As a friend writes, “Our system is very opaque.” Various thinkers have tried to diagram or schematise the relationships among different branches of western liberal democratic regimes. A popular concept in some circles, and the prototype for many such efforts, is
It's the same end result as Idiocracy, but by the opposite means: overproduction of _elites_, rather than of common people. "Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?"
Modern people make metaphysical claims all the time, they just smuggle them into other concepts like science and empathy. A lot of the "scientific" discourse about Covid, for instance, is really a proxy war for competing metaphysical and ethical claims.
Redneck here. Decidedly from the wrong side of the tracks. Spent 10 years in university. Slow learner, but I did get a PhD (EE) just before they threw me out. 50 years ago. It was the anti-military '60's. At least it was overt as opposed to the fake "thank you for your service" of today.
I think the final straw was my observation that you could tell a military person's rank by looking at their insignia; in academe you had to see how close their office was to the Department Head's.
That put me fully on the track to "cancellation"--thankfully not a term at the time.
In the 50 years since, I have become very appreciative of rednecks. People that shower after work as opposed to before work.
Have chickens myself. I also design and build PCB's.
Something that infuriates me. When I get a PCB designed, I send the files to China, get boards in a week--including shipping time. Generally, about $50, including DHL shipping. Beautiful boards. Last time I quoted a US fab shop, it was at least 10X. Apples to apples, more than that.
I hate hand wiring--eyes aren't what they were, and I have a tremor. Unless it is really simple and one-off, I just do a PCB.
Recently, I had them do an assembly for me. (placing SMT parts with bad eyesight and a tremor ain't fun). Good experience, beautiful work and they procured the parts. Very fair price.
I am not furious with the Chinese. They are doing great work at a great price. What infuriates me is that the US companies have abandoned the field.
Same reasons walmart is full of "Made in China". Labor and environmental regs just to start, massive subsidies, preferential trade treatment, among no one even knows how many other tricks. And heavily US subsidized shipping that's literally cheaper for the end user than sending cross town.
I try hard to buy US when possible, or at least not China. It's often pratically impossible. And its largely due to our own supposed representatives. Trump was right about tariffs even if not entirely about the reasons why. Yeah, getting a big screen TV for $300 instead of $800 is nice, but we're literally exporting vast amounts of wealth to China for disposable stuff. We've barely begun to feel the real effects of doing so.
Even exposing and etching my own (I'm stubborn, and don't have time for many anyway), still stuck putting all Chinese made parts on them. Great job, uniparty!
I used to work in importing, until being kicked out for being a leper. Everybody I talked to in that field agreed that the import tariffs on China were the right thing to do. That's why Xiden reversed them. Cuz, business!
Wholly agree. Spent most of my life designing and building stuff. Including raw PCBs, once upon a time.
On an even playing field, we can be very, very competitive. Perhaps not in heavy labor content stuff, but virtually nothing high tech is built by hand. Can't be done. Anything that lends itself to automation can be done here--and it doesn't have to be shipped from the other side of the world.
I once had a fair amount of business in China. Spent some time there. There is a fundamental difference in government outlook. China is, sort of, socialist. Meaning that the government has to feed and house people. Making incremental labor cost, from the government's POV, essentially zero. If you have to feed them, have them working--at any price.
Our government is, sort of, capitalist. (I really don't know the proper term). It views business as a golden goose to be cooked.
Result--China WANTS manufacturing, the US is determined to kill it.
The US would never allow the dormitories full of workers who work 12 hour plus days, six days a week. Those workers get paid enough for room and board plus a bit more for modest entertainment and the ability to send a bit to relatives in the country. Their managers are well compensated but only if quotas are met; they are better educated and their children are on a better glide path forward. As class envy has begun the workers are getting better and the most skilled are groomed for higher positions. The Chinese really do value competency, up to a point.
"you could tell a military person's rank by looking at their insignia; in academe you had to see how close their office was to the Department Head's. "
Interesting. Didn't know that. My paternal great grandparents were lowland Scots. Came to this country circa 1850.
Guess we have been rednecks for a long time.
The impact of Scots/Welsh/Irish on US culture is much unappreciated. The Founders were generally upper class English, hence our legal system and language. But, the people that did the work (and dying in the wars) were heavily German/Irish/Scot/Welsh.
My mother's family spoke archaic German ("Pennsylvania Dutch") until the early 20th Century. My mother, born 1922, was the first generation that generally didn't speak it.
I'm not exactly a "redneck," but I straddle worlds. My dad is a super-handy guy, and when they divorced, my mother remarried a steamfitter. I worked my way through college as a freelance mechanic. I also did computer programming and a few other gigs. Went to business school and ended up as a money manager.
The thing is, the upper class folks I worked with in on Wall St couldn't change the oil in their cars to save their lives, never mind fix their washing machine, or wire a new outlet in their bedroom. So they have ZERO idea of what they're F-ing with when they create all these rules, regulations, etc. They are literally gumming up a works that of which they have no knowledge whatsoever.
That's the frightening part -- these folks have zero respect for the people who actually make sure the lights come on and the cars and other machinery run. But they think they know everything.
Many of our Universities have become nothing more than indoctrination mills rather than teaching critical thinking and fostering healthy debates to strengthen the mind. It is now all about “group think” and controlling the masses.
"Average people who think they’re smart are easy to manipulate. Appeal to their egos. Average people who don’t care if they’re smart, stupid, or whatever are much harder to manipulate. You have to appeal to their real interests. And you had better come through."
