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War of the Eternals - How the Eloi's Fractionalization of Language Keeps Us Divided
Ever notice how the average person these days can’t hold two opposing ideas simultaneously in their heads? Always leaning on the crutch of one extreme or the other? You know the famous quote, misattributed to a score of people throughout history:
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
Today’s societal discourse is a roost ruled by demagogues and firebrands. Social media has created an environment where long-form thought is quickly becoming obsolete, upstaged by the cutting, emotionally-charged demagoguery we’ve now come to expect in most online ‘discussions’. The tagline, byword, buzz-line rules above all.
Twitter popularized sharing ideas in bite-sized chunks of a hundred and eighty characters. Before long, even noted academics were scribbling pieces in newly reductivist cant, using bastardizations of language like ‘bcuz’ or ‘/w’ to fit arbitrary wordcount constraints.
Anti-intellectualism has long been the fashion of the day, but these incremental designs have slowly eroded our ability to express, and therefore navigate, complex problems. Everything in our culture now springs from baseness—or is steered towards it. Reductivism of thought and concepts, false-dichotomies and dualisms—they are Overton Windows which are constantly pushed on us under duress, coercing us to think reductively in a way that keeps us from puzzling things out.
These techniques are part and parcel to the mass-scale engineered misdirection the ruling class has been utilizing since the late aughts, which I wrote about here:
If complex topics can be reduced to crude binaries, and if enough anger can be injected into people, the rest of the work does itself. What’s left is a simian tableau of ape-like creatures grunting at each other while beating their chests.
This is all by design, of course—and it makes one wonder whether the stultification resulting from the chronic ‘short-form-ization’ of social media was likewise purposely engineered in parallel to support the elites’ other cultural prerogatives.
It has been a noteworthy development, that since the start of the social media boom of the 2000’s, the types and lengths of expression allowance have gradually been scaled back in each successive generation of apps and platforms. We began with MySpace and Facebook, where you could express yourself at length, then were sandbagged with Twitter, Instagram, and various iterations thereof.
Amongst these were apps like SnapChat and Vine, which saw a newfound focus in prioritizing increasingly shorter video ‘clips’. Along with Instagram’s failed ‘Loop’ in particular, this development was pushed to the extreme: seconds-long, brain-cell deadening video loops which seemed almost overtly a form of reflexive mind-control.
This trend saw the increased infantilization of users which finally found its highest outlet in TikTok, an app built around short, vapid video clips of ‘viral dances’ or buzzy catchwords, marking the death of long form thought.
At least on Twitter, astute cognoscenti eventually found a way around this with the advent of the famous ‘Twitter Thread’:
But at best, this was an admittedly clunky work-around in sharing long-form ideas.
TikTok in particular, on the other hand, has struck your author as a most parlous of applications. Interesting from an anthropological, sociological, and psychological standpoint though it may be, one cannot help but be awestruck by the sheer psychogenically bewitching nature of the platform. Its entirely unspoken design philosophy appears to revolve around parasitizing society’s mirror-neuron reflex to create a bizarre cultural psychosis akin to the plot of Halloween III.
Substack’s own BigSerge summarized the point exquisitely:
I believe Tik-Tok is a Chinese plot to undermine America, in the sense that it is a sort of Gen-Z accelerant which amplifies all the neuroses and pathologies that makes Zoomers the most deadly socio-biological bomb ever known.
Indeed, TikTok is frighteningly ritualistic in the way it appears to program a mass-hysteria form of kinesthesiological body-autonomy vampirism into young impressionable teenagers. And it’s only the latest in the line of bizarre Hollyweird/pop-culture techniques long decried by those who’ve witnessed the phenomenal rise, in the last two decades, of such figures as Lady Gaga—an obvious reference to mentally infantilized programming.
It’s no surprise that these developments ran concurrently with the earlier-mentioned cultural engineering used by the ruling class to suppress waves of populist uprisings which followed the undoing of the financial system in 2008.
That the two developments were intimately interlinked is obvious to anyone that paid attention. What better way to enhance the needed divisions in the underclass than by robbing them of the ability to form coherent thoughts?
For the ruling class’s plan to work, in creating the type of mass-scale division necessary to distract from their financial collapse, they needed a way to binarize the discourse. Bring it to the lowest and basest, most simplistic form—one which could evoke the rawest emotions: pure, instinctual, howling rage. The ultimate lowest common denominator. It was the key ingredient they needed to turn us against each other, and take the heat off of themselves.
Not surprisingly, the era saw an explosion of new social media apps which seemed always to privilege the short and viral, the fast dopamine hit to trigger reward functions and low impulse control pathways.
Click-bait turned to rage-bait. Soon, even top media corporations were utilizing rage-targeting tactics to intentionally stir the national discourse, and to capitalize on the generated virality. The fact that this was a boon for profits was a positive byproduct.
Disney was accused of using such tactics in the marketing campaigns of some of their latest films, like the much-panned The Little Mermaid demake. Disney’s PR machine found the dog-whistle sweet-spot in triggering right-wing commentators and anti-Woke activists in generating the type of buzz that not only ensured that their film would stay in the spotlight, receiving endless free publicity, but that a leftwing backlash against the anti-Woke mob would create a swell of anti-anti-protest theater-goers to line Disney’s coffers.
