How We’re Being Engineered: Demystifying Modern Control
I’m speaking to you here, human to human, as equals.
I offer what I’ve observed and found true from my particular perspective. I’ve found these conclusions to be substantiated, albeit, in fragments across generally disparate areas of study.
I believe you’re capable of reason, that your own perspectives, beliefs, and feelings are valid and based on your own lived experience.
I believe you deserve my transparency and honesty without any hidden agenda (I wrote this piece on exactly why I do what I do:
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You’ve likely felt pieces of it in your own life: that nagging exhaustion, the pull to consume or comply, the sense that something’s off but hard to name.
I’m not here to scare you or sell you a fix. I’m here because the patterns are real, observable, and human-made. I trust you to handle this information, to sit with it, question it, and integrate what resonates. If it raises questions or you want to dig deeper, ask—I’m listening.
The Material Harvest: Your Emotions as Fuel for Their Empires
Let’s start with the core mechanism: what some conspiracy circles call “energy harvesting” isn’t mystical “loosh” sucked by demons or aliens (though it maybe, we have no way to prove this either way at present). We don’t need metaphysics to describe this: however, it is literal material exploitation under capitalism. People in power systematically trigger your emotions—fear, desire, shame, rage—and convert them into behaviors that generate wealth, which they use to build infrastructure that extracts even more from you. This is observable and measurable; it’s how the system runs, and it’s been evolving for centuries.
Take fear as an example. Anxiety about status, aging, or missing out is specifically amplified through ads, social media, and economic pressures. This drives you to buy luxury goods, beauty products, or endless self-help programs. That emotional state doesn’t vanish; it converts directly into factories producing more goods, corporate towers housing the decision-makers, and billionaire yachts symbolizing the upward flow of wealth. Consider the military-industrial complex: Fear of enemies justifies defense spending, turning public panic into weapons factories, bases, and surveillance systems that, in turn, generate more fear to sustain the cycle.
Desire operates similarly. The hope for a better life or your children’s future keeps you working overtime, accepting exploitative conditions, and staying plugged into the grind. This emotional drive builds their products, infrastructure, and profits—think of the gig economy where aspiration masks precarity, funneling your energy into apps and warehouses owned by a few. Shame about feeling inadequate or broken? It’s channeled into seeking professional help or pharmaceutical fixes, expanding medical buildings, research labs, and institutional growth. Your despair becomes their headquarters.
Rage at injustice completes the picture. Instead of collective change, it’s often isolated into outbursts, pathologized as mental illness, or diverted into “retail therapy.” This funds prisons, psych wards, and control systems that contain dissent while profiting from it. The result is a self-perpetuating loop: Emotions generate behaviors, behaviors generate wealth, wealth builds tools for more extraction.
This loop is documented and observable across scales. As of early 2025, global debt reached a record $324 trillion, much of it from fear-driven household spending and consumption patterns. The behavioral health industry is valued at around $185 billion globally in 2025, profiting by pathologizing natural responses to this systemic grind. Historically, it echoes the shift from feudalism to industrial capitalism—peasants’ desperation built mills and railways in the 18th-19th centuries; today’s economic precarity builds data centers and AI infrastructure. Globally, it manifests in sweatshops in the Global South funding tech campuses in the North, with migrant workers’ hope exploited to assemble devices that amplify the same desires back home.
No supernatural forces are needed: just humans choosing extraction for profit or relief from their own inner voids. Narcissists and sadists at the top? Their “pleasure” in domination might stem from genuine dopamine hits from control or a misattributed sense of relief from personal emptiness—but either way, it leads to escalation, addiction-like tolerance, and endless accumulation. They keep going because no amount satisfies the underlying drive, and the system rewards it.
Mystifying this as metaphysics serves power in clever ways. It makes the pattern unfalsifiable (“prove demons don’t exist”), removes human accountability (“not their fault if possessed”), and diverts energy to individual spiritual fixes like meditation or crystals instead of collective action. The metaphysical version comforts by externalizing evil—it’s easier to fight invisible archons than face that your neighbors, or even you under certain conditions, could participate in this. The truth? It’s humans all the way down—observable through economic data, corporate reports, and daily experiences. It’s stoppable if we recognize and interrupt the conversions, but that requires facing the material reality without escape.
