breaking the mancubs: activism as identity

how schools became the agent of societal dissolution and how to fix it

cult brainwashing has a long and unpleasant history. it takes many forms and has occurred in many places but the core process is basically always the same:

you strip prior loyalty, sense of self, and self-worth belonging to other community. you make it seem alien, bad, immoral, or unenlightened to “be as they are” and effectively “other” the rest of the world.

then you provide a new identity, a new morality, new names for things, and a sense of safety and belonging in a new community.

efface identity, strip it down to bare wood, then build it back up.

it’s been standard practice for ages for everyone from kool-aid cults to the marine corps. it’s all the same process with the same aims: to make you us and not them.

there is a reason the military uses different worlds for everything. it’s not a bathroom, it’s “the head.” it’s not a hat, it’s “a cover.” and on an on. it differentiates that world from the rest of the world. the distinction draws you into the new and out of the old. as ever, words, vernacular, and socialization have great power. control how people speak and how they act will follow.

one can certainly argue that there are beneficial versions of this. the “discipline” of military induction was often offered to young adults convicted of minor crimes as a “way to get yourself together.” perhaps this was not a bad idea.

but tools this powerful can also be severely subverted and do great damage if they are applied poorly.

and there seems to be a lot of that going around.

the same payload that can make you into infantry can make you into other forms of shock troops.

activism as identity is an extremely potent payload to add to such a system. it provides mission as sense of self and makes the self inextricable from the activism.

it also generates rage.

any opposition to my ideas or goals is an attack on my identity, ego, sense of self, sense of meaning. it constitutes, in a very real sense, existential threat. so i must dominate you or die.

the inducted have become not a person with ideas but a person who IS their ideas. ideology is identity and this becomes a lifelong devotion and dependence and the longer it goes on, the deeper the reliance becomes because the more time you have had to weave these needs into the warp and weft of your life.

and it’s why the best and most durable cults always want to “get ‘em young and never let them take a breath.”

these are not people you want to share a civilization with.

because they are not civilized.

civilization lies in self governance, not in dominion over others.

and all these people know is domination and dressing up their intolerance of you as “tolerance” for their endless attacks it not “inclusive pluralism” it’s brainwashed barbarism and there is no way to reason with it, accommodate it into quiescence, or live beside it in peace.

the identity lies not in an outcome but in the activism itself. so it will never stop. it cannot be appeased or satiated. each new meal evokes naught but greater caverns of hunger.

it cannot stabilize or self-limit. it’s a positive feedback disaster curve and it’s starting to come to the steep part as rule by rube (gato’s postulate) becomes the state of play in what was once “western civilization.”

and tantrum time is over.

the next round of damage is more than can be absorbed and this wearisome wokester worm is turning and the age of incandescent outrage identity must be brought to an end.

having heard this, let me ask you a question:

have you been to an american school lately?

because this is where we need to start.

right from the beginning.

by the time a mancub has had 14 years of indoctrination at the hands of whatever this is that we’re currently calling “education” it’s too late for colleges to fix them. so universities wind up pandering to cultists long since enrolled. the watermelon washing of apocalyptic green grift, structural everything-ism, dream depletion, and community destruction is already dyed yarn deep. the activism as identity poison is too hard to purge.

to be sure, it’s not all of the kids, but it’s enough to make them dominant even as a deranged shouty minority.

at a certain point the rest are just the riders on the subway all trying to stay quiet while the crazy guy who reeks like piss and has this pants on his head harangues them in a glossolalia fusillade that no one (least of all he himself) understands but that no one wants to interrupt for fear of him turning on them.

no one wants to be the one to stand up and stop that guy, but until we do, guess what train-rides are going to be like?

and this is why school choice becomes one of the most important issues of our time.

i’ve said it before and will say it again:

education is not too important to be left to the private sector.

it’s too important to be left anywhere near the government.

the time is rapidly coming when it will become increasingly trivial and acceptable to simply demolish the entire idea of “school” where you (at great expense) sit in rooms of 20-30 to have possibly qualified people talk at you in a one size mostly fits none one-to-many system of pedagogy barely altered in 1000 years.

it’s going to become so cheap, so effective, and so available that ideas like “how can we pay for this?” will become ridiculous and fade from memory. 10 or 15 years from now, the issue will be inconceivable and history students working with their own 1:1 coursework in precisely the manner and pacing suited to them will boggle to imagine a lecture hall.

but we aren’t there yet and we need an interim solution to bridge this and “public schools run by and for public unions” ain’t it.

