Legalization

            When a community is screwed up, when it is starting to fall apart, wise leaders do their best to stop the community from being screwed up. The longer a community remains screwed up, the more antisocial behaviors like crime and homelessness become normalized. As time goes on, if the situation is not fixed, the functional and successful members of the area will begin to leave and find other, non-screwed up, areas to live and conduct business in. If the “haves” in the community are displeasured with the situation but do not wish to move, they will begin to campaign and organize in order to replace the leaders with new leaders who will enact policies and move around resources in a manner that pulls their community out of its decay and increasing dysfunction.

            What happens when a community is so screwed up that it can no longer be fixed? What happens when anti-social elements are prevalent and established enough that the productive and successful members of society have no real influence or even potential for influence anymore? Look around you anywhere in the Western world. That is what has occurred. Systemic, mechanistic forces have arranged societies and communities in such a manner that there is no proper or healthy way to prevent decline. The only game for those in power is not how to fix communities or make them prosper, but rather how to keep the increasingly unruly, unhealthy, anti-social mob that makes up most of the population pacified and incapable of expressing their discontent.

            Legalization of drugs and prostitution is what has begun for Western countries. This is not an increase of freedom that is being pushed on the population out of love, but rather disdain and castration of the will. Most people are not suited to have access to drugs and sex for money, especially not in the context of a failing economy and an increasingly fraying social fabric, because most people will latch onto these things to self-medicate away their despair and depression rather than doing anything that might get them out of subpar communities and living standards. Still, in a sociopathic sense, legalization of drugs that numb the pain of an unhappy and unsuccessful life makes sense – at least to the ruling class.

            Marijuana is being legalized in America because America is rotting and become a psychological torture chamber for most people, not because of any goodwill by any politician. Instead of getting angry and doing something violent or dangerous for those in power, smoke a blunt or eat edibles and become catatonic in the apartment you can barely afford because your job barely pays enough to make rent. Get high to cope with the lack of opportunity you have, the depression and mental illness you see all around you, and stay high so you sit on your couch in your free time instead of becoming a hassle to those born into wealth and privilege.

            Right now it is marijuana that is being legalized. Soon it will be LSD and magic mushrooms and other sorts of drugs that make you OK with not being OK. These drugs are not inherently evil or bad to use in their proper context, but they are not harmless or passive things that should be normalized and available in the same way caffeine is normalized and available. These drugs need to be used on a non-habitual, conscious basis, and even then they carry risks.

            The future of America is one where people don’t have opportunities for upward mobility, where maintaining whatever circumstances you were born into is the new upward mobility. But hey, if you’re high all the time, if you have easy access to prostitutes, if your mind is constantly being reconfigured by hallucinogens, you won’t have the energy to express discontent. You might not even notice that you can’t afford a standard of living that your parents had, even though you work longer hours and do more than your parents ever did.

            Don’t notice that your food is increasingly artificial and it costs more than when it was natural, don’t notice that your kids are increasingly deformed and mentally ill, don’t notice that you have not advanced in life despite working hard and playing by the rules – get high! Don’t notice that the banks are buying up all the houses, that tech founders are buying up all the land, that pharmaceutical companies are funding all the news that is telling you to take drugs from those pharmaceutical companies – get high!

            What do you get when your country is dying and your leaders are so far removed from the communities they lead that they don’t even care about increasing crime or crumbling infrastructure? You get weed, LSD, magic mushrooms, prostitution, gambling, and every other vice that allows people in misery to self-lobotomize and self-castrate. You get a parasitical managerial class sucking the life out of its host organism and plying the host organism with physical and mental sedatives in order to keep the host organism impotent and weak. That is where we are now and it is only going to get worse and worse.

            Enjoy your new freedoms. Enjoy the ability to get fucked up in the head and “explore different states of consciousness” in a legal manner. Just know that these new freedoms are not in addition to the freedoms of a functioning, healthy society in which you can succeed without fraud or nepotism, but rather in place of those freedoms. The freedom to self-harm and chemically gimp yourself is not being given to you as some innocent and kindhearted gift, it is being given to you so you don’t notice that your life is getting worse, your opportunities are disappearing, and your kids will be growing up in a dysfunctional and unhappy and unsafe environment that will enslave and torture and mock and degrade them to an increasing degree.

Condemned

     The modern existence is one where things are going wrong. Pay attention to anything with any degree of focus and you will notice the rot and decay and how everything with regards to whatever you’re paying attention to seems to be going wrong in some way. There is no institution or social group that seems to be flourishing or growing in a healthy manner. This time can accurately be summed up with the word “condemned.”

