How to Get Your Citizens to Think They Are The Problem (& Not You): A Cheat Sheet for Psychotic Systems

Making your people blame themselves for your systemic and structural psychosis will help you scale. You got this

Dear Valued Customer

Thank you for ordering our latest publication: How to Get Your Citizens to Think They Are The Problem (& Not You): A Cheat Sheet for Psychotic Systems

How to know if this cheat sheet is for you:

We ask that you meet two criteria:

1. You need to be a system.
   Preferably a dominant one: economic, political, cultural etc: built on extraction, competition, and control, but disguised as progress.

2. You need to be (or aspiring to be) quite unmistakably psychotic.

We use the orthodox definition of psychosis:

Psychosis means losing contact with reality. This might involve seeing or hearing things others cannot (hallucinations) or believing things that are not true (delusions).

In systemic form, this might look like:

• Believing that endless economic growth is not only possible, but necessary

• Believing that the destruction of ecosystems in the name of development is “progress”

• Thinking that the relentless pursuit of profit is a rather desirable goal of society

• Believing that humans are separate from nature and it is their right to dominate and control

• Pathologising feelings of anxiety or despair about the state of the world and certainly not recognising them as valid responses to systemic and existential collapse

• Viewing rising inequality as the result of individual failure, rather than systemic exploitation

• Spending trillions subsidising the industries that are destroying the biosphere

Is this you? Congratulations, you are a psychotic system!

Note: This cheat sheet is also suitable for systems that are observably psychotic but do not self-identify as such. That’s delusion. You will think you’re fine.

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Why you might need this cheat sheet:

As a sign of your success, you may eventually encounter citizens pushing back against your organising principles and foundational myths of meritocracy, individualism, separation and control.

Some common warning signs include:

• Citizens displaying reverence and preference for life

• Citizens showing unending appreciation of beauty

• Citizens desiring clean air, water, and arable soil, affordable food and shelter, and other such items

This might lead to

• Deference to the more-than-human world

• Protest movements

• Publicly identifying the system (or some of its totemic leaders) as psychotic

• Collective organising

• Embodied grief rituals and other congregating

• Doing mushrooms in the woods and reconnecting with their soft, fuzzy mammal bodies and their place in an astonishing web of interconnectedness.

This can lead to widespread unrest, existential clarity and such like.

We know this unrest can be a distressing time for a psychotic system.
After all, the biggest threat to your existence is your citizens realising their power.

Luckily, our cheat sheet is here to help.

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Our approach has been refined over many regimes, and is built on a simple, effective tactic:

To retain and scale power, a psychotic system like you need only convince citizens (in multiple, overlapping ways) that they are the ones who are mad.
That they are the delusional ones. That they are hallucinating.
That they are psychotic.

When deployed using a multi-pronged, multidimensional approach across society, this tactic leverages:

• Your systemic power

• The breadth of embedded narratives within your institutions

• The human tendency to internalise societal patterns

What follows is our cheat sheet to help you prevent, contain, and redirect your citizens from inconvenient stirrings, awakenings and rememberings.

If you enjoy these tactics, consider upgrading to our full reality-manipulation framework: The Advanced Playbook (Vol II: Total Systems Psychosis), featuring layered deployment strategies and cross-sector application models.As part of your upgrade, receive our popular leaflet free:
“10 Monetisable Pieces of Crap You Can Make With the Final Dregs at the Bottom of the Oil Drum”

Important note: This cheat sheet assumes you’ve already sufficiently neutralised connection with natural environments, ancestral lands, and community.
If not, please refer to Volume I: Sever the Roots, available at the store.

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How to Get Your Citizens to Think They Are The Problem (& Not You): A Cheat Sheet for Psychotic Systems

• Start early … really, really early
  Train children to equate worth with performance. Good grades = good kid. Struggle = failure.
  Bonus if you can start while they’re in the womb, with mothers trying to have perfect pregnancies.
  

• Embed blame into their sense of self
  Done well, self-blame becomes a reflex. Instead of “this system is broken,” they’ll think: “what’s wrong with me?” Win.
  

• Moralise productivity
  Make hard work a moral virtue and rest a character flaw. If they’re not constantly achieving, they’re lazy. Or undeserving.
  

• Normalise the abnormal
  If everyone is overworked, stressed, sick, and food insecure, it’ll feel normal.
  Citizens will think they’re weak for struggling. Good.
  

• Make struggle feel like personal failure
  Reframe being underpaid and overworked as a lack of ambition, tenacity and grind. Citizens should “lean in” more. “Hustle” harder. Build a movement around the virtue of getting up at 5am

• Individualise everything
  Frame poverty as bad budgeting, illness as poor lifestyle choices and isolation as an inevitable outcome of their defective personality.
  

• Turn appropriate responses into personal pathologies
  Try these frames: 

  Feeling anxious about climate collapse? The problem is your mental health. You should fix your anxiety. 

  Trauma? No: you are just too sensitive. 

  Anger from females is unseemly aggression. Sadness from males is a sign of weakness.

  If citizens  are questioning the system, deploy wide-scale labelling as conspiracy theorists. Label all responses to your regime as negative or undesirable.
  

• Reward “resilience” that ignores root causes
  Celebrate those who keep working, who 'crush it', who ignore grief, who never question the system. Call it grit, call it hustle, call it ambition.
  Use mugs as propaganda: “rise and grind"
  

• Undermine solidarity by feeding comparison
  Create environments of constant competition with hyper-curated social media. Everyone else 'seems fine', so citizens will feel they are the one lacking
  

• Centre the “self” including as its own culture of wellness

  Flood your citizens with self-help, not social help. Make sure there are millions of apps to track habits but zero apps to dismantle capitalism. Self-care. Self-worth. Self-love. Self-blame. Keep the mirror pointed inward.
  

• Sell back their unmet needs
  Longing for community, peace, meaning? Retreats! Pesticide-free food and clean water must now be purchased at a premium. Send a generation of poorly-trained life coaches to replace circles and generational wisdom
  

• Make everything very noisy, loud and artificial to drown out clarity
  News. Notifications. Outrage. Lights. AI.
  No time to think, feel or connect the dots. They will be so tired and frazzled.
  

• Make help private and medical
  If citizens are feeling the weight of ecological collapse and environmental destruction, they should go to therapy. Or medicate. Or journal. Or vape. Never let them turn that feeling into collective action.
  

• Erode trust in collective responses.
  Paint activism as naïve, radical, cringe… or criminal
  

• Reward the obedient. Punish the questioning.
  Those who comply get promotions, stock, perks. Those who speak out get sidelined, shamed, jailed or diagnosed. Or: killed.

We hope you have enjoyed your cheat sheet and be sure to check back for our other publications.