no agency without responsibility

tying together the wokester/marxist/victimplex (and how to fix it)

it’s difficult not to be struck by the seeming unity of the menu of the modern multiplex of political pathologies. racism, sexism, marxism, cultivation of claims of every kind of phobia or structural discrimination from gender to sexuality to obesity to ableism. you get woke, DEI, eat the rich, fat is healthy, and marginality must be centered. it’s this wild, swirling panoply of beliefs that run directly counter to basically everything upon which american society and law was founded and it all seemed to emerge at once. ideas that would have been (and literally were) saturday night live or “in living color” skits in the 80’s and 90’s became bedrock reality and spread like an epistemic epidemic through the generation DBA “millennials” and oddly, upstream to their largely boomer parents. it sprouted everywhere like mushrooms.

this has led many to suspect some sort of specific tactic or attack to launch all these movements as one. but i think it’s very much the opposite. it’s literally all one thing and no one had to “cause” these movements. what changed was not “the organizers.” there were always people like this lying around thinking crazy stuff, we just had a societal immune system capable of suppressing it.

so, to take an analogy from epidemiology, perhaps the best lens though which to examine the last 20-25 years is not one of “prime actor” but rather one of “opportunistic infection.”

the world is and always will be awash in pathogens, viruses, bacteria, fungus, you name it. this is true memetically in the exact same fashion as biologically.

when a human’s immune system is suppressed, all manner of pathogens that were always present suddenly flourish and take hold. predicting exactly what will dominate and in what combinations is sort of beside the point as is describing “oh, it’s pneumonia and candidiasis and varicella” as though you’ve gotten to root cause.

these are not the underlying problem; they are manifestations of it and you can cure them as individual pathologies, but until you restore actual immune function, they will just keep coming back or morphing into new maladies. you cure the varicella and aspergillosis and EBV pop up instead. it’s infectious agent whack a mole.

and, again, this works memetically just like it does biologically. probably faster.

all these “beliefs” look like the problem, but they are not. they are manifestions of a deeper root cause and this is why they all cluster in the same people.

let’s take a simple example:

“the view” is sort of the avatar homeworld of this viewpoint. watch as oprah lays it out perfectly.

despite being some of the most privileged and wealthy humans in the history of bipedalism, opah and whoopie goldbrick and the whole rest of this gang share a wide variety of beliefs like this, topics on which they are rion bar certain about a set of “facts” that are so obviously wrong and hallucinatory that they would have gotten laughed out of serious discussion 20 or 30 years ago.

“obesity is not caused by overeating, overeating is caused by obesity!”

this is just buffoonery and contrary to thermodynamics. “oh, i have the obesity gene!” no, you don’t. there is no obesity gene. there are genetics. we all have them. they determine things like body type. are you naturally an endomorph, an ectomorph, a mesomorph, is your RMR high, low, or in the middle? does your body tend toward fat sparing or burning? but in the end, it’s all “calories in vs calories out.” it’s literally physics and physics remaind undefetaed, especially by this sort of claptrap.

listen very carefully to what she’s really saying.

i used to think it was me and my fault.

then, someone told me about this (fanciful) “obesity gene” that i carry.

and this gene made me overeat. it’s not my choice, not my fault, i was born this way!

quite the claim from a woman who has lost weight so many times before.

it’s also false in nearly every material aspect.

and oprah is not stupid. she’s not a dumb person. but she’s literally saying “obesity causes obesity.” it makes you want to eat too much. it’s not you, it’s “structural;” it’s in your genes.

she’s now pimping GLP-1’s that suppress appetite to fix what she has deemed an intrinsic defect, not her doing, just luck of the dice.

so the cause is not her fault, not her choice. it was imposed from outside her agency, a property of the world that she is “so brave” for facing and “so clever” for understanding that she cannot wait to explain it to you.

and the fix too is not her agency, it’s external.

you cannot “do it yourself” you need some sort of help.

not only “you did not build this” but “you cannot build it.”

and this is what literally all of this doggerel of doctrine has in common.

that is our framework.

