This piece is adapted from a lecture I delivered on 1 January 2026, originally intended as the foundational episode of a series called “How We Got Here.” I had planned to release subsequent episodes on a disciplined, sequential schedule — tracing the history of human consciousness. Life, as it does, intervened. My son, Elijah, arrived in February, and the series hasn’t continued in the format I originally envisioned. But the material here remains the bedrock of everything I think about regarding institutional capture, sovereignty, and the systematic processing of human beings still playing out in the present and doubtless through 2026 and beyond. I’m publishing it now as a permanent reference — something I can point to when these ideas surface in my other work, and something others can engage with if it resonates. Key context: regardless of if, at times, my writing seems to imply that I think there is a “system of systems” that is actively against us — I do not think that; I think that we, as humans, ultimately create and externalise systems that stress-test our choices as we are, after all, individual units of consciousness, and consciousness means awareness with a choice.
Why now?
I am about to become a father.
Thus, the clock has started ticking for the time where education will come into question. The norm — the default path that society presents as obvious and inevitable — is placing our children on what I call the compulsory conveyor belt of compliant consciousness conscripts, standardisation, and human uniformity.
Unless I begin transmission of what I deem to be the correct frameworks of teaching and understanding that humans today are still starved of. I believe the lack of this foundational knowledge is largely responsible for the disorder of the world and its peoples, which is demonstrably getting worse.
Why me?
Probably not until one is faced with parenthood does one come face-to-face with the fact: “I will have to explain this… and this… and that… and… everything.”
Not because I think I’m smarter than teachers. But because I can see the pattern of what education, along with our other institutions that govern and rule us today, have become: a consciousness management and humanity extraction system.
Methodological disclaimer
I am not a professor. Nor am I claiming to be a hotshot polymath who should have his “teachings” listened to.
I’m a philomath — a lover of learning (philos; manthanein).
Not claiming to teach anything at all, I am simply transmitting that which I’ve learned myself. All you’ll ever hear from me is mere personal synthesis — pattern recognition across fields such as psychology, neuroscience, history, archaeology, religion, and consciousness (noetic) studies.
I’ll always do my best to cite what I cite, and to point out if something is just conjecture, and whether its origins are from me or somewhere else — always aiming to show you, explicitly, the threads I’m pulling.
This project is a projection of my personal ontology (what I think is) and epistemology (why I’m convinced).
When Jung replied, when asked if he believes in God in one of his last interviews, “I don’t believe, I know” — the statement is ontological (God exists as part of his map of reality) and his epistemological method is experiential/phenomenological (internal). Not belief. Belief is accepting something without direct knowing, implying faith in other’s claims.
Purpose, point, and direction
The purpose of this project is to compile and archive the history of human consciousness through the dissecting of human incoherence, for those who are lost and want to find the real thread themselves.
If anything resonates, investigate it further. If anything doesn’t, feel free to dismiss it. Regardless, the point is to think for yourself, and develop your own sovereign consciousness.
From here — “episode zero” — we would start tracking from the most obvious point on our timeline: “year zero.” Not because it’s the beginning, but because it’s the hinge.
In what would have been episode one, I intended to explain the actual life behind the person we know today as “Jesus Christ,” and why he was sovereignty incarnate. I would then detail how imperial powers inverted his individual-power and anti-religion teachings into a control system that could be globalised and utilised for the camouflaging and continuance of the fraternal factions behind the Roman Empire — factions that are still “in charge” now. Eventually arriving at the present day, where the majority of humanity worship Abrahamic religions, and why that proves we’re currently losing “the battle” to slave consciousness.
After that, we would go way back: to the civilisational reset humanity experienced around 12,000 BC, and through the “Great Ages” and cycles humanity has forgotten. Where mainstream history and archaeology and consensus culture are too afraid to go — explaining our actual origins as humans.
Ultimately, over the coming years, going where our institutions would never tread but where our children must be walked, lest we continue this evil loop of distortion that perpetuates and accelerates. At best: disenchantment and disenfranchisement. At worst: suicide, mental and physical illness, societal fallout, and civilisation collapse and erasure.
The consciousness capture data
Now to the body of this foundational piece. Why exactly have I named it “Consciousness Capture and the Slave-Sovereign Axis”?
Institutional education
Children spend approximately 40% of their term-time existence under institutional control.
