bosses.
But can we test reality?
We can. And we don’t have to look crazy while doing it.
There are ways to test the official narratives imposed by media and established academia without engaging in behaviors that others will consider ‘crazy.’ And that’s important, because appearing crazy to others never helps. The Truman Show has a lesson about that too. Truman conducts two types of tests:
he does something so unexpected that it flirts with insanity, in order to see if the con artists can keep up with him; and
he does something entirely normal that, under the official narrative, he should be able to do, but which, if he cannot, will expose the official narrative as a phony.
In the second category are such things as walking into a random building on the spur of the moment. People walk into buildings—this is entirely normal. But if the building is a fake building, just a prop, walking suddenly into it when Production is not expecting Truman may allow Truman to expose the con.
Another example is Truman’s attempt to leave Seahaven. If this is a real island, leaving it is normal. But if the entire island is a prop, trying to leave it will force Production to behave in a crazy manner to keep Truman in Seahaven, thus revealing the con.
The tests we need are normal behaviors that force the bosses to act crazy.
I speak of doing entirely normal things; things that—by all rights—should be permitted, according to the very premises of the ‘consensus reality’ imposed by Big Media and established academia. So the test is to see if we really can do them.
As an example, I offer you the story of one such test that I conducted myself:
So let’s do this.
Let us defend the West, first, by finding ways to conduct other tests, on other aspects of official reality, large and small. Because to secure a good, democratic, humanitarian future for the West requires, first, that we can describe its true structure. We need to know who and what we are fighting.
Bringing you to this reflection was the entire purpose of this essay. So think on it.
And watch the movie.
We have been through one global psy-ops with the scamdemic. For the first six months of it I was convinced it was real but I had the good fortune to espy an earnest warning by Dr. Sucharit Bakhdi, who may have saved my life by revealing the 100% mortality rate of animal subjects of mRNA testing. Then, after sux months, I noticed the implausible incongruities: 1) attending church and family gatherings, working out at the gym BAD! -but bars, strip-clubs, and crowded street riots GOOD! 2) Supposed “superspreader event” - which BLM riots would have been had the C19 virulence and lethality been real - failed to increase infections; 3) the complete subversion of health guidelines: stay isolated, don’t go out in the sunlight; seniors with heart issues being told NOT to take their mini-aspirins, and for me the final kicker was 4) the amounts of psychological bullying and authoritarian pressures by media, by academia and by governments upon all of us to surrender and take the vax! Since my teen years spent largely in an oppressive British boarding school system with suffocating conformism I have always pushed back against psychological coercion. I refused to even consider the Swine Flu vaccine being pushed by the Ford administration and I wasn’t going to let them bully me now into accepting a questionable and likely dangerous medication. But around me my family, friends and colleagues were all trying to badger me into taking the vax. It all did seem like my own Truman show except there were anchors of reality out there: the Bregginses, Dr. McCulloch, Dr. Bakhdi and others who enabled me to free myself from the psy-op. And now with the “drone invasion” I see another psy-ops trying to panic us into empowering the Deep State once again.
Looking forward to part three of your series explaining the globalist West’s designs upon (or against) Israel.
whoa, we must be getting the same youtube recommendations. I noticed yesterday, before seeing this article, that youtube has Truman Show for free, and I watched it last night and today.
Indeed, I do think that a lot, if not all, white house level politics is a scripted and managed reality (but I very much prefer the Trump reign over a democrat reign). Vince McMahon's wife is a high level official--and no msm is really making any big deal over it. Mind you, I figure she's as qualified as anyone--but is it not odd that the WWE is now merging with politics??
Pretty much everything celebrated in the msm, I've become quite skeptical of. Eg. An online source made an interesting point that even long before this Luigi guy was caught, the cops let everyone know that he had written 'deny','defund' and something else on the casings. Normally, cops NEVER release this info when they are looking for a killer. This is a closely guarded type of information, and can help identify future killings by that same person.
But what if it is all a managed (Truman-type) reality? And why is the MSM presenting him like a resurrected Bill Ayers (as Jared Israel warned would happen)?? And why isn't the American 'left' clamoring for gun control in response, as typically responds?? These are things to ponder. It's at the point where I tend to tune out a lot of national level news, since I think much of it is an attempt to manage my brain, induce irrational fears.