RetroFedWhat-pilled am I?
So what is it when you see society as a series of interlocking systems and institutions whose primary mission is to perpetuate those systems and institutions, often in cruel and inhuman ways, but almost always subtly, barely perceivable by those who are enslaved by the ideology of those systems? (Edit: I’m not entirely totalatarian/bleak about this; there is room for human connection even in a gulag.)
I think it starts with birth, when our parents decide to have children for their own ends. Then we are assigned a role inside that family system–savior, scapegoat, healer, mediator, surrogate parent, etc. We are taught how to see the world, to see relationships, in ways that benefit the family system. It’s not abuse, it’s love. We are taught to shut down, to not listen to our own voices, because to be independent, to see that the family system is there to serve itself and not you, the child, is emotionally- and maybe life-threatening.
Then it continues in school. In the most pessimistic systems, teachers–whatever there original desires to teach were–are there to fulfill metrics, and those that meet metrics are rewarded, and those that do not are punished. Your role isn´t to learn about who you are, or to develop as a human, but to fulfill the metrics the teachers have. Teachers who take time to learn about you or foster your growth as an individual are eventually weeded out.
Then maybe you go to work, maybe professional work. Your first job is to make your employer feel good about themselves and make them look good to THEIR superiors. If you are in a profession, your other role is to affirm the legitimacy of the profession. You are never to acknowledge that the system is corrupt, that the institution is there primarily to serve itself.
Then in our personal lives, in need of companionship, we make an arrangement with someone else: “I’ll be who you want me to be if you be who I want you to be.” And when this fails to satisfy us, we decide to have children, and the process continues.
I don’t have much hope. Yes, I do think a French-style revolution will somewhat reset the clock on capitalist exploitation, but ultimately, this is just HUMAN behavior. As long as we live in a society, we will create systems and institutions, and we will sacrifice our individuality to gain the protection of those systems and institutions. It is a cycle only escapable only by a few individuals, and at great cost.
So what is this called?
I’ll drop my personal experiences in a comment below because I’ve already shared the highlights before.
Share on Mastodon
Share on Reddit
Share on WhatsAppANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86
If you spend too much time paying attention to the sociological systems that organize our civilization, you will only become miserable.
Humanity, at scale, is a pretty terrible thing. It is because the exceptionally cruel, or selfish or greedy are rewarded rather than punished.
It’s perversely absurd that humans could learn how to both split and fuse the atom, but cant seem to figure out how to deal with exploitation
Yeah, well, being forced to work a minimum wage job instead of the field I trained for sort of does force you to think about some things with regularity. I’m just now starting to let that go. I’ll be happy to think about it less in the future.
I think you do benefit from keeping an awareness for it, but really that just comes in the form of understanding the futility of being able to change it from an individual’s position. Best to accept it if you don’t want to be driven insane.
Find the things you can enjoy in life and maximize your attention on those things so that you can tolerate the intolerable realities of society.
You gotta pick which fucks to give… godspeed to anyone willing to make the sacrifices required to upset the applecart.
It’s harder to see white surpremacy as a white person, just as it’s harder to see the systems when you are benefiting from.
My story is this: I trained as social worker/therapist, then fell into a “bipolar depression” and lived off disability for almost a decade of my life. In the past several years, I’ve:
So here is what has finally x-pilled me: I have the credentials to be a therapist and social worker. I have the LIFE experience of “beating” both the depression and getting back on my feet financially after “disability”. Yet here are jobs I can barely get interviews for, much less employment as:
a) therapist b) social worker c) job coach for people on disability.
IF the system were designed to help people, my experience would be at least getting me interviews. Someone with credentials AND life experience? Wow! And he speaks a much-in-need foreign language? That sound amazing! Definitely give that guy a call! Instead, I’m taking your orders at the local drive through.
Keep in mind people can’t tell I’m an x-pilled lunatic from my cover letter. I just mention my history. So here is what I think the problem is:
The system is set up to reward people who OBEY. If you are a social worker starting at an agency, you’re supposed to be fresh out of college, with no life experiences that could challenge the narrative. I have fallen out of that system, and I think implicitly–even if they don´t say so–they see me as a threat to that system, or at least they see themselves as primarily giving jobs to the “right"people, obedient people.