Across a full year — holidays accounted, using a 12-hour waking day average across all ages for argument’s sake — they still spend over 28% of all waking hours in state-mandated institutions.
Multiplied by 13 years (ages 5–18) to get the whole picture: that’s 16,055 hours, or 28.2% of the not-asleep portion of their most developmental and plastic years of their life under institutional control.
The 28% figure is only part of it
At home, 74% of couple families now have both parents out working each day.
Most children are spending almost all of their time outside of institutional education under algorithmic control by technology.
The brutal truth: parenting in the modern day is primarily being done by institutions and blue light stimulation.
Meaning: our children are not being raised by families — they are being artificially processed by pre-designed systems.
Generation Beta (2025 >)
In the UK, children aged 5–16 average 6.3 hours of daily screen time (Specsavers, 2024). That’s 44.1 hours per week and 2,300 hours per year — 96 full days annually spent staring at screens, representing approximately 53% of their daily waking hours.
Remember that average school hours are around 6.5 per day, representing 54% of waking hours.
Making the combined school (approximately 6.5 hours) and screen (approximately 6.3 hours) time equal to 107% of waking hours.
For 11–14 year olds, screen time averages around 9 hours per day — approximately 75% of their waking hours under algorithmic control.
Childhood as an autonomous developmental space has been structurally eliminated.
Our generations are being raised entirely within externally imposed processing loops with no gaps, developmental sovereignty, or time for the nervous system to build its own structures and rhythms.
Humans are being formatted, rather than grown. Plants treated like machines.
The new dual parenting
Our children are being parented not by parents, but by two hijacking processes:
During regulated hours: institutional formatting providing behavioural conditioning and cognitive standardisation.
During what should be unstructured time: algorithmic formatting providing constant external stimulation and direction through not just content consumption but neurological interference from blue light stimulation — which humans used to get exclusively from the Sun.
Screens are not neutral tools. They’re delivery mechanisms for dopamine manipulation, attention fragmentation, and the systematic prevention of boredom — when internal processing and pattern recognition actually develop, if allowed.
My kid's cohort
Will be the first to be born into a world where AI integration is native. They can only know a world prior to its presence conceptually.
Them, like my generation with smartphones and social media, regarding the knowledge of what the Devil is that’s being dealt with and all its implications, have been failed by our elders and institutions.
The system we live in, or the Devil we’re in bed with, is self-reinforcing. Each generation becomes less self-aware and more dependent — making it harder for the next generation to transcend it, or at least turn and face it.
The prisoner's dilemma
Parents of children in this system — most of them — feel unable to set boundaries with smartphones and social media, as their kids report being isolated and excluded from the same world their peers operate within and navigate from.
As group-mammals, our worst punishment (and worst fear) is ostracisation.
This creates a “prisoner’s dilemma” where individual parents can’t solve the problem because it requires collective action.
Most parents are required to be out of their child’s way (working), which allows for their institutional capture — “brainwashing” can’t happen if parents are present — creating the prisoner’s dilemma, and the slave chain perpetuates.
The trap: choice one
Parents who attempt to set boundaries with smartphones and social media face a choice between:
Condemning their child to social isolation when peer culture operates entirely in digital spaces. Half of 11–16 year olds find it easier to be themselves online than face-to-face (EU Kids Online, 2011). Three in five 11–16 year olds said they would be lonely if they couldn’t talk to friends via technology (NIH, 2020).
The trap: choice two
Or, as the guardian to your young, surrendering them to the second hijacking process of algorithmic control — securing occupation for 107% of their waking hours.
It’s safe to assume that this is what happens in almost every case. 91% of UK children have smartphones by age 11 (Ofcom, 2025). Age 11 is when children start secondary school, so this number will shoot up to approximately 100% by the time they start their second year.
The perfect storm for slavery consciousness
There’s a perfect storm that has been created where the outcome is our children being raised by systems, not humans: institutional schooling plus algorithmic hijacking plus economic coercion of parents’ absence.
The harsh truth: no individual parent can solve this without pulling their family out of society at some level.
It’s a collective action problem requiring system-level intervention — which will not happen because of some more harsh truths regarding said system.
The three systems-level intervention truths
Why will intervention — correct guardianship of our generations — at the systems-level (outside of the family unit) not happen?
The economic pressure that forces both parents to work means they’re barely present anyway.
