Learned helplessness is one of the main reasons that we are allowing the atrocities in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere to happen.
We have to face the cold, hard truth about our own complacency in the face of industrial-scale slaughter. We sit on our couches, paralyzed by the sheer scale of the horror on our screens, forgetting that the imperial war machine relies entirely on our passive permission to keep grinding human bones into dust, feeding on our collective apathy like a parasitic fungus thriving in the dark. |
This paralysis isn’t an accident; it is by design, a cage built exclusively for our minds. Learned helplessness is a carefully cultivated psychological prison where the magnitude of the slaughter in Gaza and Lebanon is designed to make you feel that your resistance is futile, and the empire relies on this belief to turn your paralyzing shock into a form of tacit consent for its ongoing crimes. They don’t need you to support the killing; they just need you to feel too small and too insignificant to stop it. |
But there is an antidote to this engineered apathy, and it starts with realizing how fragile the power structures really are. If people watch ‘THE TRUST FALL’, we shatter the engineered illusion of learned helplessness by showing that the empire is absolutely terrified of a single journalist armed with nothing but the truth. Assange didn’t just casually publish leaks; he knowingly put a massive target on his own back by exposing the blood-soaked, sociopathic reality of the US war machine that mainstream media cowards were desperate to hide. While Western journalists dutifully regurgitate State Department press releases, Assange possessed the radical courage to publish the Iraq and Afghan War Logs, staring down the most violent empire in human history to meticulously document its systematic slaughter. |
| It is staggering to comprehend the sheer scale of his bravery, knowing that at first, it was just one young man from Melbourne, with a brilliant mind and a laptop, going toe-to-toe with the world’s most violent empire. Later he had help of course, but those initial strikes against the war machine were a high-wire act of solitary, terrifying defiance. As lawyer/journalist Mark David said in THE TRUST FALL: “He knew how dangerous it was; he was on the run in those key moments before it became a huge organisation, it was pretty much just Julian and whatever secret communication devices he had in his laptop.”  |
| He showed us the exact blueprint for taking on the leviathan without blinking. As Daniel Ellsberg famously noted in the documentary, “Julian took on the most powerful countries on earth – basically all of them,” a testament to a level of bravery and radical truth-telling that leaves the timid status quo trembling in its boots. Proving that true journalistic integrity cannot be bought by the empire’s hollow kings, Assange famously declared, “My principles are not for sale,” backing up his words by unequivocally rejecting a presidential pardon from Donald Trump – offered via an intermediary – in exchange for compromising his sources and publicly denying Russian involvement in the 2016 DNC email leaks. |
| The empire desperately wants you to think that heroes are a myth, but Julian proved them categorically wrong. As Mary Kostakidis brilliantly points out in the film, “He showed us that it’s possible for a person that’s not part of a power structure to stand up for his principles, for what he believes is right, and to be fearless,” utterly destroying the toxic, learned helplessness that tells us mere citizens can’t throw a wrench into the gears of the colonial war machine. We are not powerless; we are simply unpracticed in using our immense, world-altering power. It’s time we start practicing, because the alternative is a rapid descent into absolute, unmitigated barbarism. A sprawling oil slick of apathy suffocating the life from our potential for change, we have been conditioned to view our own political agency as non-existent, but the moment we reject this manufactured helplessness and embrace the radical, defiant act of refusing to disengage, we realize that our collective refusal to accept the “inevitability” of war is the only force capable of breaking the cycle of colonial violence and becoming the active, dangerous threat to the colonial status quo that we were meant to be. We just have to decide, together, that enough is enough. |
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| This is the very heart of the matter, the absolute crux of our shared responsibility to one another. As I said in my narration script for THE TRUST FALL: “If he knew that we have an ability to realise that we’ve been deceived, to finally, and critically, and profoundly, and devastatingly open our eyes, then this was a trust fall – an incredibly brave trust fall – and we are the ones who were meant to be doing the catching.” If more of us were braver, we would have “caught” him immediately. WikiLeaks would have risen to be the most prominent and trustworthy media outlet on the planet, and perhaps today’s shocking atrocities could have been prevented. We must unlearn our learned helplessness. We are standing on the precipice of history, watching the old world rot, and I reckon it’s time we stopped asking for permission to live in a peaceful world. When the billions of us who truly hold the power finally realize our collective strength, we will become an unstoppable tide of justice that sweeps away the corrupt few. |
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| As I wrote in THE TRUST FALL: “Twenty feet high, one meter thick, and one mile long, prison walls of solid concrete separate a man from freedom, family, liberty, deliverance, warmth, sun, air, and space. Yet, this wall is like dust on the sleeve of humanity. We can move it with one half breath if enough voices combine. Inhale, exhale, look forwards and upwards, and remember our desire, our instinct, and our right to be free.” So let us take that breath, let the righteous fire of a million silenced voices fill our lungs, and refuse to be quiet spectators to this bloody machinery for even one more second – let us step out into the streets, raise our voices until they crack, and reclaim the beautiful, defiant humanity that the empire has tried so desperately to steal from us all. |
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| Humanity is starving for an escape from this paralyzing numbness, beginning by lobbing a massive brick of truth (peacefully) straight through the spin factory’s pristine window. A brutally honest documentary such as ‘THE TRUST FALL’ serves as the ultimate remedy for the artificial compliance keeping us anesthetized. It tears down the sanitized broadcast filters, compelling ordinary folks to stare directly at the totally vacant ethics of the Washington-Tel Aviv slaughterhouse. This film isn’t mere entertainment – it acts as a sledgehammer built to smash through willful ignorance, packing enough electric shock to jolt the masses from their cozy Western slumber before the whole Middle East turns to ash. You can watch it worldwide at no cost, yet its power to sabotage the military vultures depends totally on everyday mates giving a rat’s arse enough to pay it forward and help expand its reach. Thanks to the financial support of donors, we were able to show THE TRUST FALL for free to 1,023 people in the past week. Let’s keep educating and building the momentum. |
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