President Lyndon Johnson recorded all his phone calls and they are still available to listen to. On these tapes we hear a solid leader become broken and desperate, pleading for reliable information about Vietnam. What we now know about the Vietnam War is that the CIA was managing it all from the shadows. The experience made him nervous and paranoid and ultimately drove him out of office. In my mind, in the letter a sitting president leaves for the incoming president, President Johnson warned President Nixon of people working in the shadows to confuse things and manipulate an outcome. But, Nixon, being a political power broker, interpreted this warning in political terms only. Nonetheless, his own experiences with such shadow work made him paranoid and drove him over the edge.

With social media and AI, this is where we are as a culture and nation. No one is able to know what is true anymore. As a result, everyone’s anxiety and paranoia is building. Left or right, red, blue, or neutral , everyone is becoming stressed due to the lack of certainty. Even the people who think they know what is going on and are getting their way. This path our nation is on ends at the same place that Presidents Johnson and Nixon ended. 

Is there a way to break this effect without violence? China’s Cultural Revolution murdered many people. The people who were purged, from my understanding, were either known or believed to be working to maintain the old system. Is this the only way to move forward into a new system? To purge our society of anyone believed to be working openly or secretly to maintain this broken and corrupt system?

I say no. It is possible to exist with this constant pressure without it doing too much damage. It requires that we develop our intentions and value them as much as outside information, as individuals and as a nation. This is also called faith. It is possible for faith to blind us from reality if we choose to hide in it, but this is where a routine of balancing is needed. Continuously measuring our intentions against available information; keeping track of how information evolves; being conscious of things being too perfect.

The number one piece of evidence that the United States is under the control of shadowy forces manipulating a discrete outcome is that there is no clear vision of what we are doing or why. There is nothing for Americans to have faith in.