Institutions benefit from compliant, algorithmically-pacified, and cognitively standardised children.
The system is self-reinforcing: each generation’s increased dependency and unique illnesses makes intervention progressively harder and collective resistance increasingly impossible.
The dire data that we do nothing about
But why am I saying these systems are bad?
They are only bad because the outcomes are not good.
Suicide is the leading cause of death for people aged 5–35 in England. Approximately 75% are boys.
Higher suicide rates exist in young people receiving non-statement SEN support (school-level intervention), compared with those who received no SEN provision.
And higher suicide rates for children in households where the adults have formal qualifications, compared with households who do not.
All: ONS (2025)
The false promise of "education"
One in nine (10.8%) children had a mental health difficulty in 2017 (NHS, 2023). This rose to one in six (16%) in 2020, and one in five (20.3%) in 2023.
74% of teachers believe poor mental health is negatively impacting children’s learning (YoungMinds). Over half of teachers (56%) think they spend more time supporting pupils’ mental health than teaching them.
Higher education
In the UK, over 69% of university students are dealing with mental health issues (Oxford CBT, 2024).
Average student debt stands at £46,150. It takes on average 29 years and 4 months to repay. For the average person, the interest grows faster than they can pay — £465 per month added while paying £170 per month. 44% are never able to fully repay, but the debt follows them for 30 years before getting written off.
Graduates now earn £1.43 for every £1 earned by minimum wage workers — down from a 2:1 ratio in 2007.
The pathway con
More than one-third of UK graduates are underemployed.
78% of students consider leaving university during their studies.
48% of recent graduates (past 5 years) regret going to university. 44% say they don’t need their degree for their current job.
When looking back, 52% of UK graduates regret their decisions entirely.
So why is suicide a choice that people choose?
Suicide as sovereignty sickness
When the realisation occurs that you were wrong to trust the system, and ended up a slave to tyranny in return for promised outcomes you either didn’t get or did not like — you feel too far gone, making any idea of course correcting feel so out of reach that your last sovereign decision as a human is to stop being one.
Proving that, in all their years as a human, they weren’t able to develop into what that should have meant.
Suicide is the ultimate symptom of a captured consciousness recognising its capture but seeing no escape route except terminal exit.
Because, as a society, we do not develop sovereign humans — we format, process, and extract their consciousness on their behalf, without teaching them what it is.
The systematic harvesting of human attention and the external processing of identity formation
This data reveals something far more totalising than the reductionist conclusions of “screen addiction in kids these days” or an “education crisis for kids these days.”
It documents the complete capture of consciousness during its most formative and plastic period.
The consciousness capture framework
The systematic initial capture and embedded control of attention, cognitive development, and identity formation through the convergence of:
State-mandated institutional processing (28.2% of childhood waking life).
Algorithmic behavioural and neurological modification (50–75% of daily waking hours).
Economic coercion removing parental presence (75% dual-income necessity) — children can only be “brainwashed” if away from their parents.
Social coordination traps preventing escape or course correction (peer culture entirely digitised; fear of ostracization).
The results of total capture
Total capture equals 107% of young people’s waking existence under institutional and algorithmic control during their most neurologically plastic years, resulting in:
Dopaminergic pathway hijacking — external dependency for motivation and direction, loss of personal locus of control through externalisation, and no ability for self-authorship.
Default Mode Network (DMN) suppression — identity consolidation never properly develops with no boredom or rest states for it to occur, loss of internal narrative generation and ability to sustain autonomous thought.
Prefrontal cortex dysregulation — executive function impairment, inability to self-control, and loss of decision-making abilities as not required thanks to years of externally provided direction and the always-on stimulation of novelty intake and task-switching.
The ultimate irony
This consciousness capture system, with its industrial aims of standardisation, creates precisely the same neurological patterns that it labels as “neurodevelopmental disorders” — and the rise in their diagnoses as an “epidemic.”
The more the system tries to format round pegs (the decided order), the more square pegs (the “disordered”) it produces.
The system is manufacturing more of what it defines as dysfunction while attempting to create uniformity. The “ordered order” is producing increasing disorder — which, in an ironic twist, is proving the order itself is disordered.
The canaries in the coal mine
The rising neurodevelopmental “crisis” isn’t more disorders — it’s more visibility of what the system does to all children. They are the canaries in three simultaneous ways:
1) Natural, innate resistance — they reject the formatting from the start. Square pegs refusing to be rounded.
