I had a fever dream once in which I was woken up from the simulation and learned it was a rehabilitative prison for reactionaries to demonstrate the end result of reactionary ideologies and the hell that results. I got to leave and live a normal life on probation in an advanced communist world and then, in the cruelest twist, it all melted away and I was back in my bed shaking and delirious.

I haven't been able to get that idea out of my head ever since, it just keeps growing and trying to elaborate on itself with further rationalizations. I don't believe it, of course, because it's far too hopeful and is dangerous on top of that, being fundamentally a dismissal of agency and responsibility (if we're all slowly-being-reformed monsters doomed to fail at doing anything good as a lesson in why it's bad when reactionaries win, then there's no reason to do anything but retreat into some mad hyper-purist devotion in the hopes of being judged as reformed, there's no consequences to anything apart from our continued suffering; taken seriously to its conclusions this is an absurdly nihilistic concept), but goddamn if it doesn't feel like things are actively being shaped to be as absurd and awful as possible for no point but to be absurd and awful.