it’s a subsumation of rationality and responsibility to emotive slop about how special you are and how none of your choices or outcomes are your fault.

objective reality is irrelevant because a human with weak emotional and moral control and low agency does not want reality, they want story time where they are the hero and the “solution” is always to make the world adapt to them.

it’s “colicky baby” elevated as oppressive virtue cult

it’s not that these people are morons.

they aren’t. (well some of them are, but it’s not required and this actually works better among the midwits than the truly stupid)

they’re just weak, fragile, insecure, unfinished humans who lack basic ideas like “accountability.”

they will happily believe and rationalize literally anything no matter how ridiculous or obviously wrong so long as it tells them “you’re OK and none of your bad choices or bad outcomes are your fault.”

imagine how good it feels for such a person to slide into the warm bath of “this is a system arrayed against you. you’re not lazy and soft, you’re being oppressed!”

belief in structural racism, genderism, islamophobia, fatphobia, homophobia, every kind of cult of marginalization worship, hatred of capitalistic success, it’s all different angles of the same issue:

some outside force did this to wonderful special you.

it’s not your fault.

you’re owed.

and someone needs to fix this and you deserve respect for being lame and touchy and demanding. it distills to the crybully mantra:

you are never the fascist, it’s always everyone else who is “literally hitler.”

that’s it. that’s the whole pathology in a nutshell. the root cause of all of it is a failure of individual agency rooted in denial of responsibility and accountability.

it works for everything. didn’t get promoted? it’s your gender, your race, your neurodivergence. get the company or the government to fix it. fat? it’s the obesity gene. buy our product and fix it. side effects, yeah, well, don’t you worry pretty little your head. we’ve got products for those too. trust the experts.

this manifests in WILD ways. we saw a whole government medical establishment tell people that acquired immunity from exposure to covid was ineffective and you needed a vaccine. they started actually dismissing the idea of acquired immunity altogether and making claims that herd immunity can only come from vaccination. (they know this to be a lie, btw. it’s just counter to all epidemiologiucal data and the evidence is surfacing that they knew how much better recovery was than jab)

it manifests as jackbooted structural racism dancing around in the skinsuit of pluralism and an unshakable belief that if kids of some race are late to class and get detention more frequently than kids of some other race, that the problem is the teacher. it cannot be the children.

time for struggle sessions!

as a teacher, this is horrifying, but imagine this from the viewpoint of the child. imagine the entitlement and sense of mistaken virtue with which you would grow up.

now consider what all these things lead to, what they all have in common.

1. the problem was always imposed upon you from outside.

2. and you always need someone or something else to fix it. you need DEI, equity, pills and shots and quotas.

3. there’s always a villain, always a bugbear, always a threat.

can you see now why those who thirst for power are so keen to promulgate these policies?

it is the effacement of agency and cultivation of dependence.

this is self-induction into the ethos of a slave.

and none of this was subtle or unexpected. people used to make fun of it. it was obviously a joke, a pastiche, an absurdity.

this “kids in the hall” skit in the 90’s was intended to be so over the top that no one could believe it. it was slapstick lampoon.

would anyone today deny that this has become more norm than fiction in academic discourse even and especially at the once top institutions? these kids are ready for harvard, and not even as students. as faculty. as deans.

and even these wild swings at “it could never get as bad as this” humor by patiche cannot keep up with the reality they so accurately (if inadvertently) predicted.

watch at 2.14. “stop trying to co-opt my black anger!”

as it perfectly prognosticates 2026 and black activists demanding that white people not use their protest phrase.

i suspect that a lot of this inadvertent augury stems from one simple source: the removal of agency, responsibility, and basic comprehension from social structures is funny. it’s a form of slapstick, pie in the face humor. it’s also a powerful form of self rationalization and self-pity morphed into self-congratulation, so a certain sort of person “becomes the meme” because the meme is about a sort of person who is ridiculous.

but then they start taking themselves seriously.

and it gets far darker

while it’s beyond hilarious watching these people get rug-pulled, over and over again by the very structures of statist intrusion they were so keen to put in place when they thought that they would always be the ones holding the whip hand, it’s also dangerous and serious.

they seem so genuinely surprised that it could be turned back upon them, as though this idea somehow never entered their mind. because it didn’t. coyote’s law never occurred to them. they granted powers to the state without first imagining what other state actors might do with such prerogative at some later date.

and the aggrievement ouroboros must always and inevitably eat itself because status by marginalization is always relative and thus negative sum. i can only rise by making others fall.

and low agency, ineffective people get pulled into and held in these structures as a way to ape virtue and gain influence. and it’s great right up until one day when it’s not.

