how to heal

breaking the civilizational spiderman meme

watch this video. as you do, keep track of your impressions. remember which issues leap to mind and which people and ideologies or stances you feel it to be criticizing.

got ‘em?

good.

now consider how others might view this same video and that the selfsame folk you believe this idea of “lost critical thinking” lampoons and indicts see it as an indictment of you.

this is not about correct and incorrect, fact vs delusion, or which argument is better or more right or righteous. leave that aside for a moment.

consider instead what this “spider man meme” of socicial conciousness and the hideous frequency with which it crops up in every context from foreign wars to hometown blue jeans actually means about the substrate of our society.

because it says a great deal.

it says that we have fallen prey to a totalitarian conquest of fascisti framings in which, no matter how uninterested in such things you may be, a vast and powerful state has become implacably interested in you and will pervade all aspects of your life, forcing you into its frame which in turn shapes your thoughts and your relationships, your allegiances, and your alliances.

this gives inexorable rise to a form of politics of division and mutual adversariality and antipathy.

if you'd like evidence of what an incredibly divided and not only mutually incompatible but outright mutually uncomprehending society we have become, consider this:

both left and right will smugly watch that video and presume it is a critique of the other side.

and that pretty much tells you everything you need to know.

it means the all encompasing state is playing with advantage because they have been granted the choice of fields upon which to fight.

and if we would reclaim our civilization, this is a prerogative we would be wise to revoke.

one of the clear symptoms of a late-stage ideological war with totalitarians is the politicization of everything. it's exhausting. back in the 90's, politics was sort of a dull quacking sound in the distance somewhere that very occasionally rose to the level of "something you had to care about" or "common conversation." but politics has become so oppressive and intrusive and the war around it so all encompassing that you cannot escape it anymore. it pervades everything, every business or education or conversation, just walking down the fricking street, it walks with you.

this is actually a big win for the totalitarians. once you have been forced into the frame of every choice, view, and aspect of your life as extending into a political dimension behind which lurks judgment and fear of cancellation, strife, and struggle session it really does not matter whose ideologies wind up ascendant:

the thieves of joy have already won.

you will live your life at war and inside a toxic framing of politics über alles.

this constitutes the core tenet of such fascist ideas: everything within the state, nothing outside the state. the communists/collectivists do this too. "everything is political.” this is just another way of saying “everyhting feeds the marxist maw." this intolerable state of "the politics of everything" is life within their construct.

you cannot win a debate or a war that way. we need to overturn the gameboard and go back to ignoring these people instead of letting them set the tempo and the terms of the societal story.

“everything is political” is a constant sapper of will to all those save the politicals. to them it’s catnip. it’s the very definition of a slanted playing field.

instead, we must fight upon a ground that we wish to occupy, fields pleasant to us and noxious to oppression and intrusion.

one side or the other shall draw energy and nourishment from the lands around this fight.

and we should be making damn sure that that side is us.

(this is actual sun tsu, btw)

once group has been set upon group in ideological contest and judgement and all of the simple actions of life have become high friction fault lines of contest and conflict, leviathan is safe. the people can be induced into clamorous war upon war against one another each wrestling for control of the levers of power that entrench their arguments into instantiated and enumerated diktat by which to impose their will upon the others.

but consider what this framing at once entrenches and obfuscates: the very idea that this should exist at all, the concept that the purpose of the state it to impose the ideology of some upon the others. the notion that this should never be a desirable much less just role for government is hidden from discussion, erased from consciousness.

“let’s you and him fight” occludes the real enemy.

so long as the struggle remains one of “who shall wield the leviathonian whip hand and to what ends?” the battle for actual independent thought and independent liberty has been conceded as lost.

you’ll flip back and forth between the two sides of the authoritarian coin but never be able to escape your compounding losses in the currency of liberty and agency in which such wagers are paid.

the goads that lock one into these systems are fashioned of fear: fear that you lack agency and fear of what others will do to you if granted agency over you. “if our tribe is not in power, we’ll be purged by the other tribe.”

how many elections of late have you felt that way about?

