Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead through The Rutherford Institute,

“If all that People need is safety, they will go to jail. They’re going to have sufficient to eat, a mattress and a roof over their heads. But when an American needs to protect his dignity and his equality as a human being, he should not bow his neck to any dictatorial authorities.”

 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower

The federal government needs us to bow all the way down to its dictates.

It needs us to purchase into the fantasy that we live the dream, when actually, we’re trapped in an limitless nightmare of servitude and oppression.

Certainly, with each passing day, life within the American Police State more and more resembles life within the dystopian tv collection The Prisoner.

First broadcast 55 years in the past within the U.S., The Prisoner—described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered via Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes which can be nonetheless related in the present day: the rise of a police state, the lack of freedom, round the clock surveillance, the corruption of presidency, totalitarianism, weaponization, group assume, mass advertising, and the tendency of human beings to meekly settle for their lot in life as prisoners in a jail of their very own making.

Maybe one of the best visible debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner facilities round a British undercover agent who abruptly resigns solely to seek out himself imprisoned in a digital jail disguised as a seaside paradise with parks and inexperienced fields, leisure actions and even a butler.

Whereas luxurious, the Village’s inhabitants haven’t any true freedom, they can not depart the Village, they’re underneath fixed surveillance, all of their actions tracked by militarized drones, and stripped of their individuality in order that they’re recognized solely by numbers.

“I’m not a quantity. I’m a free man,” is the mantra chanted in every episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, who additionally performed the title function of Quantity Six, the imprisoned authorities agent.

All through the collection, Quantity Six is subjected to interrogation techniques, torture, hallucinogenic medicine, identification theft, thoughts management, dream manipulation, and numerous types of social indoctrination and bodily coercion with the intention to “persuade” him to conform, hand over, give in and subjugate himself to the desire of the powers-that-be.

Quantity Six refuses to conform.

In each episode, Quantity Six resists the Village’s indoctrination strategies, struggles to keep up his personal identification, and makes an attempt to flee his captors. “I can’t make any offers with you,” he pointedly remarks to Quantity Two, the Village administrator a.ok.a. jail warden. “I’ve resigned. I can’t be pushed, filed, stamped, listed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my very own.”

But regardless of how far Quantity Six manages to get in his efforts to flee, it’s by no means far sufficient.

Watched by surveillance cameras and different units, Quantity Six’s makes an attempt to flee are repeatedly thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres generally known as “rovers.”

Nonetheless, he refuses to surrender.

“In contrast to me,” he says to his fellow prisoners, “a lot of you will have accepted the scenario of your imprisonment, and can die right here like rotten cabbages.”

Quantity Six’s escapes develop into a surreal train in futility, every episode an unfunny, unsettling Groundhog’s Day that builds to the identical irritating denouement: there isn’t any escape.

As journalist Scott Thill concludes for Wired, “Rise up at all times comes at a worth. In the course of the acclaimed run of The Prisoner, Quantity Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: Within the episode ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,’ his thoughts is transplanted to a different man’s physique. Quantity Six repeatedly escapes The Village solely to be returned to it in the long run, trapped like an animal, overcome by a stressed power he can’t expend, and betrayed by almost everybody round him.”

The collection is a chilling lesson about how troublesome it’s to achieve one’s freedom in a society during which jail partitions are disguised throughout the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress, nationwide safety and the necessity to guard in opposition to terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, and so forth.

As Thill famous, “The Prisoner was an allegory of the person, aiming to seek out peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.”

The Prisoner’s Village can be an apt allegory for the American Police State, which is quickly transitioning right into a full-fledged Surveillance State: it offers the phantasm of freedom whereas functioning all of the whereas like a jail: managed, watchful, rigid, punitive, lethal and inescapable.

The American Surveillance State, very like The Prisoner’s Village, is a metaphorical panopticon, a round jail during which the inmates are monitored by a single watchman located in a central tower. As a result of the inmates can’t see the watchman, they’re unable to inform whether or not or not they’re being watched at any given time and should proceed underneath the belief that they’re at all times being watched.

Eighteenth century social theorist Jeremy Bentham envisioned the panopticon jail to be a less expensive and more practical technique of “acquiring energy of thoughts over thoughts, in a amount hitherto with out instance.”

Bentham’s panopticon, during which the prisoners are used as a supply of low-cost, menial labor, has develop into a mannequin for the trendy surveillance state during which the populace is consistently being watched, managed and managed by the powers-that-be whereas funding its existence.

Nowhere to run and nowhere to cover: that is the mantra of the architects of the Surveillance State and their company collaborators.

Authorities eyes are watching you.

They see your each transfer: what you learn, how a lot you spend, the place you go, with whom you work together, while you get up within the morning, what you’re watching on tv and studying on the web.

