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Scorched Earth Policy

@Scearpo

Feb 7, 2024

Besides the obvious implications of a crumbling economy putting a stranglehold on the average consumer, the service industry has always been a bubble waiting to burst.

The entire foundation of working in service is built upon replicating the experience of aristocratic dining where every aspect of logistic necessity is removed from the act of preparing and consuming food. A majority of society for a majority of history has had to contend with these basic logistic necessities. The ingredients need to be procured, the food needs to be cooked, the eating environment needs to be set, and the mess needs to be cleaned afterwards. While variations and communal context varies, traditionally a matriarch performs the cooking within a single household unit, ingredients either literally or symbolically procured by the patriarch through provision, and both setting and cleaning either being performed by her or shared among the family as a duty.

What makes this different from being rich and having servants is that you’re taking the responsibilities away from those participating in the dining experience. A chef procures the ingredients and cooks the meal, servants set the table, servants serve the food, servants clean up the mess, and servants wash the dishes. Every participant of the actual dining experience is completely unburdened by the laborious necessities, free to enjoy the act of eating itself with as little imposition on their time and energy as possible.

However, because of this, those raised in wealth are given a strict standard of etiquette to follow with a higher form of ritual. The spiritual health of a society is both affected and indicated by the basic social rituals within a few key elements of the human experience. You can judge a people by the standards of certain activities they perform, including how they solidify marriages and therefore families, how they dispose of their dead, how they handle disputes, and most notably, what rituals they perform when eating.

The specific rules of etiquette exist as a function of acknowledging the presence of others and performing basic acts to reduce as much sensory imposition as possible. Belching is rude because it sounds disgusting, napkins are placed on the lap, not the table because it’s unpleasant to see food stains on them, elbows stay off because it shakes the table and disturbs other diners. In a high class environment, the act of eating itself is always relegated as a vehicle for the social element of dining. All of human history signified the act of breaking bread as a ritual of enhancing communication, understanding, and social bond between two individuals. The rich have learned that eating the food itself is never the focus of dining in company. The food is merely a vehicle for continual participation in ensuring your place in this world and working towards elevating your position in the hierarchy of those around you.

This is why it’s traditionally polite to never fully finish a meal. First it’s a function of abundance. To eat to completion is a symptom of scarcity, acting out of fear of starvation which is incongruent to living a life of means where there will always be more food available than you could ever hope to consume entirely. But furthermore it’s an expression of self control, all etiquette is. Etiquette itself is the act of enforcing both self control and focus on acknowledging those around you through followable mutually understood rules. Secondly, leaving leftovers fulfilled a function of rewarding the servants. They would always eat whatever wasn’t used, enjoying decadent meals which they otherwise wouldn’t have access to were it not for their position.

In many ways, the servant living in the palace, having families alongside their masters family, eating their food, and so forth created a symbiotic relationship. All of these dynamics were mimicked in the creation of the modern dining experience, an inevitable folly serving towards its own downfall.

The modern dining experience began as a process of mimicking the dynamic of having servants. Someone seats you, someone serves you drinks, someone serves you food cooked by a chef, someone cleans up the table after you, and someone washes the dishes. Your only responsibility as the patron is to compensate for the food and service at the end of the meal. The concept of public dining is ancient, the thermopilia, the inn, tea houses, taverns, cookshops, bodegas, etc. Historical context varies but a significant amount of these public dining establishments would cater to the lower classes, often combining services with alcohol, prostitution, and gambling.

The French conceived of the modern “restaurant” in the late 18th century, the specific dining format described here, a simulation of having servants, chefs, access to an elegant dining hall, and a choice wine cellar. The revolution would disenfranchise many nobles, leading to the creation of many more restaurants across France and spreading throughout the world eventually.

Until the 20th century, having the title of “restaurant” would imply an experience elevated beyond simply having a bowl of slop handed to you at a bench or a table. The dining experience was still for the wealthy and many of the same expectations of etiquette would be expected of the customer. Restaurants would be iconic places of status, judged shrewdly by an elite class while becoming a social arena for them, places where empires could rise and fall, multimillion dollar deals hashed out onto cocktail napkins.

