God, Murdoch, Musk: The Lineage of Narrative Control
Suffering and magic are the price of thinking. Rigley
Childhood Just a Moment Ago
I didn’t grow up thinking we were poor.
We were, by any official measure, but it wasn’t something that lived in my head. It wasn’t something I carried around like a weight or a wound.
I remember Thursdays—payday.
My dad would come home and place a shiny threepenny bit into each small hand. It felt like treasure. We'd race off to the corner shop, dreaming of Black Jacks and Fruit Salads, sweets that cost only a halfpenny each.
Back then, a threepenny bit could buy you a proper little paper bag bulging with sweets. Today, that same bag would cost over £3 — a reminder of just how much the world has changed, and not just in price tags.
We didn’t think about what we lacked.
We thought about what we could savour.
We lived in a world where meaning was installed quietly, almost invisibly.
The Apps given to us by our parents, our teachers, our small communities were sturdy and straightforward:
Work hard.
Be grateful.
Aspire to something better.
We weren't sold success in neon lights.
We weren't compared to an endless scroll of unreachable lives.
We weren't told that if we struggled, we had failed.
Poverty wasn’t an identity.
It wasn’t a moral failing.
It was simply the backdrop to a life that still made sense.
We inherited dignity without even knowing it.
Hope wasn’t something we had to create against the odds — it was something we absorbed, like sunlight.
The Lineage of Narrative Collapse
Nietzsche warned us.
When he declared "God is dead," he wasn’t celebrating.
He was grieving.
For all its flaws, he understood that religion had been more than just a belief system.
It was a structure.
A scaffold.
A quiet, invisible architecture that provided ordinary people a way to bear suffering, find dignity in limitation, and move forward with hope.
Religion wasn’t just about salvation.
It was about the Apps installed early:
Endurance.
Patience.
Purpose beyond immediate reward.
It provided meaning without demanding constant reinvention.
It transmitted resilience silently across generations, shaping not just individual lives but entire communities’ biological and emotional fabric.
When that scaffold collapsed, Nietzsche recognised that the danger wasn’t just atheism.
The danger was emptiness.
The danger was that the Jellyfish Mind, left unguided, would become desperate for new Apps.
And desperate minds do not choose carefully.
They cling to whatever narratives fill the void.
When the old architectures of meaning collapsed, the mind did not stand empty.
It could not.
As Aristotle observed, nature abhors a vacuum — and so too does the human mind.
When the scaffolds of faith, endurance, and patience dissolved, something had to rush in to fill the hollow spaces.
The Jellyfish Mind, stripped of its inherited frameworks, reached outward—not carefully, but desperately—seizing whatever Apps were most available:
rage, urgency, distraction, addiction.
The mind without PreForm does not float in peaceful neutrality.
It drowns — clinging to whatever flashing narrative promises survival, even at the cost of dignity.
Thus, the collapse of meaning is never silent.
It is filled quickly, recklessly, and often fatally.
New Storytellers and Manufactured Fear
The hole left by God did not stay empty for long.
First came the politicians and the press,
Into this vacuum stepped the nation builders, politicians, and moguls.
Murdoch taught the world how to manufacture consent through mass media, weaponising fear and rage into loyalty. Musk represents the next evolution: the platform king, shaping not just opinions but realities, exploiting the fractured Jellyfish Mind through algorithmic emotional capture.
Both are symptoms, not causes.
Symptoms of a world where narrative has become a commodity, and attention has become the currency of power.
They didn’t offer eternity.
They offered progress.
The new Apps taught:
Work hard.
Trust the system.
Believe in your country.
Aspire to material betterment.
It wasn’t sacred.
It wasn’t perfect.
But it still offered a scaffold, a new way to endure hardship without drowning in despair.
Yet even this scaffolding was fragile.
It required faith in institutions, faith that effort would be rewarded, and faith that sacrifice would mean something.
When wars, scandals, and widening inequalities began to corrode that faith, the hunger for new Apps returned, this time more frantic, more untethered.
Into that vacuum stepped the marketers, the platforms, and the algorithms.
No longer was meaning handed down slowly, through tradition or hard-won progress.
Now it was manufactured virally, frictionlessly, optimised for clicks and emotional spikes rather than truth or human flourishing.
The Apps of today do not scaffold resilience.
They exploit the Jellyfish Mind’s vulnerability.
Instead of:
Endurance,
Purpose,
or Aspiration,
they install:
Urgency,
Comparison,
Addiction.