Each transfer you make is being monitored, mined for knowledge, crunched, and tabulated with the intention to amass a profile of who you’re, what makes you tick, and the way finest to manage you when and if it turns into essential to convey you in line.

When the federal government sees all and is aware of all and has an abundance of legal guidelines to render even probably the most seemingly upstanding citizen a prison and lawbreaker, then the outdated adage that you simply’ve obtained nothing to fret about in case you’ve obtained nothing to cover not applies.

Aside from the plain risks posed by a authorities that feels justified and empowered to spy on its folks and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and expertise to watch and management them, we’re approaching a time during which we will likely be compelled to decide on between bowing down in obedience to the dictates of the federal government—i.e., the legislation, or no matter a authorities official deems the legislation to be—and sustaining our individuality, integrity and independence.

When folks speak about privateness, they mistakenly assume it protects solely that which is hidden behind a wall or underneath one’s clothes. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their continuously shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privateness.” And expertise has furthered muddied the waters.

Nevertheless, privateness is a lot greater than what you do or say behind locked doorways. It’s a way of life one’s life agency within the perception that you’re the grasp of your life, and barring any quick hazard to a different particular person (which is much totally different from the fastidiously crafted threats to nationwide safety the federal government makes use of to justify its actions), it’s nobody’s enterprise what you learn, what you say, the place you go, whom you spend your time with, and the way you spend your cash.

Sadly, George Orwell’s 1984—the place “you needed to dwell—did dwell, from behavior that grew to become intuition—within the assumption that each sound you made was overheard, and, besides in darkness, each motion scrutinized”—has now develop into our actuality.

We now discover ourselves within the unenviable place of being monitored, managed, corralled and managed by applied sciences that reply to authorities and company rulers.

Think about that on any given day, the common American going about his every day enterprise will likely be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in additional than 20 totally different methods, by each authorities and company eyes and ears.

A byproduct of this new age during which we dwell, whether or not you’re strolling via a retailer, driving your automotive, checking e-mail, or speaking to family and friends on the telephone, you possibly can ensure that some authorities company is listening in and monitoring your conduct.

This doesn’t even start to the touch on the company trackers that monitor your purchases, net shopping, Fb posts and different actions going down within the cyber sphere.

Stingray units mounted on police automobiles to warrantlessly monitor cell telephones, Doppler radar units that may detect human respiration and motion inside in a house, license plate readers that may document as much as 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public area” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing expertise that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” packages, police physique cameras that flip law enforcement officials into roving surveillance cameras, the web of issues: all of those applied sciences (and extra) add as much as a society during which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—particularly not when the federal government can eavesdrop on your telephone calls, learn your emails, monitor your driving habits, monitor your actions, scrutinize your purchases and peer via the partitions of your own home.

As French thinker Michel Foucault concluded in his 1975 guide Self-discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a entice.”

That is the digital focus camp—the panopticon jail—the Village—during which we are actually caged.

It’s a jail from which there will likely be no escape. Actually not if the federal government and its company allies have something to say about it.

As Glenn Greenwald notes:

“The way in which issues are purported to work is that we’re purported to know just about every thing about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re referred to as public servants. They’re purported to know just about nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re referred to as personal people. This dynamic – the hallmark of a wholesome and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know every thing about what we do, and are continuously constructing techniques to know extra. In the meantime, we all know much less and fewer about what they do, as they construct partitions of secrecy behind which they perform. That’s the imbalance that should come to an finish. No democracy may be wholesome and practical if probably the most consequential acts of those that wield political energy are fully unknown to these to whom they’re purported to be accountable.”

None of this may change, regardless of which get together controls Congress or the White Home, as a result of regardless of all the work being completed to assist us purchase into the fantasy that issues will change if we simply elect the precise candidate, we’ll nonetheless be prisoners of the Village.

So how do you escape? For starters, resist the urge to adapt to a gaggle thoughts and the tyranny of mob-think as managed by the Deep State.

Assume for your self. Be a person.

As McGoohan commented in 1968, “At this second people are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves… So long as folks really feel one thing, that’s the good factor. It’s when they’re strolling round not considering and never feeling, that’s robust. Whenever you get a mob like that, you possibly can flip them into the type of gang that Hitler had.”

You wish to be free? Take away the blindfold that blinds you to the Deep State’s con recreation, cease doping your self with authorities propaganda, and break freed from the political chokehold that has obtained you marching in lockstep with tyrants and dictators.

As I clarify in my guide Battlefield America: The Struggle on the American Individuals and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, till you come to phrases with the truth that the federal government is the issue (regardless of which get together dominates), you’ll by no means cease being prisoners.