Amerika

When the kings fell, they were deposed by the middle class in the name of the peasants; the peasants had revolted previously, then the middle classes cooked up the Enlightenment, and in doing so took over the peasant revolution and weaponized it, allowing the middle classes to rule.

They considered that to be intelligent, but it has ruined them, since it forced them into a mode of thought we call “control.” Control means that instead of assessing events by outcomes, such as rewarding the good and punishing the bad, you force everyone to do what is Universally Right™ so that both bad and good are rewarded. This cements your power even if it is unstable, and therefore requires constant manipulation and the destruction of those who transgress as examples. The ancients knew this as tyranny, and knew it was a mental/spiritual process as much as physical; those who go down the path of tyranny become cruel and lose sight of any goodness in life.

Such has happened to the middle classes. They treat their children like subjects in a Communist Khanate; they are not told what to do, with the implication being “imitate us,” but they are punished for not doing what was expected. When the child fails to be a mini-Me for the parent, punishment is inflicted which is not designed to cause pain so much as it is to make the child feel bad, namely feel sentimentally bad about himself and hopeless, so that he runs back to Mommy or Daddy with a newfound attitude of subservient conformity.

Control does this because it is a virus. Adopt it anywhere in your society and it spreads to all parts of it like yeast in syrup. Control resembles other methods of material manipulation, namely the assembly line and salesmanship. In both cases, you assume that all people are basically identical, which requires you to look only at the simplest and most basic things they have in common, which reduces humanity to mere grunting animals both hungry and lusty. You do this so you can get everyone to do the same thing at once. That way it does not matter if they are competent or incompetent, good or bad, or even intend to do it; you force them to do it, and if they refuse, you destroy them so that the rest will fall in line.

Your other option, of course, is to be destroyed yourself. Once you become the Controller, you must always maintain control; to lose control is to face the guillotine, the stones of the angry mob, the witches’ pyre, the gulags, or a lonely stare into an open mass grave as the pistol cocks behind you. If something goes wrong, you need to find a scapegoat quickly and destroy him thoroughly, letting the angry crowd tear apart his body and feast on his flesh, in order to protect yourself.

In my experience, all human interactions at some point come down to this level, unless there is someone who knows what they are doing and can avoid that descent. In fact, people who know how to avoid this death spiral are the most valuable people for humanity, since all human ventures fail the same way and eat up good people on their way down. The only justice that we have, perhaps, is in stopping the usual decay of our groups and organizations. The middle classes did not invent tyranny any more than Genghis Khan did; tyranny is simply what happens when there is no organization, meaning no purpose, hierarchy, structure, guidelines, ambitions, and procedure. Without organization, humanity becomes a mob, and the only thing that can control it is a tyrant; the middle class, by separating itself from the natural order function of aristocrats and adopting an outlook more like the hand-to-mouth behavior of the proles, made itself into a mob, and now rules itself through cruelty, hatred, passive aggression, narcissism, and other modern socially-acceptable mental diseases.

Take your average middle class kid. His parents do not want to communicate with him; they want him to do what they want. So they say little, or nothing, and then at some point he decides he wants to be a guitarist instead of going into the family business of selling extraneous widgets to functionless morons. They realize now that they have a defector, or a dissident, or even an enemy, so the two parents — who are normally at odds, fighting over power in the relationship — join up on a single quest, which is to inflict as much pain as possible. They want him to feel bad about himself, wish he was dead, hate himself, and destroy his own personality, so that he becomes a programmable blank slate like people are assumed to be in egalitarian society. They will increase the pain until he is shattered, and then instead of picking him up and putting him back together, they will encourage him to continue to be broken so that any time they need, they have a “handle” that they can twist to make him obey.