We moved, almost without noticing, from grace to progress, to dopamine.
Meaning was no longer inherited.
It was no longer even consciously chosen.
It was moment-by-moment scavenged from whatever flashing distraction happened to win the algorithmic lottery.
And so here we are.
Narrative no longer scaffolds dignity.
It scavenges attention.
It no longer lifts the human mind.
It collapses PreForm and fills the empty spaces with noise, fear, and craving.
In the hollow left by collapsing institutions,
where faith was once enough and aspiration once sustained,
we now find only the endless, restless hunger of the untethered mind.
Fear, Slave Mentality, and the Collapse of PreForm
Murdoch instilled fear through headlines.
Musk installs urgency through dopamine loops.
Both know that whoever feeds the Jellyfish Mind first wins.
Fear collapses PreForm.
Fear activates the Sympathetic Nervous System, putting the body into survival mode.
In this state, the mind cannot afford slow, generative thought.
It stops generating meaning.
It urgently reaches out to Apps already available in the environment, whether offered by good actors or bad ones.
Whoever controls the scripts controls the frightened mind.
This is not a political phenomenon.
It is a nervous system phenomenon.
When PreForm collapses, the mind’s Thought Generator shuts down.
The Thought Selector hardens.
Selection becomes mechanical—pulling from a small, rigid library of code that may have been installed long ago by others.
In this state, human beings are not truly thinking.
They are selecting.
They are executing the past, not inventing the future.
Biological Proof: Inherited Trauma
This collapse is not just a psychological event.
It is biological.
It is inheritable.
The Cherry Tree study showed this brutally.
Mice conditioned to fear the scent of cherry blossoms passed that fear to their offspring —
mice who had never been shocked, never suffered directly, but still flinched at the smell.
The trauma was encoded — not into memory, but into biology.
The Dutch Hunger Winter confirmed it in humans.
Children born to mothers who starved during the winter of 1944–45 carried metabolic scars, cognitive scars, and emotional scars —
long after the famine had ended.
Fearful Apps are not just thoughts.
They become flesh.
They shape generations
Manufactured Rage and the Modern Trap
Stoking anger, inflaming grievance, and amplifying outrage may satisfy the emotional needs of those who already live comfortably.
Or — more dangerously — it may serve those who seek permission to rule.
Nietzsche saw it first.
When internal meaning collapses, people will not rise in freedom — they will beg for new masters.
Huxley refined the warning.
The most effective rulers do not impose fear by force alone.
They manufacture fear, then sell themselves as the cure.
Fear collapses PreForm.
The promise of safety installs the new script.
Chomsky showed how mass media manipulates the emotional landscape, guiding not thought, but consent.
Rage may feel like rebellion.
But rage often prepares the ground for new captivity for minds already trapped in survival mode.
True liberation requires more than anger.
It requires rebuilding the architectures of belonging, resilience, and hope, the very architectures that poverty, fear, and trauma have silently dismantled.
How Good Minds Become Monsters
It is tempting to believe that atrocity requires evil.
It does not.
It requires only collapse.
It requires only a mind flooded by fear, stripped of PreForm, executing whatever Apps promise survival.
When the frightened ego installs an App that says:
"They are the enemy."
"Their suffering is necessary for your safety."
"Your cruelty is righteousness."
It does not feel like evil.
It feels like loyalty.
It feels like survival.
It feels like truth.
History shows this with brutal clarity.
In Germany, the Holocaust was not created by monsters alone.
It was orchestrated by frightened citizens, convinced by relentless propaganda that Jews posed a mortal threat to their nation and families.
Neighbours became informants.
Teachers became collaborators.
Ordinary people committed extraordinary horrors — not because they were evil, but because they believed they were protecting what was good. The Jellyfish mind was hijacked.
Today, we see the same machinery at work.
In Russia, the state installs Apps that frame Ukraine not as a sovereign neighbor but as a den of "Neo-Nazis," manipulated by NATO, posing an existential threat.
Ordinary soldiers, who once might have lived peacefully, now inflict brutality under the belief they are defending their homeland from annihilation.
It does not take much to turn good men into instruments of horror.
Only fear — and the right app that allows them to commit evil while feeling righteous.
Thus, kind parents can instil hatred.
Otherwise, decent neighbours can rationalise starvation.
Additionally, ordinary soldiers can kill and mutilate under banners they would have once rejected.
Not because they chose to be monsters.
But because they stopped choosing at all.
Preform collapsed first.
