Very rarely does a book make you feel good about receiving bad news. Usually, there’s something you fear so much that you want anything but to face it. But if someone is able to explain in clear steps what you must do to face it, and how the other side is indeed brighter, it lessens the burden. With decreased resistance and doubt comes greater effectiveness, and you may emerge with more triumph than suspected possible.

Can Life Prevail? is one such book. Since I was old enough to walk and perceive, it has been clear to me that something is very wrong with our world. Our adults are not focused on the task of living, but on the task of managing their self-image. Consequently, they ignore stupidities great and small. From the dumbness of school to the boredom and fear inherent to the workplace, to the poor design of everyday objects, to the inanity of our public culture and the transparency of our politicians’ lies, adults are oblivious. They are easy to deceive and are so distracted they are “shocked and amazed” any time their children have sex or take drugs, their politicians cheat them, corruption is found to be rife, etc. In short, our civilization is a ship with no one at the helm. Most disturbing is our effect on the environment; we can get more humans if we screw them up, but we’re short on extra earths.

Unlike most environmentalists, Pentti Linkola does not try to talk to us through the filter of denial and distraction. Instead, he levels with us as a Machiavellian scientist would: each additional person takes up space our nature needs, we have too many people, most are thoughtless oafs who destroy eternally beautiful things for temporary cash, and our modern laziness arises from the ease with which we interact with life through machines. In this collection of provocative essays, Linkola targets every sacred cow with an even-handed but unequivocal whittling down of our resistance to the obvious: our species is out of control and needs pruning, and the problem is too many individuals of low intelligence and character. Unlike most “environmentalist” books, this is not a hand-wringing or maudlin work; it is forthright, assertive, strong and also very funny as Linkola probes the ostensible logic behind our decisions and contrasts it with his observations from many years in the field as an observer of birds, fish and trees.

Linkola asserts a number of worthy points:

• Habitat loss is more destructive than pollution;
• Climate change is a vile problem resulting from lack of woodlands;
• We can fix climate irregularities by re-planting forests we killed;
• Domesticated animals destroy wild species;
• Most people are careless and unable to be stewards to nature;
• Democracy will not limit the selfish actions of individuals;
• Human overpopulation is the driving factor behind habitat loss;
• We are too distanced from nature, even the gross aspects;
• Our machine-oriented mentality makes us lazy and weak.

At his best, Linkola is half scientist and half satirist, always nudging us back to a level of reality. If nature were a machine, he seems to say, we’d pay attention to signs of its decline. But it’s too complex for our point-to-point modern mentality, so instead we space out and hope for the best. Each of these essays picks an intriguing angle to its topic and explains it through a clear example, usually backing up observations with factual data from ornithology or the experience of a fisherman. As stated above, it gives hope by giving us a clear analysis of the problem that isn’t mired in ulterior motives or the greatest ulterior motive of all, “don’t rock the boat.” Where most green books offer you what’s basically a shopping guide for “green” products, Linkola goes further — not only by realizing that consumerism and environmentalism are incompatible, even if that consumerism is of a “green” kind, but by striking against our preference for all things human. He makes the point many times that we only consider human emotions and thoughts, and do not stop to observe our world. If it were named Steve and talked with a lisp, we’d respect it as equal. But outside the anthrosphere, nothing gains equality to us brave equal humans.

He brushes by the question of our reactions to, or judgments of, his ideas. Like a researcher he gives us the data and recommendations, and leaves it to us to react in private and then realize our reactions have nothing to do with nature; as history shows us, only what is effective matters. All of our fond notions and egalitarian sentiments, politics and politeness, feelings and validations are entirely irrelevant. What works matters. What is not part of that process is irrelevant and forgotten by time. I find this very comforting because our world normally has a stop-start rhythm where a new concept is uncovered and then we must all wait for the inevitable simian panic, outbursts and finally grudging admittance. This part of our monkey heritage disgusts me the most. There is none of it in Linkola. It is like reading a lab report on the fauna of the North Atlantic. It’s unusual to see humans treated like the other subjects we write about, but comforting in that it is purely logical.

