Amerika

Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented. — Mark Twain, Mark Twain In Eruption, page xxvii

Nature, as Plato observed, is a ceremony of opposites: what gives health in one context delivers death in another. The context shift often happens when something becomes dominant, and therefore becomes a goal in itself, with the actual external goal — civilization, sanity, productivity, health, love — being forgotten.

As a civilization becomes dominant over nature, it produces those who are entirely self-referential. They cannot exist without civilization; they have now goals outside of themselves (a condition called individualism); they believe they have no duty to maintain civilization because they have taken it for granted because it is already there.

They tend to have a cluster of traits based around self-gratification including the improvement of their self-image, a condition most call “narcissism” that is in fact a lot simpler: they are in constant conflict with nature and reality because those do not reflect their self-importance, requiring them to be subjugated and illusions to be created instead.

We can see the cluster as being social traits, essentially replacing the goal of civilization with how they are seen in their social group and how that rewards their egos. These people tend to be contrarian, fatalistic, bourgeois, codependent, anarchistic, and above all else, egotistic.

If you walk among them, you will notice that they live entirely on the surface of reality in a world made of categories determined by social popular. Some things are good, so they slavishly endorse those; any alternatives are designated bads, basically scapegoats in order for them to avoid mentioning things they really fear.

This group unifies itself based on denial of its fears, assertion of its importance, and desire to control perceptions of reality through peer pressure. The root of control — limiting methods in order to change thinking — comes from the social group, which ostracizes anyone who talks about the things that it fears.

Sometimes we all encounter the Pod People on social media. It is like entering a different world: each one has some kind of project, cause, or hobby that they talk about obsessively as if they have nothing else to do in life. They all have triggers and speech codes. Their actions are designed to draw attention and penalize those who do not conform.

For all the many books, plays, movies, scientific papers, and grand speeches made about the dangers of tyranny, few seem willing to point out that tyranny begins when most people are crazy. The Pod People embrace craziness through individualism, which allows them to deny reality and wallow in themselves.

Future historians will record that our aristocrats were intelligent. They gave people free time and ability to explore their world, but kept them on a short leash with wealth, so that they did not become self-indulgent and drift into weird little fantasy worlds like the Pod People have.

In their fantasy world, whatever music they are listening to, products they are buying, causes they are shilling, hobbies they are indulging, or opinions that they have are important simply because they say so. In reality, functional people are interested in functional things and in their off-time try to simply enjoy life.

For the Pod Person, everything is political because they use these things to justify their presence in the group. If you have a hobby it must be fascinating so that on the surface levels of categories you can be one of the important people. Any deviations must be challenged with passive aggression because they threaten to reveal the irrelevance of this drama.

This is why Pod People obsessively trade news stories. They need to update their lists of approved topics and their dictionary of responses to whoever might be bringing some reality into the picture. They do not intend to win arguments, only to throw up enough objections to sway the crowd in their direction.

In that way, their behavior resembles the third world. In the third world, every action is either a disrespect or something beneficial to the individual. If it works for them, they are happy; if anyone does something that is other than what they want, the third world people portray themselves as victims and demand to be sated with giveaways.

If someone tells a third world person that something is forbidden, they play the victim and go into bargaining mode. You say that they cannot steal, but that is an injury to them, so what are you offering to make them happy, because otherwise they will wail and cry in order to attract the herd to attack you?

We call the Pod People “normies” because their goal is to become happy servants of the system, to norm their behavior to it, and then to spend their time on irrelevant details and obsessions so that they have social importance. For them, nothing exists outside of human social interactions.

When they do this, they invert civilization. Originally the goal is civilization so that people can maximize what is good about their group; over time, because fears are fled, the civilization becomes oriented toward avoiding uncomfortable notions for its citizens and making everyone feel good.

As you might guess, as in other situations where humans abandon reality, this leads to really bad places because denial of reality leads to unrealistic ideas that succeed at first and then fail catastrophically. It is too late to avoid the coming downfall, but the good thing is that it will make the Pod People irrelevant and drive them out in droves.

Tags: contrarianism, individualism, normies, pod people