The inherent problem of the restaurant model compared to being served formally was the lack of privacy and the emotionally incongruent act of paying at the end. The former was managed by the highest possible emphasis placed on seating and architecture. An ideal restaurant creates a little world for each table where the background is reduced to a minimum, both visually through alcoves, walls, separators, etc and acoustically. The latter issue, payment, is a bit more complex.

The payment portion of the dining experience is the most jarring. Anyone who’s worked in the service industry can tell you how consistently and curiously patrons will behave one way the entire evening and then the mood will quietly shift when the check comes out. As if some flip has switched, the patrons are suddenly reminded of the realities of the world. The check symbolizes the cessation of festivity and a reminder of the dividing line between them and the server. They suddenly are forced to acknowledge a position of hierarchy, accept an imposition of need, and reconcile with the possibility that any rapport they’ve possibly built with their server was a completely manufactured experience.

All of these factors were kept to a minimum in the traditional servant-master dynamic. The question of pay was most certainly kept far and away from the act of dining, and the mark of a good servant or butler is defined by how invisibly they can perform their functions. Any good server should be trained in this art, understanding that the diners do not give a shit about you. A good server completely occupies an existence built around predicting and silently fulfilling the needs of their patrons with as minimal interruption to the intended dining experience as possible. If the customers have some need of socializing, a good server detects and fulfills that function, a great server finds a way to make that be or at least feel like a genuine human connection, much like a good prostitute makes her clients feel like she genuinely loves them.

The act of serving well factors into a variety of skills which were performed at their highest during the invention of the modern dining experience, where servers would have had all the same training, standards, and etiquette of an actual servant. With time these standards could only have fallen as they did because the model of a restaurant is incongruent to the thing it tries to imitate.

It was an inevitability that restaurants would receive their downfall as they did. Boulanger’s restaurant concept was a step away from the conceptual ideal of what fine dining is. Fine dining by its nature is a wasteful experience. It is an abstract need for metaphysical fulfillment in the act of enriched socializing among wealthy people who can afford it as a luxury.

Public dining is not owned by any individual patron, its perpetuation is upheld by capitalistic forces. As a result there will always be a powerful force tugging the model of a restaurant closer to the most efficient mechanism of delivering food to the public as efficiently as possible. This means more asses in seats, more seats crowding the venue, cheaper food, greater appeal to a common denominator, cheaper staff, plainer decor, dirtier environment, so on and so forth. Every change made incentivized by a need to cover overhead reduces the necessary elements of having a proper fine dining experience.

The restaurant was once a place you were forced to dress up for. It was a symbol of exclusivity distinctly separated from the connotations of public eating available to the masses. The distinction was codified into the name itself. If you didn’t have certain basic facets you couldn’t properly call yourself a restaurant. Most places you would go to now and call a “restaurant” actually fall into the category of public dining.
This extends beyond mocking obviously cheap franchises like Applebees or Olive Garden. Rather, even places most people would consider “fancy” or “high end” fail to fulfill very basic procedures such as cleaning crumbs off of the tablecloth, replacing all silverware between courses, making sure acoustics do not drown out conversation, having professional attentive polite staff, so on and so forth.

Truthfully, even if there was some way to uphold these standards for restaurants across the world and make it economically sustainable to force amenities and higher standards of staff while retaining current prices (an impossibility) it would STILL fall flat because the modern diner is incapable of adhering to the standards of etiquette necessary to uphold the amenable environment necessary for a properly enjoyable dining experience. There is no formal education in western society. Etiquette standards are not taught in schools, with the exception of some private institutions. But even if they were, the public dining module incentivizes tolerating misgivings and behavior shortcomings in exchange for securing revenue.

The modern dining experience is approaching a return to its primordial form as an unaffectionate crude avenue of consumption. Restaurants are dying off slowly and transmogrifying, either into sterile cafeteria environments where food is procured standing up at a line or from the window of a truck, or being phased into silent anonymous kitchens which exist solely for mobile app delivery mechanisms.

For the past 100 years or so, what has the restaurant been? Generally, a very dirty place filled with dirty people. Restaurants are quite often associated with criminal activity. If not completely existing as a front for laundering money, they most definitely are the host of a number of labor violations, poorly implemented pay practices, stealing, and a vector for drug dealing.