There are parts of this book where I cannot get onboard the Linkola train. It’s hard to tell when he is provocateur and when he is prescribing a medication of lucid sanity, but in most cases, he seems to be serious and it’s hard to disagree. It shocks the average human when he rails on housecats as killers of birds, but when we think back on our own experience, we’ve all seen stray cats slaughter wrens by the bushel. I can handle that, and the idea of being less squeamish about day-old fish, but during the last few pieces, Linkola outlines more of his ideal for a society and it falls short. Primitivism is a neat idea on paper and would solve the problem, but lose so much of what makes us vital. Unlike Linkola, I cannot blame our machines for the fact that most people are thoughtless, destructive, short-sighted and corrupt. I think we need to realize that we like the wrens are biological creatures and just do as our instincts instruct. Perhaps another future thinker will suggest that those humans who do not have such frailties should prevail, and the others quietly go away, but Linkola stops short of calling for world eugenics on that scale.

Most importantly, Linkola says what so many of us think in private moments. There are too many of us, and too many idiots. If we keep growing we’ll kill everything. People sacrifice nature for short-term profit. Because most voters are idiots, we cannot control this process. The instant we try something constructive, a corrupt person will buy a few hundred thousand dollars of TV time and use it to sway the masses of useful idiots to do his bidding. As a result, our current civilization is like a speeding car with no brakes. We’re out of control and cannot stop. As we accept this, day after day, it kills us a little inside. Linkola is the antidote who removes our false pretense and the emotional manipulation of our fellow citizens, giving us instead a clear path to victory that true, must rocket through taboo and the herd fear of a mass of humans whose average IQ is barely 100, but nonetheless can be achieved if cooler minds prevail — and are willing to as relentlessly manipulate the masses as their ideological opposites.

Disclosure: Our author Brett Stevens wrote one of the introductions to this book. It was not reviewed. Our collaborator Vijay Prozak wrote a review here which was not used in the writing of this column.

This little book wins people over because of its simplicity not its rhetorical fireworks or intricate arguments. When you think about it, distilling a simple truth out of a complex situation is either supremely difficult, or strikingly dishonest.

In this case, I believe, it’s the former. Reverence is “the virtue that keeps human beings from trying to act like gods,” says Woodruff, and we’ve forgotten it. That jives with what I know of people arrogantly acting as if their own needs are all-important, their opinions are fact, their science and statistics are more important than observation and, most of all, that we’re all equal and better toe the line and not offend anyone — or else.

All of these things originate in what Woodruff describes as the irreverent outlook, where we believe that our emotions, socially-defined conclusions, social status and shared memes somehow trump ultimate reality itself. In short, we’ve made ourselves gods and replaced paying attention to reality with solipsistically paying attention to ourselves.

Nietzsche pointed out how humanism leads to solipsism that denies all that’s good in life so we can avoid conflict, and get along like good equal social animals, nevermind that we’ve traded the future for temporarily stability today:

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist.

And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly — as though the world’s axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with a gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. There is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought.

On truth and lies in an extra-moral sense, by F.W. Nietzsche

In Woodruff’s view, the human tendency to view human commentary on the world as inherent truth is diametrically opposed to a transcendent worldview, in which we place ourselves mentally as small parts of a big world, and pay attention to how it works and adapt ourselves to it.

Through this transcendence, he reasons, we can interpret any belief system in the correct context, and assess any fact or reason in context, giving us the ultimate simple tool for finding a realistic solution or way of life.

Even more, as he argues in plain “psychologist speak” with a heavy dose of literary and philosophical references, we learn to appreciate ourselves again by not taking on an insane burden of the world but by seeing it as the magnificent, complex system it is and alleviating our feelings of the necessity of moral judgment.

Reverence doesn’t tell us what is right and wrong. It is instead the ultimate meta-level thought, telling us how to think about how we think about right and wrong. Although it will not grab headlines, this simple thought-virus is profound enough to make this book recommended reading for those in any discipline, religion, ideology or stage of life.

Finally, I bit — I asked the obvious question that he was pretty much waiting for me to ask, so he could spring the trap.

Well, why not?

“Because I only watch the internet at work, and your site is filtered by our company’s filter.”

Those filters are designed to keep out porn, hatred, hacking and bad guys — how’d we get included?