Very average people now have university degrees, and their sense of self-worth depends on their being perceived as "smart" (including by themselves). Alas, they are not terribly smart, which is why they end up following da Science (TM), which is easy to understand, but has very little to do with actual science. Even the ones who actually are smart are, for the most part, sufficiently informed only about a small number of things. But they are "smart," and so they listen to other "smart" people, i.e. to da Science (TM). And so here we are now...
Note to self (and anyone else who wants free advice): don't overestimate your own intelligence, as it may lead you to buy into remarkably stupid things.
Better to be a wiseguy wiseacre, or smart alec, than to believe oneself a know-it-all. I, myself, am only a know-it-90%. When I ask someone something and they say they don't know about the subject, I ask them to tell me more than they know. But actually, that's probably what people who think they're smart but aren't are doing, telling more than they know.
Noam Chomsky once wrote that university graduates are the most vulnerable to propaganda. They are trained by parasites to become parasites. Others must work.
Today’s university graduates are yesterdays village idiot, because… equality not meritocracy.
Consequently, Government and its institutions is the cesspit into which drain those with no marketable skills to get a decent job in the competitive, wealth producing private sector.
Systemic analyses are valuable, and capture an important element of the political dynamic. The more conspiratorial lens - highlighting the role of organizations like the WEF in a contemporary context, for example - also has a lot of evidence backing it. In my view, both are necessary to understand what's going on.
It's interesting that you point to the incredible power of the zombie robot state. Hardcore conspiracy theorists also have a tendency to frame their antagonists as almost omnipotent - every event becoming a 4D chess move, with every possible response already anticipated and built into the plan. If reality is closer to the median of the conspiracist and systemicist views (which, interestingly, map closely to the Great Man and Historical Forces theories of history), there's perhaps more room for hope. Conspiracies being directed by zombies that are themselves in possession of no more agency than the common NPC somehow become less scary. I'm probably not articulating this well, as it's an idea that's still half formed.
You're correct. I think our tendency to overestimate the competence of the state actors is part of the problem. We let them buffalo us into thinking that we can't successfully oppose their (nefarious) plans for us. Eugyppius does a great job of pointing out the mechanics of the administrative state. Once enough of us understand that WE have the power, we gain the more substantial inertia and can effectively fight for our human agency.
The danger of overestimating the abilities of high level actors is the main failure mode of conspiracism, yes. But, it also seems to me that a purely systemicist approach can make a comparable error in the opposite direction. One might be able to talk sense to an individual human, but how does one engage an implacable system? The crucial problem seems to be the removal of agency from human actors, and placing all agency in an unseen force - whether shadowy conspirators or the emergent egregore.
I think the two models (conspiracist/Great Man vs. systemicist/historicist) may actually be two faces of the same coin. Think of emergent systems that are the outcome of active agents pursuing their own agendas in a specific competitive context. As individuals, everyone has "free will", but they will succeed only if they choose winning strategies. Winning strategies are determined by the overall playing field, including the current strategic behavior of all others. The "system" is always an ecosystem of forces made up of intelligent actors, and is nevertheless as determinate as if they were all bouncing gas molecules.
The error is to suppose that the Great Man sets the system as he likes it (and hence, so can we), or that the forces of the system are impersonally divorced from the will of individual humans (and hence, resistance is futile). Rather, we cannot fight against the "system", but we can swim in it. And swimming means that we must always be prepared to fight back against the human predators who will devour us if we do not develop effective defensive strategies of our own. Thus, we survive and partly shape the system by finding and guarding our own niche.
I've been wondering along the same lines whether the free will vs. determinism debate is a clash between two separate perspectives of the same system. I love your comment, as it articulates what I have been thinking but have struggled to put into words.
I've been struggling with it a long time too. I think much of the problem is that, in our usual scientific mode of thinking, we set ourselves outside of the system we are trying to analyze. But for a wholistic understanding, we have to recognize that we are a part of it.
Wholistically, everything is determinate. Subjectively, I can choose. But my choice is still determinate, based not on outside powers, but upon the will arising from my own prior nature, in consideration of my circumstances.
What I will do tomorrow is already determined today, and was determined a billion years ago. But it is absolutely not predictable, neither by myself, nor by any conceivable material computational machine. What I will do, and what choices I will make, has to be worked out in real time, and nothing else in nature can match the unfolding itself of my life for both speed and accuracy.
Yet the choices I make will also affect the outcome, because I and my choices are a part of the whole system. If I try to cop out and not go to the trouble of making the choices and doing the work, on the supposition that the predetermined system has the outcome fixed for me anyway, then that fact, also predetermined, assures my failure.
The geopolitical analyst Joaquin Flores describes the way that elites project more power than they actually have as the "Gargoyle Effect", When you think of it, Klaus Schwab is exactly that; a gargoyle. A sinister apparition designed to frighten the peasants from on high. I think the effect is beginning to wear off though. Onkel Klaus has no clothes, figuratively speaking of course.
Great Men rise up and oppose the Historical Forces.
The forces seems to be progressive while the great men are conservative, in the broadest sense. Conservative as in reversing to past times, progressive as in change for the sake of change
As one of my favourite writers put it "progressivism is death, conservatism is life".
Well, it is simple, really. Everyone wants to keep their jobs because everyone needs their job, and the structure of modern society means that most of the workforce has no truly valuable and portable skill. A plumber can work anywhere plumbing exists, which is everywhere, but few people, relatively speaking, are plumbers. An office worker is so easily replaced that if you have no independent fortune, and you wouldn't because otherwise you wouldn't be an office worker, you cannot risk much.
