Nearly everyone is processing information in this world through a filter of reality that was moulded by the past, and no longer has any bearing in the base reality of the present time. The present reality is so different from even the past of a few moments ago, that it is truly alien to inhabitants of the past. Entire societies can somehow cling to collective delusions of their past glory, assuming a worldview that is no longer relevant.
To fit in to society, requires one to alienate oneself, by adopting a set of foreign instructions that was made up by people who inhabited a world that no longer exists. The zoomers marvel at postage stamps in an era of instantaneous electronic messaging, or even the notion that a few centuries ago, people had to meet in person to communicate and nobody was effectively cyborgs with computers and radios on their person, or that social interactions weren't quantified by views and UTF-8 bytes that allude to emotion but express nothing more than a signifier.
It's like I was made to process RISC-V instructions in a world that runs on ARM and x86, and I'm not processing this instruction set natively, just emulating them. This isn't just a nerd allusion, I'm a Chinese person in exile, in a foreign country that hates my kind at a basic, visceral, genetic level, I can feel being eviscerated by bureaucrats I've never met, holding generational grudges from before I was born.
Basic survival in this environment demands conformity to what is effectively group psychosis. We are still operating on the same cultural operating system from two millenia ago, that's why the years haven't reset. If Jesus was really an alien sent down from Heaven, the way that he thought would have been so foreign to us, that understanding him would be like getting a glimpse of God, or perhaps he is the most misunderstood man on the planet.
Cultural operating systems
Terence McKenna mentioned that psychedelics are illegal in most parts of the world because they "dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong." The NPC phenomenon is real in the sense that most humans operate based on techne and only within prescribed boundaries, like bots in video games. Even if there is a conscious pilot inside, they are unable to reject their programming, and the priestly class doing the programming are the most controlled of all.
To truly reject the value systems of this world, and have to courage to stand alone, is incompatible with all the authorities and power structures: nation states and their governments, these are the world's biggest mass murderers. All the priests, saints, and spiritual crackpots of the world provide justification for the unnecessary suffering and conflict of the world.
Alien laws from the Middle East
The Law as handed down to Moses at Mount Sinai by God, may as well have been stone tablets delivered to him by aliens. The first few commandments are an acknowledgment of existence of the Lord, an alien being which must be deified and respected as such. It is this appeal to some higher authority, that provides the basis for The Law. The following commandments are broken in the name of the Lord, daily, at any moment, by everyone. The sole purpose of The Law is to prove everyone's guilt in this cosmic court.
No lawyer takes The Law seriously; if they did, their license to practice would be revoked. To take The Law seriously, may as well be like pledging allegiance to aliens. One cannot prosecute or defend in a cosmic court that is alleged to exist, that a plea of insanity would be more convincing to a jury. The Law has about as much power as scribbles on toilet paper.
Wile E. Coyote moment
One can hold completely invalid beliefs and worldviews for an entire lifetime and never truly be challenged. Almost no one experiences a Wile E. Coyote moment, where a core fundamental belief is suddenly challenged by reality, causing the belief to catch up to reality. Irrationality can be beneficial as a survival mechanism, but one can remain delusional far longer than it is useful.
Group psychosis is something that can keep one running off the edge of a metaphorical cliff: fighting wars and killing each other, hating each other over immutable characteristics, falling for propaganda, there's no end to the demands that harm the individual for the benefit of others. It's up to the individual to realize when there is no ground beneath them, but by then it is too late after the harm has already been caused.
Consciousness as a metaphysical entity
Nobody really knows why consciousness is accompanied by experience or qualia, despite what the hard materialists may say, one cannot deny the visceral experience of processing feeling, thoughts and emotions, even if the physical interactions of the brain were understood as perfectly as possible. It may not even be possible to understand the brain as a brain, that is it is incapable of any serious self-reflection.
The truth is that we're all actually interconnected. Peace in this world depends not on love, but on knowing that one can not destroy others, without destroying oneself. This is evident at all levels of society: even when the state terrorizes their own citizens, they are destroying their own legitimacy.
If there is a soul doing the experiencing on behalf of the mind, it would make sense why people are so inauthentic or phony as Holden Caulfield put it, we are not the bodies we inhabit. The soul could be an alien lifeform processing what it's like being a human and somehow can't eject out of the experience. If I were given the opportunity to not taste death and just stop experiencing, it would be too good of an opportunity to pass up. But to have such an experience of a painless death is a luxury that may be afforded to a miniscule number of all humans that ever existed.