collectivist misery

and the path to individual happiness

let’s start with some simple salients:

politics is misery; therefore, making everything political makes everyone miserable.

this is is the bleakness of totalitarian and collectivist systems.

the entire ethos of such structures is and must be political:

“all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”

-mussolini

these are the maxims of the totalitarian impulse to human perfection and its need to not only subsume the individual to the collective but to lionize this subsumation as “progress” and “the way forward.” it takes A LOT of effort because to efface human nature in such a fashion is no mean feat. it requires total commitment and an absolute surrounding by ethoses and demands for obedience and self-erasure, of dominion by doctrine. there can be no way but “the way” and all dissent must be cast as outgroup and relentlessly purged. there can be no counterexample.

this is why, contrary to the jingle on the box, collectivism and “common good” are always a focus on division, a focus on shaking the jar until the bugs fight so that some narcissistic sociopath can play at being king of the ants. the 0.000 batting average of creating utopia is irrelevant to such people, in the end, it all comes down who gets to be the boot and who shall be cast as buttock.

“within the revolution, everything… against the revolution, no rights at all.”

-fidel castro 1961

it is, frankly, the most inhuman system imaginable because it sets itself, as a matter of core doctrine, against human nature declaring it unfit and unevolved and seeking to cast in its place some form of ideological imposition that was either mistaken for utopia or cynically cast as such by the pigs who will rapidly show you just how they feel about some animals being more equal than others.

you want to understand why so many seem so unhappy? that’s why.

we are not meant to live like that.

it’s intolerable.

and worse, everyone can increasingly feel where this is going (and this is nothing new, we have been here before and the game is always the same).

“all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines.”

-mao, 1942

people speak about how movies suck now, how music is stagnant, how art and even fashion are kind of going nowhere and do not have a patch on the vibrancy and variety of the 60’s, the 70’s, the 80’s, the 90’s. they make lame accusations about “kids today” etc but the reality is that it’s not the kids, it’s the politics.

this happens in every single society that gets captured by totalitarian twaddle of “we need to tell the humans how to be some inhuman elevation of themselves that we imagine to be finer and to deny their own natures in service of the collective because some self-styled elite has become determined that the world would be better that way.”

this is what pain feels like.

seriously, ask yourself: has any such society ever created any art of worth? did the soviets, maoist china, communist cuba, fascist italy or germany or spain? is anyone grooving to the soothing sounds of the music of the khmer rouge? no. they are all artistic wastelands of bad political hectoring and if you don’t like it, well…

“he who protests is an enemy; he who opposes is a corpse.”

-pol pot

obviously, the west is not quite there yet, but it can be and it will be if someone doesn’t get a hold of this nonsense and break the political intrusion into culture and the totalitarian war for the very nature of what it is to be human and the vast killing fields of joy thievery with which it has replaced the elevation of culture. such “media” is set in opposition to the better angels of that which is intrinsic to the human animal seeking to break and malign them and demanding in their stead an endless stream of “for your own good” involuntary induction into the cults of “soviet citizen” and “maoist man.”

we get force fed like pâté geese on the sort of doctrines that require the denial of the input of one’s own eyes and ears and “noticing things” and “exercising discernment” gets deemed “counter revolusionary” and “racist, sexist, homo/trans/islamophobic” become the new “bougeiose class traitor” epithets. but it’s all the same “we will perfect you” crap of the vilification of humanity and the demand to devote the self, heart and soul, to that which attacks the idea of being human.

it may call itself freedom and choice and pluralism, but it never stops there. “you do you, i’ll do me and leave the kids out of it” is never acceptable to those who would politicize and dominate everything in totalitarian structures. dragging the kids into it is ALWAYS the front and center goal. molding them into the brownshirts and snitches and ideologues of the movements to come and prying them away from the family and into the care and tutelage of the state is the path to “revolution” and to social domination.

it takes many forms and pushes on all boards at once.

this is just the same tactic as the soviet commisars and maoist struggle session fetishists pulling the kids into revolutionary circles and telling them some new-new thing is normal. and now, as then:

1. the things that are not supposed to be happening keep happening and

2. the claims that were supposed to be axiomatic keep turning out to be false.

