Author: Metabroh

The mountains worth climbing are for the most part in your mind.

I can write 1,000 words breaking modernity down and setting up definitions, but what does Modernity actually look like in the field? Let’s turn away from the abstract to the concrete – it’ll be easier to grok.   That said, here are some examples (signs and symptoms, if you will) of peak Modernity:

1. People watching other people play video games and vlogs. Celebrity culture in general.

Especially the non-informative ones. If they’re just vapid know-nothings who have nothing to teach you, why are you spending time caring what they do? Your time and attention is a precious non-renewable resource and you’re frittering it away to satisfy someone’s narcissism. I am convinced that when a society allows its members to become famous on the basis of being famous, rather than for some notable accomplishment or display of excellence/heroism/virtuosity, that society is not long for the world. Think!

2. Aimless Travel.

People say they travel to find themselves but that’s nonsense.   You find yourself by going within. Or by throwing yourself against a challenging task. A change in scenery won’t do that for you.   Most people travel because it’s simply what modern people do. A century of advertising and affordable flight has created warped expectations.   Travel is portrayed as desirable just… because… it is. It’s what well-adjusted and attractive and prosperous people do. Therefore you must travel to be considered one of these people. You don’t want to be seen as some ignorant yokel who’s never left his home country, riiiiight?   Consider that the average person today can affordably travel further and wider than a king of antiquity and you begin to see what I mean. But then…

• How many travellers return inspired from a trip to the Serengeti and write the next great novel?
• Does one need to climb the steps of Borobodur or study at an ashram in Ladakh to arrive at a new insight in religion/philosophy?
• To what extent do people return home from a tour convinced that they must change their lives for the better?

No, no, and no. The self is created, not picked up like some cheap souvenir from a roadside store in Ho Chi Minh.   The mountains worth climbing are for the most part in your mind.

3. High Engagement in Ideology and Politics.

One unspoken assumption in Modernity is that nobody questions the nature of the state, or their role as members in a polity. Being bereft of a true personality, they feel insecure, thus they cast about them for an identity and find it in affiliating themselves with things like brands, lifestyles, diets, gender, sexual orientation, and politics.   In every sane society prior to the 20th century, this would have been seen as delusional. Greater apathy towards politics equals greater satisfaction in life. The problem with demotism as it is currently practiced is that it makes individuals vastly overestimate how much they should care, or how much they should be involved. When everyone is bamboozled into thinking that their individual voice/vote counts, people get ridiculous notions of grandeur, imagining that each and every one can be the captain of the ship of state.   This is patently false.

4. Generalised Anomie. Proliferation of People Saying “That’s life.”

There is in the Modern phase of a culture a drastic rise in the psychological type some have referred to as the soy boy – the bugman. Better writers than me have written countless words on this phenomenon. And before you ask, yes, the term refers to females as well as males. It is a state of being and way of life, not merely a biological descriptor.   I venture that in addition to all the identifiable traits, there are many people today who maintain a bizarre outlook on life which allows them to absolve themselves of responsibility for their situation in life.   These types will whine and complain about injustice, or some perceived external party or factor that is “keeping them down”, or discriminating against them. You may meet such a dude and he will blame his lack of health, wealth, and excellence in life on ten thousand things from the sun to the moon and never once consider that he is the architect of his misfortune. Here’s something you can say to him:

It’s not Life, you’re just stupid.   You are unhappy because you have spent your entire life within the psychic and material confines of a profoundly anti-human idea-structure that we call modern civilisation.   Your work has no meaning, your food is designed to kill you, you no longer know the feeling of pure and total exhaustion that your body craves, your mind is filled with the useless self-referential jibber-jabber (pundits call it “analysis”) of the 24 hour news cycle, you perk yourself up with coffee because you don’t sleep enough, and you come down with booze or cigarettes or weed because you have lost the ability to meditate and breathe back into a state of calm.   These are all distractions from the pit of empty horror that is life in 2021 and you shrug and say “that’s life.”   As if no other way of living were possible.

Your ancestors faced worse odds than you ever will. Than you can ever even know. These humble men and women did not complain. They did not take it lying down. They grit their teeth and put in the work and badabing, badaboom, here you are. To abdicate responsibility and ownership over your own life and adopt a passive attitude is to dance on their ashes and spit on their graves.

5. Cognitive Dissonance. Double Standards.

Isn’t it curious… that… a lot of the people who claim to champion the environment (climate change activists, vegans, the World Economic Forum) have no desire to cut back their standard of living?

Five minutes after haranguing you for eating red meat and not doing your part to cut down on plastic, these types get back in the limo to the next speech and fly (often on private jets) around the world and source the ingredients for their vegan smoothies from 10 different countries.   Very often they endorse or advertise products made using resources extracted by eight year old miners in the Congo, assembled in a nation notorious for ethnic cleansing and cultural erasure, produced in factories where working conditions are so grotesque that safety nets have to be installed because people keep jumping falling off rooftops.

If it is as you say, where is your willingness to put your values in action?   I am perfectly happy to consider cutting down my carbon footprint if you lead by example. Sell your car. Give up your ten-bedroom house and live in a cabin. Liquidate your stock portfolio and give to the poor. Traveling by boat and train instead of airplane is the only way to be an environmental activist without being an absolute fucking hypocrite.   These types are particularly perfidious for they made their money climbing up a ladder made of cheap energy and environmental degradation and resource drawdown. Having achieved a place at the top, they seek to toss away that ladder, condemning the rest of the world to a life of mediocrity and energy serfdom.

This is not a coincidence and in case you weren’t aware of it, now you are.

Listen: There is a club of people rich enough to own the world. At least, they’re convinced they ought to own it and make the rules. It’s an exclusive club, and they really, really don’t want any more people joining it.

If you’re reading this, that includes you.

You know a society has entered a phase of decline when elites and leaders can flagrantly flout their own rules and standards while expecting the commoners to obediently comply. When kings are not bound by the law of the land, it is not the people who rule. Only anarchy can reign.   Anarchy is the cruelest form of tyrant.