When all this happened in the 1970s, even mainstream entertainers flirted with patriotism and dissent over and against the incompetent malaise-Borg. The divide has sharpened, yes, and we are in deeper ways worse off now. But make no mistake—real resistance is rising.
It’s not just that if you are concerned you are not alone—you are NOT alone—but it’s that they can’t keep dissent bottled up forever no matter how many fingers of control they try to plug the holes in the dike with. It’s going to start flowing out into the mainstream.
The right is feckless, yes, in the face of the rolling cultural revolution spurred by woke zealots and encouraged by our shameless oligarchs—but people also resent gross incompetence. Trump ain’t President and the 2 Minutes Hate for the Bad Orange Man ain’t gonna cut it no more.
Frame for all this is not the feckless Right but an elite whose institutions and modes of control are getting their teeth filed against the hard-diamond landscape of today’s realities. Tech, finance, & media needs to adapt & the big dawgs cannot. Who can?
After decades of hearing about “choice” and “stunning & brave” odes to abortion, etc. the sick irony is that women with kids (too many!, too young!) are the ones who take all the slights in our culture from all our major institutions. The real intolerance is clear enough.
And so much inner peace, happiness, & fulfillment on display surrounding all these women w/o kids—affirming the ability & choices of other women to have kids, of course. After all, U.S is in midst of historically low birth rates + older than ever which will cause massive problems
So we should be happy for those able and willing to choose life, no? Instead of believing laughable but convenient lie of a PSYOP about how low birth rates are good, acktually?
We need new models of local community that support families and family formation, remote & local work, & physically encourage actual local/regional political self-government—that old notion is a distant memory. We need new/better as in beautiful but still functional architecture.
What this will take practically is higher political powers/leaders prioritizing the creation of such space/slipstreams here and there instead of going with the flow and doing the usual garbage. Experimentation with new models arising from acknowledgement of the problem.
Will also take communities forming or becoming more intentional by actively congregating and demanding solutions. Doesn’t have to get weird. But will require far more engagement than usual & exercise of more leadership/action that is the norm. Often based around existing networks
Thread. A lot of people out there are "just trying to live life" after being proverbially blown apart at some earlier point in their lives with a shotgun like Arnold does the T-1000. You might not even realize you are one of those people. Or that you pulled the trigger. Or both.
1 of central themes of The Odyssey is a kind of civilizational PTSD as Greek society tries to live again in aftermath of Trojan War. There's much weeping & wrestling w/guilt & grief on the part of all the decent people, heroes mostly. Idea of *long-suffering* permeates the work.
"Long-suffering"=resolving &/or just bearing non-physical burdens over long periods of time, i.e., human life. Our vain & rather primitive silly materialism doesn't help us here. We don't get it.
In the "advice no one should give their kids" category, I've often noticed in life that there really is no telling what brazen lying can accomplish for people, nor any limit to the heights it can take them.
There are ever more complicated downsides as they progress, and clearly it causes internal damage to the liar throughout, but, practically speaking, brazen lying no matter how outrageous often seems to work pretty well.
One doesn't want to acknowledge it for much the same reasons that one doesn't want to acknowledge that, in the moment, drinking and driving can be a hell of a lot of fun...but nonetheless it never ceases to amaze me how well outrageously lies often work.
Hope is that which Christianity gave the world, even if you think it bunk.
European primitives before conversion struggled w/just this: a dark vision of a doomed world. The monsters would encircle them eventually, they thought. In the end, the dragon would come & slay them all.
The therapeutic and distractive use of technology in our time are designed to keep such visions at bay.
Such myths would inevitably return except for the fact that our masters today have isolated us, and told us a different lie: like Sisyphus in reverse we must keep entertaining and pleasuring ourselves, over and over, with small delights, ultimately alone.