Category Archives: society

Futility of pretense

Posted on by
Reply

I was recently asked how I can manage it; knowing that the global economy is in the process of controlled demolition, that a major world war is unfolding and it’s just a matter of time before it goes nuclear, and the global “elites” have plans to kill half of us and completely subjugate the rest.

My response was “what’s the alternative?”

I can pretend everything is fine but that takes away my power to do what little I can to be aware and prepared, essentially to watch for the direction of the falling tree before I start running. I cited the example of a leaky window frame – I can either pretend there’s no problem, and ignore rainwater seeping into the wall and the black mould colonies, I can be aware of the problem and do nothing about it because it’s not my problem to fix, or I can be aware of the problem and do something about it. The only options that include any agency on my part start with awareness. Sure, it’s not very comfortable to know that the world that we know is pretty much doomed. But what is the alternative? Live in an illusion? What problems does that solve? It’s like having a brake light on my car turn on, but I say it’s fine because the brakes haven’t failed yet. Yes, fixing the brakes is a hassle – get an appointment with the mechanic, wait, travel there and back and spend some money. But what’s the alternative? Wait until the brakes fail completely, hope you don’t wreck the car when they do, and then still have to fix the problem, only with an undriveable car so you have to have it towed. How would that be helpful?

With the civilizational collapse, the matter is different only in the sense that one can say we’re doomed anyway and no degree of preparation can help, so it’s better to just not get stressed over it, but that is a fallacy right there. Let’s assume the worst-case scenario – total doom, and nothing you can do can save you. Oh, really? You can’t meditate, you can’t pray to God for guidance, you can’t resolve your attachments, you can’t put your affairs in order? You can do many things, because souls do survive the death of the body, at least for those who in fact have a spiritual core worth speaking of. Let’s say there’s a nuclear exchange, and it kills the total of 3.5 billion people, which is more-less the worst-case scenario estimate. With today’s world population of 8.1 billion, this means 4.6 billion survivors, which is more than the world population was in the year 1980. There would be no nuclear winter; that’s known to be pseudo-scientific rubbish. Sure, there would be some dust injected into the high layers of the atmosphere, but no worse than the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, which puts a definite upper limit on all my estimates, and the global climate effects of that were trivial. Radiation will be really bad in hot spots, but those will be the exact hot spots where the likelihood of surviving the nuclear explosions and their aftermath will be lowest, anyway, so it’s like shooting a corpse; not really adding to lethality. If you’re not in one of the directly impacted zones, you will likely not even know what happened because there will be a total or almost total loss of communications. There will definitely not be real-time reporting on the Internet or the cable TV.

Let’s say it’s just the economic collapse and the war threat fizzles out for some reason. Economic collapse looks like Yugoslavia in the 1990s, only everywhere, and there isn’t a stable foreign currency to use, because everybody is impacted at the same time. If only one could have known in advance and bought gold and silver to trade with. Oh wait…

Knowing what’s about to happen might not change the outcome, but it gives you some degree of control over your situation, it gives you time to spiritually prepare for death, and it gives you time to prepare for a survivable bad situation in ways that can possibly mitigate the hardships, and even if it doesn’t help in the end, you feel better knowing you at least did what you could.

Honestly, I’m not sure what good my preparations will do, if any, because every single actual hint I got “from above” was about the “other side”, afterwards, and it felt wonderful. I wasn’t warned to stock up on canned beans because I’ll have to survive a nuclear holocaust or something. I was told that this nightmare will end for me. So, why am I still buying gold coins, fixing my car, fixing the leaky roof window and buying a new computer? Why am I not just letting go and letting everything turn to shit? Because that’s not my style. When the end comes, it will find me firmly in control of things, acting as if everything will go on forever, with car serviced, phone batteries charged and with enough gold to ride through a really bad shitstorm, God willing. And at every single second of dealing with things as if they are to go on forever, I will be ready to go at any moment.

Woke

Posted on by
Reply

I find the term “woke” disgusting, because it’s an English agrammatism, used by people who are unable to say “awakened”, because education is apparently racist, and speaking English poorly is apparently a matter of culture.

However, when we try to define what it means, in practice, it’s quite hard, because one would be tempted to write down the entire syllabus of neo-Marxism that underlies it, which would be a lengthy and impractical endeavour.  I thought about it, and here’s what I came up with.

“Woke” is a state of willingness to substitute reality with illusory beliefs whenever truth hurts. Basically, it’s rejection of reality in order to pander to affectations.

