There is a sickness permeating human society that I could blame on a million things, but I haven’t the time or the concrete evidence of how it came about, only that it exists and that it is being exploited and expanded by politicians, the rich, and certain intellectual elites for a concerning reason. In this piece I will attempt to justify my position and how I think society can solve the issue we are currently facing. It’s a lot easier to imagine myself explaining this to someone in conversation, so apologies if my preaching feels half-hearted or not concise.
Man is a social animal. That is the simplest way of explaining our nature and what we need to grow, but I believe it is good to expand upon the fact so I can establish what has been taken from us. Man is a social animal, with individualistic desires, preferences, ideas, that exist in both the realm of the self and the collective, on occasion transcending these realms for the purpose of seeking enlightenment. Humans want to survive, as do most other organisms on the planet, and work best in groups where they can use their own skills and express ideas to evolve and progress alongside one another, prolonging survival as a species and a sense of fulfilment. Fulfilment is the fabric that keeps us tied together, that reminds us living is worth working hard and, on occasion, suffering for. Man, as an animal, surpasses all others intellectually, yet has the same instinct of living as a group of other animals. Perhaps longwinded, but an important part of establishing how we act and our purpose. Man is a social animal as much as he is individualistic and both of those aspects, while seeming dichotomous, truly enhance our experience as man and make us what we are.
In our collectives, we come up with ideas that improve the lives of all in the collective. I touched on this not long ago, which you hopefully will remember. Of course, this cultural evolution of sorts is something to be proud of, but the state has adopted our ideas and turned them into half-baked monoliths intended as ‘alternatives’ for the other side, fracturing and rebuilding the illusion of choice, while they continue a greater plan of control. I understand this way of seeing the state has a lot of negative associations with alt-right conspiracy theories, but to that initial distrust of the concept I ask you one question; do you trust the state in the first place? In the USA, a country that is quite foreign to me, the CIA has admitted to using mind control techniques on innocent people, for purposes we cannot begin to imagine. There have been repeated waves of scandals regarding Epstein and all of the utter demons, many politicians and other kinds of elites, who visited his island. Palantir and Britcard are emerging, things once imagined to be just crazy conspiracy theories that only Bible thumping fascist lunatics would believe could ever come to be. I cannot fathom unconditionally believing that people with so much influence, control, and support, would have your best interests in mind, that they wouldn’t fall deeper into the throes of wanting more of that control, that this establishment exists for anything other than throwing power back and forth between frenemies of sorts that all want a piece of the pie. None of it is real, and no benefit comes from supporting the illusion that the authoritarian capitalist right or the authoritarian capitalist left truly are against one another, when we know they have all committed and enabled genocides, mass rape of children, caused unimaginable amounts of poverty for average people, et cetera.
The politicians attain the right of man to act as individuals working for, or as, a collective - they bargain with your safety and fulfilment to continue getting richer, enjoying the adrenaline of control, pretending that this election cycle will change something for once. And you? I will tell you what you get to enjoy, if you haven’t yet pieced it together.
The common man has been turned into a mindless consumer, engaging in the entertainment landfill as he watches his world fall apart around him, Millennials and Zoomers most affected. I hear Boomers often whining that these generations are lazy, that they sit on their arse all day and that getting a job, buying a house, raising a family must be as easy as pie. What these geriatrics fail to understand is that you can’t walk down the road and pick up a well paying job in minutes these days, nor did we have everything subsidised and handed to us on a silver platter. No, the economy has been in shambles since the 2000s, we have been raised by what Ted Kaczynski called ‘surrogate activities’ and that we have been stripped of any community that we could connect with in the first place. The job market is absolutely huge these days, sure, but these jobs exist naught to build on and improve infrastructure or education in communities, they exist only to serve faceless, unremarkable, entirely forgettable capitalists, typing and filing and emailing mindlessly, repetitively, meaninglessly. It’s a lot easier to get laid off, too, with the rise of LLMs and automation. You could spend years trying to get a job as an adult that doesn’t pay peanuts, if you’re lucky. You leave the office, commute home, you don’t ever speak to your neighbours, engage in bastardised simulations of love and humanity while scrolling on your phone, and then go to bed. Rinse. Repeat. It’d be better not to work, contributing to such a pointless system. What benefit do you get doing this? You’re tired, weak, depressed, and see no improvement to society doing what you ‘must’ these days.
