Remember What's Real

As Self-Government Turns on Itself

There comes a point when the theoretical becomes visceral. When the abstract danger materializes into concrete action. When the warnings that seemed perhaps overwrought suddenly appear prescient. We are witnessing such a moment.

The Department of Homeland Security has begun polygraphing its own employees, hunting for those who dare speak truth about operations that may violate law, conscience, or basic human dignity. The machinery of state turns inward, seeking to root out not espionage or corruption, but the mere act of revealing uncomfortable facts to the public.

Let us name what this is: the instrumentalization of government against itself. The weaponization of secrecy not to protect national security, but to shield political actors from accountability. The criminalization of conscience.

And let us see it clearly for what it represents: a threshold crossed. A boundary transgressed. A normalization of practices once reserved for authoritarian regimes.

You feel it, don't you? That subtle shift in gravity. That almost imperceptible tilt toward something darker. The moment of weightlessness—that suspended time when we could pretend this was all normal political oscillation—has passed. The plunge has begun.

This isn't merely partisan rhetoric. This is about the nature of reality and how power seeks to control it. The regime demands loyalty to its narratives over loyalty to truth. It requires complicity in its fictions. It needs you to forget what's real.

Remember: Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day.

These aren't just mathematical facts; they are anchors in reality. They remind us that some truths exist independent of power's ability to manipulate them. That the territory has features that resist even the most determined efforts to redraw the map.

When governments begin hunting for “traitors” within their ranks, when they deploy machines to measure the physiological manifestations of conscience, when they criminalize the revelation of their own actions—this is precisely when we must hold tightest to what's real. Not as a political stance, but as an existential one.

The landscape of your consciousness—your perception, your memory, your capacity to recognize patterns of meaning—is now itself contested territory. Power wishes to reshape it, to determine what you perceive as significant, what you remember as important, what you understand as true.

This is where the battle for meaning unfolds. Not in abstract debates about policy, but in the concrete question of whether you will surrender your own capacity to make meaning to those who demand your compliance with their narrative.

The polygraph represents something profound: the attempt to mechanize the detection of inner dissent. To create a technology of conscience-hunting. It symbolizes the regime's fundamental problem—that human consciousness remains stubbornly resistant to total control, that the inner landscape cannot be fully colonized by external power.

And herein lies both danger and hope.

The danger is clear: as the gap between official narrative and lived reality widens, the machinery of enforcement must become more intrusive, more punitive, more totalizing in its approach. The polygraph today. What tomorrow?

But the hope is equally present: that same gap—between what power claims and what people experience—is the space where new meaning emerges. Where revelation becomes possible. Where the subtle resistance of simply seeing clearly becomes revolutionary.

This is why they hunt the leakers with such determination. Not merely because operational details were revealed, but because the very act of revealing represents the human capacity power fears most: the ability to stand apart, to see clearly, to choose conscience over compliance.

The leakers—whether you agree with their specific actions or not—demonstrate that the inner landscape remains, finally, beyond control. That human beings, when confronted with violations of their deepest values, may still choose to act. That meaning cannot be dictated, only negotiated.

And so we arrive at the simplest yet most necessary instruction for the times ahead:

Remember what's real.

Not what they tell you is real. Not what is convenient to believe is real. Not what you wish were real.

Remember the weight of tangible things. The solidity of facts that don't yield to narrative pressure. The persistence of human dignity even when denied. The reality of suffering even when hidden. The truth of injustice even when justified.

Remember that your ability to perceive, to judge, to evaluate—your consciousness itself—is not something granted by authorities but inherent to your humanity. It cannot be legitimately surrendered to any power, any institution, any leader.

Remember that meaning emerges from the space between consciousness and reality, from the creative tension between what we perceive and what we create together. And that this process, this emergence, is precisely what authoritarian systems seek to control—because it remains the one thing they cannot fully master.

The gravity has shifted. The plunge has begun. But even in free fall, orientation remains possible. Even in darkness, clarity can be maintained.

The door to authoritarian control has been pushed further open with each transgression, each normalization of the previously unthinkable. The weight of this reality begins to exert its pull. We are no longer suspended in that moment of political weightlessness where we could imagine this was all temporary, all within normal boundaries.

We are falling now. The question is not whether we will hit bottom, but how we will orient ourselves during the descent.

In these moments of crisis, of shifting gravity, of beginning plunge, the most revolutionary act may be the simplest: to see clearly. To speak plainly. To remember what's real.

This is how freedom persists in unfree times. Not through grand gestures alone, but through the daily, hourly practice of refusing to surrender your own perception. The quiet insistence that reality matters. That truth, however contested, however complex, remains worth fighting for.

Remember what's real. For in remembering, you keep alive the possibility of meaning. And in meaning, the possibility of freedom.