It starts simply. He comes down to the kitchen table and his mother observes that he is wearing mismatched clothes. “That probably explains why you have no friends,” she says. “You’re just not very good at looking good, and so no one wants to be with you.” This breaks his heart, of course; the people who gave him life and now expressing regret for having done so, even indirectly (divorce and infidelity signal the same to children in the universal language of survival). She goes on, pointing out how he got a bad grade in school or has a messy room, or left out his toys. At this point, he is trying not to cry, something that she steadfastly refuses to notice. She then commits the primal sin of mothers, which is to express doubt that he will ever be important in her world, and then compare him to some other child that she implies she wishes she had instead. “Oh Danny, you just probably aren’t cut out for this whole being a successful member of society, are you? Maybe you should go talk to Davy, since he seems to have good grades and wear matching clothes and he doesn’t have these sloppiness problems that you have that just won’t go away.” If you hand Danny a shotgun at this point, he will take his head off. Then Dad comes home. Danny really hopes, you can see it in his bright little eyes, that his Dad can say something that will make him feel better. Nope, not a chance. “Still having problems getting those grades up, huh son? Well, most people don’t make it, you shouldn’t feel bad. Run along now, since I’ve got important things to do,” says the father, effectively implying that Danny is forever useless to him. The back door slams.

When the camera next alights on Danny, he has a blank face like a skull in twilight and his eyes have lost their glow. They never say it, and they have plausible deniability and can swear to it in a court of law, but his parents just said that they don’t love him. They are disappointed; like customers at a store, they took down a product from the shelf and found that it was defective, and they want to turn it in. “Hi, somehow I got this Danny and it does not work, so can I trade it for that nice shiny Davy over there? I’ll pay the difference, it’s no problem.” They will trade him off like they let go of the family car, like they rip out growing plants from the garden because they want something fuchsia and not teal, like they euthanized the old dog when it started peeing on the floor every now and again, or like how they dropped off grandma and grandpa at the old age home. Be not fooled: the middle classes are masters of commerce, and they know when they got a bum deal, and they know how to twist people and snap the threads that hold them together, leaving weakened shells that can be commanded. Ultimately, this is the power that they enjoy in life: having people pay attention to their demands, whether those make any sense or not.

However they are not done with their act, this Mom and Dad like so many others in the middle classes. They are waiting like a spider behind its silken door, waiting for the moment when the prey feels comfortable again. Danny has nowhere to go, and he is a good kid at heart so he does not run into traffic despite wanting to, which means that he must come home. He had a nice few hours talking with the kids he knew in the neighborhood, and they really could care less whether his clothes match, he is disorganized, or he got a C in mathematics. They want to catch frogs, start fires, climb trees, and ride hastily-constructed carts down hills. They are, unlike their parents, actually alive. But then they must go home, so Danny walks in the growing darkness, finally coming to the door. The porch light is not on, so he goes in the back door. The house is silent. He walks into the living room. His parents are there, in the darkness. “Did you have a good time?” his mother asks. Then: silence. He waits until it becomes awkward, then flees.

The next few days are done the same way. He is ignored and treated like a worthless, useless, disposable, and failed person. He gets one or two-word responses from his mother, and no maternal affection; his Dad treats him like someone who has undergone a tragedy, of the “it’s too bad your life has failed son, but it was always doomed to fail, since you are kind of a failure, so I’ll treat you nicely like I did the dog, at least up until the point where we euthanized her for the sin of getting old.” Translation: you are here to be my public image of a child, so that I look successful, but afterwards you will be like the smoking shell ejected from a shotgun, worthless with its potential spent, kicked into the undergrowth where no one thinks or wonders what happens to it, or whether this extra litter is destructive. Yes, Danny, that is you, his father might be thinking. Detritus of a family of winners, left behind in the undertow, sort of a sad little person so I treat him with exaggerated care like I do babies, retards, and Negroes, showing everyone else that I am the bigger person and the better man, always. The mother looks at him sadly, also, shaking her head and muttering silently, as if to imply that she has seen a tragedy beyond her control, and so the only moral thing to do is observe from a distance and not get involved (“do not get involved” is the middle class manifesto in toto, expressing the bourgeois idea that society exists to facilitate the making of money, requires no maintenance, and will be of zero use at the end of the lifespan of the individual). She views him like the starving orphans of Biafra, the girl down the street who got pregnant with a Mexican baby, or that guy at his Dad’s office who cannot figure out that the reason he never gets promoted is that he is just boring and sort of nebbishy and everyone wishes he would just go play in traffic.