the studies below were published recently on the dramatic changes in the attitudes of young adults. this is certainly a deeply multifactoral outcome and many cited internet use and an online lifestyle as a core cause and this likely has quite a lot of truth to it. others (including me) opined that it’s a child rearing issue as well where “everyone gets a prize” erodes conscientiousness and confidence as there is no real base of “i did that” achievement to underpin genuine self-confidence, but i’d like to add another idea to the mix:

this outcome is both the result of and the catalyst for totalitarian systems and censorship cultures. it’s what life in an abilene paradox feels like, alientated and hopeless where 77% of college students in their private lives feel that “dudes who tuck” should not be playing women’s sports but all are forced to agree that “athletic gender is a social construct” in public and all fear one another because to express a common-sense view brings down the wrath of deans and puts your place at university at risk.

what would such a life feel like?

i suspect it would feel like this:

neuroticism spikes, agreeableness and extroversion plummet. you’re alientated on solipsism island, unable to feel connected because you think you are alone. why bother being conceitious? favor goes to the ideologically pure and intersectionally advantaged, not to you. color of skin trumps content of character, identity supersedes merit. all who seek to get ahead are forced to play this soul crushing game of pledging allegiance to the horrible and the hallucinatory, of fealty to falsity and opposition to others.

you live at war and in fear, playing a rigged game and trying to avoid stepping on landmines.

is it any wonder people cease to be outgoing or helpful or trusting?

life in this totalitarian abilene pits all against all. you never know who will turn vichy or narc. fear of the thought police renders each and all extensions of the thought police. self-censorship reigns.

small wonder these young people close up like clams.

and if we would reverse these trends, we need to escape the totalitarian frame of politics in everything. jeans must become jeans again, sex become sex, and commerce commerce. life must become life, not ideology. that is the escape path. and there is large scale change brewing.

whether this inflames the conflict or escapes it is the choice we’ll have to make.

this chart (and others like it) get used to frame these issues but i wonder, does it show what people seem to claim it does?

have the young women truly become so much more liberal or have they simply been more affected by asch and abilene and pressed into feeling less able to express their genuine preferences, especially to one another?

i suspect that may be a bigger driver than people realize and this means that the underside of this iceberg may be quite different than the surveyed top would imply.

tiktok and twitter have been awash with the sidney sweney uprising of sorority culture and americana.

how representive is this? it’s hard to say, but consider this: 5 years ago these videos would have been shouted down and crushed by the winged monkeys of ostentatiously offended oberlinian obstreperousness.

today, they’re going viral and getting cheers.

the phrase “we are so back” daily gains currency.

best of luck fighting this from the joyless fields of perpetual politics.

you’re about to be sitting alone at lunch.

you can see this same trend in the political shift.

in just two years, the change, especially in the young, has been dramatic.

the young women seem to be lagging the men in making this move, but i suspect this is more artifact of abilene than genuine belief and as we have all seen, once you get these balls rolling, the phase change of a group coming once more to know its own mind can be near instant. eveyrone looks around, realizes they were never alone, kicks the joyless ones into touch, and gets back with their lives.

if we are up to it, the renaissance of removing the politics from everything is upon us.

the difficult part of this is that in the face of such a powerful and all encompasing state that has grown so intrusive into so many aspects of life, the initial fight will, of necessity, be political.

we must go into darkness to find the dawn.

but this does not mean it must be fought from a political place.

dismantling DEI and intersectional and economic and regulatory imposition can be fought from fields of freedom. these ideas do not need to be replaced by anything, merely deracinated and discarded.

it’s just one vast rising and saying “no.”

and in this, i think we are well on our way. where i fear we may go awry is in keeping the levers of power for leviathan and wielding them in ways “we like.”

any power thus preserved is power lying around for when the other side once more inevitably takes power and will once more use such power for things that “they like.”

this is the inherent and intrinsic flaw of the high-authority, long-reach state:

a government powerful enough to give you everything you want is also and always powerful enough to take everything you have.

and this will not only steal your property, it will steal your joy and demoralize you through the politicization of everything.

you cannot ignore something with so much influence and such determination to use it to intrude upon your personal space.

it is always there, pressing, taking, judging, pitting citizen against citizen.

to remove this from our lives for good and all, we need to vastly shrink the state in ways that prevent it from growing back.

we must return to high-confidence, high-agency, high-trust culture and small-authority, low-agency, distrusted government.

low trust people require an aggressive and oppressive state.

high trust people do not.

this was the genius of our constitutional and societal framers and so to these ends, must break the totalitarian frame.

the answer is not to ever more fiercely fight upon the fields upon which it has been conceded that nothing is outside the state and that the state can kept out of nothing.

the answer is this.

LFG.