Restaurant staff are an even mixture of ex-convicts, drug addicts, alcoholics, gambling addicts, combined into an environment of immigrants, college students, random elderly, and teenagers. Not every single person who works in a restaurant falls within the category of a miscreant, but the surrounding environment creates an extremely strong peer pressure of escalation towards degeneracy.

It’s a well known fact that if you put the average high schooler in a restaurant, they will likely pick up at least one of several habits including smoking, drinking, gambling, casual drug use, petty theft, and the consumption or performance of sex work.

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Scorched Earth Policy

@Scearpo

Dec 7, 2021

It is highly likely that the most ancient story on earth, The Epic of Gilgamesh & its many concurrent forms are the descended tales of an evolution of stories passed down from half remembered fan fiction about an ancient Atlantean TV show being told over post apocalyptic campfire

Ideas and the network of fiction, philosophy, and knowledge which those ideas can connect to create, are all built on biological foundations. Ideas are tangible and have a living consciousness that is fed by the creation, interaction, and reproduction of the idea itself.

Whenever you dedicate physical energy towards having an idea, talking about an idea, recording an idea, or transmitting an idea, you pour a small amount of your vibrational energy into it, invigorating the idea, prolonging & increasing its life, viral spread & raw emotional power

Read 17 tweets

Scorched Earth Policy

@Scearpo

Nov 14, 2021

Average TNG plot: the crew encounters a new form of life created when the holodeck glitches the replicators into failing to process the crews shits out of their toilets properly. The resulting shitpile collides with subspace neutrinos and creates a shit based nano organism.

The sentient shit monster develops an ability to communicate through the ships computer within thirty seconds of its sentience. It proclaims its intent to rape and kill every living creature in the universe and that such an act is the sole purpose of its existence.

The crew attempts to destroy the creature during their only possible window of attack but are stopped at the last second by Picard who makes a stirring speech about the sanctity of life and how this new abomination they’ve created has just as much of a right to live as they do.

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Scorched Earth Policy

@Scearpo

Aug 14, 2021

The act of cutting open an animal and revealing its organs is one of the most ancient & powerful forms of divination known to humanity. It comes to no surprise that the meat industry is secretly one of the highest purveyors of animal sacrifice magic, both in benefit & consequence

Every time something dies, the entirety of its life, its past & the very meaning of its being are funneled into the means of its death. This is true for immaterial concepts as much as it is true for living creatures. The death of something defines a great deal of its life

When a creature is killed in ritualistic sacrifice, you are taking the entire temporal length of its lifespan and dedicating it towards the reason you killed it. When this is done towards haruspicy (organ divination) the creature has lived its whole life towards this purpose

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Scorched Earth Policy

@Scearpo

Jul 18, 2021

Silicon Valley billionaires, in conjunction with rogue CIA cells, have been pushing DMT propaganda in media and culture because they want to create a legion of mercenaries in the Afterlife Dreamscape to control key access points where spirits and god-entities can alter our world.

Signals can be sent from spirit dimensions into our own in exchange for some form of incomprehensible spiritual currency. They manifest themselves as incongruencies, synchronicities, and strong abrupt feelings. Spirits, gods, demons, and everything else choose different signals.

These can be as simple as a blooming flower or a wayward butterfly catching your attention and making you think, or as complicated as an underlying memetic trend manifesting itself online over years and decades. The messenger could be your ancestors, ancient gods, or otherwise.

Read 13 tweets

Scorched Earth Policy

@Scearpo

Jun 18, 2021

There is an inherent trauma to learning. Whenever you learn something you are altering your physical being around that subject, taking in permanent features into your subconscious which will imperceptibly mold you to an established aesthetic. This is true for anything you consume

When I say trauma, I don’t imply it’s necessarily bad. Lifting weights causes micro tears in your muscles that when healing create hypertrophy and increased strength. That is technically still trauma but it implies growth in a positive way. Of course there can still be negatives

When you engage in a sport you fit your body towards a particular aesthetic. I’ve noticed men who grapple or do jiu jitsu often develop very strong prominent jaws, often because doing many escapes and throws involves some inherent face pulling motions most likely.

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