There is a fair degree of consensus among thinking spiritual and (Mere) Christian people that the forces of evil have by-now won the culture war, and now control human perceptions of reality in the realm of 'the five senses' (mainly vision and hearing).
In other words, that the great bulk of audio-visual inputs for most Western people, day by day, is more or less as wished by the forces of purposive evil.
But what relationship does this have to the spiritual realm? In principle, Men remain free to accept salvation - so why go to all the bother of incrementally (over decades) taking-over culture and creating a delusional world of lies and inversion?
The answer is that the strategy is two-pronged - and involves two simultaneous brainwashings.
One is to take over culture and, by the mass media, to immerse people in it, and addict them to it, so they are continually subjected to cultural brainwashing (remembering that this is only partly a matter of content because the form of the mas media - the medium itself - is even more important than its specific content).
The other, equally important, brainwashing is to indoctrinate people into thinking that the realm of public perception is the only valid source of knowledge.
Because if people still retained their self-directed and intuitive forms of thought - if they were able to intuit knowledge directly for themselves, and regarded the real world as extending beyond the realm of the five senses (including the abstract but public realm of the measurements of scientific instruments, machines, statistics etc) - then clearly Men could not be led into self-damnation merely by controlling the world of culture.
Intuitive Man is able to see-through culture, and to know reality directly - and this would represent an insuperable barrier for creating and sustaining a world of inverted delusion.
So, the ideology of materialism, 'Enlightenment' rationalism, scientism, positivism (it has had various names) had to become mainstream, normal, and assumed before cultural indoctrination could have a direct effect on human spirituality.
And this has happened! The two prongs have had the desired effect - modern Western Man lives inside the artificial world of materialist culture, and also believes that only this materialist culture is real and true.
The loop has been closed.
But the way out from the loop is clear - because while it is hard to overturn a vast system of mass media and official lies and inversions - it is nothing like so difficult for any individual person to reject the modern metaphysics of materialism, and to assume instead the validity of their own intuition as a source of knowledge.
And it many people do this, and share the perspective and amplify it - then that would be IT for the vast system of lies and inversions.
I think the capacity to be led astray has always been stronger for the young than the old, but never moreso than now. Younger people are a bit more 'plugged into the matrix' than anyone else, and ersatz reality is more real to them than anything else. So it's not even materialism, but virtualism (sic) that has them in its grips, and they have no idea what it's doing to their minds and souls. A small example from the book "I-Disorder" (whose thesis is that the internet, at the very least, induces mental illness-like symptoms in those who use it) points out that reading a negative comment about oneself on social media affects the regions of the brain associated with pain the same way that gripping a scalding paper cup of coffee does.
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