Everything that I have been calling “deschooling” all these years is wrapped up in the title. 

Unsubscribing from consensus reality is an idea I was introduced to a couple weeks ago in an email newsletter form the amazing Lucy AitkenRead, an unschooling mom and coach in New Zealand who is (much) farther down the path than me. In short, she is a huge inspiration to my journey, even though I only found her just recently.  For the life of me, I cannot figure out how I ended up on her mailing list, but I know you can find her on IG too, and you should follow her as part of curating your feed to nourish you.

Consensus Reality Hijacked by Mass Media

Consensus reality is meant to be all of the things that the majority of a society believes and agrees to be true and real. It works really really well in smallish societies with free thinking people who are free of mass media and advertising. For example, we all agree room temperature water is liquid, as it has certain properties that differentiate it form a solid or a gas. We all generally agree couches are solid objects for sitting or laying on. We all agree rain is wet. We mostly agree that flowers are mostly pretty and baby mammals are mostly cute. 

For those of us in “developed” nations, however, consensus reality has been hijacked by the “elite” class who use all their powers of mass media indoctrination- and yes, compulsory school is in fact forced mass media- to direct our thoughts as much as they can and strongly encourage us to uphold their status quo, where the vast majority of humans lead unfulfilling seemingly purposeless lives spent working in their money funneling jobs projects for meager income which we then also return to them through mindless consumerism, buying the things we make at our jobs in an attempt to feel ANYTHING at all and fill the void in our hearts that has been left by not living real human lives. In essence, we give all our time to them to make money, which we immediately turn around and give back to the elite class for absolutely no good reason, except that they built the system that way for their own benefit, with no regard for the people that fuel it, and the system is a closed loop (vicious cycle?) they keep us trapped in through their control of mass media illusions, and there are very few exits.

Yes, compulsory schooling was once the beginning of the training of most Americans to be controllable and controlled, and we’ve seen pushes for it to begin earlier and earlier and last longer and longer throughout our short history. Once upon a time, you could choose whether you wanted the education schools offered, and that was an amazing opportunity. Then, the powers that be decided to require attendance, and we lost control of what we were force fed. YES, IT WAS THAT EASY. If you’d like to read all about this yourself, feel free to read either Dumbing Us Down, which is a fairly quick read, or The Underground History of American Education, which is a huge book, both by John Taylor Gatto.

These days, with children being given access to ad-ridden screens even before the age of voluntary preschool, their training begins even earlier than compulsory school age. Fortunately for my family, the rampant consumerism-as-a-path-to-status in the class/caste systems inherent to schools became very obvious to us, a gigantic warning beacon, urging us to free our children from the trap ASAP.

A few examples of beliefs from this hijacked consensus reality include the beliefs that: schools are not only the best but also the only place to receive an education that ensures a fulfilling life, good fences make good neighbors, learning only happens inside an institution where you are forced to learn because no one wants to learn anything, fast and efficient are better than beautiful and healthy, everyone must learn the same things in the same order at the same ages, life without school equals neglect, standardized testing measures learning, having a college degree allows you better job opportunities, and jobs are the best way to get money, status, and fulfillment.

I know, when I spell it out like that, some of it seems obviously flawed, which is evidence that the tide is shifting away from mindlessness. Thank gods.

We might not be plugged into a computer program directly like in the Matrix movies, but the result is similar and the exits can be nearly as hard to come by. Which is why I’m here. I’m not Morpheus, but I do have a caricature of myself my family calls Captain Alex, and I guide people out of our hijacked consensus reality and back into the real world, which I promise, is generally far more beautiful and organic and still looking like Earth than the reality Neo chooses.

I choose to unsubscribe from their so-called consensus reality, because my family is not interested in upholding any part of their status quo. Quite the opposite in fact, we would like to change the status quo to something far more fulfilling for the vast majority of people. What that might be, I suppose we will figure out along the way, in the process of forming an ACTUAL consensus reality. 

I’m over here, creating an exit from their maze of illusions and propaganda.