As Danny huddles under his blankets, cold from within in a way that nothing can cure, and finally drifts off to sleep, Mom and Dad pour cocktails. “I think we have the Danny account on the hook,” says the Dad. “We have leverage, now it’s just a matter of closing the deal,” says the Mom. They give Danny the unofficial silent treatment — unofficial because, technically, they have continued speaking to him, just without any sense of estimation or affection — for another couple days, and then the Mom knows she has to say just one nice thing (just one) and he is back on the hook forever. “I like this drawing you did,” she says, even though it is terrible just like the rest because young boys get distracted by drawing flames and explosions rather easily, and then says nothing for another couple days. She, the father, and Danny all realize that at this point, he will crawl through ice, pick his way through minefields, and trawl the depths of Hell just to hear something like that again. “Me? I did something good? Really?” is all he can think about. And so the manipulation begins.

Danny is now playing a game called “hot and cold.” You remember this from when you were a kid: you are looking for something, and someone else in the room calls out “hotter” the closer you get, and “colder” if you drift away. Everyone else in the room laughs at your efforts. This is some kind of Simian peer bonding exercise… well, should humanity survive, we are going to have to figure out the psychology behind this cruel ugliness. Danny gets told that he is “colder” whenever he does anything but what his parents desire; this hurts, and makes him feel cold inside, and so after a few days he tries again, anything to get that “hotter.” Vital point for Danny: you will never, ever, get “hot”; you will always be, at best, “hotter,” and it will always (double underline) be followed by a whole bunch of “cold” and “colder.” Oh, yes, you cannot get hot, but you can be cold; in fact, it is your default state, because your Controller wants to keep you crawling back to them for affirmation. They took your self-esteem so that you would come to them for your daily dose of feeling halfway OK about yourself, like a lab rat in a cage begging for its pill of alfalfa and willing to run through any maze to get it.

How do his parents know, as if instinctively, how to manipulate like an ultra-genius Asiatic tyrant from the outer steppes? This is how you sell things. Called the “cue-reward loop,” it is a psychological tactic of making your quarry think that they are lacking something, and therefore, that if they find that something, their lack will be fixed and their lives will be (implied but never stated, especially not in writing!) perfect. This in turn addresses their fear, which is that their lives are far from perfect because they are far from perfect, but you can turn to them and tell them with a straight face that all people are equal, therefore they are perfect, therefore their problems are not their problems, but the lack of something… maybe even a product… and oh look right here in the trunk or glass case, do I happen to have something that will fit the bill, and it is on sale too! (Clashing of cymbals, triumphant organ chords.)

The cue-reward loop keeps people thinking that there is something wrong with them, because they have been told that they are equal, and not simply that they are mice of the field and not eagles of the air. A caste system gives them place; they see only what is necessary for their lives, and worry less about those above and below. But when they are equal, the trap has been set… any failing to be a superstar is their failing, and so they think something is wrong with them, and thus they are always questing around for products. The middle class — ultimately, the shopkeepers of the world, risen above the other peasants and maybe with an aristocratic great-grandfather somewhere in the line — know how to create this cue-reward cycle by alternately belittling and praising the consumer. They know how to subvert any healthy sense of self-esteem and replace it with this gnawing existential need to find something to fill the void, to have some claim at having a good life, to have some picture they can post to Instagram showing they are not a loser, to have enough experiences to make a movie. Modern people move restlessly from one thing to the next in a state of panic, being a yoga devotee today and a New Age shaman tomorrow, then forgetting both and trying their hand at long-distance bicycle riding or collecting vintage flashlights. They fear being insignificant. They fear being failures. The system needs them to fear this, because that way it can sell them junk, and most of them will not connect the dots even when they see a whole year worth of paychecks being devoured by taxes, expenses, and the constant pursuit of “new” things to make themselves seem important.

