A Farewell to Niceness

I turned 40 last year. Like most men, it was the sort of mile marker that put me into a reflective state. That it occurred during the Covidian chaos and the social media purges only added to this effect. To paraphrase Miyamoto, by the age of 30, though I understood tactics, I did not know strategy. As one ages, the patterns become self-evident.

The pattern of generational epochs, for example. They tend to last about 20 years. When I joined the military, the post-Vietnam era was just coming to a close. The uniforms were olive drab, and the paperwork was still paperwork. I served during the transition to digital – the cagey banning of Furbies from sensitive sites – the introduction of the disruptive pattern ‘relish suits’ – and the increasing mechanization of operations. Today I look at the military, and a whole new style has appeared. The standardization of NOGs, the centurion armour system, and the abandonment of well-polished Black Cadillacs for a tactically coloured combat boot – just as the barracks uniforms had been abandoned in the era before that.

A similar pattern has emerged with political discourse; where once I was an amiable agonist, I’m now half-remembered fever-dream. The current debates center around some new point of contention, but with the same old polarization. Just like with the military technology, the cyclic nature of these debates has become obvious; so what does that say about myself? Was I an actor, or just a leaf carried along with the storm? At the very least, I was operating under a naïve set of assumptions about how the world worked, and the events of the past several years have helped those scales fall from my eyes. The result is a reorientation, and repurposing of the skills and tools I’ve developed, so that they might harmonize in a direction that bears more fruit – and one of the steps is identifying where I went wrong.

Error 1: Cooperation is Penalized

I used to believe in the potential for a democratic win-win scenario; that if one could combine a sound idea with effective rhetoric, two warring sides could learn to cooperate and build a better world. Penn and Teller summed up my old attitude when they said something like: “If we can just convince the gun nuts the the pot heads aren’t so bad, and the pot heads that the gun nuts aren’t so bad – all of a sudden everyone is a libertarian!” It’s a nice idea; the introduction of a new paradigm that satisfies all vested interests, while providing opportunities for further growth. Where it goes wrong is in identifying who is a vested interest.

The West is not at Democracy. Nor a Republic. It isn’t even a Dictatorship. It’s an Oligarchy. Grassroots activism is worse than useless in such a system, it’s actively counter-productive. The Alt Hype explained this in a video back in 2019, when he explored the paper Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizen: popular support of a policy has a negative impact on the likelihood of it being passed. The reason for this was explained by the late AfOR back in 2011; it’s because Game Theory was developed by a paranoid schizophrenic.

So, true game theory states that players who are forced into states of paranoia and distrust will always fuck the other player over given the chance, and will always assume the other players will do the same to them, given the chance, and this will achieve a state of stability, however, if the players are human beings and if they are allowed to co-operate, then they will skew the entire game beyond all recognition off into some entirely new and unpredictable realm.

https://wimminz.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/a-beautiful-mess/

The West is ruled indirectly by a very small number of vested interests, and none of the debates which the people argue over are what they seem to be on the surface. A retrospective on Gamergate sums this up: back in 2014, most of the people involved (including myself) thought it was about a new industry showing record profits being beset by grievance-monger parasites who were simply looking for a payday. The reality was far more drastic: ‘Gamification’ as a social technology had matured to the point where DARPA and Big Education were deeply interested in it (Extra Credits had some excellent videos on this topic). But before it could be expanded to society as a whole, its status as ‘masculine hobby’ needed to be destroyed. Gaming needed to be perceived as being for everyone – thus, the slew of “Gamers are Dead” articles. In the same way that blockbuster films are culturally bleached to appeal to the international market, video games needed to have their lifestyle cachet homogenized so that everyone could be trained to think like a gambler.

Gamergate thought it was defending video games from feminist colonizers; in actual fact it was fighting against not only DARPA, but also the Triple-A studios themselves, who would have been brought on board long before the controversy made itself apparent on our level. Or to put it another way – the game was rigged from the start.