I didn’t know, so I wrote the company that provided the web filter at his work, WebSense. After a brief exchange of emails, we got sweet relief:

The site you submitted has been reviewed. We have made an update to the following URL(s) in our master database to address this issue:

http://www.amerika.org/ – Advocacy Groups

Categorization updates should be available in the next scheduled publication of the database. A new database is published every business day, five days a week, Pacific Standard Time. You should notice any updates referred to in this message within 72 hours.

So if you’ve been seeing this:

You won’t anymore, I think. Unless they also filter advocacy groups. My guess it’s your system administrator’s prerogative and will be unfiltered in most cases. Thanks to Jeff for catching this one!

I get in trouble because I point out that it’s not just the record industry — it’s also the publishing industry and the movie industry.

What do these have in common? They’re entertainment. And also, since the 1980s and even more 1990s, they’ve become democratized. It’s easy for almost anyone to write a book, record an album, or make a movie.

And how well has that turned out for the industry, I ask. Did it make more Hemingways, Beethovens and Hitchcocks, or did it make more of a mid-1980s punk scene, where every fan had a band and none of them are good?

Because if it’s the latter, I tell people, you’re going to run out of money. You need real out of the ballpark smashes to make it in entertainment. You need a handful of names people can know, and buy, and always get quality. That’s how you build an audience.

If everything’s about as good as everything else, they’ll just download it, listen to the radio, or go without. Because there are no keepers. There are no names worth remembering. It’s sort of like a faucet, you turn it on and stuff comes out, and it’s about the same from one day to another, so it just serves a function. It doesn’t, you know, touch your soul or anything.

The usual suspects — hipsters, Democrats, religious fanatics, addicts of dangerous drugs, denial fiends, scenesters and emosexuals — turn on me at this point and say I’m being severe. No, they say. The reason the record industry is in deep doo-doo is file sharing.

O really? I say. Then what about the publishing industry? Everyone downloading their copies of The Lovely Bones now?

Of course they aren’t. Of course the usual suspects are wrong. Of course the most direct (not to be confused with “simplest”) answer is correct:

The industry is declining because it’s pumping out mediocre material.

…[H]ere are a few tidbits of information shared by publicist Ariel Hyatt about U.S. album sales in 2008: More than 115,000 albums were released, but only 110 sold more than 250,000 copies, a mere 1,500 topped 10,000 sales, and fewer than 6,000 cracked the 1,000 barrier — further evidence that sales of recorded music are not the way of the future for artists. Instead, it increasingly appears that recordings will be more like advertisements for opportunities that actually do make money: live performances, merchandise, licensing to movies, commercials and video games, ring tones, etc.

The Chicago Tribune

Yeah, somehow, I don’t think so. If it were that easy, they’d be doing just fine already.

More likely, they’re running into trouble selling their music, movies and books because they have been democratized: there are too many, and they’re too similar.

The 30th American Film Market (AFM) has announced 445 films in 27 languages, including 73 world premieres and 311 market premieres, screening to 8,000-plus film buyers and industry professionals from more than 70 countries.

Indie Wire

It works like this. In the old days, getting a script/book/album out is hard. That filters out most of the crap. Even more, you have editors and A&R guys to filter out more crap. Yeah, sometimes they get delusional with trends, but in general, they filter out most of the goo.

Then those go away.

So now anyone can make a record, book or film… so everyone does.

An upcoming artist looks at this and thinks: you know, whatever movie/book/record I make is going to get lost in the flood. I’m going to business school, getting into performance art, or participating in another type of art to make my name known. Because if I don’t make my name known, I starve.

And that’s the bottom line for artists: everyone you know is telling you you’re a moron for doing it, so you need to avoid starving or they’ll cluck “I told you so!” over your emaciated carcass. Having no ability to immediately separate yourself from the crowd and win on the basis of quality drives away quality artists, leaving the average ones. That means no great big awesome hits but lots of OK-not-great.

There are too many favorites of the day and not enough standouts of a lifetime, and that’s why the music, movie and publishing industries are choking themselves out.

Eating watermelon has a similar effect on the body to Viagra, according to researchers in the US.