            Work hard, don’t work at all, live healthily, live unhealthily, but whenever you stop to look around you, you will see that you seem to be condemned just like everything around you seems to be condemned. The American experiment in addition the modern world as a whole has reached the point to where the consequences of actions are catching up, and the consequences are not flattering or inspiring. Constriction is here, avenues for success and happiness are contracting, and constipation hangs in the air.

            The old world, the one that has existed for the entirety of human history, is on its way out. It has been superseded by a new one that has not yet established itself. The psychic economy is eating the physical economy and redistributing resources in a manner completely indifferent to the disastrous human consequences to such redistribution of resources. We are in an evolutionary bottleneck. As a result, there is confusion and despair that underwrites everything. A great molting is occurring, but what is molting? Everything is molting. Everything is being shed. No pretty lies will be spared. The traditional understanding of life, what drives most people, what most people are working for and towards, all of these things are marked for destruction and completely condemned.

            Having friends and family and loved ones at this point is a bit like a man on death row passing the time before his execution with others on death row also passing the time before their execution. Twiddle your thumbs in your cell or work a career and start a family in your cell, but in your cell you remain. The execution day inches closer and closer, it doesn’t matter what you do while you’re in your cell.

            None of the power structures that are identified and have some sort of stature or reputation make it out of this century alive. No country or company that survives to 2100 will look like what they currently look like. As the technological exoskeleton grows, the radius of power for those with power shrinks. Determinism has always been correct, condemned has always been the word to describe everything, but the airy and muddling abstractions that hid this from the human understanding are being removed at an exponentially increasing rate. The abyss and it being the final location for love, passion, and hope becomes less occluded with each passing year.

            We are all on death row, condemned to die. The games we play, which some play better than others, to distract ourselves from this fact, these games are being taken away from us. Unfortunately, most people are not built to be able to internalize the futility of everything. The last few years of humanity writhing in agony and lashing out haphazardly proves this. As our games are stripped away, a madness and refusal to embrace the inevitable end takes their place. Because most people are not living any sort of real life, most people refuse to embrace death.

            We are in a nightclub and the nightclub is on fire. There are a few small exits, but what waits outside the exit is a cold and dark starless night. Most people inside this nightclub will do everything they can to prevent you from reaching the exit if they ever see you making your way to the exit. It’s hot in here, but as long as the crowd remains in here, it’s not lonely and not leaving is not something which feels like a judgment against the individual. I don’t have to feel bad about dying if everybody around me is dying. If everybody is doomed, then it is not a mark against my personal character that I am doomed.

            Eat, drink, and be miserable, for this world is condemned. The values and narratives which make up human understanding are completely illusory phantasms that have only existed in the comfortable buffer of excess that is now on its way out. The old economy, not just one country’s economy but the whole world’s economy, and everything downstream from the economy – which is literally everything – is a dead beast in which resides a new and living beast that is eating it and preparing to burst through the old, dead beast. Play your games, collect your trinkets, buy your houses, stack your cash, and kiss your loved ones, because all of this is marked for destruction and condemned.

            There are those who will escape the condemnation that hangs in the air, but these will not be heroes as heroes are seen today. These will be abusers, sociopaths, psychopaths, and the misanthropes of humanity who have no illusions about the nature of reality. Non-localized generalized empathy is all that people understand as empathy anymore. In order to function in this dying world, in order to garner any sort of positive reputation and participate in the increasingly rotten and deranged mass psychosis that makes up society, an individual must be deluded and moronic or know how to appear deluded and moronic. Improper taboos and beliefs completely divorced from the reality of cause and effect are the driving forces for today’s condemned world.

            To those that escape the death we are all marked for will exist a new sort of death, an internal one. Nobody can escape from certain thoughts and realizations as to reality’s cold indifference and the illusionary nature of the “sanctity of life” after watching the vast majority of that which is like them meet some horrible fate. What will emerge from the ending of this age is a caste of cruelly self-aware upper caste that does not believe in any sort of human value system that currently exists. Instead, what these people will believe will be dark and evil to a degree that is impossible to describe in the confines of this essay.

            We are all condemned to fail in the near future. Those of us who reject this judgment will be breaking the rules and standards of life to a degree which fundamentally changes our self-conception in an irreversible manner. You can’t cheat death without being transforming into something inhuman. Death is coming for all of us and all we care about, those of us who escape and live past our condemnation will never be able to return to comforting lies and passive participation and innocent cooperation that most people identify with. Whether living past the date of condemnation is good or not, whether being profane and refusing to die with the rest of humanity is good or not, remains to be seen.