Yeah, but here's the thing. The Man has gotten so good at what it does that it can squash such personalities so easily. I mean in a soundbite it can kill someone's character. "He's a conspiracy theorist." Done. "He's anti-vax." Really done. He might as well be the plague personified.

Saw a good one recently - someone was labelled a 'rabbit-hole conspiracy theorist' - which not only takes care of their view, but all the research they'd done to support it!

The MAN controls thought through social standing. It knows that individual are controlled through the acceptability of their thoughts. The threat of shame is almost as powerful as that of death, even more so for some people.

That's a good point. Unwanted truths are cloaked in a thick sludge of social disapproval, so that even mentioning them requires the mentioner to endure a wave of opprobrium. Which most people don't want. So you say nothing.

An example is the poetry night that i've been going to for nearly 3 years. Although several readers do (safe) political stuff, there's only one other guy who's ever uttered the C-word. For me, that's weird in itself. I still talk about it coz as Diogenes (follower of Socrates who co-founded Cynicism as a philosophy) said: If a philosopher is not prepared to be provocative, then what's the point?.

But it's a strange experience reading C-word related poems. Last time, looking out at the audience, i could see half of them laughing/enjoying it, while the other half were bristling with disapproval. Unfortunately, one of the bristlers is some poonce who controls the poetry scene gigs in this area.