The Engineered Breakdown: How Interventions Dysregulate Your Brain
Zoom in on the tools enabling this harvest: Modern life is laced with interventions that target seven key neurobiological systems, creating widespread dissociation, helplessness, and compliance. This mirrors complex PTSD at a population scale—chronic stress, anhedonia, and disconnection as the new normal, making extraction easier.
Food additives lay the foundation. High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and refined sugars hijack your dopamine system, creating addiction-like tolerance and withdrawal that makes natural rewards feel flat (Avena et al., 2008). MSG, hidden in processed foods as “natural flavoring,” causes NMDA excitotoxicity, overstimulating brain cells and damaging regions for memory and appetite (Olney, 1969; Onaolapo et al., 2016). Artificial sweeteners like aspartame confuse your reward pathways—no calories arrive after the sweet taste, disrupting dopamine learning and gut bacteria that produce neurotransmitters (Yang, 2010; Suez et al., 2014). Food dyes (e.g., Red 40) link to hyperactivity and dopamine/norepinephrine imbalances (McCann et al., 2007), while preservatives like sodium benzoate add behavioral disruptions.
Environmental pollutants amplify the damage. Fluoride in water, promoted for teeth, reduces IQ by about 7 points on average and calcifies the pineal gland, affecting sleep, melatonin, and potentially deeper consciousness states (Grandjean & Landrigan, 2014; Luke, 2001). Lead, still lingering in pipes and soil, permanently damages dopaminergic neurons and blocks NMDA receptors, impairing motivation and learning. Microplastics, now found in blood, lungs, and brains (2022-2024 studies), disrupt hormones and cause neuroinflammation. Glyphosate (in 80% of US food) acts as an antibiotic on gut microbes, depleting precursors for serotonin, dopamine, and other neurotransmitters (Samsel & Seneff, 2013). Aluminum from cookware and vaccines accumulates in brain tissue, linked to cognitive decline.
Pharmaceutical “solutions” often worsen the dysregulation. SSRIs blunt emotional range—flattening both highs and lows—while creating dependency and withdrawal that can last years (Goodwin et al., 2017; Andresen et al., 2011). ADHD stimulants like amphetamines boost dopamine short-term but lead to receptor downregulation and tolerance, impairing natural motivation. Benzodiazepines enhance GABA for calm but downregulate receptors, making natural anxiety regulation harder and withdrawal potentially life-threatening.
Technology and media seal the deal. Social media algorithms exploit variable reward schedules—the same as slot machines—for compulsive checking and dopamine hijacking (Skinner-inspired). They prioritize outrage and fear for engagement, activating kappa opioid receptors (KOR) for chronic dysphoria. News media’s “if it bleeds, it leads” creates distorted threat perception, inducing learned helplessness. Screens’ blue light suppresses melatonin, disrupting sleep and all systems’ recovery (Gooley et al., 2011).
The daily cycle is relentless: Morning processed breakfast (sugar crash + MSG) plus phone checks (social stress) leads to afternoon attention fragmentation, evening exhaustion from work/news, and poor sleep. Over time, this cascades—synergistic effects where one hit (e.g., gut dysbiosis) worsens another (e.g., neurotransmitter depletion).
Outcomes match the evidence: More than 1 billion people live with mental health conditions globally in 2025. 27 In the US, depression rates for adults under 30 have doubled from 13% in 2017 to 26.7% in 2025. 18 Globally, the prevalence of depressive disorders increased by over 50% from 1990 to 2021. 56 US adult obesity hovers around 40% as of 2023, up from about 13% in the 1960s, with recent trends showing slight stabilization. 42 36 Attention spans have reportedly declined to around 8.25 seconds on average in 2025 (down from 12 seconds in 2000), though screen-focused tasks average 47 seconds. 47 Political apathy and voter turnout decline amid this, as helplessness sets in.
Is it a grand conspiracy?
Partly emergent from profit motives (trillion-dollar industries in food, pharma, tech), partly deliberate through hidden data, addictive designs, and regulatory capture. The effect is the same: A compliant, dissociated population easier to harvest, with symptoms normalized as individual failings.