It’s down to a chemical called citrulline which is found in the juicy fruit. It helps relax the blood vessels which means blood gets around the body more easily.

The BBC

Again, “science” — in reality, an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people, each trying to make a name for him or herself by “discovering” something others want to know about — has stumbled across an old folk wisdom.

In the Southern part of the United States, pickled watermelon rinds have been a favorite snack for years, but are also known as a folk remedy for underperforming dongs.

More citrulline — about 60 percent — is found in watermelon rind than in the flesh, Patil said, but that can vary.

MSN

Maybe we will someday learn to compile our knowledge, and stop make “science” so official (because it brings us our sainted technology) that it overrides all other forms of knowledge.

Either that or we can keep learning, one factoid-pegged article at a time.

No sane “science” will tell us yea or nay on this one for another fifty years, or indeed ever, since we cannot mathematically isolate this factor, unless we find someone who literally has eaten all food out of tupperware and had no other environmental influences.

So in the meantime, we’re left with instinct and mine is: stick to what has been in use the longest if you want to minimize environmental toxicity.

Amazon, $20.99

Here’s the first part of your solution: pyrex bowls. You can find them at Bed, Bath and Beyond, which although all your hip friends tell you it’s a giant tower of corporate and possibly (gasp) Republican doom, is the best place to buy these things.

The three bowls are reasonably sized: the hugest is a 4 quart bowl that’s about the size of a salad bowl you’d use to serve a party of eight, the middle is a 2.5 quart bowl that is about the size you’d use to marinate a couple steaks for barbecue, and the “smallest” is a 1.5 quart bowl that will fit comfortably a meal for four people that got cooked and then not eaten because pizza arrived that your teenage daughter ordered.

True, the lids are plastic; however, nothing seals better than a flexible substance, so plastic is your option if you want a tight seal. Try not to pack them to the rim, and it won’t touch your food. Seems a reasonable compromise to me.

Amazon, $14.99

Here’s another, this time from what all your urban friends will agree is the world epicenter of Satanic industrial might, Wal-Mart. Although they’re showing the set and don’t list it, you can get the 1 quart flat-bottomed piece for $6, which is a good deal. Flat-bottomed is important: if you have leftovers which need to sit flat, like lasagna or enchiladas, this’ll do it.

Next time someone tells you about how plastics are killing us all, remember a balance between idealism and reality: buy sterile, non-leachy pyrex for your containers, and let the lids be plastic. This is a realistic response and one more thing you can cross off your list of modern terrors.

Yeah, you heard right! Hydra Energetic! Not just merely hydrating, we’re talking several mythological heads of moisture-embedding manliness! In TURBO! This is a moisturizer so energetic and masculine, the effect of applying it is like furiously masturbating while sprinting through a girl’s college dorm wearing an antique diver’s suit filled with lager! Hell yes indeed, it’s moisturizer. For your man face. Not a performance enhancing device for your car, though you may be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

And with a name like Hydra Energetic Turbo Booster, what appearance conscious male could resist? It seems acceptable to buy an effeminate and vain beauty product if it’s got a ludicrously overblown name like an engine part for a Ferrari. If there was a new male eyeliner (it’s known as “guyliner”, apparently) in the shops called Bastard V8 Musclepencil or something, I’m sure truckloads of them would sell, for a while anyway.

To be fair, for all I know this product might do exactly what it says on the tin. That is to say, once you get past all the meaningless hyper-bumpf, it actually moisturizes your skin. In essence, what Loreal are selling you is some liquid chemical that you rub on your face in the vain hope that it’ll make you more attractive to women and at a retail price of $13.25 for a 50ml bottle is probably more expensive than gold. But, it is Turbo and everything, so that’s ok.

Basically, it’s simple business expediency: a product that mainly sells to one audience is pitched to a new market by simply changing the packaging and advertising campaign. The product is not new, but you can dress it up to look new and give it a manlier scent (if that’s not an oxymoron) and colour. Your average man on the street usually wouldn’t dream of buying a “female moisturizer”, but as long as it’s got words like “turbo” and “energetic” on it, he’ll fork out for the exact same product.

