Outrage is the new black, so it seems. Glenn Beck. Common Core. Eye of Horus. New World Order. MK Ultra Programming. Alex Jones. Occultist pop singers. 9/11 was an inside job. Sandy Hook was staged. And so it goes. The Illuminati is here, and here to stay, or so they say.

I used to be the consummate conspiracy theorist and I would get completely outraged about these things. It started with skeptical research. I would thoughtfully read articles and watch documentaries on this all powerful enemy poised to enslave us all. Documentary after documentary, my cynicism began to fade, until it was undeniable. I had taken the red pill, and it left me joyless and numb.

I walked around in a daze, executing my daily duties as if they were a useless backdrop to a reality darker and thicker than I could possibly fathom.

If my life, and everything that made it real and vibrant were a lie, what was there to live for? What was true, and how could I even know?

Why should I work? American money isn’t real. Why should I enjoy the fresh air? It’s been poisoned with carcinogens so that they can get the population down to a controllable number. Why should I enjoy good conversation and good company? Everyone I know has been deliberately numbed into submission and programmed to find meaning at the lowest possible denominator, so as to keep them from reaching their full potential.

Why should I enjoy this cup of coffee, or this sumptuous dessert? The ingredients used in it have been chemically manipulated to nourish our brains enough to keep us alive, but not enough to give us the power we are able to have. Life, as I know it, doesn’t exist. It’s all fake.

I stopped voting, because I believed democracy was a lie. I had visions of politicians watching the huddled voters with derision. “They think they are actually doing something,” I heard them scoff, while clinking glasses of champagne. “Look at them out there, standing in line in the rain with their little umbrellas. Go ahead. Mark your little ballot.” I stopped celebrating July 4^th for the same reason. I would have stopped celebrating Thanksgiving, but my mother would have killed me if I stayed home from Thanksgiving dinner in political protest.

It was the Ed Snowden scandal that I flipped me into high gear conspiracy theorist, though. After that, I needed to know everything, so that…so that…so that…what? So that I could…be aware? So that, somehow, it wouldn’t be as bad, because I knew about it? Looking back, I don’t know what I need this information for, really. But, I was convinced I needed to know how far this Illuminati thing went.

Every single night for months, I would spend hours upon hours researching. I watched probably hundreds of videos. I learned about the planned global economic collapse, chilling theories behind natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, government programs to send electric signals into the air to react with our brain waves and reroute them.

I would stay up through the wee hours of the morning, this research now having an almost supernatural pull on me. Eventually, I would fall into an exhausted sleep, my body frozen in fear. Of course, none of this would lead to particularly restful sleep, or sweet dreams. So, I would awaken, still in a fog, last night’s search for fluoride water still lighting up my laptop screen and beckoning me into the next morning.

I don’t remember what broke the spell, but maybe it was when it started getting personal. There was sort of an Illuminati McCarthyism. Everyone was searching the music videos, movies, and photos of politicians and public figures for Satanic signs. This person was a Satanist, that one was an MK Ultra slave, tortured into mind control.

Then they hit a historic televangelist. I froze. I held a degree from his university. The things they were saying, unfortunately, did make a bit of sense. But, after four years laboring under the tightly controlled tutelage he endorsed, was I mind controlled by extension? How deep was it? Not only that, the church I grew up in, while a slightly different persuasion, stood very much in line with this man’s teachings. To throw out this televangelist’s teachings, would be to throw out so much of my own Christian upbringing, I didn’t know if I could.

Then they started going after Christian pop stars. I grew up practically worshiping the CCM movement, and had always dreamed of a career working behind the scenes. But when they hit a very influential artist, I nearly collapsed. I grew up with his face on my wall.

His band had been the single biggest name in Christian rock in the 1990’s, and there was no way to overstate how influential they had been to my adolescent theological development. (For all of you who figured out who he is, I don’t agree with those rumors anymore).

Through my teens, I devoured their interviews, and knew every lyric to every song they ever published (and even a few they didn’t). I savored those lyrics, mulling them over and over, incorporating them into my budding young theology. I built upon them my own thoughts, and upon those heaped ideas from other sources. He started his own record label, and I bought CD’s off it, just because he was behind them.

As an artist of faith myself, I listened intently to his ideas on how art, ministry, and business can mix, and I made vocational choices based around that theology. (Don’t hate. People do it all the time with pastors and evangelists. Think: Jimmy Swaggart, or even your own pastor).

To think, that nothing that came out of that band, or likely CCM at all, was true, then I actually didn’t know truth. I was actually a blank soul. This was one of the scariest thoughts of my life.

At this point, I decided I had had enough.

I realized, that by subjecting myself to all this confusion, fear and outrage, I was exactly where they wanted me. Completely helpless, stripped of identity, and utterly useless against them.

By trying to save my life from them, I was actually letting them steal it. But what could I do? Stage a protest? Like that would help.

Read my conclusions in Confessions Part II: How to Defeat the Illuminati in Four Easy Steps.