The mental river that most folk live in – Find some land!
Wed 1:09 pm +00:00, 21 Oct 2026
Source: https://jupplandia.substack.com/p/its-not-the-matrix-its-the-river
Above: As a reiteration of the points being made below, this is an AI generated image.
One of the things which becomes increasingly obvious is that there is essentially very little real, practical difference between the mainstream and the extremes of Globalism, Nazism, Islam, and Communism.
Imagine the entertainment, media based, political world we all inhabit as a river.
This river is not the same as objective reality. Objective reality, if you like, is primarily everything outside the river, the land we have left behind, the banks and shores of the river.
The river is a data stream. It’s news. It’s mainstream media and alternative media. It’s everything you see on a screen, or in print, it’s journalism, it’s Ted Talks, it’s literature and art and film.
The river may sit within the overall existence of objective reality, but isn’t itself very real. It’s fiction, and interpretation, and comment on reality, rather than reality itself. It’s ALWAYS mediated. It’s ALWAYS directed.
Now imagine that this river, which comments on but isn’t reality, has become almost inescapable. There are screens everywhere. There is a 24/7 news cycle. There is universal childhood ‘education’. There is advertising. There are billboards all around you. There are public sculptures and graffiti. Most of us live in urban environments which become huge canvases that other people write on, and the writing almost always has a political intent.
Now imagine that many people have forgotten that a river bank exists, forgotten that there is a land beyond the river. They rarely reach the shore. The common expression for this, for reaching the shore, is ‘touching grass’, because a natural setting isn’t mediated. In a natural setting, you aren’t trapped in the river of mediated data, unless you choose to bring it with you and look at the screen of a phone. But for many people the distinction between natural experience and mediated experience has been lost. They think both are equally real, or they think the mediated experience is more real than the natural one.
What a totalitarian ideology does is serve as a river you can never escape, or are never allowed to escape. In totalitarian thinking, there is no natural world or objective reality beyond the demanded, mediated, controlled attitudes of the ideology. This becomes particularly ironic in Green politics, which purports to wish to preserve the natural world but which actually interposes a political framework over the entire natural world and is generally followed by urban dwellers who couldn’t survive five days in the natural world.
The mainstream is a data stream, which determines the conditions of our existence regardless (and increasingly in opposition to) actual objective reality. This is why globalist politicians and bureaucracies, just like old twentieth century totalitarian regimes, are so desperate to control news, media, information and what they label as disinformation. Control the data flow (the ‘narrative’) and you control the mainstream. Control the mainstream and you control everything, because most people never leave this mediated reality and never spend long outside it, in unmediated reality.
Foreign totalitarian ideologies (and all of them are foreign to traditional Western thinking, which is why populist nationalism gets people back to reality quicker than anything else) are like huge ideological factories that sit between the banks of the river and the river itself, pouring a black tide of pollution into the river. Globalism, Islam, Transgenderism, the Woke Left, the Woke Right, Luxury Communism, all pushing a filthy poison into the river of msinstream understanding. Foreign enemies (Qatar, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia) build these ideological factories and fund the polluting ideas they pump into the river.
Imagine the person dependent for their understanding of reality on mainstream or alternative media as a fish that doesn’t know the difference between clean water and polluted water. It swims happily in the second, imagining it is the first, even while dying.
The labels of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ are deeply unhelpful if you want to return to reality, or if you want to swim in water that is at least clean and unpolluted. If these labels were genuinely applied and controlled by those who themselves know what objective reality is (and want others to know that) they might be useful. If it was a label one put on a Chinese lie, for instance, it would have some accuracy and utility. But it’s not that. It’s simply another attempt at total control of the data stream, often applying ‘disinformation’ to a thing that is objectively true. Quite often, ‘disinformation’ is what the polluter calls the remaining sections of clean water they haven’t polluted yet.
There are still people who are completely unaware of any of this. They don’t even know they are the fish, and they have forgotten that they once lived on land. They have devolved, reversed the evolutionary process life once made when moving from sea to shore. They are entirely dependent on the mediated data stream, and entirely incapable of knowing when they gulp contaminated water and swallow polluted lies.
The most unaware of all are the ones that THINK this truth doesn’t apply to them, who think they are aware of the nature of the data stream and that they are swimming against the tide. If these fish could speak, they would tell you that Jews control the river, or that you’ve been taught to hate Islam, or that French students are protesting about the under resourcing of schools, or that there is genocide in Gaza, or that Trump is a Russian agent and a child abuser.
These are the fish that are already dead inside.
As a practical consequence of contemporary living, it is very, very difficult to leave the river entirely. One would need to not only never watch TV in any form, and never follow the news or political commentary in any form, but also to physically remove oneself from most of modern society. You would have to be some form of contemporary hermit or anchorite. You couldn’t live in a town or a city (the data flow is all around you there, everywhere is ‘wet’). Dry locations, where the mainstream is less full and raging, would be places of poor internet reception, places of more natural cycles of existence-the wilderness or the rural backwater.
If one has the money to buy a farmstead or build one, or the skills and determination to build an isolated existence in a rural locality, then one is stepping out of the river and onto land. But it’s not easy, especially for modern populations which have been deprived of both practical skills and truly autonomous action. Survivalism is mocked by those who couldn’t do it, but it is also an extreme choice (which becomes wiser as societies collapse, of course). Some version of what the Amish do or what very rural populations have automatically is probably the closest to true independence that people can get while still being social animals. But the degrees matter too-rural communities that work the land are in touch with the natural world in a practical way tend to also be the most resistant to the most absurd ideas (at least the most absurd MODERN ideas).
The best that most of us can do is to try to recognise the taste of tainted water, regardless of the particular factory responsible.