It’s rather like how those tiresome teenage emo/goth/nu-metal types “hate” pop music and refuse to listen to it, yet will gladly and enthusiastically consume the very same garbage as long as it’s played with angsty guitars and impotent shouting and wailing over it like a transsexual who’s just been mugged. You can apply this uniquely modern ailment to almost anything – food, clothes, books, movies, even people (see Obama, hipsters etc).

The challenge we face everyday in our society is to get past all the nonsense and see what actually lies behind. That way you can ignore all the useless stuff that tempts you with surface gimmickry but has no real substance, saving yourself a lot of money and more importantly, time. In a world like ours it’s an essential life skill to be able to sniff out bullshit and scams like man moisturizer, Apple products and voting for “change”.

Anyway, next week I’ll be reviewing the new range of Scud Destroyer desert camouflage men’s handbags exclusively designed by ex-SAS hardman Andy McNab. I can’t wait!

“I understand Jane Austen”

It was a very curious thing to write on a toilet door and intrigued, I decided to capture it photographically for further analysis before heading back to the bar.

At first glance it seemed to be merely a bizarre and random piece of pretentious vandalism, perhaps the inebriated and spastic outpourings of some cider sodden student or drug addled hipster.

However it then struck me as being similar to, though less violently vehement than, the “yuppie scum must die” graffiti which Patrick Bateman espies (or himself writes) in Brett Easton-Ellis’ American Psycho – a reflexive and unconscious discharge in sudden horror at the realisation of the hideousness of his surroundings.

It seems to me the author of this particular message was making a desperate and confused appeal to his fellow city dwellers, despairing of the stygian depths in which he believes himself helplessly stranded and powerless against, a rusty cog in the grinding merciless hell of the 21st century world.

Like a delicate flower absurdly sprouting up through miles of festering faeces and commercial plastered concrete, it states with quiet defiance how even in the midst of the baseness and ceaseless mechanised “advancement” of modern life, the author of this graffiti had still managed to cling onto some degree of higher thought.

Why Jane Austen though, I wonder. He could have plumped for Mary Shelley at the very least. Unless “I understand Jane Austen” is some kind of homosexual palare, in which case I may be about to receive some very unusual emails…

So in the name of being open-minded, I tried the “scripture mints” that came my way through interesting channels. On the whole, I have a rule that I will consider anything, but if I figure out it’s based in bad thinking, I bail out and head for the hills, never to return.

My first concern, of course, was the ingredients, because one of the best things our government has done is require manufacturers to list what stuff they’re putting in foodish items:

Sorbitol, Xylitol, Artificial Flavor, Magnesium Stearate and Acesulfame Potassium

O RLY?

What an interesting collection of lab experiments. It’s rare to find real mint oil, even though it’s not expensive, in mass consumer candy; I understand the use of non-sugar sweeteners as well. But add it all up and I’m not feeling super thrilled about people who are cutting costs on a half-ounce of mints.

The taste was not bad, but not distinct, either. Like the Wintermint Lifesavers that use artificial flavor, it’s a one-dimensional “minty” but not mint taste that somehow ends up a lot sweeter than it should. All of the edge, bite and fullness of the taste is gone, but no one would confuse it with chocolate, I guess. Still, I wouldn’t recommend it.

Consistency on the mints was good. In fact, these are some of the better-dissolving mints I have known. These little fish — and who can resist a fish-shaped candy? — stay on the tongue for about ten minutes, slowly losing edges and finally shape until they are like little blurry coffins eroding in your mouth. Good points there.

Crunchiness was not bad either. If you’re really a person on the run, you’re going to crunch your mints and not suck on them. After all, people sucking on tiny things look like they have a forebrain disease. I would say these mints score well on the crunchiness scale because they are crunchy but not too hard, although with the artificial flavor cheesiness, it’s hard to want to crunch them.

I guess my summary here would be: why bother? They’re too small to have scriptures on them. They’re not better than competing mints with better prices. They may work well on the breath, but I wasn’t brave enough to ask anyone for ratings (“Hey, I just ate a pound of onions and had a scripture mint. Want to see if Jesus can hold back the tide of stench?”).