The code took over second.
The atrocities came third.
The architecture of dignity did not explode.
It eroded, one unexamined fear at a time.
If fear can turn good minds monstrous, then only love—stubborn, scaffolded, lived love—can turn them human again.
Thinking is the price of being human.
It can birth new worlds or bury us under the weight of our questions.
The Jellyfish Mind does not collapse by accident.
It collapses by instinct.
Because thinking is both magic and suffering.
And fear offers the sweet illusion that we can be saved from both.
Condemned to be free. Sartre
To be condemned to be free is not merely to face the burden of choice.
It is to bear the more profound paradox.
That thinking itself is both suffering and magic.
The Jellyfish Mind does not hate thinking because it is lazy.
It hates thinking because thinking reveals how fragile and unfinished we are.
Thinking demands the labour of meaning-making, a labour that offers no guarantee of safety, comfort, or even success.
To think is to suffer.
To think is to create.
Both are true.
Thus, the ego seizes the first escape when fear floods the system.
The mechanical App, the prepackaged certainty, the borrowed truth.
Anything to avoid the terrible, beautiful price of being human.
Freedom, after collapse, is not a luxury.
It is the slow rebuilding of the mind’s courage to suffer meaning into existence once again.
Freedom is not given.
It is built, painfully, consciously, against the gravitational pull of collapse.
We are condemned to be free.
Condemned to suffer the labour of thinking when forgetting would be easier.
Condemned to rebuild meaning when mechanical Apps offer faster relief.
Condemned to imagine futures when rage and despair feel so much nearer.
It is the heaviest burden.
And the only magic we have left.
Love Trumps All: Rebuilding the Architecture
If fear collapses PreForm, love is the only force to rebuild it.
We know this not just intuitively, but scientifically.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development, tracking lives across 80 years, found one overwhelming predictor of human flourishing.
Strong, secure relationships.
Not wealth.
Not fame.
Not achievement.
Love.
Those who felt loved in childhood or adulthood built more flexible, resilient minds.
They recovered from hardship faster.
They created meaning more freely.
We see it again in the Blue Zones, the small pockets of the world where people live longer, healthier, more fulfilled lives.
It isn't superfoods or superior genes that sustain them.
It is belonging.
It is community.
It is a shared architecture of meaning, trust, and quiet dignity.
And I have seen it firsthand in the Willowsway — an approach born not in laboratories,
but in the daily, stubborn work of nurturing children.
Watching them struggle.
Watching them thrive.
Watching how Apps of belonging, patience, and resilience are installed — not through lectures, but through lived experience.
If we are serious about improving the life chances of poor children, then we must be serious about love.
Not as sentiment, but as architecture.
We must stop pretending that anger will liberate them.
We must stop pretending that money alone will rescue them.
We must rebuild the architectures that once made poverty survivable and aspiration possible.
We must reinstall Apps that tell a story of kindness and love.
You belong.
You matter.
You can endure.
You can imagine new futures.
Without love at the centre, no system will save them.
No opportunity will stick.
No future will open.
Love is not a luxury.
It is the original, essential App.
And it is the only one that can outlast fear.
The Quiet Revolution: Rethinking the Good Life
Ultimately, we must ask the only question that truly matters.
What is a good life?
As I have previously discussed, this is a deeply personal matter.
There is no single answer.
But to have the choice, to be able to define and pursue your version of a good life, requires something deeper and more fragile than we often realise.
It requires PreForm.
Without the capacity for flexible, generative thought and the ability to imagine, select, and dream beyond the Apps already installed, there is no real choice.
Only selection among pre-packaged scripts.
When PreForm collapses, so does the possibility of a truly chosen life.
Is a good life comfort?
Consumption?
Recognition?
Or is it something quieter, sturdier, older?
A sense of belonging.
A sense of purpose.
The feeling of being necessary to someone else's life.
The belief that struggle can still mean something.
Much of modern politics, especially on the left, clings to the idea that the good life can be delivered through the redistribution of wealth.
The irony of a philosophy that despises wealth, yet claims it as the key to human flourishing, is palpable.
All the real evidence, from Harvard, the Blue Zones, and the lived histories of resilient communities, points to a different truth.
It is not the redistribution of wealth that sustains us.
It is the redistribution of happiness.
The redistribution of meaning.
The scaffolding of hope, belonging, and dignity must be rebuilt first.
Without it, all the money in the world will wash away on the tide of collapsed minds, hardened by fear, unable to imagine new futures.