I myself was always getting fired for being a somewhat incorrigible gal within the world of office indentured servitude, but I interviewed beautifully because I spoke well, and I wrote well, and I was useful to bosses because of that, and there was no shortage of bosses who valued that.
Now everyone speaks in upvoice vocal fry, including the bosses, and no one writes well so no one notices, and it's a good thing I'm now retired because otherwise I'd be unemployable.
There are so few good doctors that any moron internist will be hired by a hospital system, so all are easily replaced. There are so many analysts that anyone identifying unfortunate trends counter to the desired outcome is easily replaced.
I'm glad you keep demonstrating why conspiracy theories of world domination are far less likely than the overwhelming incompetence and stupidity we really have.
Well, this is the story of human civilization. Education has always been controlled by one authority or another, one cult or another. Heretics to any way of thinking broke off, escaped, created their own orthodoxies. A freethinker in any sphere is a lonely person, ultimately.
(Thank you for the link to sign in, eugyppius!) I just wanted to thank SCA for the information about vocal fry and upspeak. I swear I have NOT been living under a rock, but I don't think I have ever heard these terms before, and had to google them and watch multiple youtube videos! (Okay, I was a teen during the valley girl phase, LOL!)
I have a 17 year old daughter and now I'm going to be listening for these types of speech patterns. She's been complemented often for her vocabulary, but I'm not sure how often she may be relying on vocal fry and/or upspeak, though the vocal fry does sound familiar to me. She'll be taking public speaking this year so this is timely information. Thank you, SCA!
Ha! I had to become aware of this because it seemed every woman under the age of 50 I heard on TV was unable to speak like a normal human being. A viral plague indeed.
And I'm really, really feeling old now because the death of good diction is making me nuts. One of my great triumphs as only a HS grad, as Ernestine was famous for saying, was having an excellent phone voice that callers always praised to whatever boss I had at the time. If friends would call me at the office they'd say "you don't have to use that, it's me!" and I'd revert immediately to native Noo Yawkuh. It was a very useful talent.
I started to notice many TV Newscasters mispronouncing "Manhattan" about 30 years ago; the current pronunciation is "Man-ha-in", the letter T is no longer voiced. It has become widespread and prevalent on local news channels, and the unvoiced letter T is showing up in other words spoken on TV.
At least the vernacular "Noo Joisey" was evolved from the spoken English of ordinary peasants, not from elite and educated TV personalities.
Yes!! This describes me to a T. But I question authority in today's medical industrial complex. That up talk and vocal fry seemed to coincide with Kardashian's bull crap
Women are now discovering that a sensitive, artsy, empathetic ally type o' guy is absolutely useless when a hurricane blows the roof off, not to speak of the absolute utter lack of visible signs of life.
But then I was foolish when young, too. Experience is a hard teacher.
I think we cannot ever have a top down structure. it brings out the worst in everyone and everything it touches. This is how six sigma can get implemented into a company by the ceo and everyone at the bottom knows how effing stupid and destructive it is but the higher you slide up the ladder the more the job depends on beintlg part of the consensus until the VPs all think its the bees knees...
burn the system to the ground. also all civilians need to have access to actually money and any kind they like. the politicians should hwve all their assets digitised on the block chain so we cslan question them.
Yep. My Dad had a copy of that that he got for free at a printing place. Postal Instant Press, PIP. It was in the 70s. Those were the days. Thus spake Zarathustra. 🤲
Yes all very accurate. Please allow me to boil it down in my simplistic voice.
I noticed that Covid created, from top down, little authorizations from the usual minions everywhere in society.
I refused to wear a mask, I had the police called on me dozens of times, I was threatened with physical violence, and verbally abused constantly .
It was always the grocery store stocker, the pharmacy clerk, the hospital admitting staff, the lowest ranking nurse, the gas station attendant, the secretary of an office , and on and on. Anyone who never had any authority in general was now a gatekeeper or moral judge accusing me of selfishness for helping spread this invisible menace that guaranteed death or at least the threat of gasping for breath on a ventilator.
add to your list: ushers in Broadway theaters, newly promoted to mask nazis, whose job it is to prevent you from enjoying the show you just paid $200 to see and embarrass you in front of the entire audience for failing to maintain proper mask wearing protocols
where i am (SC, USA) it is almost uniformly black people who are always masked even when walking, biking or driving alone. my guess is that they aren't buying the vaccine shit (having vivid memories of the Tuskegee experiments) and are doing whatever they can to protect themselves, futile though it may be.
i have thus far refrained from asking a total stranger but i would love to take an informal poll
If they have to choose between masks and "vaccines", then they are probably wise to go with the masks.
I wonder if there is a constituency of people who fear both covid and the vaccines? We usually think of people who wear masks when they aren't required as hopelessly lost to the vax-covidian cult, but maybe we are misjudging some of them. Are they wearing masks on top of being vaccinated, or are they wearing masks because they are NOT vaccinated?
“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?“
Winston thought. “By making him suffer”, he said.
“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?
[snip]
The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy – everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends."
I use this quote all the time, and the further we get into the hellscape the more it is proven true. Now we're on to the 'you can't trust your wife or child or friend' aspect.
