How Did We Get Into This Mess?

To understand the matrix we’re caught in, we have to understand how it was created in the first place. Join us on our journey down the rabbit hole and out of the matrix by signing up for our newsletter and receive The How Did We Get Here? Reading List!By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy, Cookies Policy, and Terms & Conditions

About

Gadfly Academy
The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates referred to himself as a "gadfly" because he asked difficult questions that often made people uncomfortable.Gadfly Academy is a place to ask the right questions, hard questions, and especially to discover those questions that most people have never even considered.Manifesto
To learn more about Gadfly Academy's critical perspective, please read our manifesto.Who am I?
My name is Herman Andrew Middleton (Ph.D., Thessalonica), please join us for a journey down the rabbit hole (by signing up for our newsletter)!

Manifesto

It is our conviction that:
- Our modern society is involved in an ongoing mass social experiment, which we have not opted into
- All humans were born for a similar purpose, with similar needs, and a similar sense of reality
- However, this basic commonality has been undermined and overshadowed by cultural factors
- These cultural factors have been greatly aided by technology
- While technology is not inherently bad, it is not neutral. Without understanding how, each generation has become increasingly enslaved to the technologies that have been created, a process that has sped up dramatically over the past 50 years.
- This enslavement increasingly undermines our ability to discern and fulfill our innate purpose, our ability to understand reality, our most basic connection with other people, to address our basic non-material needs, and greatly diminishes our natural intuition.
- As humans become increasingly enslaved, we become increasingly discontent, unhappy, and confused. Ironically, the technologies that we believe will liberate us and satisfy our desires are the very technologies that make understanding and achieving actual joy and fulfillment increasingly difficult.
- For this reason, the beginning of the path to joy and fulfillment lies in liberating ourselves from falsehood and from the technologies that empower them. And the first step in this process is to discover and understand what these technologies are and to find ways to liberate ourselves from them.
- In this process, the metaphor of the matrix is useful to help understand our condition. We were all born into a culture and raised to assume that certain things are “true” and other things are “false.” It is our job, firstly: to recognize what these assumptions are, secondly: to question them and, thirdly: if they are found to be false, to find ways to mitigate their influence over our life. It should be noted, too, that there is not only one matrix, there are many matrices, and they become increasingly apparent as one comes to a deeper understanding of reality.
- It is the goal of Gadfly Academy to explore the ways in which humanity has become enslaved, and to discover ways to liberate ourselves from these chains

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