Each little thought that we entertain is a command to the universe, and this universe, guided by the simplest prayer or most earnest wish, complies to those cultivated thoughts, good and bad, with mirror-like fidelity.

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The reason that I'm starting this article with the idea of thoughts being things is because I mean to confess: that by accident or by my own careless negligence, I have helped to create the messed-up world that we are all experiencing now.

Before condemning me though, allow me to explain how I may have helped to screw things up for everyone here on this planet.

Writing the World Into Existence?

Several years ago, I came up with an idea for a story that I named The Fictionarium, and actually wrote some of it's chapters and posted them on Steemit, sharing my curious world as I was childishly imagining the thing in my tinfoiled head.

I started writing, but when my fictional tale started to resemble real life, I had to stop writing it for my own sake, and for the sake of humanity.

What had I done?

I hesitate to describe even the premise for the story, but so that we can learn from my mistake, I'll outline it briefly.

The Fictionarium

Fictionarium is a story about a fictional town called Hill Valley. Like any real town, Hill Valley had a fictional government, but while many of the residents had already forgotten, the little town of Hill Valley was itself fabricated and set up with the intention of it being part of a larger governmental Science experiment.

In this experiment, Hill Valley and several other small towns were built in remote locations, far from any civilization, but while the towns were completely fitted with running water, electricity and roads, there were, at first, no people living in these places.

As part of the experiment, volunteers were invited to become living participants in the Fictionarium experiment by moving themselves and their families to one of these fabricated towns, to live and work like anyone else. Like brave pioneers, these volunteers moved into the Fictionarium towns in hopes of making better lives for themselves.

Television Programming For the Town's Mind

Once populated, the Fictionarium towns stayed connected to the outside world through the town's television news, all of which was carefully scripted and piped in from the distant government. These broadcasts were essentially the blueprints for the engineering of a culture, being written by the scientists who were managing the Fictionarium experiment, and then these blueprints were invariably precipitated into reality by the viewing audience at home.

In the story, one Fictionarium town named Hill Valley becomes the focus. In Hill Valley, the residents begin to figure out that all of their news is propaganda, designed to manipulate their thoughts and emotions, and this realization begins to spread through the communities.

The folks of Hill Valley start to see their television programming for what it is, and in paranoid whispers, they begin to question some of the other foundational features of their society.

While the Fictionarium that they called Hill Valley was still considered by many of its residents to have been part of a social experiment, some of the whispers were starting to suggest that there must be other motives for building and settling these remote towns, but no one was sure of what those other motives may have been.

Rumors crept through Hill Valley, conspiracy theories sprouted, some organic, some seeded by the government. In this Fictionarium system, the idea of 'Fake News' was actually contrived by the government's social scientists, and was a term used by these scientists to describe any news story that was specifically designed and broadcast with the purpose of herding and controlling the group mind.

A Working Occultocracy

Using long-forgotten psychological trickery, the creators of the Fictionarium system managed the population of subjects in the experiment by controlling their collective mind with sorcerous precision. So pervasive was the secrecy behind the true workings of these Fictionarium towns, that even many of the government employees who secretly observed and managed these towns had no idea why these little towns were built in the first place.

The government's planted spies and observers could have been part of the experiment themselves, to give the whole illusion of external governance more depth and authority in another layer of deceit and facade. Some of the government agents understood the Fictionarium system well enough, and some would even dare to expose it to the civilians.

"This isn't… it ain't exactly 'Mayberry RFD'-- we're living inside a brittle and fractured Fictionarium mind-control device… and the more it cracks up, the more dangerous it gets." - Arlo, from Fictionarium

A Laboratory of Unwitting Subjects

Some theories which crept through the town claimed that the Fictionarium was a laboratory, part of an experiment to see how many generations it would take for the population to figure out that they didn't need the government any more, or perhaps to test the limits of a population's tolerance to an external authority.

By regulating and destroying resources, forcing the population to live in scarcity, how long would it take for the residents to figure out that they have been willful slaves to a distant oppressor, and what will they do when they wake up to that fact? What does a person do when they realize that their every whim and notion was fed to them by the television's constant stream of malarky, and that they have bought into it their whole lives?

Any of That Sounding Familiar?

Fake news piped into a culture from afar, mass mind-control through disinformation and obfuscation, these were all parts of my fictional tale, my Fictionarium story. But was I just plagiarizing reality?

It's true, I was just stealing material from my own real story, as if my tinfoiled world was only an imagined world, and as if imagined worlds were not liable to become real.

Instead of ending my story, I finally abandoned it. There was no way my story could compete with the real Fictionarium that I'd been trapped in all along, and so defeated, I turned on the news to see what I'd been missing.

Conclusion

Maybe a decent parable would have a lesson at the end, some nice wisdom to finish the story with. I really was trying to help make the world a better place by showing some of the illusion in allegory, but the Fictionarium that I am living in now is beyond my own simple imagination, and is far more detailed and believable than my unfinished fiction story.

Writing the first part of Fictionarium in order to show how an illusion can be maintained, I watched an even crazier illusion unfurl in real life around me, and I feel like I may be the one to blame for it. Had I just ignored the clues to my enslavement here, going through life without writing Fictionarium, I don't think the real Fictionarium would have gone away, but I do feel at least partly responsible for the way things have turned out for us all.

If every thought is a thing, I may have inadvertently helped cause this thing that we are all clunking around in here, this labyrinth of mirages that we call modern society.

I'll try to be more careful with my thoughts from now on.

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Here's a link to one of the old chapters of Fictionarium, where one of the characters, named Arlo, goes over the 3 different types of tinfoil hats:

https://steemit.com/writing/@therealpaul/fictionarium-chapter-4-the-news-three-primary-types-of-tin-foil-hats-discussed

Back to the beginning, here's Chapter 1 of Fictionarium, and Chapter 2, all exclusive to Steemit.

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all images above are mine, 2016. All links above lead to my historic steemit.com posts from 2 years ago

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