Political economy is my favorite thing in the world and you do brilliant political economy. Thank you for all that you do. I guess I would just add though -- yes this is "a coup for the middle bureaucratic ranks..." but the paradox here is that the shots are killing and maiming these same middle level bureaucrats. That's what makes this situation so profoundly weird and difficult to describe. It's the bureaucratic fascism that Hannah Arendt warned us about -- but the bureaucrats are directing their toxic policies at themselves. I tried to write about it here, but the situation is so weird that to even describe it plainly is heretical and may lead to excommunication from polite society:
I would add one more dynamic: Speed to Change. The goal is to get new policies and practices so far along so quickly that it is nearly impossible and always painful to reverse course. We saw it with vaccination. Get the shots or lose your job and societal privileges. We’re seeing it with the switch from fossil fuels. Cancel pipelines and destroy the oil producers so there can be no turning back from inefficient and inadequate renewables. Consumers will just have to get used to soaring prices and blackouts. Like Mao’s Cultural Revolution. All the world’s automakers are putting the vast majority of R&D investment now in electric vehicles. But we are less than 2 years removed from $2 a gallon gasoline under Trump. What happens to all that investment in EVs few can afford if Trump returns and Ron DeSantis follows that up with an additional 8 years of oil promotion? Is the die to EVs already cast? Is the path to a fossil fuel-less future assured? I think not. This could blow up very badly on the greens. And not a moment too soon.
Great diagnosis! Now, what's the cure? I see elements in the stupidity of the bureaucracy - present them with an out of context problem, and they just don't see it until it is parked in front of Parliament honking or spraying liquid manure all over their building.
So maybe a ferment of diverse disruptive actions at all scales is important. An alternative society of regime skeptics might be part of that. We need to recognize and support each other, and find ways around the chokepoints the squid controls.
Well I don't know about a cure, exactly, but I'm pretty sure this downard diffusion of power is irreversible. And increasingly I think that the diffusion can't be stopped any longer, so these behavioural features will only grow more extreme. There will be opportunities in there, maybe there are already.
There is no "cure" in the System as we know it. I am somewhat a student of societal collapse. It will continue to deteriorate until the aphorism that "that which cannot continue, won't" applies. I know of no historical example of a corrupt society reforming itself.
I think it is in human DNA to become more and more inefficient and counterproductive until it cannot continue. In the old days, when a society became too fat and inefficient, the barbarians came over the hill and "reset" the place. Post Hiroshima/Nagasaki, the barbarians have been negated. Until they aren't.
The collapse of the late, great USA will be nothing the world has ever seen before. I am an old man, expect not to see it. But, I weep for my children and grandchildren.
Brilliant continued analysis of modern State power dynamics. Curious to hear your thoughts on “The Network State: How to Start A New Country” by Balaji Srinivasan - a possible life raft for dissidents.
> It is very hard to sell many people at once on complicated ideas, and so there is inevitably an emphasis on simplicity and an absence of strategy.
This is an essential point, one with applications to other areas (such as the spread of management fads). Sophisticated ideas tend to degenerate into crude ideas as they spread and reach larger numbers of people. This natural tendency is further amplified by the ongoing decline in technical competence that we are seeing in most areas of society, which further reduces western society's cognitive carrying capacity and ability to coordinate behavior.
Ever stop to consider that most of the world problems are caused by university graduates and not the village idiots? Scary thought.
I think about this all the time.
It's the same end result as Idiocracy, but by the opposite means: overproduction of _elites_, rather than of common people. "Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?"
Modern people make metaphysical claims all the time, they just smuggle them into other concepts like science and empathy. A lot of the "scientific" discourse about Covid, for instance, is really a proxy war for competing metaphysical and ethical claims.
Redneck here. Decidedly from the wrong side of the tracks. Spent 10 years in university. Slow learner, but I did get a PhD (EE) just before they threw me out. 50 years ago. It was the anti-military '60's. At least it was overt as opposed to the fake "thank you for your service" of today.
I think the final straw was my observation that you could tell a military person's rank by looking at their insignia; in academe you had to see how close their office was to the Department Head's.
That put me fully on the track to "cancellation"--thankfully not a term at the time.
In the 50 years since, I have become very appreciative of rednecks. People that shower after work as opposed to before work.
Yo.. Same here. Also a Ph.D. EE. Just fed my chickens before hiding in my home lab to build PCBs.
My non-academic friends "Don't trust nobody no more." The smart ones.
Eugyppius's earlier writings on the inevitable corruption of all bureaucratic systems rings true.
Now that the Western media is on the dark side, we live among lies. Yet we can still choose not to live by them.
Have chickens myself. I also design and build PCB's.
Something that infuriates me. When I get a PCB designed, I send the files to China, get boards in a week--including shipping time. Generally, about $50, including DHL shipping. Beautiful boards. Last time I quoted a US fab shop, it was at least 10X. Apples to apples, more than that.
I hate hand wiring--eyes aren't what they were, and I have a tremor. Unless it is really simple and one-off, I just do a PCB.
Recently, I had them do an assembly for me. (placing SMT parts with bad eyesight and a tremor ain't fun). Good experience, beautiful work and they procured the parts. Very fair price.
I am not furious with the Chinese. They are doing great work at a great price. What infuriates me is that the US companies have abandoned the field.
Same reasons walmart is full of "Made in China". Labor and environmental regs just to start, massive subsidies, preferential trade treatment, among no one even knows how many other tricks. And heavily US subsidized shipping that's literally cheaper for the end user than sending cross town.
I try hard to buy US when possible, or at least not China. It's often pratically impossible. And its largely due to our own supposed representatives. Trump was right about tariffs even if not entirely about the reasons why. Yeah, getting a big screen TV for $300 instead of $800 is nice, but we're literally exporting vast amounts of wealth to China for disposable stuff. We've barely begun to feel the real effects of doing so.