The Binding Force: Psyops as Modern Magic
What glues this extraction together? “Magic”—not supernatural woo, but advanced psychological operations hacking your beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors via symbols, rituals, narratives, and authority. The metaphysics? It doesn’t matter if gods, spirits, or energies are “real.” What counts is if you buy in—or act as if you do—creating self-fulfilling realities through cognitive and social mechanisms.
Historically, medieval magic was proto-psychology without the modern labels. Magicians used plants to alter consciousness (e.g., hallucinogens for visions), symbols to trigger emotional associations (e.g., runes for fear or protection), and rituals to build expectation and placebo effects. They timed interventions for maximum receptivity, donned costumes for authority, and understood group dynamics for collective buy-in. This was pattern recognition of human responses, predating formal studies in neurochemistry, cognitive biases, and behavioral conditioning.
Today, it’s rebranded and scaled. Marketing deploys color psychology (red for urgency, blue for trust) and scarcity biases (“limited time!”) to drive impulses. Unboxing videos are rituals bonding you to brands; celebrity endorsements leverage authority for deference. Medicine’s white coats symbolize unassailable expertise, diagnoses act as naming ceremonies reshaping your identity (no proven chemical imbalance required for the label to stick), and prescriptions are talismans carrying belief. Law uses robes and gavels as power symbols, Latin phrases as esoteric language, and oaths as binding rituals in sacred courtroom spaces. Finance turns worthless paper or digits into value through collective faith—money’s power is symbolic, backed by legal enforcement; stock markets materialize prophecies from earnings calls.
Examples abound: Corporate earnings rituals (quarterly reveals, prepared incantations, Q&A divinations) shift billions because participants believe they matter, turning abstract numbers into real wealth transfers. Nation-states are imagined communities: Flags as emotional anchors, borders as arbitrary lines enforced by violence, passports as permission talismans. Psychiatric diagnoses function as spells: The clinical interview (confession), DSM as sacred text, pronouncement as naming—accepting it alters your behavior to match.
It works through proven mechanics: Belief shapes perception (placebo/nocebo effects make expected outcomes real); shared belief materializes social structures (e.g., money’s value or nations’ existence through coordinated action); symbols bypass rational processing (a badge triggers obedience); rituals create altered states (repetition induces trance, synchronization builds bonding); authority provides permission (experts remove your doubt). None requires literal metaphysics—just human psychology at play.
The dark side ties directly to extraction: Despair is farmed as a resource, labeled a personal defect rather than a systemic response, keeping you adjusting to intolerable conditions. Institutions betray by mystifying control as care—protocols enforce compliance under the guise of help. Why wrap it in metaphysics or legitimacy? It hides the mechanisms (questioning “medical fact” is harder than social control), prevents counter-magic (unfalsifiable claims deflect scrutiny), removes accountability (“the market decides” absolves humans), and bypasses reason (symbols trigger precognitive obedience).
Counter it materially: Name the spells (“this diagnosis is control, not care”), question authority (“who benefits?”), refuse symbols and rituals (don’t accept labels or follow protocols blindly), and choose counter-beliefs (“I’m not defective; the system is”). Seeing “inevitability” as a master lie—that this arrangement is natural or unchangeable—reveals it as one set of human choices we could rearrange.
Why This Matters—and Why I Trust You With It
Far from abstract theory, this is THE machinery running your daily grind, converting your humanity—your fears, hopes, and pains—into their assets, infrastructure, and control. No external evil or supernatural forces to blame; just humans making choices that scale harm for profit or personal relief. You’ve likely felt the edges in your exhaustion or disconnection; now you see the whole interconnected system.
I’ve laid it out matter-of-factly because I respect your capacity to absorb it without crumbling, dismissing, or needing it softened. The truth stands on its own—documented in economic reports, scientific studies, and lived patterns. It doesn’t need selling or mystical framing; it just needs seeing to lose its hold. If this sparks questions, curiosities, doubts, or even anger—about specifics like a citation, broader implications, or how it plays out in your life—I’m here. Ask, and we’ll unpack more together. The recognition alone shifts things; what you do with it is yours.
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