The middle classes like control. Bourgeois to a core, they want to keep away the natural order since that is hostile to commerce; lots of equal warm (and equally desperate) bodies coming in the door with sweaty cash makes the middle class excited. Be popular! Sell yourself! Charge a high rate! These are the things that the middle class likes… they tolerate everyone and everything, except that which is intolerant of course, for fear of excluding anyone, since that is a potential client. To the middle class, civilization is something that just exists in perpetuity so that they can make money and enjoy doing whatever it is they enjoy (hint: they have no idea, which is why like tyrants, they simply become more disagreeable and desperate as they age). To them, life belongs to the Controllers, or those who wield the cue-reward loop, by nature, and that is all that matters. They want a comfortable life; the fact of its emptiness does not bother them, at least not until it is too late to do anything about it.

They will shape Danny into one of them. They will not take him by the hand, and they will not nurture him. No, they will starve him by withholding love and approval until he does exactly what they say. They do not want a human being; they want a robot to do their bidding so they can feel the cruel delight of the exercised will. Never mind that this is illusion and ultimately empty, since will exercised for its own sake leads to circularity much like pornography and masturbation, but it is all they know, so they take great delight in it until one day they wake up and realize that they have been living the shadow imitation of a life. They will hurt Danny and then ignore him, they will scorn him, and they will badger and needle him until he caves and comes crawling back. Then they with pet him — just once — and send him away, at which point he will cower in his room thinking, “Maybe they love me… or at least don’t fully hate me all the time completely.” He will figure out what they want and do it. They will give him material things. Years later, he will weep over the one time that his father without being asked took him outside for a game of catch, and then grow cold and silent when he remembers how his father laughed at his ineptitude. Many guys like Danny are uncaught murderers. One night after a few too many at the office Christmas party open bar, they get accosted by a homeless guy on the way home and beat him to death, then throw the body in the river where it drifts out to sea. They seem to have the luck of the damned, but then again, at that point, they do not care if they are caught.

Our problem is that having any control in a situation turns it toxic. You start with one smart person thinking he is in power, and you end up with a group of snarling monkeys exploiting and manipulating each other, while antisocial behaviors proliferate and people become more hateful of themselves and life itself. You end up with a group of zombie-robots who are soulless and possessed only by cruelty, a will to dominate and an impulse to destroy. They take great pleasure in crushing others as if they are collecting slaves to serve them in paradise… they seem obsessed by money, but what really obsesses them is power, since they gladly give their money away for some of that mainline. They give up on everything else; it is a means to the end of power, something that for them is symbolic, or more important in appearance than reality. Power symbolizes their importance, their success, and a lack of having failed at life, so they can look down on everyone else and howl “see my works, you mighty ones, and despair.” They want to feel immortal and omniscient, godlike and impervious, in total control, a will exercising it for the sheer beauty of itself, a toxic combination of narcissism and individualism and solipsism that the ancients called hubris. To them, the symbol matters more than reality.

They leave a wasteland in their path. To them, any creature, person, object, or group which comes in their path must be dominated; like a prison rapist, they are going to sodomize it and then punch it in the back of the head goodnight so they can go through its pockets for anything they missed the first time. They indulge in a faux bitterness, saying things like “no good deed goes unpunished” because that basically translated to a commandment to stop wasting your time with good deeds, since what you need to do is compensate yourself for the unjust punishment that you have received. They deliberately do highly destructive things in organizations, guiding everyone to whatever massive illusion or deception is currently trending, so that they can be the few who are not fooled, and therefore make the smart choice instead… they take great delight in humility, since it gives them an excuse to belittle others and bring them down to a notch below themselves. You will find no great group of humanists than the middle classes, because they recognize humanism as the condescension that it is, and they use it to demoralize, emotionally sabotage, and control others. Every desperate middle class person needs some personal afterlife slaves.

