The Truman Show, Facebook, The Social Network: life under a dome

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

“Huxley’s Brave New World trumps Orwell’s 1984, because it posits pleasure as the ultimate control device. Genetic and pharmaceutical innovators will engineer brains along a narrow bounded channel of satisfaction. Brave New World is a countrified suburb of the mind. Accept all the feedback signals and you’ll have your miniature package of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. You’ll have the outcome, as if you’d done something to gain it, when in fact no effort was necessary. Skip right to the end of the story. You’re already under the dome. There was no story.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

The 1998 film, The Truman Show, presents a character, Truman Burbank, who unknowingly stars in a 30-year soap opera/reality show about his own life, under a giant dome whose boundaries are hidden from him. The show is broadcast to a global audience of billions.

The fake town Truman lives in, Seahaven, is populated by a massive number of actors playing real people. Seahaven’s creator, director, executive producer, and god, Christof (“Cue the sun”), is convinced that the deception is benign, because Truman’s life in the synthetic town is far happier than anything he could find in the real world, a “sick place.”

As Truman begins to suspect he’s existing in an elaborate set, a movement arises, among the show’s audience, who avidly root for him to escape. That becomes the hook. That becomes the primary item of suspense and tension.

Watching the film, we see the false reality and the viewing audience hoping for Truman’s liberation.

That viewing audience, of course, is vicariously wishing and hoping for their own rescue, because they, too, are trapped. Their real world is very much like Truman’s. But, when all is said and done, audience is audience. For isolated moments, the adrenaline pumps, the highs are felt, and then “normality” sets in.

Truman escaped; wonderful; change the channel; find another program.

Now, if we had a Truman Show II, where Truman lives in the real world and talks with people and shares his 30-year illusion…we might find some truly interesting material.

The escapee reflects on his velvet-lined trap. The escapee recalls how it felt to discover, bit by bit, the trap. The escapee meets the creator (Christof). The escapee sits down with a few loyal viewers, who followed his artificial existence for the full 30 years, and they explain their fascination with the Show. They see Truman now, beyond the character they rooted for inside their television sets.

“You know, Truman, I don’t find you as interesting in the flesh.”

“Really? Why not?”

“Because the Show allowed me to look in on a whole different world.”

“But now?”

“You’re here, in my world. Now we’re both trapped in something we can’t see clearly. We’re inside it.”

Cue Facebook. It was inevitable that audience would want to become actor, and Facebook was invented, with CIA-connected money, in order to make that happen (while also providing an ideal voluntary framework of users to accommodate the voracious appetite of the Surveillance State).

Facebook is a safety valve: “Here, people, now you can star in your own media creation. Reveal mundane details about your lives and share them with other FB stars.”

The award-winning 2010 film, The Social Network, is a fictional representation of Facebook’s creation. At the heart of the film is a legal/money struggle over FB’s ownership. In other words, the film is a melodrama about who profits from a meaningless business that allows audience to become small-time actor.

Facebook is The Truman Show happening on the Internet. “Celebrate your lives under the dome by connecting with other inhabitants—picnic photos, vacation videos, all the acceptable details of a fabricated existence…and you can demean a few personal and petty enemies along the way.”

The Surveillance State, of which FB is a functioning piece, is The Truman Show control room, where directors and technicians deploy cameras to watch all the Truman Burbanks live out their lives.

In both cases, the promise is the same: toe the line and you’ll be happy and protected.

These days, we have another dome—the Capitol, under which the 535 members of the US Congress do their work. Several of these elected officials are protesting the secrecy surrounding the negotiations and content of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty.

Yet not one of them is willing, so far, to step forward and reveal, in complete detail, what he knows about the treaty, which will create a form of international governance over the United States.

These 535 legislators are also living in a synthetic Seahaven. They’re Truman Burbanks, minus the desire to escape. They would doom the population of America to a future of mega-corporate oligarchy, rather than risk spending a night in jail for breaking silence.

Their Truman Show is playing 24/7. The viewing audience isn’t rooting hard for them to break protocol on the TPP, because the audience holds little hope for such an outcome, based on past performance.

The public approval rating for Congress is hovering at about 19%. You can’t get sink lower than that. But their Truman Show goes on. Ratings in that venue don’t matter.

Viewership and readership for large mainstream news outlets have been on a fade for years. That Truman Show endures because the media companies are actively constructing and maintaining the synthetic Seahaven. Without them, it would disappear.

Christof: “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented, it’s as simple as that…If his [Truman’s] was more than just a vague ambition, if he [Truman] was absolutely determined to discover the truth, there’s no way we could prevent him…I’ve given Truman the chance to lead a normal life…Seahaven is the way the world should be…I am the creator…of a television show.”

As Truman is finally about to open the exit-door hidden in the fake sky of Seahaven, Cristof contacts him. His voice descends on Truman from that sky:

Truman: [to an unseen Christof] “Who are you?”

Christof: [voice-over] “I am The Creator – of a television show that gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions.”

Truman: “Then who am I?”

Christof: “You’re the star.”

Truman: “Was nothing real?”

Christof: “You were real. That’s what made you so good to watch.”

Of course; Truman was the only one, in all of Seahaven, who believed the town and the set and the actors were real. Until his moment of discovery, until he now exits.

What will therefore happen to Seahaven?

The show’s producers will have to turn off the lights. It’s of no use anymore.

It’s been exposed.

So it is with the matrix of consensus. Each person who sees through it can have an effect, beyond what is ordinarily supposed.

In the late 1980s, I embarked on an extensive research project with a brilliant hypnotherapist, Jack True. One of Jack’ strategies with patients involved having them invent “vignettes, dreams, alternate realities.”

Jack wrote: “These aren’t merely stories. Each vignette has its own space and time, and if the patient becomes acutely aware of it, he will then deal with this space and time, where we spend our days, in a different way. He’ll cease to feel trapped. He’ll begin thinking in a new fashion. He’ll spontaneously come upon ideas that otherwise would never have arisen. He’ll know more about freedom than he ever did before.”

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 OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.