“i never thought leopards would eat my face!” laments the woman who has been a lifetime voter for the leopards eating people’s faces party.

and again, this happens with 100 memetic pathogens at once because it’s not about each individual idological instanciation: it’s about root cause:

the loss of societal immune function.

memes like this cannot infect healthy people.

healthy people see them and laugh.

sick people are drawn to them like moths to a bug zapper.

and you can see it clear as day in the nature of the activists and who they are.

the inversion of “revolutionary” and “entitled and oppressive little prat” is on vivid display.

then you get the “skinner box” problem. (this is a reference to BF skinner’s experiments on reinforcement where you put a rat in a box and give it a reward for pushing a button so it learns to push the button)

a whole childhood and even adulthood of “magic words” that work like a “give me a treat button” becomes the path to status, position, and prosperity. worse, it gets mistaken for the very agency it supplanted. why learn to be good at a job if you can learn to be good at pressing the “ism” button until you get a raise based on your intersectional attributes or aggrievement?

fluency in the magic words that bring free stuff gets mistaken for being a builder. it’s a terrifying cargo cult and the worst part is what happens when you try to tear it down: when you unhook the reward button and rats no longer get a treat for pressing it, the rats go wild. they get aggressive. they attack the machine, strike it, break it, gnaw at it. (and if you think humans don’t to this you’ve never seen one lose their mind on a vending machine that failed to dispense the paid for item. animals are animals and conditioning is conditioning.)

watching people strike federal officers and scream wild, out of control things in their faces and spit on them suddenly break down, cry, howl, deny that this is happening when they get arrested for it, that’s this. what’s going on in their head is the rage that their magic words failed to work and that accountability has re-entered the equation for special little them. it’s brain breakage and entitlement detox.

and we need it. lots of it. gobs of it. there is no way out of this except for through it. the consequences of eliminating consequences and elevating bad behavior are devastating and the gains from once more restoring them are legion.

during the last set of minnesota riots, there were no consequences. our leaders knelt to the mob. the feeder button attached to “burn and loot and assault” was running overtime.

now it is running in reverse.

and that is a test of resolve. it needs time to work, time to remove bad actors, and time to build up credibility that things have changed. and both sides are now committed. it’s not going to back down. someone has to blink. and if the feds back off and show the gangs and protest professionals that this worked, then the conditioning just drives deeper and next time is harder. so it needs to be now.

but even this is not root cause. root cause is the schools and parents.

and that’s what we need to address.

they are co-opted and captured horrors.

walz and others are keeping the kids home from school to “keep them safe.” more likely, it’s to flood daycares and make them look real (won’t work) and to let them march and protest and hope that something bad and telegenic happens to the student sacrifices.

(of course, they might just fight with each other instead and look awful)

but this will be the issue.

these kids were raised badly, educated badly, and conditioned into systems that attack virtue and reward venality. everyone got prizes and trophies and whoever screamed loudest got the most cookies.

and we can fix this.

we must.

after all these years, i still think that “in praise of lawn darts” is the best thing i have written on this site.

