Bad Ideas

             There is no doubt that we are in a tumultuous era of sorts, especially in the west. Things are going wrong, breaking, and generally not behaving in the manner in which our parents and grandparents had them behave, let alone how our parents and grandparents raised us to expect and what they promised us. Ever since 9/11, America and the rest of the western world has seemed to be in a sort of “bad dream”, a low level nightmare that never ends and instead keeps getting worse. Prior to 9/11 was a sort of delusional complacency and happiness and expectation for perpetual growth and prosperity combined with sincere patriotism. That is no longer the case, and it is very hard to find any real patriots in any western countries anymore.

            In this time of upheaval and confusion, it is clear that something is wrong. Something is going on which is BAD, that is causing all the inter-class and inter-gender and inter-faith and inter-race strife. It is only those who are coddled and have trustfunds or jobs that aren’t market facing at all (government workers or government contractors), as well as those who are genuinely mentally disabled who are not aware of this on a fundamental level.

It is not hard, it is not smart, it is not deep to look around you at this point and see that everything is coming apart at the seams, that everything visible and established is decaying. And yet, because things are so fundamentally off and bizarre in the modern reality, there are lots of people who think that they are smart, that they are deep, that they are worth listening to simply because they can recognize the obvious symptoms of dysfunction that are everywhere around them. These people do not go past a surface level understanding that things are bad, they just know that things are bad and think that knowing things are bad is some impressive accomplishment worthy of praise.

To make matters worse, there are large audiences of people who also never do any thinking past observing symptoms of dysfunction. These people are unaccomplished, bored, boring, over-educated, white collar mediocrities with too much free time, and they latch onto people that do the same “point and moan at symptoms of dysfunction without providing any worthwhile analysis or thought” in a public manner, because these people who do this in a public manner validate the self-image that these mediocrities have of being secret kings, secret philosophers, and secretly intellectuals. The public space is essentially filled with these figures at this point, both on the left and the right. The more “academic” or “respected” these figures position themselves, the more they will have mediocrities giving them money and attention, because these mediocrities are essentially using the public figure to assuage their own ego. This is basically the same function as the function that voracious readers of philosophy and political theory engage in, as well as super fans of musicians or artists who lack any defining characteristics or talents for themselves and must find some external object that “represents them” to live vicariously through.

Because things are so obviously off in the western world, because there is so much concrete symptomatic dysfunction which can no longer be ignored, there is now a huge market for these pseudo-intellectual figures who do not really have anything of value to offer. Still, as they are pseudo-intellectual figures, they must offer something, because something must be sold in order to make a profit. What is sold is a bad idea. The bad idea varies depending on which pseudo-intellectual is involved, as different pseudo-intellectuals have different pseudo-solutions, but it is always a bad idea. Sometimes, the bad idea is political in nature, such as Curtis Yarvin’s cargo-culted stolen Anglo idea that corporations are good and the world would be much better if it was a feudal society, sometimes the bad idea is pseudo-romantic, such as the autistic Lex Friedman’s idea that “love will save us”, which doesn’t mean anything and is quite frankly just retarded and juvenile, but these pseudo-intellectuals always have some bad idea as a solution for the “problem” that everybody can sense.

The reason these bad ideas are bad ideas is that none of these bad ideas are looking below the surface at what is really occurring, which is an evolutionary bottleneck and a fundamental shift in how resources are being created, distributed, and protected. None of these pseudo-intellectuals have a basic grasp on economy or how it functions, which is understandable because the academic sense of economy is extremely poor and surface level. Because resource flows and how these resource flows organize society as a whole, what money actually is, what has fundamentally shifted over the past few decades (the psychic economy detaching from and summarily eclipsing the physical economy), and many other aspects of economy are not understood, none of the ideas that these pseudo-intellectuals have are even close to being interesting, quality, or accurate to people who have a solid grasp on economy. Of course, the general public’s grasp on economy is equally as bad if not worse than the pseudo-intellectuals such as Curtis Yarvin or Lex Friedman, so the general public does not have the perspective needed to realize that Curtis Yarvin and Lex Friedman have no idea what they’re talking about.

In times like these, times where there are obvious problems and systems are failing (because they were built for and in a context in which the physical economy was dominant over the psychic economy), bad ideas become attractive to the general public, because conscious inaction and Taoist thought are not the natural mode of behavior for 99% of people. For most people, society decaying and “traditional” modes of life being destroyed is unnatural, and so any idea that says it can prevent this (which is a bad idea or else it would not promise something which goes against resource flows) or preserve that which has outlived its natural lifecycle is an idea that seems like a good idea. Of course, these sorts of ideas are bad ideas, because they are not in line with how reality functions and give a warped picture of reality which is detrimental to personal perspective.

The fact of the matter is that what is happening now is not wrong, it is not off, it is not unnatural. What is happening now is that physical institutions -- communities that only formed due to the need of protecting and sharing physical resources that have now been abstracted -- are dying because they have become unneeded. The decay and chaos you see around you, the unrest and unhappiness that seems to fill the air, are essentially just animals that are caught in a trap and struggling to get out. These animals that can’t get out, can’t get out because they don’t understand what is going on. There is confusion and distraught concern everywhere you look because there is a lack of understanding regarding the fundamental mechanics which have built up and torn down societies and civilizations on a local and global scale since the beginning of time.

Until there is a conception of economy which is not just “GDP” and trade and Anglo in nature, until humans can internalize the reality of resource acquisition, protection, and distribution being the fundamental driver for how groups are formed, where these groups are located, and the infrastructure these groups build and take care of, the most well-known and most “influential” pseudo-intellectuals will continue to be pushing bad ideas on the general public. The general public will latch onto these bad ideas, they will waste their time, and they will harm themselves in the process due to operating on faulty base level assumptions on how reality functions. I do not really have any delusions about the general public figuring this out, nor do I particularly lose any sleep about the general public not figuring this out, because as stated earlier, we are in an evolutionary bottleneck of sorts. Most people, and all of the pseudo-intellectuals, don't make it out of the bottleneck alive.