Social atomization serves the interests of an Oligarchy; organic, grass-roots organizations threaten it. It doesn’t matter how ingenious your new political paradigm is – there is a war in heaven, and if you aren’t serving one of the gods, then you’re just a speed bump for them to flatten.

Error 2: The Masses Love Their Opiates

Politics isn’t about politics, it’s about entertainment, and anybody who tries to do actual politics is being rude and belligerent.

This is true in a top-down sense, as a result of what I described in Error 1; but it’s also true in a bottom-up sense. It has become abundantly clear over the past two years that the NPCs like it this way. They put on political outfits and cheer for their side in a manner no different than a sportsball fan – the tragedy is that, unlike sportsball, the results of their cheering have real-world consequences.

As society approaches the leftist singularity, the contradictions within the system grow increasingly hard to ignore. 20 years ago the War on Terror violated international law, and shredded our rights and freedoms at home, but the effects were easy to ignore. “You’ve got nothing to fear if you’ve done nothing wrong, and I’m pretty sure that Saddam guy had something to do with 9/11.” With the past two years of the Covidian Chaos, the effects are traumatic, and the hypocrisy obvious. This has led many to erroneously believe that there will be some sort of Great Awakening where the NPCs finally wake up to reality.

The NPCs are not interested in waking up.

The great revelation of “With, Not Of, Covid” created a glitch in the Matrix that shocked them to their core; for a moment it looked like they were going to wake up… but then the New Thing in the Ukraine started, and they immediately forgot about everything that happened over the past two years, leaving many of us frustrated and confused. To explain what happened, let’s consider fans of the WWE Professional Wrestling league.

Imagine that the news suddenly broke that everybody’s favourite Face was actually a Heel. It turns out that in his spare time, Hulk Hogan was going out at night and beating up nuns. All of the WWE fans in your life are shocked, they start tearing down their posters of him – you think they might finally be ready for a discussion about real athletic competition, and what an icon of masculine heroism ought to be…

Instead, they put up a poster of Jake the Snake.

As Mad Magazine once quipped, “Nobody calls ballet fake just because it’s well choreographed!” Your insistence on pointing out the kayfabe is horrifically gauche.

The Lines are Finally Clear

One of the great silver linings of the past two years is that it’s become abundantly clear who is thinking for themselves, and who is wilfully immersing themselves in the illusions of the demiurge. Who it is that we can build meaningful relationships and community with – and who is worshipping power, conformity, and the god of this world. It’s Manichean. The spiritual issues bankrupting the West have finally manifested themselves into a physical sacrament of despoilment. The damage is already done. No refunds. The controllers are spiralling themselves and their followers into a crash, and nothing we say or do is going to stop it. It’s up to us to step out of the way, and allow them to plunge face-first into Sheol.

There is no need to throw pearls before swine; to stand between the sinner and his sin. Like trying to save a man who’s drowning, you’re just going to get pulled down with him if you try and argue.

As I sit back, and take on the role of observer (a role forecasted by the serendipitous naming of this site) I can occasionally see the supernatural struggle being waged for their souls. One force acting through childhood memories, to pull them upwards; another, affirming their Thumos whenever they participate in the latest Two Minute Hate. The time for argument is long past, however – nothing you or I say will have any bearing on how they turn out. Repentance is always possible, but it’s up to them to choose it.

Thus, the title of this piece; “A Farewell to Niceness”. Nice – ne scire – know nothing. They don’t want to know the truth, they want to live in the lie. The consequences of this are dire, but it’s the reality they want to inhabit. The metaphysics of Free Will explain how choosing the Good isn’t meaningful if the choice is forced; likewise, if a spirit chooses to go against the Good, they have the fundamental right to suffer the consequences of that decision. They have the right to live their lies. We have the freedom to move on.

The Great Awakening is indeed happening. It just doesn’t involve as many people as we might like. The path forward involves disengagement and integration, not fractious identification. Preparation for the conflagration that clears the land for new growth.

Ascend, brother, ascend!