The Mask-erades that Define Our Culture

Dr. Will Tuttle

The world’s political, economic, medical, and cultural landscape has been changing with dizzying speed throughout 2020, and to make sense of things it may be helpful to get back to basics and take a fresh look at the idea of selfishness, and its opposite, altruism. Selfishness is caring about oneself and one’s own welfare more than that of others, and implies a willingness to harm others or let others be harmed to benefit one’s own position. We humans seem naturally, intuitively and rationally to limit and discourage selfish behavior and view it as being immoral, unethical, and wrong. Harming others for our own benefit is the antithesis of moral and spiritual maturity; altruistic actions, which help others without seeking gain for ourselves, are universally appreciated as good and ethical behavior.

The obvious contradiction to this is the current situation of rampant injustice and inequality, whereby the wealthiest fraction of one percent of humanity has accumulated so much wealth (and consequent power) that it can effectively dominate and exploit most of the population by controlling governance, economics, and media narratives. Given our natural human cultural discouragement of selfishness and unfairness, it becomes obvious that the only way this situation can be maintained, and even constantly increased, is through the strategic use of huge amounts of deception.

By disguising harmful and self-centered exploitation and oppression of others as beneficial and natural, a tiny minority has been able to gradually create a situation where it can reliably fool and manipulate the vast majority. This use of deception is the key, and by controlling the accepted messaging about the hoaxes that are being perpetrated, it is now possible for a few people to dominate many people by deceiving and manipulating them, just as it is possible for a few humans to dominate many livestock animals by confining and manipulating them.

The use of charades, scams, masquerades, hoaxes, and disguises to dominate, control, and attack other people goes back thousands of years. The Trojan Horse is a poetic example, and there are countless more ruses through the ages where intrigue and deception have been used to trick opponents and subjects in order to advance self-benefitting agendas.

Today, though there are countless such hoaxes we can discuss, there are three major ones that are especially powerful, widespread, and insidious in their consequences. These three foundational hoaxes are animal abuse, chemical abuse, and banking abuse.

As I discuss in The World Peace Diet, abusing and killing billions of animals daily for food is the defining core of our culture today, and it is the deeply ingrained set of practices and attitudes of this hoax of animal agriculture that is foundational to virtually all the other abuses and hoaxes that are harming people, animals, and nature in order to benefit a predatory and parasitic elite class.

The Animal Abuse Hoax

The animal abuse hoax is based on the lie that we humans need to imprison, impregnate, and slaughter animals to get adequate protein, calcium and other nutrients. As a healthy 40-year vegan, I am but one of millions of people daily exposing this devastating and selfish scam. It is selfish because it uses false narratives, such as human superiority, nutrition, taste, convenience, and tradition, to impose extreme abuse on animals exploited for food. Due to animal agriculture’s inherent inefficiency, we are seeing the ongoing destruction of rainforests, oceans, aquifers, wildlife, and indigenous people, the unnecessary proliferation of hunger and starvation among less privileged people, and a massive web of trauma affecting every dimension of the entire web of life, including workers in industrial dairy, slaughter, and CAFO facilities who suffer from perpetrator-induced traumatic stress disorder. Most current disease is linked to the toxins accumulating in animal foods, and this ocean of misery is all based on a hoax. It is completely unnecessary to eat animal flesh, dairy products, or eggs to get the nutrients we need to thrive and celebrate our lives on this beautiful and abundant Earth. Unfortunately, disease and conflict are profitable for a wealthy elite, as is producing the toxic chemicals underpinning both animal agriculture and the flood of medicines and drugs sold to consumers for their predictable plethora of diseases.

The Chemical Abuse Hoax

The second hoax is the chemical hoax. Again, we are from the womb now exposed to over 80,000 toxic chemicals that are sprayed on fields to kill living beings, added to foods and household products to enhance performance, applied to fabrics as flame retardants, injected and swallowed as medications, and inhaled, drunk, and otherwise consumed as by-products of fossil fuel burning, manufacturing, mining, agriculture, and countless other industrial processes. Prior to World War 2, for example, farmers lost about 20 to 25 percent of crops to “pests,” and today, after 80 years of massive increases in the profusion of millions of tons of toxic chemicals causing cancer, birth defects, neurological disorders and many other diseases, as well as sending insect, bird, fish, and other animal and plant populations plummeting, farmers still lose 20 to 25 percent of crops to “pests.” Profits to industries and financial institutions have soared, though, and consequently this is all euphemized in mainstream narratives as the Green Revolution, and as progress and the wonders of modern science and technology.