2) Visible damage — they show the neurological harm from capture more obviously than neurotypical children (“more compliant”) who successfully suppress symptoms and appropriate normalcy.
3) Early casualties — they’re the first to break under a system that’s breaking everyone, just some more slowly than others (hence the rise in 30+ year old diagnosis).
Industrialised consciousness farming
These are not fragmented problems requiring fragmented solutions. This is the industrialised farming of human consciousness by a system that:
1) Captures the raw material (children’s attention and neurological development) — through compulsory institutional attendance and unavoidable digital dependency, with punishments if you do not comply.
2) Processes it through standardised mechanisms (uniform curriculum, expected normalcy, algorithmic recommendation engines) — designed for compliance and consumption, not sovereignty or coherence.
3) Extracts economic value (university debt servitude, credential inflation, precarious employment) — while transferring risk (fear) entirely to the individual.
4) Produces broken outputs (one in five with mental health difficulties, suicide as leading cause of death ages 5–35, graduate regret at 52%, underemployment over one-third) — because the system was never designed to produce healthy, sovereign humans but to produce compliant standardised economic units for industrialisation and military conscription.
5) Reinforces itself generationally — through coordination and coercion traps that make individual escape impossible without social exile, while each generation’s increased dependency makes the next generation’s capture more total and resistance more helpless and stigmatised.
Why "consciousness capture"
It names the resource being extracted — attention, neurological development, identity formation, capacity and ability for sovereignty at scale — and the systemic mechanisms (institutional plus algorithmic) doing the extraction.
In a consciousness universe (that we exist and operate within), the primary resource for an economic control Empire requiring slavery is not just labour, but consciousness itself.
Not “mental health crisis” — that treats symptoms as disease, distracting from the cause.
Not “technology problem” — that implies personal choice, distracting from systemic sovereignty impairment.
Not “education reform” — that assumes Victorian institutions can be fixed, distracting from their primary function being capture.
Nor “parenting failure” — they are forced to comply with state parenting.
The Tyrant-Slave dynamic
The ultimate representation of slavery is consumption. In order to leave the land of a tyrant, you must first refuse all that they offer you to stay — as in Exodus, Moses, the desert, the Israelites’ complaints of the desert, and wanting to go back to Pharaoh.
The opposite to leadership-by-tyranny is leadership-by-invitation.
Systems of tyranny do not invite. They force compliance, one way or another, but typically through fear and force.
Tyrants say: “The end is coming, the bad is coming, and we should do everything — including control you and everything that you do — because of that.”
The ultimate indictment
Children are not being raised — they’re being processed.
Consciousness is not being developed — it’s being captured.
This is not education — it’s industrialised identity formation for economic extraction.
Career pathways and employability are cons — it’s standardisation formatting for predictability at scale.
The outputs — personally broken, mentally unstable, financially indebted, professionally precarious young adults — are not system failure. They’re system success. The conveyor belt working as intended.
Inherited, unexamined
This data does not highlight problems that need solving by a Government or by the institutions themselves. That would be continued externalisation of agency.
Instead, this all shows, in crystal clear definition, a regime requiring our recognition and resistance.
Everything in this universe is inherently neutral, and the world exists for good — but good has to be chosen, and its opposite fundamentally rejected, at the individual level.
Evil thrives, and grows, where that which is inherited is also unexamined.
The game we're really playing
I’m led to be convinced that what the ancients called an “eternal battle” between two polarising forces — light versus dark, good versus evil, truth versus distortion — is real.
Which would make coherence versus incoherence in one’s individual (and ultimately collective) ontology the difference between a healthy or corrupt internal substrate. And that’s what leads to either a healthy or unhealthy world.
The definition of “consciousness” is awareness with a choice.
Therefore, the specific experience we are all here to participate in is a “game” of slave consciousness versus sovereign consciousness.
The only real teachings
If the highest individual resource in a consciousness system is not human labour but the human spirit — individual human nature, divinity itself — and consciousness is awareness with a choice (something we all start with the capacity for):
Being aware and able to choose is paramount, and are therefore the two things that will always be most meddled with by system control actors.
Think for yourself, and question everything.
Face your life with eyes wide open, even — and especially — when it hurts.
Choose good and love at every crossroads. They’re the same thing, and our only actual job.