woke addiction: drugs and cults are the same thing
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woke addiction: drugs and cults are the same thing
anything that alienates a human debases a human. community is the answer.
“how can anyone believe that?”
it’s the most common of modern refrains.
team A says it about team B and team B says it about A.
“OMG, what IS that and how can these IDIOTS believe it!?!”
well here’s a big, useful fact:
it exists because people want it to exist.
it exists because people need it to exist.
it exists because something has to, and this is easy.
people keep acting like “inhabiting a hallucination” as some sort of lifestyle choice is a bug in humanity or in belief systems.
it’s not.
it’s not even a feature.
it’s a product, and a popular one.
this is how cults have always been made and sustained.
let’s look:
addiction does not work the way people think it does. it’s far less about a substance or an activity than it is about allaying or avoiding pain. there is a wonderful book on this called “chasing the scream” that i recommend highly.
in the end, being addicted to gambling is not that different from being addicted to heroin or to getting indoctrinated into a cult. it’s the same dependency, the same need, and the same ability to avoid problems and failings until they fester into something well and truly too big for you to face and too far to fall for you to survive with your self-conception intact.
and now you cannot climb down.
it’s how they trap you and drag you deeper.
but how do they find you in the first place?
those who are desperate and alone seek succor.
they just want the pain to stop.
so you find the injured, the broken, the purposeless, the people in pain from loss or alienation or confusion or any of the 100 other things that isolate humans and make them scared.
it does not have to be a great sales speil to hit the middle of the bell curve. that’s not how you get the ball rolling. you’re looking to screen and to just select the right sorts for conversion. i used to see the scientologists in san francisco ply their pitch on the sidewalk just up the block from the transamerica pyramid.
“do you ever feel sad or scared or alone for no reason?”
it’s a great opener.
you or i walk right by shaking our heads. but the one who says “yes, i do, it it must mean something is wrong, talk to me more about this!” is a very specific kind of person.
sad. scared. alone. uncertain. looking for answers. probably has no social or support group to speak with this about. so they will speak to strangers and wind up paying half their income for “audits.”
maybe it works on 1 person in 1,000. maybe 1 in 10,000. but when it does, you have yourself a lonely rat ready to smack the feeder bar for drugs they would eschew if they had any pals to hang out with. you have found the vulnerable one.
like the nigerian finance minister scam which famously uses broken english and misspellings and absurdities, it’s a well honed tool and it does this on purpose. you’re not looking for the 50th percentile, you’re looking for the bottom few.
these are the people who can be most easily moved and persuaded and indoctrinated.
and this does NOT work the way most people seem to think it does.
where this gets complex is that there are LOTS of scales for percentiles, many dimensions against which to be measured.
and smart is no defense.
it may well be a weakness.
smart, educated people can lack meaning as easily as anyone else, in this modern age perhaps more so as they are often led to eschew many of the historically common group identities/sources of meaning like religion, family, community, vocation, country, etc.
but it does not eliminate the need. it leaves the sort of evolved slot in the human mind that says “put something bigger than me to believe in here” open.
like rats alone in cages, humans seem not to do so well with this slot empty.
and nothing runs downhill faster than a thoroughbred.
so the smart are not only better at ginning up pretexts for meaning and shoe horning them into this hole they feel in their sense of self but they also tend to be sure they are too smart to fool.
rarify that into an inward facing echo-chamber peer group and this is how you get the “wow, you need to do like 7 years of school to believe something that obviously insane and divorced from reality!” phenomenon and make it socially contagious.
and this is how one creates and unleashes the secular jihadi cult that does not know it’s a cult.
they tell themselves stories about “science” and “reason” and “righteousness” and they believe them because they need them.
they fill the hollow places and create a sense of unity.
but it’s the deranged unity of the hallucinating mob riled into mass formation.
and whoo doggie does that turn ugly and the irony is that it inevitably transforms these would be social justice warriors into exactly that which they purport to hate.
there is basically no other path for the energy to go.
this level of hallucination effaces any sense of irony.
and pretty soon these are the people who claim that a speaker on the other side of campus makes them feel “unsafe.”
and this is the part you have to wrap your head around:
they have never felt more meaningful, kind, or empathetic.
these people have been driven mad.
it’s not about “safe spaces” it’s about erecting an aristocracy of the malformed and insane so they can invert the persecution fantasies they have generated for themselves as an excuse for their own failures to strive and attain into a weaponized outward facing manifestation of bullying and tyranny of the other side.
any remotely empathic 4 year old would recognize this at once as oppressively vicious, but these people have convinced themselves that this is justice and a desperately needed opposition of the ascribed privilege of others that they must conjure into existence in order to be allowed to indulge in their own.
when it comes to one’s own failings, projection as primary praxis gets ugly. fast.
and they are hopelessly addicted as are the professors who whipped them up into this who now cling precariously, perched upon tigers from which they dare not climb down.