In recent years, the majority of people have begun to consume their news primarily through social media, where posting and sharing articles has become a quick and convenient norm. This has led to even further degradation of the discourse. People were now overloaded by articles spammed left and right on their feeds simply for the allure of their headlines.
Studies found that the vast majority of people shared articles solely for the headlines, and never actually even read them. A fake site even proved the hypothesis: it created an article with the headline “70% of people only read the headlines”, which was subsequently shared by hundreds of thousands of people. But the problem was, the article itself was filled with random words and gibberish—proving the point that everyone was sharing it only on account of the headline, and never bothered to even click it open for so much as a light skim.
Headlines drive outrage, and post 2010, America has been little more than an outrage culture. Jonathan Turley recently described American politics aptly as merely ‘amplified rage’.
Their plan is clearly working; the discourse has become nothing more than inflammatory ‘gotchas’ and rage-baiting tactics. Nowadays, It’s nearly impossible to discuss anything at all with the ‘enemy camp’ on impartial grounds because the arguments quickly veer into lower-vibrational, reptilian-minded, ego-driven attacks, which evoke the same response from the other party; and it’s by design.
It’s no different than the concept emblemized in Nineteen Eighty-Four: if you can limit people’s ability to verbalize certain words, then over time you necessarily elide their ability to even think the concepts those words once represented. Thus, you in effect extirpate the very impulses behind those concepts. Could dissent and protests exist if you delete those very words from the lexicon over the course of generations?
Similarly, by constraining our ability to communicate long, complex thoughts, devolving it ever-gradually into three-word-long utterances, the Overton Window of general discourse is likewise contracted. After all, how can we ever level the pitchforks at responsible parties if we can’t even express the complex, labyrinthine mechanisms of their control?
Now there’s an omerta on many unfashionable topics. To speak on things found inconvenient to the ruling class is to be complicit in ‘hate’ speech, ‘intolerance’, ‘bigotry’, or—god forbid—‘violence’. Taken in tandem, this creates the perfect control mechanism: any verboten topic treated at length is immediately smeared as ‘hateful’ and deplatformed. Or, you can choose to express your views on the constricted-by-design platforms like Twitter, and then be forced to dumb them down, and parse them through a system which rewards short, quippy baiting tactics and ‘gotchas’ over true intellectual discourse.
Either way, you end up losing.
Recently, Elon Musk deftly countered such traps set for him in an ambush-style interview by a typical establishment plant. Such attacks have a two-fold purpose in not only cornering you into a boxed-in construct of fake attributions (“hate speech purveyor”, etc.), but also triggering your defensiveness in an effort to make you slip up and vindictively retaliate in a way that can later be re-construed as your being the aggressor.
The fact is, a society cannot function properly, cannot regulate itself, without the ability to have long-form discussions, complex discourse which addresses complex and highly-nuanced issues. The ruling class, by way of the multi-headed corporate hydra at their disposal, have deliberately sought to stifle this ability by imposing on us a system of technological limitations. A system whose walls remain invisible to most, and whose ‘rules’ prey upon our basest instincts.
That is why I believe it more important than ever to share such long-form expression, erratic and irreverent and off-kilter that it may be (I offer my advance apologies), and continue the thread of discourse so often lost in ‘character-limit-driven’ platforms.
Like a bee to nectar, the human mind requires the ability to unspool, the right to unhinge, the freedom to spout wild vagaries and inane conceits. But the Eloi of the ruling class would love to see us slowly devolved into something resembling the Morlocks of Wells’ The Time Machine, or perhaps even more aptly, the Brutals to the elites’ Eternals of Zardoz fame. After all, isn’t it only apropos that the false-god of Zardoz brainwashes the Brutals with the short, infantilized utterance of “The gun is good! The penis is evil!”
The sentiment is highly befitting of today: violence and infertility for society galore! The Will of the Eternals be done, their interests forever sated.
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Before i say anything else, "You give The Ruling Class an intelligence it never had, or has !"
The fact is that everything moves at light speed these days and everyone is attention deficient. The way to fight back is to create better sound bites;
The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
When the medium enabling markets is privately held, we are all tenant farmers to the banks.
Money is a medium, like roads, air, water, etc. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Should they be confused?
They only job those flunkies have, is creating the debt the banks need to function. What they do with it is irrelevant to those pulling the strings. So we have delinquent children playing cowboys and indians on the other side of the planet, while the country rots.
Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family as godhead. To the Ancients, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. The Romans adopted a monotheistic sect as state religion as the Empire was rising from the ashes of the Republic, basically because The Big Guy Rules.
Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through the film, than the images and narratives played out on it. Ideals are not absolutes and the philosophers should have been all over that centuries ago, but here we are, still obsessed with the totem poles at the center of our own cults and cursing the rest.
Good and bad are not some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. We live in that spectrum and feedback between light and dark.
Assange for President! He looked the Beast in the eye and didn't blink.
Lets get those tee shirts and bumper stickers everywhere.
Contest! Everyone come up with more!