If I were in charge of a modern church, I would focus less on making it an ideological brand than a community identity and center. People crave a community center and a communal sense of togetherness and clarity, of having a purpose to their existence as a group, so they don’t feel that obligation to each other is arbitrary.

People like knowing that their efforts go toward something good. Scripture Mints, like so many mass products ideological and otherwise, may not be it.

However, in this post, I’m going to describe why I detest Apple Computer, Inc. and will not buy any of their products, least of all a Macintosh computer. Ever.

So it looks like my Macbook Pro hates me. My monitor won’t display anything even though the computer is on. I can even log in and turn the volume on and off. I can hear my email sound and everything…but the monitor just doesn’t work.

{ pause for about 24 hours }

So I went in and he went through all the simple resets and tests that I had already gone through and he told me it was the logic board. I asked him to check if it was the NVIDIA defect and he did. Wasn’t that. Either I pay 1200 for him to fix it in store or I pay 300 to send it away. Lame but I guess I have to send it away.

RTTP

This guy bought what’s probably a $1500 laptop and is now getting told that he can’t get it fixed here for a halfway decent price; he has to send it off, where the cost is that it’ll take a month to return. And why has the machine blown out?

The motherboard has failed.

This seems to happen to Apple machines quite a bit. You won’t find much mention of this in the spammy internet, but starting around the time of the Macintosh II, Apple began taking shortcuts with its motherboards. It mounted some directly on the plastic of the case, and with others, used daughterboards in odd configurations, or used sub-standard power supplies.

The result is that Apple computers have been blowing motherboards since 1987.

The company has no incentive to change this because they’ve got their audience on the hook. Apple’s marketing is like a microcosm of modern society: they convince you to buy the product for social reasons, surround you with people who chant blank-eyed about how great it is, and then hook you… if you want to be cool like us, you need to keep buying Apple stuff.

Even back in the 1980s, the Apple fanbase was notoriously dishonest about how much their machines failed, or even how they stacked up poorly compared to other machines. Apple users were even banned on several Houston BBSs because they couldn’t stop telling everyone else how inferior their machines were.

What causes this? First, the ego hook: Apple is the hip company (remember those “1984″ ads?). Second, the price hook: you just paid a lot more for this thing. It better be good! But if it’s not, what are you going to do… lower your social status by admitting you didn’t buy the luxury brand, Apple?

So Mac users buy their machines, take them home, and when the thing blows up, the repair price is usually the same… about 75% of the cost of a new one. What would you do in that case? Of course, you buy the new one, and start the depreciation curve over.

Or if you’re like this poor gent, you sent it off for the $300 repair, and see it again a month later. Back in the 80s, they used to repair machines with refurbed motherboards, which meant they were often back, and then got sent away to be seen a month later. After several months of no computer, that $1200 starts to look cheap.

The MacBook Pro 13″ has a 6bit display. That means it cannot really display millions of color. Yes, on Apple’s website it claims it can “support millions of colors,” but what they don’t tell you is that it does so through a process called “dithering.” Any designer knows what that means. Anyone else: it means the screen will display colors closely in a pattern in order to give you the perception of a blended color.

A few years ago, a few individuals started a class-action lawsuit against Apple for advertising millions of colors with their 6bit displays. Unfortunately, they needed a “class” for a class-action lawsuit, and not enough people cared/noticed. The matter was settled out of court.

You already know I’m a designer, so you know how important color is to me. A 8bit screen such as my 30″ Apple Cinema Display is able to achieve 16.7 million colors. A 6bit MacBook Pro screen? 262,144 thousand colors. That’s roughly 60 times less colors. That means for all of those colors it can’t display, it blends with nearby pixels. This is just embarrassing and unacceptable.

Louie Mantia

They’re able to do this because of the difference between appearance and reality. If they’re able to forge a fake appearance that appears to complement you, and raise your social status, then you’ll like a crack addict do anything to keep it up. That means shouting down others who don’t agree.

Since there are enough of you to cause problems for anyone trying to launch a product, career, or even just have friends, people learn to be quiet. And so the illusion spreads. Just like in our modern time, when we have a decentralized totalitarian state, where sacred dogmas are chanted at each other and those who disagree are seen as the modern untouchables.

It’s a mental control structure that’s hard to shake, isn’t it?