and none of this is good for anyone except for the wreckers elevated to leadership by their own self-serving doctrines that demand it.

in the institutions of power it becomes selectively oppressive and increasingly vicious. “they” get near absolute licence. “you” get the boot in the face if you oppose them or demand similar rights and choices. “for my friends, everything. for my enemies, the law.”

it’s when the pigs get rights the cats cannot have that you know the animal farm is going rancid and art is always a marker.

it becomes banality and relentless dogma making pretense at the very timeless themes and human experience it so desperately must consign to the memory hole.

utopian is the opposite of human.

that’s the literal definition: making humans act in a manner that humans do not act.

and it just plain sucks when someone seeks to force you to live under it.

and you cannot make cinema or music or fashion in a world like that.

i would argue that the death of art is, in fact, a near perfect canary in the civilizational coal mine:

flourishing societies create art that speaks to humanity.

moribund societies make moribund movies; it’s all political and this makes it just awful.

let’s take the simple example of this new supergirl movie that seems to have been such a flop. by all accounts, it’s just a bad movie, meandering and kind of pointless. but you cannot just say this anymore. both sides are making political theater out of it because the thing about the politicization of everything is you might not care about it, but it cares about you and will relentlessly seek to frame mog you into its own salience systems.

there is a norm here: comic books and superhero movies tend to cast ostentatiously attractive people as heros. you do not get gilbert godfried to play batman, you get christian bale. no one asked roasanne barr to play wonder woman, they got gal gadot. and everyone was good with that. but when you start to break the history and the archetypes, human nature kicks in. “helen of troy is black” might, at one time in american history, have been a sort of edgy piece of art. maybe in the 80’s you could have done it and had it not be politics. maybe you could have had jim gaffigan as othello. maybe that could have been art.

but not today. not once art has been politicized and where the relentless push of ideology as cinema pervades and every single fricking movie has the same exact intrusions in the same exact directions and yet each one claims to be some separate stand alone thing, people lose it. the question flips from “can you not tolerate divergence from the norm?” to the statement of “you must accept this as the new norm.”

the simple fact is supergirl looks to be a bad movie with no redeeming character or plot lines. and the simple fact is that for whatever reason milly alcock (who seems fine in number of other movies) has come off as distinctly funny looking in this movie and looks, frankly, weird and far different from herself in her days targaryen. she was an odd choice for this.

(this is an official movie photo)

it’s just bad art. but we cannot say this anymore.

because all art is political.

because all of society has become political

this is no longer just a funny meme, it’s a political fault line.

i mean, look, neither sydney sweeney nor milly alcock are ever going to threaten glenn close or helen mirren as paragons of astonishing acting talent, but both can make movies worth seeing.

supergirl was just not one of them.

and this becomes political rage. it’s mysogny and homophobia! (apparently supergirl is a queer icon and the movie was released during pride month, itself an imposition many are getting exhausted by as a month of pride flags on main street supplant american flags for the 250th anniversary of america).

but you cannot dislike the movie without giving political offense.

this is not a healthy state of affairs and is a sure sign of totalitarian belief sets.

everything within the revolution, nothing against the revolution.

and those pushing this, especially hollywood will not stop because they cannot stop.

the cultural commissars outputting this dog’s breakfast of constipated indoctrination film strips cannot cease this endless agitation, intrusion, and offense because it’s who and what they are.

such systems inevitably and always pull in the weak minded and low identity, low individualism people, those who want to know who to be and what to do, how to act, what is virtue, and to subsume their sense of self to the collective and play a role. (it’s zero coincidence that actors are always such a vanguard in these movements, pretending to be what the audience demands for fame and credit is their stock in trade. politicians too…)

but once you have done this, it’s a trap masquerading as wubbie.

they cannot deviate without losing sense of self. they are no longer people who have ideas. they are people who are their ideas.

and they are iron bar sure that they are right and you are wrong and that we’re just one more 5 year plan away from the utopia they are sure you’d want if only you were brought to consciousness as they have been.

they are sure that if you disagree they need to talk louder and slower like some bad american in greece trying to get the locals to understand and to tell you how bad you are a few more times until you get it.

and if you still won’t, they start controlling media, preventing speech, and sending the thought police to your house for memes. it’s not a coincidence that this is cropping up all over the west from the UK to france to germany and canada and australia. speak “our truth” and be amplified and lauded. speak against it and it’s hate.

that’s not pluralism, that’s oppression and “common good before individual good” is the “your mask protects me” false framing to render you always outnumbered and forced to comply.

and the lies and mental pretzels get pretty baroque.

