Escaping the Boxes of Authority and Fear

We spend 12 to 16+ years in indoctrination boxes.

They reduce our ability to think outside the box, the glowing ball of our acceptance, purpose, autonomy, empathy, and creativity are separated and alienated. WE are separated and alienated. Our connections are dangerous. Black and white thinking is imposed and drilled. You are good or bad. Your answers are right or wrong. The Authority judges. To follow and agree is the path to safety and comfort. We are forced to box up our anger and healthy aggression. Honest expression is taboo. We are taught about others in different boxes who are bad and to think of them as Enemies. We are conditioned to love and crave the comfort and safety of boxes and Authority. For our own “good”. A strong belief in consensus and herd wisdom is formed.

Our parents were trained this way. It is all they know. They reinforce the message of safe conformity and the importance of obeying Authority. Outside the box is dangerous and lonely. Take the safe path.

Later we inhabit our “own” boxes to protect and isolate us from nature, our nature, and Enemies. In comfort and safety, seeking to fill the voids left by our glowing balls of acceptance, purpose, autonomy, empathy, and creativity, we ingest poisons from cold boxes while reinforcing our programming from glowing flat boxes. The Message is that we are limited, must fear each other (Enemy) because we are separate and different, and that we need the coercion provided by fancy-suited parasitic rule making masters who scheme from their fancier boxes (Authority).

Those who question Authority, the outliers, are seen as dangerous; Enemies.

Inside, we know we are slaves to parasites but our indoctrination has separated that knowledge into boxes too ugly and painful to open. Our boxed up anger is channeled into flashy competitions involving controlling the un-boxy “ball” (representing our liberation), flashy competitions to choose which violent psychopathic parasites will be our Masters of Authority, and flashy killing campaigns dressed up as righteous because faraway parasites enslave their people from differently colored boxes in slightly different ways. It’s okay because they are Enemy.

To afford all those “luxuries”, we spend our days using moving boxes (hopefully, fancy) to spend precious time and energy in someone else’s box building their box-making capability. If we do enough of that, we can afford to get into flying boxes to visit differently colored boxes and play pretend that we are Masters of our lives.

Wrote a poem based on this article and fed it to Suno. Prompt I used is at the bottom. Here’s the song it generated:

Culture of Boxes

**[Piano instrumental intro]**

**[Verse 1] [Male]**
They put us in a room when we’re young and barely grown
Twelve long years of learning to never think alone
They split apart the light inside — the fire and the feeling
And handed us a ceiling for a sky

**[Verse 2] [Female]**
Your answers can be right or wrong, your heart can be a crime
To follow is to flourish, and to question is to climb
A wall they built around you ’til the outside felt like danger
And safety wore the face of a stranger

**[Chorus]** **[Male and Female]**
Living in boxes, sleeping in boxes
Driving our boxes to build someone else’s
Poison from the cold ones, we stare at the bright ones
And call it a life, call it a life
Gave us a ball to chase instead of freedom
A vote for our chains and we call that a reason
We are living in boxes, boxes, boxes
And calling it home

**[Bridge]**
Our parents learned to bow and so they taught us how
They loved us and they meant it – it’s the only way they know
But somewhere underneath the skin, the anger never sleeps
It’s buried in the boxes that we’re terrified to keep

The ones who dared to question got a different kind of name
The outliers, the enemies, the ones who bear the blame
But deep inside we all can feel the bars behind our eyes
A knowledge too uncomfortable to let rise

**[Verse 3] [Male]**
The suited men in fancier rooms are pulling at the strings
They sell us on our differences and fear of other gangs
They dress their killing campaigns up in colors we believe
And point us at a stranger so we never see the thieves

**[Guitar and bass instrumental]**

**[Verse 4] [Female]**
We spend our hours in a moving box to reach somebody’s floor
We pour our days into their walls and come home to want more
We save enough to fly across and stare at foreign walls
And tell ourselves we’re free inside our gilded wooden halls

**[Verse 5] [Male]**
But the glowing ball is still inside – the empathy, the art
The purpose, the wildness, the unboxed human heart
They separated all of it and told us it was gone
But it never left – it never left – it’s been there all along

**[Outro]**
*(Piano returns, soft and sparse)*
Open the box…
Open the box…
You were never just a shape they made you fill
You were never just the silence in a system built to kill the light
Open the box…
Open the box…