Your mind is colonised. Not by a foreign power, but by the systems you use every day and you haven’t even noticed.

Well, maybe you have. Maybe you’ve felt it but lacked the language to name it. In this essay, I will show you why the system depends on that silence.

More importantly, I’m going to show you how to recognise it, articulate it, and break free from it. Because once you see the cage, you can choose to leave it.

Orwell showed us how language shapes thought. But he assumed someone had to be orchestrating it. What if the system does the work for you? What if control emerges naturally—not from a shadowy cabal, but from profit incentives?

This makes control dangerous. Because now control becomes subtle. Control becomes insidious and most of all, control becomes voluntary.

Slaves were forbidden from reading. But when religious instruction happened, it was carefully curated—only passages about obedience. The mechanism is the same today: not total restriction, but curated access.

Slaveholders understood something crucial: you don’t need to keep people ignorant. You need to keep them from articulating what they experience.

So they controlled the narrative. What could be said in church, what could be discussed, what interpretations were allowed. The Bible became the delivery system. Selective interpretation became the mechanism.

But here’s what’s changed: Slaveholders needed force to maintain that curation. Guards. Punishment. Active enforcement. Someone had to be watching, controlling, restricting.

Modern systems don’t need force. They need only incentives.

As you continue, you will see how the art of enslavement lies not in negative obedience nor abject submission but in free will.

Remember, the serpent did not force Adam nor Eve to eat the fruit.

Humans are wired to seek the divine. In Islam, this is called ‘Fitrah’ the innate disposition toward God. Every society, regardless of time or place, has longed for something higher.

Slaveholders understood this.

They stripped slaves of their gods and handed them a replacement-one that came with instructions. The Bible became the tool. And the innate human need for God became the vulnerability they exploited.

Anyone who’s studied scripture deeply knows it requires more than rote memorisation.

It requires depth.

It requires understanding.

It requires critical thinking.

And they were given none of these. It is very easy to take a line such as ”Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear.” (Ephesians 6:5) and run with it.

The slaveholders understood human psychology and exploited it deliberately.

But here’s what’s different about modern systems: no algorithm engineer sat in a room saying ‘let’s make people stupid.’ Instead, they optimised for engagement. And engagement, it turns out, is maximised by outrage, novelty, and emotional stimulation—not depth.

The outcome looks identical to intentional control. But the mechanism is more insidious: it’s structural, not conspiratorial.

While this famous saying cannot be attributed to Rockefeller, the quote stands testament to the industrialist mindset.

Just as slave owners needed literate slaves to spread the Gospel amongst themselves, Rockefeller needed more than labourers. He needed thinking workers but not critical thinkers. But how do you educate the masses without making them dangerous?

Enter the Prussian System.

This system caught the attention of industrialists because it emphasised standardisation, rote memorisation, and hierarchical authority— all traits valued by both militaristic states and industrial economies.

It is a system designed to create obedient citizens, loyal soldiers, and a disciplined workforce.

This system makes you able to think, but not ponder.

Remember, but not reflect.

Ask, but not question.

This is how you create a valuable voluntary slave. And schools today still operate on this model.

Now, what does this have to do with TikTok?

Everything.

Where slavery needed whips and schools needed bells, algorithms need only one thing: your voluntary participation. They don’t force shallow thinking. They reward it. And that’s infinitely more effective.

The algorithm reveals itself most clearly when you’re a stranger to it. Create a new account— no history, no preferences, no customisation. Watch what it chooses to show you by default.

What you’ll find is decadence. Why?

The algorithm is a curator. But not because someone decided to keep people stupid. Rather, the algorithm learned that shallow content drives engagement.

Engagement drives ad revenue.

Revenue drives survival.

And so the system self-organises toward the lowest cognitive levels—not because of malice, but because of math.

This is more than just brain rot.

Shallow content is a debasement of your reason, creativity and curiosity. Yet we willingly participate.

Consume. Scroll. Repeat. Endlessly.

And it does not help that the platforms are engineered for addiction.

With each scroll you train your brain to expect novelty over depth.

Each shallow video conditions you to accept surface-level information. Every dopamine hit from a like or comment reinforces the behaviour.

Over time, your mind becomes incapable of sustained focus, deep reading, or critical analysis— essential tools you need to keep the veil from covering your eyes.

We downloaded the app. We choose to scroll. We choose to stay. The cage is invisible because we built it for ourselves.

But here’s what changes everything: This is actually more dangerous than intentional control. Because you can’t negotiate with a conspiracy. But you can recognise when a system’s incentives are misaligned with your wellbeing. And once you see it, you can choose to leave.

But the algorithm is just the tool. The real mechanism lies in language itself.

The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ’This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ’politically free’ or ’intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. — 1984

Newspeak showed us how controlling language controls thought.

Orwell imagined a totalitarian state deliberately simplifying language to control thought. But modern language degradation isn’t orchestrated from above. It emerges naturally when platforms reward brevity, memes reward simplification, and discourse rewards hot takes over nuance. The result is identical to Newspeak—we lose the vocabulary for complexity. But the mechanism is market-driven, not authoritarian.

Simplify vocabulary, eliminate nuance, and you eliminate the possibility of rebellion. Algorithmic curation, meme culture, and soundbite discourse is digital Newspeak.

Complex ideas are reduced to consumable fragments. Nuance dies. Critical thinking becomes impossible.

You’re not prevented from reading, but you are prevented from thinking deeply about WHAT you read.

When you can’t articulate the problem, you can’t solve it. So the mind stays trapped. The body breaks down. The coffers empty. Each stage makes the next inevitable.

If this doesn’t make sense, allow me to connect some dots.

Take the word ‘burnout.’ People used to understand it as a systemic problem. Lack of control, misaligned values, unsustainable workload.

Now ‘I’m burned out’ just means ‘I’m tired.’ The nuance is gone. And when you can’t name the real problem, you can’t solve it. You blame yourself. You stay. Your body breaks down.

You can’t demand better because you can’t articulate what’s wrong. So you accept the low wage, the long hours, the exploitation. And even if you think about leaving. You can’t find a good reason. So you stay. The system profits from your silence.

Language is the difference between awareness and numbness. Imagine if we called starvation ‘hunger.’ If we used the same word for mild discomfort and death, we’d stop seeing the difference. We’d normalise the extreme. This is what happens when ‘burnout’ becomes synonymous with ‘tired.’ The vocabulary collapses. The severity disappears. And you stay trapped, unable to articulate why.

You now see the trap. But seeing isn’t enough. You must articulate it. Write it down. Say it out loud. Name what you’re feeling. The moment you can articulate it, you can think about it. The moment you can think about it, you can act on it.

Once you realize one trap, you’ll see them everywhere. In your job. In your relationships. In your school. In your media. You’ll start asking questions. And questions lead to agency. Action changes your life.

Once you see the traps, you have a choice: reclaim your inputs or accept the curation. Read books instead of scrolling feeds. Seek people who challenge you instead of comfort you. Choose your language deliberately. Choose what shapes your mind.

You can go back to sleep. Scroll mindlessly. Accept the curated life. Or you can stay awake. Articulate. Question. Reclaim your inputs. Act.

The cage only works if you’re silent.

The moment you speak it clearly, it breaks.