Federal, state, and local governments provide $764.7 billion or $15,120 per pupil to fund K-12 public education.

this is in excess of $300,000 per class of 20. so, sorry, but no possible way this is an “insufficient funding” problem. the unions are skimming something like 10% of this right off the top for themselves and for kickbacks to politicians in the form of donation and PAC’s to maintain their monopoly on public funded ed. the rest is going to the sort of administrative bloat that replaces AP math with a third DEI obersturmführer with designs on proving that biology class is a form of patriarchy.

and for this we’re getting deteriorating schools, worse results, and brainwashed, broken kids reared for ideological purity not critical thought or self-governance much less self-possession.

they are teaching many of the kids to hate themselves and mistake their own capacities for privilege. they are robbing others of their potential by claiming that the deck is so systemically stacked that only racial preferencing can save them and that they must complain and take rather than strive and achieve. they inflict self doubt and personal guilt in some and sentence others to life in a prison of low expectations and the achievement invalidation of affirmative action that makes all success in such patronage groups suspect.

this is the exact sort of brainwashing discussed above. separate them from parents and peers, make them hate the outside system and often themselves, teach them raging activism mantras like “anyone not being actively anti-racist is a racist” to set them in proportion to all non “fellow travelers,” and then draw them into performative grievance cults as foundational identity.

they come out broken, uneducated, and un-self-governing. they are taught that government and rules are civilization instead of learning to be the sorts of civilized people who do not need government to order their affairs.

it’s cradle to grave dependency and incapacity and it’s being harnessed to generate rage and opposition to every evolved human system of interaction and to despise liberty and flourishing.

this is how a society dies.

this problem cannot be fixed from inside the system. it must be replaced.

so here we go.

anything would be better and a free market would be MUCH better. fund every kid. make the schools compete for them by offering good product not this “take or pay” dumpster fire that forces contribution even if you want to opt out.

no other rules. no “certification,” no credentialing, no approved lists or mandated curricula. just choice. free, unfettered, self-adapting choice.

we must tolerate bad choices or choices we disagree with to ensure that the truly good choices are free to emerge. the speed with which this will lift all boats and take us to levels dizzyingly above those of today will be so stark as to be unmissable. it’s why the teachers unions will do anything and everything to prevent it. they are 100% cognizant of the fact that the garbage they peddle cannot survive competition.

and make no mistake, “garbage” is likely charitable as a descriptor.

but if we allow school choice, some kids might get bad educations!

this is a bar so low you could trip over it in the dark. and the arguments about “well we need rules and accreditation or some kid might learn some dumb thing i don’t like” fall awfully flat in the face of what the kids ARE learning now. maybe you cannot “save” everyone, but there is no way we cannot do 10 times better than this.

there is no way the current school system is more useful or better suited than a choice based system would be. the germans have, to great success, replaced many high schools with vocational tracks to become skilled technicians, plumbers, electricians, repairers of engines and operators of equipment. and the US has shortages of all these things and great career prospects within them. and not every kids wants a “liberal arts” education. so offer the option, see what happens.

the cataclysmic clownshow of US schools in 2020-22 should have been a massive wake up call. smacking the snooze bar here is going to make this 100 times harder to deal with down the road. this should be THE domestic political issue of the moment in the US.

it’s how we break the totalitarian trickery of activism identity. it’s how we re-create an american dream and an american zeitgeist. it’s how we develop the human capital and agency for societal thriving.

time to stop chasing squirrels and take back our future.