Deception is rampant. Big Chema, Big Medica and Big Pharma, like Big Ag and Big Food, are actually destroying our physical, environmental, cultural, psychological, and spiritual health, and at the same time masquerading as our benefactors. In fact, when there is an outbreak of a new disease, there are two different investigative departments in the CDC. One looks for viruses and bacteria, and the other looks for toxic chemical contamination. The former department is far more generously funded and respected, and pressures are enormous to blame disease on “natural” factors like viruses and bacteria, rather than pollution and corporate malfeasance. With epidemics, there is no corporate liability, and in fact, there is even more money to be made by creating fear and marketing ever more toxic chemical medications and injections. It’s well documented that virtually all government regulating agencies have been captured by the industries they’re supposed to be policing through funding structures and revolving-door employment practices. In a similar manner, mainstream media narratives have been captured by the money and influence of these wealthy industries as well. Non-compliant narratives are discouraged and, increasingly, they are brutally censored.

The Banking Abuse Hoax

The third Trojan Horse is fractional reserve banking. Banks, like chemical companies, are portrayed as our friends, providing us with needed products and services, in this case loans for our homes, vehicles, and businesses. Yet every time a bank makes a loan to someone, say for $100,000, the bank creates, out of nothing, an asset on its books of about $90,000 and collects both principle and interest on this money. If the person or business can’t pay it all back, the bank keeps all of the money it has gotten, plus it takes ownership of the house or business. In times of rapidly rising unemployment due to draconian lockdowns like we are now experiencing, millions of homes and business are being swallowed up by the elite banking class, destroying economic freedom, cultural richness, and social stability, and causing extreme suffering and distress to millions, especially the more vulnerable, such as children, women, and the less wealthy. Henry Ford summed it well when he wrote, “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

These are but three of the most obvious and devastating Trojan-Horse frauds operating in our world today. The mainstream media and the “War on Terror” are two more Trojan-Horse hoaxes that are also significant in their insidious implications, falsely portrayed as our friends—informing us and protecting us—when in fact they are to a large degree doing the opposite. With the current pandemic operation, the wealthy parasitic entities that control the international financial system as well as the large corporations, media, and governmental agencies, are calling in their chips. Their Trojan Horse hoaxes have been working well for decades, concentrating wealth, power, and narrative-control into fewer and fewer hands. It has all been done by deception: projecting a benevolent image-mask behind which functions a selfish and malevolent intention to dominate and exploit.

The Boomerang Effect

As a long-time vegan activist, this basic tendency on the part of the military-industrial-meat-medical-pharmaceutical-media-banking complex has become increasingly obvious to me, especially through traveling to 50 countries and all 50 states promoting veganism over the past 35 years, researching and reading, and speaking to thousands of local advocates, and discussing the outlines of the hidden agendas propelling our culture in the direction it’s going. I have been warning for years about the insidious consequences of our routine mistreatment of animals. As we sow, so, in the end, we reap. If we insist on heartlessly exploiting, injecting, and microchip tracking billions of vulnerable, aware sentient beings, we will inevitably find ourselves being similarly exploited, medicated, chipped, and tracked.

The key to the whole thing is to make a sustained effort to look behind the benevolent-appearing masks of these powerful Trojan-Horse forces. Masks hide the truth. Masks cover up real identities and deceive us. The tremendous irony is that the masked forces exploiting animals, nature, and humanity have now succeeded in one of their greatest coups. They have deceived us, the general population, into wearing their masks. Mandatory masking leads straight to mandatory injections, mandatory tracking, and the loss of basic human and economic rights, and of our dignity and purposes. What we have relentlessly inflicted on nonhuman animals is now boomeranging, and even many caring and seemingly aware people have been deceived by the false narratives spewing from behind the masks of authority.

The ancient Greek word for mask, “persona,” comes from “per,” meaning through, and “sona,” sound. It’s what we speak through and it covers and hides our mouth and our identity so we can speak falsely and no one can see who or what we actually are behind the persona, the false identity we are projecting to the world. Today, we are ironically told it’s unselfish and responsible to wear masks. We are told this repeatedly by the voices behind the Trojan-Horse masks, the elite class that would enslave us as livestock.

