I used to see progress as real enough to trip over. A plow, a steam engine, a child who lived to see twenty. Real things, built by people who saved before they spent and measured twice before they cut once.
Turns out that’s not whole story. “Progress”, for several decades now, has been a sleight-of-hand, and most of us have been clapping for the magician while he picked our pockets.
Imagine a pizza. Let’s say every American worker is handed a Supreme pizza once a month as part of the job. The actual cost is $24. But they only take $4 out of your pay stub because your employer is subsidized by dot.gov to keep you gruntled. You have no idea what the pie really costs, so you pile on pineapple and triple cheese, because why not? It’s free!
The pizzeria loves the arrangement. The chef pulls down $26 mill a year, but your take-home pay hasn’t moved since flip phones.
That’s the government model of health insurance in one greasy metaphor. When the enhanced subsidies expire (at the end of 2025) that $4 pie jumps to real cost. No more borrowed crust. You paid for that cheap pizza in a hundred ways over time, by the way. Overpaid. Seriously overpaid. Now the beer is warm.
In a related coup, the finance wizards threw the concept of “growth” into an embassy woodchipper and replaced it with “GDP.” Gross Domestic Product. A statistic so deep-state friendly that it counts bombing a bridge and then rebuilding it as a buy one/get one bonanza. Two separate economic miracles.
Finance, once the humble butler who carried trays at the party, wanted a more important cummerbund. So it cut a piano wire, strangled the master, and now throws its own parties. Parties where the guest of honor is inflated share prices, typically for companies that haven’t made anything useful since the Macarena. And untold wealth for those who serve the borg.
Progress used to mean sanitation, electricity, and kids who didn’t die of whooping cough. Now it means the S&P 500 went up again because UnitedHealth bought back another billion dollars of its own stock. The yachts got bigger, the water in Flint stayed brown, but the number went parabolic, so fuck it, it’s a win.
The yachts, by the way, are registered in Delaware and don’t pay taxes, but they do count toward GDP when the teak is imported. Neat trick.
“Illusion is the first of all pleasures“ - Voltaire
Meanwhile, the descendants of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth were working the other side of the street. An unholy trinity of modern mythmaking: the mainstream media networks, ivory tower professors pontificating from the safe harbor of tenure, and the blue-check church ladies on social media, tsk-tsking in support of their new religion.
They spent years training half the country to insist that obvious, measurable realities were actually “alt-right” fever dreams.
Open borders? Myth. Surging crime in certain cities after 2020? Statistical artifact. Biological men dominating women’s sports? Bigoted hallucination. Inflation eating your paycheck? “Greedflation.” Kids falling years behind in reading and math? Equity in action.
The evidence is right there in the data, in the videos, in the lived experience of anyone who walks through an American city or glances at their grocery receipt, but for decades they repeated—calmly, nightly, in that soothing therapeutic baritone—that none of it was happening.
Eventually the denial became load-bearing. People’s identities fused to it. When the raw numbers or the viral video or the simple evidence of their own eyes finally collided with the narrative, the conditioned response wasn’t “maybe I was misled.” It was fury at the evidence itself. The stats are racist. The video is deep-faked. The grocery bill is Russian disinformation. “Who ya gonna believe? Me or your lyin eyes?” (the late great Richard Pryor)
Power doesn’t have a political persuasion. It has a balance sheet and a narrative. Yesterday it sold weapons of mass destruction and patriotic duty, and the day before that it was ‘super-predators’ and trading jobs for trinkets. Tomorrow it will sell some other bullshit. The wrappers change, the factory does not.
A population too broke to notice the trap and too weak to stop the trapper even if they notice. One foot shackled by fake money, one foot marching in whatever Two Minutes Hate is trending this week. When the subsidies finally snap and the premiums triple, the conditioned response will be “torch the m’fers who took my pizza away.” Because chaos has its benefits…
We were sold a mansion made of spray-painted cardboard. The government kept redecorating it with borrowed paint. The finance lords kept extending the note. The networks kept insisting the foundation was poured concrete, and anyone who rapped on the walls and heard the hollow thump was canceled for whatever the word of the day was.
Now comes the wind. Call it arithmetic, call it reality, call it karma if you truly hate yourself. The facade is flapping like a faded flag.
Some of us are aware we are standing in the rubble holding painted shards, blinking at a sky we were told was a ceiling. Most are still digging The Truman Show, where the hurricane is a Russian op.
I don’t know exactly how you rebuild after a civilization-wide acid trip ends. But I know the first step is refusing to applaud the magician anymore. Insist on brick. Insist on prices you can see. Insist on money that remembers it’s supposed to be heavy.
And when someone tries to tell you the sky is green and your lying eyes are fascist, trust the eyes.