I watched “The Social Dilemma” last night, and a lot became vastly more clear to me. We are witnessing, through planned psychological manipulation for profit, the creation of a new breed of neurotic, compulsively conformist, addicted human being.
I really thought there would be rebellions against these ridiculous lockdowns by now. Our young have no reason at all, really, to be wearing masks. They are at no risk, and if the people in their lives at high risk self quarantine, there is no risk to anyone.
But the young are the biggest conformists of all. As one of my kids told me, they are all terrified that someone will take a picture of them without a mask on, and it will be posted on social media, and their lives destroyed by a horde of mindless, thoughtless, reckless, and emotionally violent banshees.
So we have in place a system of complete social domination, which has as an inevitable feature the erosion of initiative, individual personality, creativity, and emotional independence. We are creating empowered zombies, who will voice the same opinions en masse at the same time in the same way, all thinking that they are being bold and brave and unique.
It is baffling, and truly mind boggling. I can’t fight this. No ideas will work against forces like that. Something monolithic, something in government–I hate to say–or some strong voice from within the stream of noise that they all tune in to has to fight this.
Even in the movie, they bring up the Russian interference idea, even though it was then, and remains now, thoroughly ludicrous. They polarize within a movie about the negative effects of polarization. They, to their credit, show an “Extreme Center” party, but then show fighting in the street between two sides, as if the right and left, in this country, were even remotely equal in their violence. It is 99% the Left, and occasionally the right will show up, then they will talk about it continually for three years, as if it was an example of something happening daily or weekly. This was in that movie, and I doubt many partisans of the Left failed to see the Extreme Center as a thinly veiled caricature of their vision of the Right, one that manipulated drones on the Left keep fighting in their dreams, while they are fighting the structures of their local communities–its buildings, its economy, its police, and indeed its citizens–in lieu of actual physical opponents, who they continue to invent in hoax after hoax.
You want to hear something crazy? The guy who seems to have led the team that developed the iPhone, Richard Williamson, was my best friend in high school. Strange irony. We played Dungeons and Dragons together (it is apparently becoming nerd chic now, but was not then), hiked, played chess (I am not very good at chess, by the way), and I spent a lot of time at his house. The very first time I got drunk when I was 16–on Everclear, which is very dangerous, and his brother Michael was plainly to blame–I puked in his bed.
I corresponded briefly with him back in 2016, I think it was. We had lost touch with each other long ago. He had always looked down on me a bit, not least because I was in many respects an idiot. I was also crazy, for reasons I have discussed here, but which I had no inklings of back then. I had no idea what my problems were. But when he realized I was a Trump supporting alcoholic, the correspondence ceased again. He himself never posts on Facebook, and I had the impression his kids–like those of the executives in the movie–were not being addicted to their phones and social media as most kids in this and other countries are.
I have an altar in my home. I have taken to lighting a small candle every day. It is the candle of hope. None of us can truly foresee where all this is going. As the guy who invented the Like button said, he thought it was something which would make people happy, but it seems to have worked instead, on balance, to make people miserable when they don’t get enough of them. The world is filled with unintended consequences, and in my view the most useful aspect of Friedrich Hayek’s work is describing at length the futility of even the smartest people trying to plan the world, rather than to work with its intrinsic, and desirable, Complexity. Liberalism is politically deployed Complexity Theory. Socialism is its opposite. Socialism is straight lines deployed against the raging currents of human life, which can only work by constraining and containing human energy to bounds which are unnatural to it, and unhealthy for it.
In a sense seeing the scale of the trick being played is liberating for me. I understand the mask people now. Nothing I can say or do will make much difference. They NEED their conformity. You can’t use reason to denude someone of a deeply rooted emotional impulse. The future may be bright and it may be dark, but I can in good conscience stop trying to pretend I can even in minute way shape it from this chair, in this room, at this keyboard.
I will continue my other projects, and devote more time to them. What might make a real difference is ideas I can only deploy in the presence of other people.