the actual holding of people as hostages becomes “peaceful protest.”
because these people inhabit hallucinations. and these hallucinations are severe.
the conjured fantastical realms these half-humans inhabit give them permission to act like mongol warlords sure that their wrath is divine.
the woke delusion is this same circular reasoning.
and it serves the same purpose: to render violence and subjugation a virtue and to tell yourself the pleasing story that you are the good guy for doing it and an ally to justice.
the fact that it breaks their brains is not an accident.
it’s the product.
and they seek it like junkies.
and once you get it loose in a community and manifest the savage belligerence it engenders toward any who say it nay, it keeps breaking more and more community and adding more and more social suasion from peer effects. silencing opposition is VERY powerful in accomplishing this. it’s how the few appear as the many and how half-baked awful ideas go unchallenged as “the consensus” despite the fact that few really agree or like it.
silence seems like consent as each, once alienated, at once fears they are alone in being out of confluence with the masses AND fears to ask the questions that would allow them to find out that they are not.
and so we get more desperate, lonely, deracinated people ripe for the plucking.
now imagine arriving as a freshman onto a college campus arrayed in this fashion. you’re alone, new, know no one, and have no basic support networks yet. see how screwed you are?
this is why universities wind up the hotbeds of this idiocy. they at once create the problem (alienation and loneliness) and then suggest a terrible solution (becoming a woke warrior) that has addictive properties.
they inflict pain, incite rage, then offer power.
seductive stuff.
we can argue about how deliberate this was as planful societal manipulation or how emergent and accidental as a high replication meme, but in the end, the output is the same:
it’s how literal card carrying fascists (by any actually accurate application of the definition) wind up really truly believing that they are “antifa” and how the people championing “diversity and inclusion” will war upon and destroy any who differ from them and not catch even a whiff of their own hypocrisy.
it’s a false succor that just keeps making the base problem of lacking community and commonality worse and makes all interaction predicated and tenuous.
but by the time you realize that, it’s too late and you’re living your own ideological trainspotting.
these are weapons grade delusions used to turn the broken and bereft into self-loving and entitled exemplars of exactly that which they think they have devoted their lives to destroying. and self-hate is a HUGE part of the addiction cycle. once that sets in, there is no letting go.
self-delusion that one may mistake for meaning is the product and the dissonance that develops around it to avoid experiencing self-hatred is what keeps them coming back for more.
the choice becomes horrible.
and it keeps getting worse as you fix the ill effects of kool aid with more kool aid. and pointing this out to them just makes them rage. it’s why yelling simple epithets like “racist” or “phobic” or “patriarchy” becomes the rote response to evidence and ad hominem suddenly dominates the discourse of the allegedly educated:
actual engagement with reality would pull the whole edifice tumbling down.
it becomes a form of mental illness and worse, a form of dependency and its craziest and most extreme practitioners always seem to be the ones setting the pace and dragging the rest along in an unending succession of purity tests.
the key comorbidity for this affliction cum addiction is a lack of community.
it’s really that simple.
universities used to excel at generating community. now they ravage and impede it putting ideological struggle sessions in its place.
family structure has been pulled apart, social structure unraveled, religion marked as “extremism.”
i am not a religious person. never have been. but i have many friends who are. and i’ll say one thing, they held up A LOT better under covid’s lockdowns and mask ups and life upheaval than most other groups i saw.
it’s because they had community and sense of self.
it gave them a joint bulwark from which to resist.
it was not a coincidence that the BLM riots exploded in such outlandish and destructive fashion right when they did. it was that last extra push of isolation and social breakage that jammed everyone over the line of sanity and into fire and rage and the delusion to hallucinate that it was “mostly peaceful.”
and the defense against this is communities of our own.
it’s what we’re building here and other places.
it’s the commonality to realize we are not alone, that their alleged “moral majority” is neither of those things, and that we may speak against it, know our minds and those of our friends, and declare that enough is enough and reclaim civilization from the cybully barbarians masquerading as intellectuals who have overrun it in their zeal to hide their own emptiness from themselves.
this “product” is joyless and vapid.
and community should bring happiness and meaning.
it’s what we must build.
and the society we save will be our own.
and it’s going to be fun.
giddy-up.
woke addiction: drugs and cults are the same thing
I have spent most of my career doing academic research on depression and anxiety.
After interviewing hundreds of patients, it is clear to me that the root causes are lack of meaning and lack of community.
Pills and brief courses of therapy are not lasting solutions.
The virtual community is important, but we need to see each other, too. During the Covoodoo madness I felt distant from many old friends because, while they might not have been all-in, they weren’t “hell no what the fuck is this???” out. So I sought out groups who saw through it, and we met online and in person. Tom Woods organized meetups for his listeners and I went and it was life-changing to know, really *know*, that even if we weren’t all in Galt’s Gulch somewhere, we could create a network and a community where we didn’t have to fear that our neighbors would volunteer us for boxcars to assuage their own anxiety.