You may notice that patterns repeat because people choose the same ideas in response to the same problems. It is as if we are wired with a bad idea generator, but really, these ideas just reflect mental laziness and the desire for easy solutions.
Even more you may notice that humans think of themselves first. When you present a problem to a group, everyone comes up with their own answers in order to stand out as individuals. They want to be seen as leaders, not have working ideas.
When you take the hours and days of time required, you will find that these ideas are variations on the same few notions, and therefore succumb to the problems of those notions. In other words, all but a few will be totally wrong.
Humans have this assumption that if you take a very basic idea, such as socialism, and add some variations or complications, somehow you have a new idea. In fact, you get the same failure as before because the core is unchanged.
That is to say, the flow of information through the system remains the same. Socialism like liberalization distributes power and wealth, therefore paralyzing the system and condemning it to slow death.
People encourage such systems and endless variants of the above simply because they know that others want this. That lets the person who recommends it seize power, and by definition, those who crave power have no idea how to wield it.
In fact, we can separate human ideas into two groups: those which target human emotional appeal, and those which aim for realistic (but imperfect) solutions regardless of the opinions of the herd.
Your best leaders are those who stick to the realistic and find a way to gradually improve it, bumping up the level of quality of life-experience instead of trying to eliminate all of the things that people fear.
Anyone who tells you that they have one idea which solves all problems is by definition insane. However, this is with a few exceptions exactly what you get from a human group, ideas which appeal by being oversimplifications.
The Right may be the worst for this because we emphasize seeing people as individuals not fungible parts of a crowd. Our tolerance for individual expression means that we end up supporting popular lies and deflections.
Almost all of those consist of justifications for personally doing nothing by the person offering them. Waiting for the great race war, for example, lets the person speaking excuse their own inaction by claiming it is in fact a higher good.
Another Right-wing lie, promoted mostly by the grifters who exist to sell advertising, is the idea of “think locally.” In other words, stop worrying about your government — it is toast — and just set up a nice life for yourself.
The gods must laugh at that one! After all, this is what conservatives have done for generations, in the process ceding all power to the Left, who although incorrect offers civilization-wide solutions.
We hear a lot these days about the “parallel economy,” Benedict option, cottagecore and other forms of compensatory behavior. If you cannot fix the problem, apply a palliative cure so you feel good as you wait for death.
Most of this is pushed by grifters who recognize that the armchair audience is huge. Convincing you to start a garden or even move to a rural area is safe. You will do nothing, but you will keep watching.
Even more, since you have sunk time and energy into the process, you will become another voice defending the cop-out. You will speak up for how whatever non-activity is the only right path.
Some of these armchair activitists want “race war.” Translation: do nothing, and wait for race war. Others want a parallel economy. Translation: do nothing, but buy lots of quirky unnecessary stuff from Right-wing companies.
Do we have to revisit the Black Rifle Coffee Company? People paid four times the market rate for some overrated coffee in the mistaken notion that they were “doing something” about “the problem.” Doing what, other than buying dreck?
The slogan think locally really means “do nothing except what you were doing.” Maybe plant a garden, but keep going to your job, paying those taxes, and waiting for someone else to change something someday.
Conservatives have drugged themselves on this nonsense for decades. It never leads to anything except constant book, advertising, podcast, and coffee sales. It makes grifters take over the Right because we have signaled that we are weak.
All of these dodges serve as a way of avoiding the obvious, which is that we need to recapture our political system, eject the Left, and restructure so that these lunatics cannot stage another worker’s revolution ever again.
You either face that, or you are dodging the obvious task, which is another way of saying that you have found some rationalization, excuse, or justification for doing nothing in the face of the greatest crisis of our species.
Not surprisingly, they do not tell you that on YouTube videos or podcasts. No one makes any money when we have a clear answer. But in a tumult of contradictory responses, we can all do nothing and profit from it.
Tags: benedict option, cottagecore, grifters, parallel economy, think local