The fundamental attitude of science is to carefully measure the facts, and then allow them to lead you wherever reality is. To be “woke” is the exact opposite of that – you start with ideology, and if the facts refute it, the facts are “wacist”.

There is a definition of mental illness as a state of mind that is in disagreement with reality, and that, apparently, is what being “woke” is – an affirmation of mental illness as a legitimate take on life.

 

Tools and signals

Posted on by
12

I saw a comment by Jordan Peterson recently, stating that tools are inherently “magical”, because our brains re-wire themselves in order to encompass the tool as part of personal identity. This rings as very true, from things such as swords and spears, to cars, computers and smartphones. When a good driver drives a car, his identity is so merged with the car, he for all intents and purposes is the car. When a swordsman wields a sword, his self is the sword. If you treat the sword as an outside entity between you and the threat, you won’t live long.

This is something that has long been the object of my interest, as I’ve watched videos of people talking about their tools – from axes and kitchen knives to guns, smartphones, computers and, yes, dogs.

What I found interesting is that people’s relationship with tools seems to be gender-specific. While men will merge self with their tools and project through them in the world in order to accomplish tasks – the tools being things such as axes, swords, guns, cars and computers – women will see those things as mere things that accomplish tasks; there is no extension of self through them and outwards. To a woman, a car is merely a thing that goes from A to B, a computer is merely a tool she uses to communicate or whatever; there is seldom any interest in how it works, or desire to invest effort in proper maintenance. There are exceptions, of course, but those make the rule. What women identify with, extend through and project into the world are clothes and accessories to their body: makeup, handbags, shoes and so on. Women will extend through those things with as much focus and force as a lumberjack through his chainsaw or a racing driver through his car. I would say the difference essentially comes down to the fact that the men’s primary focus is on accomplishing goals in the world, and their tools are the instruments of projecting self into the world and controlling it. If you want to fell a tree, you might not care what your clothes look like, but you will care for what your chainsaw does, because your life depends on it. A woman, however, seems to be primarily inward-oriented, where self is completely immersed in the body, and the tools serve the purpose of amplifying the body and signalling-towards, essentially advertising body-self as attractive and desirable, which then accomplishes the primary life goal of attracting a desirable mate and starting a family. Basically, a man projects self outwards and modifies the world to make it liveable, and a woman attracts a man towards body-self and tries to wrap the world around self in order to create a protective and controlled nest. Interestingly, there is very little self-awareness in all of this; people just do it and seldom think about what they are doing.

Not me, though. I usually give quite a bit of thought to things people just assume, or not even that. For instance, I observed how I identify with and extend through my tools, and how I feel computers differently, depending on whether it’s a laptop or a desktop. It’s much easier to envelop a laptop into self, because it’s one thing. A desktop computer is different, and I form contact with the peripherals – keyboard, mouse, monitor – while the computer itself is somewhere behind all that, a box with wires that is out of sight and out of mind, however I extend into the filesystem, the drives, the directory structure, the network connections, the software tools I use, and through that into the Internet, and there’s always the question of where exactly is my self when I’m on the Internet? It’s certainly not in the physical room, in the body that sits behind the desk. It’s in some forum, forming connections and interacting through the existing ones. I wonder what the actual topology of this would look like in the global astral – Internet “places” would probably look like those maps of illumination taken from Earth’s orbit, where more light means more human activity and presence, and ideal concept such as “brands” would be points of convergence, things people brush against to acquire their “scent” and project such “scented” self outwards, into the places where others come, so that they are perceived as “enhanced” and “accomplished”. The entire thing is probably quite comparable to dogs wallowing in shit in order to change their scent.

It’s not just brands, however – it’s a more general thing. It’s about being perceived as having the right attitudes about things, not just being properly accessorised. That’s why people virtue-signal on the Internet; they basically wallow in “right” kinds of shit in order to smell “right” and be acceptable and, hopefully, popular, in their desired social circle. Unfortunately, there is very little conscious thought involved in all of this; just social animals scent-signalling and marking territory, or declaring self as marked territory, in submission – I belong to nation, I belong to religion, I belong to “climate change social justice believe everything the authorities say” cult. Inject yourself with bioweapon in order to signal submission to the authorities and belonging to the main stream of the herd in order to claim its protection, and the sense of superiority to the “others”. Believe every kind of nonsense you are told and still declare yourself to be a free, liberal person, because that’s a thing you have to believe if you’re “normal”.

