depending on where you stand when seeing the evidence daily you can measure this over time just by observation. a friend sent this essay and so here i give you the opportunity as well; 

This essay is inspired by Dr. Toby Rogers' - uTobian  - recent posts and remarkable testimony before the U.S. Senate, where he articulated with devastating clarity a concept that has only 132 results across the entire searchable internet, yet represents one of the gravest threats to human knowledge and wellbeing we face today: epistemic capture.

In my previous essay "The War on Knowing," drawing on Peter Duke's - The Duke Report

 - groundbreaking work on epistemological warfare, I explored how systems of control manipulate not just what we know, but how we know. Duke rightly corrected me afterward—it's actually a war on thinking. He was right. At the end of the day, that's what epistemic capture is about: it aims to collapse your ability to see reality correctly, to collapse your ability to think, and to reach small-r truth, to reach small-r reality... or as Plato might say, to exit the cave.

Rogers, a political economist who follows the money through the labyrinth of pharmaceutical influence, sat before senators and explained what philosophers of science have been warning about in obscurity: when an industry captures the entire knowledge production process—what gets studied, how it's researched, what counts as evidence—it doesn't just corrupt individual decisions or regulators. It corrupts reality itself. It keeps us chained in Plato's cave, mistaking shadows on the wall for truth, while those who cast the shadows profit from our confusion.

What Rogers revealed in that Senate hearing room wasn't just another case of corporate malfeasance or regulatory failure. It was the systematic imprisonment of human consciousness within a carefully engineered bubble where the very tools we use to determine truth have been weaponized against us. This is the story of that prison, and why breaking free from it may be the most important challenge of our time..........more.........