“unsupervised is how you grow, it’s how you learn. it’s where ALL the important stuff comes from.

you learn to explore new places, learn new stuff, meet new people, and build and sustain relationships and interaction.

it’s not that we were magic or made of some sterner stuff.

we could do this because we had learned to do this. it’s a skill, it requires practice and confidence and above all reason. this is what you get from being left alone, and it needs to start young.

when you meet new kids, you have to figure it out.

when you need to decide what to do, you have to come up with ideas, build consensus, and make it happen.

when you argue, you have to resolve it.

these are the micro societies in which humans practice being civilized. from the anarchy of childhood emerges societal order as we grow and get better at planning and the implementation of our ideas.

but to gain this skill-set, we must be free to scrawl our own designs upon the world. we must face the difficulty of doing so, the responsibility for failure, the lessons of losing, and the triumphs of getting stuff right.

that is the most important lesson in all of growing up. not piano or soccer or interpretive headstand watercolor painting and certainly not indoctrination into the grievance cults of wokedom:

what must be learned is how to become self-governing.

and it has been stolen from our children.”

it’s really this simple. we’re neglecting neglect, neglecting accountability. kids grow up soft, unable to set their own systems and resolve their own disputes, reliant on external authority because they did not develop the skillsets of self-governance and high agency autonomy.

it’s not that gen-X was made of some special physical or mental or moral fiber, we just got to practice this. we had to. you learned it. agency is acquired and can only be acquired by challenge, hardship, and failure, not nerfworld here’s a “you tried” cookie or “here’s your prize for being the most gender oppressed 3rd grader at dingbat elementary.”

instead of teaching them to focus and behave, we concussed them with drugs because “not your fault.” we diagnosed them all as ill.

we told them they could not fix it. we told them the solution was outside.

instead of calling them badly behaved, we called it “cultural” and called their failures “racist” because that was the magic word and a bunch of mindwiped people assumed that any difference in outcome could only be structural prejudice.

instead of letting them play their own games, we forced games on them. we adjudicated who won, who lost, and what the rules were. so they never learned to do this.

we nerfed their world and took away the sharp edges until they all went soft and helpless. yeah, getting bullied sucked. it happened to all of it. but it also made us resilient, a resilience not present now. and it reined in the kids who took their whining too far or felt entitled to insult or hector people. you got stuffed in a locker and you learned.

“tattling” was the one true and unforgivable sin. you squeal to the adults, you’re done here. you are anathema, you are outcast.

now it’s the virtue of first resort.

“don’t try to settle this yourself, ask a teacher. ask mom.”

this is the root cause.

we destroyed the agency of children in hopes of providing them with safety. memeories of hardship drove this. maybe many meant well and just wanted the kids not to have to suffer the way we did, but this is like saying “don’t bench press. don’t hit the squat rack. it’s painful and hard!” to your football aspiring son. you can’t do that. that’s where strength is made.

so too is the lord of the flies aspect of childhood. resillience is a skill we have stolen from the kids. and we need to give it back by letting them have lives that allow its acquisition.

when i was 17, i told my parents i was driving to california (from the easy coast) for the month of august with a buddy. where are you staying? i dunno. what are you going to do? not sure. well, call when you get there… that’s pretty much the whole conversation. “no, you cannot go,” was simply not in the cards. it was a grand trip. i had a blast, made memories, had adventures, surfed la jolla, came back older and wiser and tan.

today my friends who have seniors in high school say things like “i’d be afraid to send her to the grocery store alone.” (this happened the other day) i’m not even sure these kids can drive.

and that’s not alright. those kids are not being set up to be alright.

you want to fix basically every single thing in america? start there.

raise high agency children. raise them to be responsible, accountable, and courageous and free. let them take risks, fall, fail, learn, and triumph.

know them by their scars, the places where they fell against the thorns of life and they bled.

know them by and respect them for the strength this built.

if you want all the rest of this nonsense to dissolve like a sugar house in a rainstorm, raise real humans again for if you cannot govern yourself, make no mistake: someone else is going to come along and do it for you, good and hard, for he who adjudicates grievance may easily rule the plaintiffs and demand ever more baroque and debased prostrations to whatever is passing for “authority.”

and that is no fate for a child.

and the world that such children will build and aspire to is no fate for the onetime land of the free and home of the brave.

however much you would like, you cannot do this for them.

but they will do it for themselves if you let them. i’m watching friends do this and their kids are growing up strong and confident and independent. i recognize them. they remind me of us. they are kids i’d have shared hose water with when i was young.

and that is the future.

and that is the way.