Amerika

Politics is Leftism: the idea that every person is able to make leadership decisions, which in reality translates into the need to manipulate, control and manage them to make them reach the right conclusions — or any conclusions at all.

When we view our time this way, we see that the root of modernity is The Enlightenment.™ With the rise of the notion that every person should manage his own fate according to nothing but whim, social order began to die and was replaced with mass manipulation.

Every aspect of modernity is shot through with this. The constant advertising that seems to cover every available surface. The droning syncopated music that places the audience at its center. The religious cults which emphasize the ego. And of course, slogans and laws and regulations everywhere, all the time.

We have lost control.

Modernity manifests for most people as a lifestyle, and this is also its Achilles Heel. We are trained from an early age to go somewhere away from home where we spend our time obeying rules and conducting exercises unrelated to end results. This makes us instructable, so that we respond in Pavlovian sympathy to symbols.

The “good” symbols make us drool, and the “bad” symbols make us bark. This, more than Christianity, is the root of our binary morality. To control people, you need to create a good/bad pair so that when you want them to do something affirmatively, you call it good, and when you want something away from consideration, you tag it as bad and destroy those who pursue it.

Control — using categorical limits to create mass compliance — works in this fashion. Its opposite is hierarchy, where people find their own means of achieving goals which are invariant, and the best rise. With Control, there is no invariant purpose; there is only the whim of those in Control, who pride themselves on being the most powerful monkeys in the troop.

Your life has been managed by Control, which means that you are directed toward specific methods of behavior without regard for goal. These behaviors are mostly designed to fill time and keep you instructed in the ways of compliance, and so you may find that your irreplaceable seconds are being flooded with irrelevant gunk for purposes unrelated and contrary to your benefit.

The modern person goes to work or school, waiting through stoplights and traffic jams as his fellow incompetents struggle with simple tasks. This instructs him in passivity, or that he must always defer to what the group is doing.

At work or school, he works on details that are unrelated to an end result. If he is an architect, he bases his designs on what has sold well in the past. If he is a doctor, he follows what the literature of his profession says are the right procedures. If he is a lawyer, he uses statements by others to argue a case for his client. In no case does he wonder what a good result would be; his entire being is invested in playing the game.

When he votes, he plays the game, trying to choose the candidate whose actions will lead to his own personal wealth or power increasing. When he shops, he tries to outwit the pricing algorithms at the stores. When he drives, he chooses his route based on what others are doing, and tries to avoid them.

His mindset is entirely conditioned to react to the group and choose some things he assumes are “good” over the norm, which is mostly negative in outcome. He values money, convenience, comfort, sex and power. He has no concept of purpose, meaning or any higher significance than his own sensual experience.

This is how Control works. Like rats in lab cages, we pull one lever to get food or an electric buzz in the pleasure and sexual centers of our brains. Pull the other lever, and we get a nasty shock to the nose. Soon we know exactly which lever to pull every time.

90% of our work is not necessary and very little of it is fun. But our society does not run on results, but perceptions, because every man is a little king. Those nano-kings must believe the same things so they operate on the same assumptions, or control will fail, and who knows what comes after that.

In the meantime, the controllers are not tyrannical ideologues like Hitler but super salesman like Dale Carnegie. They know how to manipulate people. They instinctively flatter and then enrage the group, creating moral binaries: diversity is good, racism is bad, so we all go broke if you do not support diversity and smash down racism!

The needs of Control have ruined your life. You get only one, at least in this form, and your time is mostly spent on useless and degrading labor so that you remain malleable to Control. In order to justify this, your mind chooses to exist in a bubble world of its own ego, rationalizing that although life is horrible, at least the ego is in control and that makes the self important.

When you get home from work or school, there are only self-directed hobbies. You can watch porn or television. You can experiment with woodworking or music. But these are dead ends; they connect to nothing, and serve no purpose except — like work and school — to expend your time in a mixture of compliance and self-fascination, rendering you inert.

Our modern time is baffling because the entire thing resembles a religious experience of the ego. All day long there are choices and chances to feel a sense of personal power, but while these have consequences, none exist at a level greater than personal comfort. You are sealed in yourself and distracted by yourself.

This lifestyle is the root of modernity. When we went down the egalitarian path, which is what happens when a society succeeds enough to breed idiots and parasites in moderate numbers, we severed ourselves from meaning, and became atomized little cogs which require controllers, and so those showed up to control us.

Generation X recognized that the futility of modern life begins in the lifestyle. Jobs, divorces, television and shopping are meaningless and yet they are all there is, outside of open rebellion. Maybe it is time we tried that latter option instead.

Tags: control, generation x, lifestyle, modernity, the enlightenment