Generation Alpha may never know what ‘Man is a social animal’ means. They may never be able to understand what has been removed from their life, what we have in some ways enjoyed in childhood and growing up despite current situations. While we have access to understanding these matters, the children don’t. They live in a society where this endless spiral of nothingness, so far removed from our nature, has become the norm. They have been raised by the surrogate activity, they will grow up to only know what it means to be a mindless consumer, surveilled and alone. That pains me. Children of a young age now swipe on books as if they were tablets, treat teachers and peers like replaceable objects, something entirely unprecedented until the technological age arrived. Their parents understandably depend completely on the state, as it’s hard to attain enough money to raise a child these days, and don’t know how to become self-reliant. The children are living through their parents needing assistance, and that assistance is coming from the most evil organisation that will certainly keep them locked there forever. I like the internet, the vast amounts of information available, sure - but if people my age have no sense of discretion, even when they announce that ‘media literacy is dead’ ten times per TikTok, how will the youth fare? They cannot conceive of the idea there is another option, because they haven’t been given one. They are being allowed to waste their evident potential, and have become the perfect models of consumption and disorder. Their role models are influencers who hardly dare to step outside the norm, otherwise their payout will diminish.
Related to the influencer issue with discourse, I take issue with conceptions of empowerment brought on by popular culture. There is no feeling of empowerment that matters if you live under oppression. I find it repulsive when so-called leftists become entirely consumed by hyper-individualistic ideas of empowerment and obscure it using intersectionality politics, especially when they use the phrase ‘feeling empowered’. These are typically rich and privileged liberals obsessed with using the current jargon who adopt the labels of ‘anarchist’ and ‘communist’ or ‘punk’ to appeal to an audience disillusioned with the promises of the bourgeoisie, only to encourage the state to overstep and continue causing internal dissent, leading people to adopt frankly useless political views that keep us locked to the system. Of course, this still spans all ideologies, but leftists are a very easy target. These influencers certainly play a game of 4D chess, but it’s because they never got over the mainstream message of Elon Musk good, yay feminism Hillary Clinton girlboss, you can be rich too, and have integrated it into a non-revolutionary post-philosophical set of catchphrases. It’s easy to believe and promote the status quo with some of the terms swapped, but it never addresses the root issue of hierarchy or the downward spiral we have experienced. I am consistently left unimpressed by mouthpieces for the state and those who create new excuses for their failures in an attempt to manipulate the common man.
There is, also, the idea that knowledge is power - on the surface, a worthwhile platitude, but just as weaponised as the idea of ‘feeling empowered’ for the common man. Knowledge and true empowerment are things that must be achieved away from the means offered to you by the statists and the bourgeoisie. The media adopts both of these ideas as accessories that can be bought and swapped for aesthetic purposes based on the latest trends, whether that be traditionalist gender roles or supporting unhealthy lifestyles. I would even argue the constant involvement and consumption of the news cycle is a kind of distraction, even if the stories you’re fed are true; something I am often inclined to doubt, as many journalists are bought or incentivised by other means to lie or twist the narrative. Being consumed by current events, then being promised protection from them by the statists and bourgeoisie, has left the common man entirely defenceless and dependent on these forces because we are simply not afforded the ability to protect ourselves when in crisis, doomed to be chained closer to the watchful eye of the state.
Society must have council and order, established within our own community, brought about by the ideas of the working man. In England, we have the Magna Carta, and since the seventeenth century we have been bargaining with the current authority for rights agreed upon by our peers. It worked then, perhaps not perfectly, but there was something to go off of. Now, nobody can explain what a peer is, who the jury should be, a court of public opinion untainted by statism that exists because of and for the common man. In my view, we can have no compromise, not anymore. The state has been evolving and exploiting our politeness for far too long and, if the trend continues, we won’t have a way to fight it. Not many are willing to fight. I understand why. But if you have noticed, or been convinced by my spiel, or just want something to do to stop feeling alone, learning self reliance and distancing yourself from the state will be one of the most important ways of combating what has been happening to us. Use the internet wisely, read books, have a safety net and involve yourself with people locally. Stop engaging in discourse meant to distract you from the race against mass surveillance. Stop attempting to make compromises with the state. Stop involving yourself with pointless back-and-forths. Once you can forge a sense of normalcy away from state control and the perpetual strangeness of the news cycle, purpose can become clear to you.
You can't kill the beast while sucking at its teat - Claire Wolfe