Even exposing and etching my own (I'm stubborn, and don't have time for many anyway), still stuck putting all Chinese made parts on them. Great job, uniparty!
I used to work in importing, until being kicked out for being a leper. Everybody I talked to in that field agreed that the import tariffs on China were the right thing to do. That's why Xiden reversed them. Cuz, business!
I don't like tariffs, in general. Too blunt an instrument, too prone to corruption.
OTOH, I had no better suggestion. Trump recognized the playing field wasn't anything close to level and did what he could.
Wholly agree. Spent most of my life designing and building stuff. Including raw PCBs, once upon a time.
On an even playing field, we can be very, very competitive. Perhaps not in heavy labor content stuff, but virtually nothing high tech is built by hand. Can't be done. Anything that lends itself to automation can be done here--and it doesn't have to be shipped from the other side of the world.
I once had a fair amount of business in China. Spent some time there. There is a fundamental difference in government outlook. China is, sort of, socialist. Meaning that the government has to feed and house people. Making incremental labor cost, from the government's POV, essentially zero. If you have to feed them, have them working--at any price.
Our government is, sort of, capitalist. (I really don't know the proper term). It views business as a golden goose to be cooked.
Result--China WANTS manufacturing, the US is determined to kill it.
This isn't going to end well.
The US would never allow the dormitories full of workers who work 12 hour plus days, six days a week. Those workers get paid enough for room and board plus a bit more for modest entertainment and the ability to send a bit to relatives in the country. Their managers are well compensated but only if quotas are met; they are better educated and their children are on a better glide path forward. As class envy has begun the workers are getting better and the most skilled are groomed for higher positions. The Chinese really do value competency, up to a point.
Sunstone Circuits out of Portland, Oregon never disappoint. Small and large quantities.
I liked the shower observation. A good point of demarcation.
"you could tell a military person's rank by looking at their insignia; in academe you had to see how close their office was to the Department Head's. "
I check the condition of their knees.
Interesting. Didn't know that. My paternal great grandparents were lowland Scots. Came to this country circa 1850.
Guess we have been rednecks for a long time.
The impact of Scots/Welsh/Irish on US culture is much unappreciated. The Founders were generally upper class English, hence our legal system and language. But, the people that did the work (and dying in the wars) were heavily German/Irish/Scot/Welsh.
My mother's family spoke archaic German ("Pennsylvania Dutch") until the early 20th Century. My mother, born 1922, was the first generation that generally didn't speak it.
I'm not exactly a "redneck," but I straddle worlds. My dad is a super-handy guy, and when they divorced, my mother remarried a steamfitter. I worked my way through college as a freelance mechanic. I also did computer programming and a few other gigs. Went to business school and ended up as a money manager.
The thing is, the upper class folks I worked with in on Wall St couldn't change the oil in their cars to save their lives, never mind fix their washing machine, or wire a new outlet in their bedroom. So they have ZERO idea of what they're F-ing with when they create all these rules, regulations, etc. They are literally gumming up a works that of which they have no knowledge whatsoever.
That's the frightening part -- these folks have zero respect for the people who actually make sure the lights come on and the cars and other machinery run. But they think they know everything.
Cheers,
Kim G
Roma Sur, Mexico City
And actually have a voice in these digital times. Their opinions can be heard and seen globally now. That never has been the case before.
Additionally "down to earth" in actuality is "more embodied", for the more spiritual interested folks.
Many of our Universities have become nothing more than indoctrination mills rather than teaching critical thinking and fostering healthy debates to strengthen the mind. It is now all about “group think” and controlling the masses.
100%. It’s just so sad to watch the future minds being molded into jelly
Dan , we don't learn critical thinking in Universities ,we either have it or we don't .
They have replaced critical thinking with critical theory.
The universities don't train competent humans. They filter out the least compliant. That's it. That's the only function that matters.
Sadly accurate. Universities are no longer educational think tanks. They are now institutions producing fish bowl mentalities.
Walter Kirn had a great Tweet earlier today (https://twitter.com/walterkirn/status/1546276377514622978?cxt=HHwWhICy5YeLvfUqAAAA):
"Average people who think they’re smart are easy to manipulate. Appeal to their egos. Average people who don’t care if they’re smart, stupid, or whatever are much harder to manipulate. You have to appeal to their real interests. And you had better come through."
Very average people now have university degrees, and their sense of self-worth depends on their being perceived as "smart" (including by themselves). Alas, they are not terribly smart, which is why they end up following da Science (TM), which is easy to understand, but has very little to do with actual science. Even the ones who actually are smart are, for the most part, sufficiently informed only about a small number of things. But they are "smart," and so they listen to other "smart" people, i.e. to da Science (TM). And so here we are now...
Note to self (and anyone else who wants free advice): don't overestimate your own intelligence, as it may lead you to buy into remarkably stupid things.
Better to be a wiseguy wiseacre, or smart alec, than to believe oneself a know-it-all. I, myself, am only a know-it-90%. When I ask someone something and they say they don't know about the subject, I ask them to tell me more than they know. But actually, that's probably what people who think they're smart but aren't are doing, telling more than they know.
Noam Chomsky once wrote that university graduates are the most vulnerable to propaganda. They are trained by parasites to become parasites. Others must work.
I suppose we village idiots must shoulder some of the blame for not taking the pitchforks to the graduates earlier.
(Full discolusure: I'm a graduate, but with a pitchfork.)
Midwits! I'm surrounded by midwits!
Today’s university graduates are yesterdays village idiot, because… equality not meritocracy.
Consequently, Government and its institutions is the cesspit into which drain those with no marketable skills to get a decent job in the competitive, wealth producing private sector.