However, if you actually use your critical faculties to process the world around you, the silliness of it all is greatly outweighed by tragedy.

What people value

Posted on by
Reply

I was thinking about the difference between the things people say and what they actually do. For instance, they will say they are for equality, compassion, freedom of choice and so on, and in reality they just want to be seen supporting the popular things in order to virtue signal in society. So, what they actually want is not to be socially ostracised and isolated, they want to be popular and they want to have as much power and influence as possible.

Also, they say that money doesn’t matter, that love is everything, but on a practical level they will despise people who don’t have money, they will envy those who do, they will buy all sorts of trinkets in order to augment their social status, and so on. Hypocrisy is a significant factor, and so I can’t really take people’s word for it. Instead, I’ll use a different approach – see what people actually do on an empirical level. People will say that money doesn’t matter and you shouldn’t value people according to how much money they have, but the problem is that money is invented exactly as a measure of value. What else would I use? Saying money doesn’t matter in assessing how much people value someone is like saying I shouldn’t use a meter to see how big a house is. I’m definitely going to experiment by taking a look at where the money goes and assess people’s priorities in life based on whom they made rich.

Here’s a list of top ten companies by revenue:

So, it’s retail and online stores, energy and fancy computerised gadgets.

Let’s see who the wealthiest individuals are:

How did those people make all that money? There’s an empire of luxury goods, there’s one guy that sells fantasies about clean cars and going to Mars, one has a big online store and sells server space, several got rich on computer software, some successfully invested money, and one can imagine all those oil companies from the previous list made some people very rich, but curiously they are not on this list, probably because they are too wealthy and want to stay behind the curtains. There’s also that idea that religions are super wealthy, so I looked into that, too:

Surprisingly, whole religions representing beliefs of vast numbers of people and having all kinds of clergy to support pale in comparison with the wealth of individual billionaires, which brings us to the obvious conclusion that luxury goods for wealth-posturing are a greater priority for people than religion, statistically speaking, and judging by where they put their money.

I am trying to exclude anomalies such as the insurance industry and American health “care” from analysis because they don’t tell me much, other than the fact that America is based mostly on fraud of some kind, and most of that milks people for money; the fact that the insurance companies are getting rich means they are finding ways to eschew payouts, which means fraud. There are also huge conglomerates that own all kinds of real estate, that are conspicuously absent from those lists, and pharmaceutical companies that are incredibly wealthy, and also hidden from sight for some reason.

However, let’s say that people put most of their money in housing, which makes the banks, insurance and real estate companies rich. They buy cars and consume lots of petroleum products. They consume food and hygienic products. They buy smartphones and computers, and consume telecommunication services. Also, and quite disproportionally, they buy luxury goods in order to show off, and the interesting thing is that they all do it, and especially the lower and middle class, because the companies that service only the rich people aren’t featured on those global wealth lists – you need to cater to the average in order to be there. You see, everybody owns smartphones, everybody consumes energy, pays for housing and transportation, and buys food and hygienic products. Also, obviously, everybody buys LVMH products. They are advertised as “rich people things”, but obviously average people are the main buyers of “rich people things”. It also seems that Rolex products are mostly bought by the middle class, as it’s an aspirational thing.

Religion does feature in all this, but when you understand how many members they supposedly have, how much actual money they work with, and how much it must cost them to pay for the clergy and the expenses, they simply can’t compare with the incredible wealth of the people and companies that sell them ordinary worldly goods. The Mormons seem to be an exception, but other churches simply pale in comparison with individual billionaires, let alone the huge multinational corporations.

Many things are hard to see from those lists, but one can guess – for instance, gambling, gaming, entertainment, alcohol and drugs are huge business, that possibly outweigh most of what I already mentioned. Education must also feature somewhere, but it’s usually categorised as student loans, which enriches primarily the banking sector.

So, if we summarise, people pay for housing, cars, fuel, food, hygienic products, electricity, telecommunications, technological gadgets, medical costs, education, luxury goods, religion, vice and addictions. They will go to great lengths to present themselves as members of a higher social class, to the point where they will debt-finance luxury purchases, such as cars, trinkets and bling, and I should also probably include travel to fancy destinations and housing that’s too expensive for what they can actually afford. In addition to that, they will go to social media and show all of that off, and waste time trying convince others that they are happy.

