The Lie of Powerlessness
You Were Never Broken. The System Was Built That Way.
Ever get that feeling?
The one that hits you on a Tuesday night when you’re standing in your kitchen. The TV is shouting about some new outrage, your phone is buzzing with alerts, and you’re looking at a pile of bills you thought you’d already paid. It’s a quiet, grinding exhaustion. A sense that you’re running faster and faster just to stay in the same place.
You’re not imagining it. And you’re not alone.
That feeling isn’t a bug in the system; it’s the primary feature. You have been placed inside an invisible prison, one designed to keep you tired, angry, and distracted. It’s not a prison of steel bars, but of psychological warfare, and it has three walls.
The first wall is Economic Terror.
It’s the constant, low-grade anxiety of living paycheck to paycheck. It’s the reason your rent goes up but your wages don’t. It’s the fear that one medical bill or car repair could send your life spiraling.
This isn't a result of a broken economy; it’s the result of a looted economy. While you work, an alliance of government and financial giants—the Corporate State—has been systematically converting real, productive things like homes and infrastructure into financial assets for themselves.
They make the rules, they manage the bailouts, and they leave you with the bill. The anxiety you feel is the pressure they apply to keep you compliant.
The second wall is The Great Distraction.
This is the daily spectacle of rage they feed you through your screen. They have built a magnificent, two-headed outrage machine, and it runs 24/7.
On one channel, heroes are fighting a secret war against evil socialists. On the other, heroes are fighting a secret war against evil fascists. They hand you a jersey, Red or Blue, and tell you the person on the other team is the source of all your problems. They need you fighting your neighbor so you never look up and see whose boot is on both of your necks. It’s a masterclass in psychological warfare, turning your righteous anger into a weapon against yourself.
The third wall is Learned Helplessness.
This is the final turn of the key. It’s the cynical voice in your head that says, “This is just how things are. The system is too big, the players too powerful. There’s nothing anyone can do.” This despair is the highest goal of the entire operation. If they can convince you that resistance is futile, they win without another shot being fired.
But here is the secret:
The entire prison is built on a lie. And the moment you see the lie, its walls begin to dissolve.
The lie is that you are powerless. The lie is that your neighbor is your enemy. The truth is that the anger and frustration you feel are not only justified; they are the fuel. But as my ally Shane Yirak reminds us, the enemy wants to enrage us to the point of stupidity. They are counting on us to burn ourselves out in their manufactured horizontal war.
The real path forward is to take that anger and use it to be smarter. To refuse to play their game.
This isn’t about finding some magical, sentimental hope. It’s about building what my friend Lori Corbet Mann calls “Anchored Hope”—something you build deliberately, with others, even when you don’t feel it. It is a disciplined, active orientation toward the values you refuse to abandon: fairness, safety, and a future where your work builds value for your family and your community, not for a distant asset manager.
It starts with a simple, personal choice.
Turn off the outrage machine. Talk to your neighbor about the price of groceries, not the latest cable news drama. Look at your own community and ask: who owns the new apartment complex that just priced everyone out? Who benefits when our hospital closes? Start seeing the vertical conflict, not the horizontal one.
They built you a prison. But they made a fatal error. They built it inside your mind, and you are the only one with the key. The first step to freedom is realizing you’re in a cage. The second is realizing it has no lock.
JOIN THE REBELLION
https://buymeacoffee.com/commonsenserebel
Enrage us to the point of stupidity is the most relevant line. That’s what MAGA has done to their followers. Not one that I’ve encountered, has been able to support their reasoning behind their beliefs. Hence: Stupidity.
This is an absolutely fantastic article that many of us can relate to. Thank you, Ethan! ♥️🙏🤗