Those who would rule prefer village idiots, and so commandeer education in order to produce them in abundance. Thus our world.
Harvard grads
Have the village idiots proposed any solutions though?
As a leading village idiot, I can confirm that we propose solutions all the time.
And no one listens 😢the us. Censorship hard at work
Please send more Fools.
Every good end-time has to start with a Fool.
No one listens to the village idiots. It’s called censorship
Lol, true.
If no one listens to the village idiot anymore ,than I have to keep all my wisdom to myself .. ,How sad .
Simple. Don't screw up things that already work.
Actually a good question!
Proposing solutions is the reason we got ourselves in this mess.
Sometimes shutting your fool mouth is the better policy. Many such cases.
Just the diversity of tools I hope, you secret JBP fan;)
Systemic analyses are valuable, and capture an important element of the political dynamic. The more conspiratorial lens - highlighting the role of organizations like the WEF in a contemporary context, for example - also has a lot of evidence backing it. In my view, both are necessary to understand what's going on.
It's interesting that you point to the incredible power of the zombie robot state. Hardcore conspiracy theorists also have a tendency to frame their antagonists as almost omnipotent - every event becoming a 4D chess move, with every possible response already anticipated and built into the plan. If reality is closer to the median of the conspiracist and systemicist views (which, interestingly, map closely to the Great Man and Historical Forces theories of history), there's perhaps more room for hope. Conspiracies being directed by zombies that are themselves in possession of no more agency than the common NPC somehow become less scary. I'm probably not articulating this well, as it's an idea that's still half formed.
You're correct. I think our tendency to overestimate the competence of the state actors is part of the problem. We let them buffalo us into thinking that we can't successfully oppose their (nefarious) plans for us. Eugyppius does a great job of pointing out the mechanics of the administrative state. Once enough of us understand that WE have the power, we gain the more substantial inertia and can effectively fight for our human agency.
The danger of overestimating the abilities of high level actors is the main failure mode of conspiracism, yes. But, it also seems to me that a purely systemicist approach can make a comparable error in the opposite direction. One might be able to talk sense to an individual human, but how does one engage an implacable system? The crucial problem seems to be the removal of agency from human actors, and placing all agency in an unseen force - whether shadowy conspirators or the emergent egregore.
I think the two models (conspiracist/Great Man vs. systemicist/historicist) may actually be two faces of the same coin. Think of emergent systems that are the outcome of active agents pursuing their own agendas in a specific competitive context. As individuals, everyone has "free will", but they will succeed only if they choose winning strategies. Winning strategies are determined by the overall playing field, including the current strategic behavior of all others. The "system" is always an ecosystem of forces made up of intelligent actors, and is nevertheless as determinate as if they were all bouncing gas molecules.
The error is to suppose that the Great Man sets the system as he likes it (and hence, so can we), or that the forces of the system are impersonally divorced from the will of individual humans (and hence, resistance is futile). Rather, we cannot fight against the "system", but we can swim in it. And swimming means that we must always be prepared to fight back against the human predators who will devour us if we do not develop effective defensive strategies of our own. Thus, we survive and partly shape the system by finding and guarding our own niche.
I've been wondering along the same lines whether the free will vs. determinism debate is a clash between two separate perspectives of the same system. I love your comment, as it articulates what I have been thinking but have struggled to put into words.
I've been struggling with it a long time too. I think much of the problem is that, in our usual scientific mode of thinking, we set ourselves outside of the system we are trying to analyze. But for a wholistic understanding, we have to recognize that we are a part of it.
Wholistically, everything is determinate. Subjectively, I can choose. But my choice is still determinate, based not on outside powers, but upon the will arising from my own prior nature, in consideration of my circumstances.
What I will do tomorrow is already determined today, and was determined a billion years ago. But it is absolutely not predictable, neither by myself, nor by any conceivable material computational machine. What I will do, and what choices I will make, has to be worked out in real time, and nothing else in nature can match the unfolding itself of my life for both speed and accuracy.
Yet the choices I make will also affect the outcome, because I and my choices are a part of the whole system. If I try to cop out and not go to the trouble of making the choices and doing the work, on the supposition that the predetermined system has the outcome fixed for me anyway, then that fact, also predetermined, assures my failure.
Well said. I agree completely. As it happens I just wrote an essay making exact point.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/a-conspiracy-of-systems-a-system
Excellent article! I see we think alike.
Seeing with the third eye is better than just looking with the left or right.
Many "conspiracies" Are truth
Yes.
The geopolitical analyst Joaquin Flores describes the way that elites project more power than they actually have as the "Gargoyle Effect", When you think of it, Klaus Schwab is exactly that; a gargoyle. A sinister apparition designed to frighten the peasants from on high. I think the effect is beginning to wear off though. Onkel Klaus has no clothes, figuratively speaking of course.
Great Men rise up and oppose the Historical Forces.
The forces seems to be progressive while the great men are conservative, in the broadest sense. Conservative as in reversing to past times, progressive as in change for the sake of change
As one of my favourite writers put it "progressivism is death, conservatism is life".
Well, it is simple, really. Everyone wants to keep their jobs because everyone needs their job, and the structure of modern society means that most of the workforce has no truly valuable and portable skill. A plumber can work anywhere plumbing exists, which is everywhere, but few people, relatively speaking, are plumbers. An office worker is so easily replaced that if you have no independent fortune, and you wouldn't because otherwise you wouldn't be an office worker, you cannot risk much.