In addition to that, 56% of Americans can’t cover a $1,000 emergency expense with savings. Some polls report even worse findings, such as the SecureSave, whose study found that a 67% of Americans don’t have enough money saved to cover an unexpected $400 expense. The implication is that even those families that are seemingly well off, judging by the size of their house and the cars they own, are running a very tight budget – their house is financed by a mortgage loan, their cars are either leased or financed, and they buy everything on credit cards, and juggling with monthly payments. If anything goes even a bit wrong, they are too stretched financially to be able to respond. They all look wealthy and prosperous, but the only ones who are actually wealthy in this pictures are the banks giving them loans, and the companies selling them stuff they can’t really afford.

The conclusion is that social posturing is so important to humans, that they will almost invariably choose to overextend themselves financially and put themselves in a position of stress, suffering and high financial risk just to keep up with the neighbours and show off a false facade of success, and this seems to apply more to the low and middle income brackets; the truly wealthy people seem to care less about showing off their money, and statistics show that the most common brands of automobile driven by American millionaires are Toyota, Ford and Honda.

Also, one in six Americans is on antidepressants. Millions are consuming opioids. When we add cocaine, alcohol, marijuana and other addictive substances, it is apparent that almost everybody in the West is addicted to something nasty, and it’s not because they are living happy, healthy and balanced lives. Oh, and I forgot the epidemics of obesity, violence and suicide.

However, when you ask those people what they think the world’s biggest problems are, they will invariably speak about climate change.

 

Welcome to the real world

Posted on by
3

I see a pattern in lots of seemingly independent sources in the West.

People increasingly perceive that things are not working out for them. The people who work hard doing an honest job can’t even make ends meet, let alone buy a home or feel good about finances. The people who went to college like they were told end up with debt and are either unemployable or end up working low-paying jobs that are significantly beneath what they expected to be working with their degree. People increasingly understand that they can’t retire because their retirement fund is basically guaranteeing them poverty if they do. Women who believed in feminism find out that they are undesirable and ruined after their youth has been consumed whoring around and chasing irrelevant “careers”. Men are asking themselves why the hell are we doing all this for? People who have been getting in debt and spending the money they don’t have in order to keep pretences that they are doing well, like they were told good consumers should do in order to drive the machine of capitalism, find out that they are financially distressed and without hope on the horizon. People increasingly invest in high-risk schemes trying to multiply their insufficient funds because they are desperate.

The emotional undercurrent of this is “that’s not what I signed up for”; basically, the deal was that they get to be rich and powerful, above all those “third world” people. The deal was that they get to ironically complain about having “first world problems” because all the money they have is so hard to keep track of, or parking for all their cars being expensive in that high-rent neighbourhood they live in. We, who live in countries that are not America and not “the West” get to be poor and we are supposed to try hard to get a visa to get to America and try to join their privileged club. They get to earn more than our doctors and lawyers by just pumping gas and working at the cash register in America. They get to have the greatest ego trip and they get to feel successful, powerful and in a position to teach the rest of the world how to exist properly. They weren’t supposed to have a favela of homeless people in their rich California, with human excrement mixed with drug needles on the sidewalks; they weren’t supposed to have fucked up lives with nothing to show for and no hopes outsides of drugs, alcohol and suicide. Sacrifice, failure and suffering was for other people. This is not what they signed up for. Buddha taught that suffering is inherent in this place because he was a loser living in a third world shithole; he should have been born in America, then he would have said otherwise.

The thing is, you can make almost everything seem like a good idea for a short period of time. All kinds of questionable financial schemes, for instance having money that’s based on debt and not gold, look like a great idea, until the bill arrives. People knew the current economic model was unsustainable in the long run when it was originally introduced, and Keynes himself answered “in the long run, we’re all dead”.

Yes, in the long run you’re all dead. You spent ten trillion times more than you’re collectively worth, and now you’re going to die on a pile of manure. The Western civilisation introduced several dangerous experiments – atheism, egalitarianism, republic, democracy, communism, feminism, fiat money and so on, and some ended in disaster sooner than others, but apparently it took time for the entire thing to unravel, and now the bill is due. Truly, how much of this progressivism had produced true and legitimate progress, something worth keeping and building on? Most of it all was some ego-trip or another, for the sake of hunting for mirages in the world and calling it emancipation. This might not be what they signed up for, but what they signed up for will have destitution, ruin, hopelessness and humiliation as the ultimate result.