The sad truth is that they make themselves miserable. Danny’s Mom would be happier if she devoted herself to loving her son and her husband, and his Dad would be happier if he just enjoyed his son and his wife and spent less time at work selling garbage to morons and more time outside, playing catch or just screwing around, experiencing survival. As it is, Mom will divorce Dad in her 50s, then run around after a series of unsuitable men before dying from breast cancer after too many days of box wine and heartbreak crush her; Dad will get himself the hot secretary second wife, then kick her out the door a decade later when he finds out that she was rutting like a beast of the field with the pool man all along, and finally, blow his brains across his framed diploma when he hits seventy, having figured out at this point that there was no point to life all along because he never grew a soul, and despite his omniscient will, has no idea what he really wants, since he always assumed that the answer to the question was “I want what I want right now” but this loop dies when he no longer has a job, people to order around, a social role of importance, and the ability to jerk others around with his money. Alone, irrelevant he kills himself.

If we need a word for humanity right now, it would be “miserable.” The poor are the most jolly; they are dumb, have short attention spans, and so are delighted with the latest cotton candy, mix tape, monster truck, free government program, song contest, or religious revival. Their only criterion for caring is that lots of other people like it too, because they really have no idea what they want and lack the parts of their brains to figure it out. They are like lichen: they just exist because the dew is there and the sun is there and so they might as well just settle on this rock, warm up and start metamorphosizing because well what else would they do, and what was the question again please? The rich are less jolly, but eventually become giddy because they are like small boys smashing cars into each other and lighting fireworks in mailboxes. The middle classes are the ones who find true misery because they believe in misery, since it is how they control their subordinates, customers, and children.

We are miserable because we have dedicated ourselves to manipulating each other and jockeying for money, power, and status instead of doing something good with our time. In fact, time is the most valuable commodity, but no one but the rich understands this. The middle class live in the immaculate laboratory solipsism of the moment, assuming that they will exist forever just as they do right then; this shows us the limits of their biological/genetic capacity for thought. With time, you can discover yourself, discover life, and then find something that bonds the two together such that you live in a state of Nirvana or something like it. When you do that, life makes sense, and you do not need to prove to anyone that you are living your best life or a big cheese on Instagram or TikTok. You just enjoy, with function bonded to aesthetics, and you love your family, you love your dog, you love your days on this planet and as your eyes close in death, you anticipate that this is not the end because you are everywhere, spread through the fabric of life itself, the place that you have loved. You will not be like Danny’s Dad, shooting his brain for betraying him at the end of a life of power expended fruitlessly in pursuit of symbols.

Usually, in these pieces, I write a one-paragraph introduction and then many paragraphs of the meat. I’ve inverted it today; everything above is the introduction. Big point is: humanity will not love itself until we love life again, and we cannot love life while we see ourselves behaving like bastards. No one respects his own species if it leaves a planet covered in pollution, litter, and manipulated soulless zombies tearing each other apart for a few crusts of bread.

We will never like humanity so long as we live in ersatz civilization. We will not like ourselves until we reverse ecocide, demographic replacement, the modern workplace, the destruction of the family, and the utter lack of purpose caused by facilitative democratic societies. We will not like ourselves until we turn this car around and head for excellence and goodness instead of manipulation, tyranny, consumerism, control, and subtle hatred.

Stop ecocide. Support nationalism. Restore Western Civilization. Become what you are; become what you can be. Enjoy life. Be excellent to each other. Destroy lies, create beauty. Adore your existence, be in awe of your world. Search the empty skies for something you know (like an itching at the back of the brain) has always been there. But most of all, learn to like yourself, and find a purpose in life.

Tags: control, controller, crowdism, cue-reward loop, middle class