I myself was always getting fired for being a somewhat incorrigible gal within the world of office indentured servitude, but I interviewed beautifully because I spoke well, and I wrote well, and I was useful to bosses because of that, and there was no shortage of bosses who valued that.
Now everyone speaks in upvoice vocal fry, including the bosses, and no one writes well so no one notices, and it's a good thing I'm now retired because otherwise I'd be unemployable.
There are so few good doctors that any moron internist will be hired by a hospital system, so all are easily replaced. There are so many analysts that anyone identifying unfortunate trends counter to the desired outcome is easily replaced.
I'm glad you keep demonstrating why conspiracy theories of world domination are far less likely than the overwhelming incompetence and stupidity we really have.
People didn't get educated into being complete morons without critical thinking skills by chance.
Well, this is the story of human civilization. Education has always been controlled by one authority or another, one cult or another. Heretics to any way of thinking broke off, escaped, created their own orthodoxies. A freethinker in any sphere is a lonely person, ultimately.
(Thank you for the link to sign in, eugyppius!) I just wanted to thank SCA for the information about vocal fry and upspeak. I swear I have NOT been living under a rock, but I don't think I have ever heard these terms before, and had to google them and watch multiple youtube videos! (Okay, I was a teen during the valley girl phase, LOL!)
I have a 17 year old daughter and now I'm going to be listening for these types of speech patterns. She's been complemented often for her vocabulary, but I'm not sure how often she may be relying on vocal fry and/or upspeak, though the vocal fry does sound familiar to me. She'll be taking public speaking this year so this is timely information. Thank you, SCA!
Ha! I had to become aware of this because it seemed every woman under the age of 50 I heard on TV was unable to speak like a normal human being. A viral plague indeed.
And I'm really, really feeling old now because the death of good diction is making me nuts. One of my great triumphs as only a HS grad, as Ernestine was famous for saying, was having an excellent phone voice that callers always praised to whatever boss I had at the time. If friends would call me at the office they'd say "you don't have to use that, it's me!" and I'd revert immediately to native Noo Yawkuh. It was a very useful talent.
Greetings from Noo Joisey!
I started to notice many TV Newscasters mispronouncing "Manhattan" about 30 years ago; the current pronunciation is "Man-ha-in", the letter T is no longer voiced. It has become widespread and prevalent on local news channels, and the unvoiced letter T is showing up in other words spoken on TV.
At least the vernacular "Noo Joisey" was evolved from the spoken English of ordinary peasants, not from elite and educated TV personalities.
BTW, the "T" in "bitch" is silent. ;-)
LOL! Interesting!
Youse guys! (I'm now living in a NE state where I feel more culturally displaced than I did in South Asia.)
Yes!! This describes me to a T. But I question authority in today's medical industrial complex. That up talk and vocal fry seemed to coincide with Kardashian's bull crap
Women are now discovering that a sensitive, artsy, empathetic ally type o' guy is absolutely useless when a hurricane blows the roof off, not to speak of the absolute utter lack of visible signs of life.
But then I was foolish when young, too. Experience is a hard teacher.
I think we cannot ever have a top down structure. it brings out the worst in everyone and everything it touches. This is how six sigma can get implemented into a company by the ceo and everyone at the bottom knows how effing stupid and destructive it is but the higher you slide up the ladder the more the job depends on beintlg part of the consensus until the VPs all think its the bees knees...
burn the system to the ground. also all civilians need to have access to actually money and any kind they like. the politicians should hwve all their assets digitised on the block chain so we cslan question them.
Any hierarchy has problems with semantic massaging. I ran across this post back in the mid 70s, and I'm sure it was old then:
In the beginning, there was a plan,
And then came the assumptions,
And the assumptions were without form,
And the plan without substance,
And the darkness was upon the face of the workers,
And they spoke among themselves saying,
"It is a crock of shit and it stinks."
And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said,
"It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying,
"It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong,
Such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors saying,
"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength."
And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another,
"It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them,
"It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him,
"This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor
Of the company With very powerful effects."
And the President looked upon the Plan
And saw that it was good,
And the Plan became Policy.
And this, my friend, is how shit happens.
Yep. My Dad had a copy of that that he got for free at a printing place. Postal Instant Press, PIP. It was in the 70s. Those were the days. Thus spake Zarathustra. 🤲
I had a class at work, the very first one in the six sigma series. It was insane.
I'm testing an AI, and asked it to give me a more realistic header image for your post, and here is what it came up with - yeah, I'm scared too: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/989739585158389760/996096246089535619/WisePathBooks_vampire_zombie_squid_swimming_in_a_dark_ocean_hyp_b22e6e2c-a1e8-4838-abd5-8c1ffe705e85.png
aaaahhhhhhh
Frankly, we all could use one of those. I can keep it in my bathtub since I have a shower stall too, and won't need to disturb it.
"In His House at R'lyeh Dead Cthulhu waits dreaming, yet He shall rise and His kingdom shall cover the Earth."
- A 2024 campaign ad, probably
I think you might want to add "sunk cost" denial to this list.
Most people don't understand that concept...and certainly not bureaucracy
Yes all very accurate. Please allow me to boil it down in my simplistic voice.
I noticed that Covid created, from top down, little authorizations from the usual minions everywhere in society.
I refused to wear a mask, I had the police called on me dozens of times, I was threatened with physical violence, and verbally abused constantly .
It was always the grocery store stocker, the pharmacy clerk, the hospital admitting staff, the lowest ranking nurse, the gas station attendant, the secretary of an office , and on and on. Anyone who never had any authority in general was now a gatekeeper or moral judge accusing me of selfishness for helping spread this invisible menace that guaranteed death or at least the threat of gasping for breath on a ventilator.