“supergirl does not even have a romantic subplot!” they say (and this is actually true, apparently it doesn’t.)

you’re all making this up. you’re too sensitive. you’re seeing “queer” everywhere like some kind of monomaniac. (“queer” for those not versed in nuance, is basically a way to say “gay but stridently political about it.”)

well, sometimes one is paranoid, but sometimes, well, perhaps one has a point. it does seem like an awful lot of acting folk of late have been actively politicizing their roles from ziegler calling snow white “dated” to, well, this:

“kara would not hold herself to the binary heteronormative expectations of this earthly planet.”

so, yeah.

the relentless “you must change to accept the world as i demand it be seen” shift from the “accept me?” of interesting artistic icons like bowie and prince has become the relentless demand of “accept me!” (or else)” from the impositonal ideological industrial complex.

it’s an overt and deliberate campaign against the idea of cultural consent.

and it’s fricking exhausting.

adding a political dimension to every facet of human life is a misery index maximizer.

there is no soviet joy nor maoist magnanimity. there is no DEI delight.

no society operating under such stricture is ever happy.

they cannot be. it’s anti-human dystopia rooted in the denial of that which makes us human and which brings us together.

it did not used to be like this. is does not have to be like this now. back in the 90’s, politics was sort of a dull quacking sound you occasionally paid attention to. the state was not intruding into every basic aspect of your life from food to sex to free association and what kind of fricking straw you used and whether your matcha was fair trade.

was it perfect?

no.

nothing human is.

but it was a helluva lot more pluralist than this garbage.

we could be friends with others and they could be friends with us.

this is still true.

it always will be.

and those who say otherwise should have their agendas checked.

you don’t hate the UK. you hate their politicians.

they don’t hate america. they hate our politicians.

there is nothing exotic or difficult here, guys.

we share a culture, a commonality, and we can share a joy if we simply remember who the real bad guys are and thereby rediscover the commonality with our friends.

politics as lifestyle is the stagnation of art, science, economy, civility, and comfort. it’s alienation, anger, and the death of human flourishing.

the “us vs them” in this struggle has been miscast: it’s a global aristocracy with their impositional values and grand schemes and institutional capture “for our own betterment” against the rest of us who would just like to be left alone to be flourishing humans.

allowing a media who lies all the time to push this on you and to trust them about what the world and the people in it are like is madness.

watching the world come to the US for world cup and love it is wonderful, but my reason for it goes beyond the commonality:

watching the political elites explode in paroxysms of “noooo! you are not allowed to like buc-ees! that’s low class bad america and the political enemy! you need to only love our weirdly contrived solar powered drag queen story hour with genuine organic gluten free cricket flour muffins served with soy butter! those people are deplorables! noooo!” is delicious.

it’s actually brain breaking for them to have someone else render judgement on those they deem their inferiors and to have that judgement be “i love this” and worse that “you guys lied to me.” that last one rapidly turns to “you know, you kind of suck.” and that has our alleged betters in a bit of a tizzy.

but what they offered was never terribly attractive.

elites are snobs and snobs are never happy. that’s the price of snobbery: you have cultivated a jaded and exclusionary world view. you have mistaken it for cultivation and sophistication. it’s not. it’s just stacking the deck against yourself:

“i am so hard to please!”

congrats dumbass, you’re now going to spend most of your life displeased.

“those people i read about in the paper are terrible.”

congrats dumbass, you’re now never going to meet new people and expand your horizons.

no sane human would outsource this sort of discernment.

it is time for a new declaration of independence:

stop letting maladjusted lunatics tell you how things are in a world you are not touching.

go find out for yourself.

you might find it’s pretty fricking good…