How to Exit the Insanity and Find Your Own Way

The CHOICE to unsubscribe and deschool is as easy as choosing to click the link in an email that you didn’t choose to receive in the first place.

But actually exiting the vicious cycle of control? That is where THE REAL WORK begins. It is easy to follow when you are trained to mindless obedience, broken to control like a horse to the saddle. Learning to direct your own path, and that of your family, or a whole revolution, is hard to choose, because it comes with accountability. You are now officially responsible for your own education, income, and fulfillment, and that of your family, and cannot blame the lack of such on anyone else. As they say: with great power comes great responsibility.

The first skill you’ll need to learn is critical thinking, which, for all their talk about its importance, they did NOT teach you in school, because, if they did, you would never have chosen to remain in their system. You must learn to set aside your biases to observe objectively, and think logically about everything. There is no other way to get to know yourself and others deeply and authentically for who they are as people and not as the roles society expects them to play and the masks they wear to fit into society to protect themselves. There is no other way to form your own opinion about anything- events, people, places, politics, beliefs- anything. Your being here is proof that you are beginning to acquire this skill and at least searching for a better way.

Then you can apply your new critical thinking skills to the biases you learned to set aside, and examine all of your beliefs and social conditioning. When you become aware of how these ideas guide your thinking and therefore control your life, you can begin to choose which ones you actually agree with to keep, and which ones you would prefer to let go of and/or replace with new ideas that align with your truth. This can become very time consuming if you try to do it all at once, an impossible task actually, as this process can never be finished. We are all always being subjected to and participating in new social conditioning and uncovering deeper layers to assess. It can be very triggering to realize all the parts of your behavior that you didn’t consent to having influenced, and you may feel like you should just eradicate all conditioning from your life. You can’t. Social conditioning is how we fit ourselves together into a society, impart our values to our children, and create continuity in our culture. What is important is the awareness, so you can choose for yourself what to believe and how to behave.

After you have become aware and learned to think critically, you will need to choose your own adventure, as once you have left the game you will no longer have their vision for your productivity to guide your life, and if you try to keep playing, it will feel increasingly hollow and painful. In order to do this, you will need to get to know your family and friends as authentic individual human beings. You will need to distill your family’s true deep beliefs and values from the vat of social conditioning you all have acquired- including the conditioning you yourself instilled in them, for better or worse, and hold yourself accountable for it either way- and decide how to impart and uphold those values (which yes, is actively choosing social conditioning for yourselves). You will need to decide what destination you are aiming for by creating your own definitions for success and failure while dealing with your conditioning around both.  

Once you have begun these steps, you will run smack into FEAR, and you will have given up your privilege of hiding from it. You will need to confront these fears face to face, with all the courage you can muster. Fears like never fitting in again, losing your social status, upsetting your family of origin, being unable to make enough money to live on, or losing all your current friends and never finding any like-minded folks to befriend again. If you are anything like me, you will need to hunt down all the “happily-ever-after” stories you can, find at least one other like-minded family to create community and encouragement with, and otherwise sit in alllllll the discomfort until you begin to see the results of your choices. You will need to borrow the trust of folks further ahead on the paths that you have chosen, until you learn your own. Seeing the repeated good outcomes of your choices, while avoiding the less desirable results achieved by folks on the paths you have chosen not to follow, eventually builds this trust- trust in yourselves, your intuition, your choices, and the process.

Care to join us in the wilds?

So that is what I am doing over here in my neck of the woods, and in my serene valley of the internet: unsubscribing from hijacked consensus reality, rejecting the current status quo in favor of building a better one, deschooling and unschooling and entrepreneuring in a school- and job- centric society, and holding open the gate to help you escape into a more beneficent reality, a reality of your own choosing. 

We would love your company. Courses and coaching and peer support and email newsletter subscriptions coming soon- ya know, as soon as I stop procrastinating the legalities of internet business and get my terms and policies squared- for now, you can scroll down to the footer and click the links to follow me on FB and/or IG.