Ultimately, our leaders and governments are a mirror of us, the people. If we the people systematically engage in violent, tyrannical, abusive behavior on a massive scale, how are we not similarly worthy of being systemically tyrannized and abused? The overwhelming majority of our population is directly driving the system that relentlessly enslaves, rapes, mutilates, and kills billions of animals for food and other products. We force them into chronic and acute pain, fear, and disease. We cause them to be born into a dystopian world of heartless exploitation at our hands. We have absolutely no objective need to abuse these animals, and the wildlife, ecosystems, and human beings directly and indirectly killed and harmed by animal agriculture because we can all thrive on a fraction of the land and resources now used, through a whole-food, organic vegan lifestyle.

As we dominate and oppress, we find ourselves not only being increasingly dominated but actually asking to be dominated, and policing each other and enforcing the mandates of the masked elites and furthering their agenda. It’s understandable. As Erich Fromm discussed in his classic work, Escape from Freedom, we are indoctrinated into a universalized authoritarian persona that not only craves to dominate, but also to be dominated. This hierarchical, authoritarian, and materialistic mentality is widespread among people raised in our culture, wounded as we are from infancy by being compelled to relentlessly participate in the systemic oppression and killing of billions of animals. Every cell in our body is nourished with violent injustice and terror, and our minds have been colonized from infancy by the ever-present Trojan-Horse forces that lurk behind their masks, and that surround us as the food, chemical, banking, investment, government, education, and media institutions and corporations we are told to trust, support, and obey.

The reason we fall prey to these masked powers and fail to recognize their true nature is that we ourselves have become similarly masked, and hide from ourselves, from nature, and from each other. We pay others to abuse and stab the animals we consume, and in countless ways contribute to a society of violence that exploits the vulnerable. Our fear of facing ourselves shuts down the natural wisdom and healthy self-esteem of our true nature, which would liberate us from meekly acquiescing to our own oppression. If we yearn to be free, we are called to free those we are enslaving. This is the undeniable universal principle. The animals of this world yearn for freedom to fulfill their inherent purposes. Stealing their freedom and purposes, we lose our own.

Discovering Our True Face

In the Zen tradition, there is an ancient koan or meditation question, “What is your original face?” This question reveals the primal existential and spiritual issue we all face: to discover our true nature, our “original face” before the persona-image with which we identify covered it up. We are called now, more urgently than ever, to awaken to and discover the transpersonal dimension of consciousness. Cultivating awareness that is transpersonal—literally “beyond the mask”—together with liberating animals, is the path that can liberate us from the prison of fear, greed, and selfishness that ensnares our world today.

When we get a glimpse of our true face, we realize not just our own true nature, but the true nature of all living beings. We catch sight of the unity that pervades creation, the joy of being, the loving-kindness shining always in our heart, and the eternal consciousness that functions through the physical form. We realize that we are not the mask with which we’ve learned to identify. When this happens, we find that the bewildering array of masks presented by the modern world becomes much more transparent. We can discern the false from the real and distinguish the eternal from the temporal. We can no longer be so easily deceived by the masked Trojan-Horse forces because we have removed our own mask, and instead of living in fear and being vulnerable to the manipulative lies that pervade our cultural landscape, we discern the machinations operating behind false facades, and smile inwardly, refusing to be cowed, aware of the eternal and indestructible reality of our true nature. We stand up for truth and freedom for all expressions of life, and practice respect and inclusion in our relations with both humans and animals. We become virulently contagious, spreading joy and love through every gesture and thought, and by unmasking ourselves, help others to do the same.

We understand that health can never come from fear and delusion, which are far more contagious and deadly than microbes. We see that wellness can never come by following the unjust, fear-based decrees of masked technocrats. Health and wellness arise spontaneously from uncovering and discovering our true face, each of us a radiant expression of benevolent and creative eternal consciousness.

Our life is a precious adventure, and by granting animals their individual sovereignty, we regain our individual sovereignty, and every day can become a celebration of possibilities to learn, grow, explore, create, and contribute. Our lives are but a few decades on this Earth, and by sincere self-reflection, effort, and inquiry, we can make progress in understanding ourselves and our situation, take responsibility for our minds, lives, health, and relationships, stand up to and unmask the toxic fear-based theories, narratives, and parasitic institutions that generate and feed on pain and violence, and through this, we can reconnect with our purpose and with the essential benevolence and freedom of our true nature.

Contagious with this living awareness, we can bless and attract others who are also on the path of healing and awakening. Together, we can co-create a world of health, abundance, and respect for all, and as we withdraw support for weaponized falsehoods and their promulgators, we can become worthy of the world of harmony for which we yearn. First, we are called to liberate animals from human exploitation and then to liberate ourselves from the internalized fear-based, authoritarian attitudes that have colonized our minds.