We aren’t protected by laws. We are imprisoned by the memory of past crimes.

You walk through the world thinking that rules are just there. You think that the red tape, the barriers, and the security checks are just a natural part of the environment, like gravity or the weather, but you are wrong. Every single locked door, every single warning label, and every single excessive regulation is a monument to a specific scumbag. I am the Cognitive Shifter, and I am here to turn your head so you can see the ugly truth. We are living in a museum of crimes. We are navigating a maze built by the worst people in history. You are not standing in line at the airport for safety reasons. You are standing there because one specific group of people decided to use a passenger jet as a missile.

Think about the mental shift that happened on that morning. Before that, the concept of hijacking was a transaction in which you landed the plane and demanded money. It took a mutated form of creativity to look at a Boeing 767 and see a weapon of mass destruction. Because of that one innovative act of horror, the entire state of travel shifted forever. Now we take off our shoes. Now we throw away our water bottles. Now we get scanned, patted down, and treated like cattle. The system had to tighten because the wicked’s imagination expanded. Society had to evolve a hard shell to protect itself against the specific vulnerability exposed by a handful of men.

It goes back much further than that. I want you to shift your focus to the sick mind that invented the Brazen Bull in ancient Greece. Someone sat down with a piece of parchment and sketched out a brass device designed to roast a human being alive while converting their screams into the sound of a bull bellowing. That is not just violence; it is engineering. It is the invention of a new category of suffering. Who was the first person to realize that rape could be used not just as a personal crime but as a systematic weapon of war to destroy the lineage of a village? Who was the first person to realize they could dilute the baby formula with chalk to save a few pennies? These people are the pioneers of misery.

Consider the absolute depravity of the first man who decided that rejection warranted chemical warfare. He looked at a bottle of industrial acid and thought, “If I cannot have her, nobody can look at her ever again.” He invented the idea of melting a human face as a method to deal with rejection. Who was the architect of the suicide vest? Someone had to look at a stick of dynamite and realize the most efficient delivery system was their own ribcage. Who was the first coward to call a SWAT team on a teenager playing video games just for a laugh? These are not just crimes; they are inventions of pure malice.

Look at the mundane annoyances that ruin your day. Try opening a bottle of pain medication. You have to peel off the plastic wrap, push down and turn the cap, and then peel off the foil seal. It is a nightmare of dexterity. Why do we do this? We do this because in 1982, someone in Chicago decided it would be a good idea to put potassium cyanide into Tylenol capsules. Seven people died, and the entire pharmaceutical industry had to build a fortress around every single pill. Still, that very first person had already planted the seed that would lead to the emergence of a multitude of copycats. One person decided to poison strangers, and now billions of people struggle to open a bottle of aspirin nearly half a century later. That is the power of the first interaction. The first person to break the seal destroys trust forever.

We see this everywhere, especially in the digital world. You have to use a password with a capital letter, a number, and a special character, and change it every 90 days. You have to do two-factor authentication. You have to verify that you are not a robot by clicking on traffic lights. This is not because computers are difficult; it is because of the first hackers who realized they could steal your identity from across the ocean. We are paying a tax on their ingenuity. We are suffering the consequences of their innovation. Every time you get frustrated by a loyalty program that barely works or a return policy that requires a forensic investigation, it is because of the Coupon Glitch Hunter. It is because of the guy who bought a printer, used it for three years, and then returned it, claiming it was defective.

And if history moved too slowly for you, then welcome to the age of social media, where we have industrialized the production of Patient Zeros. We built a digital machine that rewards the dumbest people on earth with immediate fame, and now we are drowning in a tsunami of copycat idiots. It used to take a rare psychopath quite some time to ruin a system, but now it just takes a teenager with a TikTok account and a total lack of survival instinct. Remember the Tide Pod challenge. Someone looked at laundry detergent and thought it was a snack, and now we have warning labels on soap. Remember the Kia Boys. One kid figured out how to steal a car with a USB cable, posted a tutorial, and suddenly an entire generation of car owners cannot insure their vehicles. We have people licking ice cream tubs in grocery stores and putting them back in the freezer for clout. Because of them, every single container of food you buy is wrapped in three layers of plastic armor. We are handing out Darwin Awards at an industrial scale, and the rest of us are left picking up the bill for their viral stupidity.

This is why you read the Cognitive Shifter. You have to realize that the innocent majority is being held hostage by the guilty minority. The system is not designed for you. The system is designed to catch the 0.001% of people looking to exploit it, far less than the fraction that Lysol doesn’t kill. We are living in a defensive architecture. We are living in a world that assumes we are all thieves and liars and terrorists because at some point in history, a thief and a liar and a terrorist proved that the system was vulnerable. We are constantly flinching, waiting for the next blow.

So the next time you are stuck in traffic because of a security checkpoint, or you are fighting with a website that thinks you are a bot, or you are reading a warning label that says do not drink the battery acid, just remember who to blame. Do not blame the government or the corporation. Blame the innovator of the atrocity. Blame the first person who looked at a system built on trust and saw an opportunity to shatter it. They are the ones who built this cage. We are just the ones living in it.