It was a clown world.
add to your list: ushers in Broadway theaters, newly promoted to mask nazis, whose job it is to prevent you from enjoying the show you just paid $200 to see and embarrass you in front of the entire audience for failing to maintain proper mask wearing protocols
It still is ,it's not over yet ,the worst is still coming ,just wait 2 or 3 month .
I'm afraid of that too.
where i am (SC, USA) it is almost uniformly black people who are always masked even when walking, biking or driving alone. my guess is that they aren't buying the vaccine shit (having vivid memories of the Tuskegee experiments) and are doing whatever they can to protect themselves, futile though it may be.
i have thus far refrained from asking a total stranger but i would love to take an informal poll
If they have to choose between masks and "vaccines", then they are probably wise to go with the masks.
I wonder if there is a constituency of people who fear both covid and the vaccines? We usually think of people who wear masks when they aren't required as hopelessly lost to the vax-covidian cult, but maybe we are misjudging some of them. Are they wearing masks on top of being vaccinated, or are they wearing masks because they are NOT vaccinated?
I am near Denver Colorado USA
“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?“
Winston thought. “By making him suffer”, he said.
“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?
[snip]
The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy – everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends."
I use this quote all the time, and the further we get into the hellscape the more it is proven true. Now we're on to the 'you can't trust your wife or child or friend' aspect.
Who needs vaxx divides when there's the unholy family court to divide and steal?
I agree and It is time some one else can see that .
Political economy is my favorite thing in the world and you do brilliant political economy. Thank you for all that you do. I guess I would just add though -- yes this is "a coup for the middle bureaucratic ranks..." but the paradox here is that the shots are killing and maiming these same middle level bureaucrats. That's what makes this situation so profoundly weird and difficult to describe. It's the bureaucratic fascism that Hannah Arendt warned us about -- but the bureaucrats are directing their toxic policies at themselves. I tried to write about it here, but the situation is so weird that to even describe it plainly is heretical and may lead to excommunication from polite society:
https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/the-self-inflicted-genocide-of-late
You have inadvertently discovered the Administrative State, a noxious, impenetrable, unelected, unresponsive organism.
It is “Liberal Democracy“ at its diseased apotheosis. And it must be fought until it is dismantled.
I would add one more dynamic: Speed to Change. The goal is to get new policies and practices so far along so quickly that it is nearly impossible and always painful to reverse course. We saw it with vaccination. Get the shots or lose your job and societal privileges. We’re seeing it with the switch from fossil fuels. Cancel pipelines and destroy the oil producers so there can be no turning back from inefficient and inadequate renewables. Consumers will just have to get used to soaring prices and blackouts. Like Mao’s Cultural Revolution. All the world’s automakers are putting the vast majority of R&D investment now in electric vehicles. But we are less than 2 years removed from $2 a gallon gasoline under Trump. What happens to all that investment in EVs few can afford if Trump returns and Ron DeSantis follows that up with an additional 8 years of oil promotion? Is the die to EVs already cast? Is the path to a fossil fuel-less future assured? I think not. This could blow up very badly on the greens. And not a moment too soon.
Wind failure in Texas causing cutbacks, ironically atop some of the world’s most abundant oil deposits.
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/ercot-asking-texans-to-conserve-power-on-monday/3010786/?_osource=SocialFlowTwt_DFWBrand
Great diagnosis! Now, what's the cure? I see elements in the stupidity of the bureaucracy - present them with an out of context problem, and they just don't see it until it is parked in front of Parliament honking or spraying liquid manure all over their building.
So maybe a ferment of diverse disruptive actions at all scales is important. An alternative society of regime skeptics might be part of that. We need to recognize and support each other, and find ways around the chokepoints the squid controls.
Well I don't know about a cure, exactly, but I'm pretty sure this downard diffusion of power is irreversible. And increasingly I think that the diffusion can't be stopped any longer, so these behavioural features will only grow more extreme. There will be opportunities in there, maybe there are already.
There is no "cure" in the System as we know it. I am somewhat a student of societal collapse. It will continue to deteriorate until the aphorism that "that which cannot continue, won't" applies. I know of no historical example of a corrupt society reforming itself.
I think it is in human DNA to become more and more inefficient and counterproductive until it cannot continue. In the old days, when a society became too fat and inefficient, the barbarians came over the hill and "reset" the place. Post Hiroshima/Nagasaki, the barbarians have been negated. Until they aren't.
The collapse of the late, great USA will be nothing the world has ever seen before. I am an old man, expect not to see it. But, I weep for my children and grandchildren.
💚
My wife quit her teaching job last week. Already working part-time and just offered more work.
Brilliant continued analysis of modern State power dynamics. Curious to hear your thoughts on “The Network State: How to Start A New Country” by Balaji Srinivasan - a possible life raft for dissidents.
Wow. Very well thought through and complete.
Makes a lot of sense.
Well done!
This is the type of analysis that I come here for :)
Eugyppius is on fire again. I like it!
> It is very hard to sell many people at once on complicated ideas, and so there is inevitably an emphasis on simplicity and an absence of strategy.
This is an essential point, one with applications to other areas (such as the spread of management fads). Sophisticated ideas tend to degenerate into crude ideas as they spread and reach larger numbers of people. This natural tendency is further amplified by the ongoing decline in technical competence that we are seeing in most areas of society, which further reduces western society's cognitive carrying capacity and ability to coordinate behavior.