There is a movement to incorporate people with “life experience” into mental health treatment, but they are carefully gated off from ever participating or advancing fully in the profession; they are ghettoized in dead-end position. What they really want are house quislings, people with nominal experience but not with so much experience that they’ve actually suffered harm or being able to form cogent criticism. For instance, a place that is looking for “lived experience” but simultaneously skip my application for gaps in employment.
Anyway, that’s my personal perspective on it.
I’m sympathetic to many parts of the despair you shared. As for naming it as a whole:
Gnosticism? (Belief in a malevolent deity…)
Nihilism?
Fatalism?
Misanthropy?
As you said, though, “there is room for human connection even in a gulag”. Positives can be found in life. Look for the good bits. Play to your strengths. Help others when possible. Maybe look for charities or state agencies that can help you with the job-hunt? Stay healthy.
It is strange the paths we follow. I was interested in Gnosticism last year, not because I believe it, but because it made sense. Tell me that God is all powerful, all knowing, and all good, and I’ll just say that makes no fucking sense at all. Tell me that God created the world for us to suffer so He can harvest our spiritual energy, and, like, yeah, that tracks. (I think Prison Planet Theory was my gateway, so i might be getting things mixed up).
I think I’m on board with everything except, to an abstract degree, misanthropy. I do my best to give everyone the same grace I´d want them to give me, but, at the end of the day, in the abstract, I don´t think humanity is ever going to be different than it is–in the aggregate–and that it therefore wouldn´t be worth saving. The Universe can just, you know, not know itself and everything will be fine until the octopuses evolve.
That was a good read, your post succinctly describes the thoughts and feelings I’ve been struggling with over the years. There must be something we’re missing about the inherent human need to be ‘connected’ and why so many of us go to extreme lengths to create, maintain and expand these systems of order.
Somewhere, I was reading a criticism of the quote
Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to say, “Beaars are meant to live in apartment buildings, but everywhere, they are outside!” Or “Fish are meant to fly, but everywhere they are underwater!”
Obviously, if man is everwhere is in chains, then he is MEANT to be in chains as part of human naure. And while there may be bears living in abandoned apartment buildings, or maybe as pets in Qatar, they are the exceptions, the outliers.
I don’t know what the mechanisms are, exactly, but the human need to cooperate and live inside a society is surely part of it. Needing groups, groups will take on a life of their own. We also crave meaning and connection, two things that groups and group-supporting-ideology can provide.
Anyway, yeah, welcome Prison Planet.
I think my autism makes me an anarchist. Not sure if that feels like the right “title” for yourself. I’m not sure that labels for this are helpful in general. On this site I am a “tankie” even though I am not a Marxist Leninist but the people who call others that don’t really care if it’s accurate or not.
I don’t really love that this is the way I am. I just spent all day trying to convince americans that their enemy is the state not their fellow working class people instead of searching archives for historical photos as I planned lol. I can’t really help it.
I have a lot of hope but people in North America (and beyond, but let’s keep it simple) need to get over the fear of investigating their place in upholding these unjust systems. You mention white privilege. Having white privilege does not make you a bad person. People think they are being asked to feel shame for being white. It’s not remotely true. Shame is such an awful roadblock. In addition to anarchy I think abolitionist principles are really key to being able to look beyond shame and move past those roadblocks to organize for a better world.
Totally off topic but I used to invite people over to “watch movies” (if you know what I mean…) and it would always be They Live. I thought it was funny. I still do. But I’m old and monogamous now so those days are over.
I got into anarchism briefly as privileged white teenager and it kind of has a halo of shame around it. Like Marx, I think there’s valid criticism of the system, but the solutions seem questionable. I guess the problem is how do you free peoples minds when, for the most part, its much easier to accept the dominant ideology and rejecting it comes at such a high cost. Revolutions happen only when people are pushed into situations they can literally not survive.
Ever do any research on collectives of homeless people? That’s some interesting shit, politically speaking. I haven´t heard more than a passing podcast about it, though.
It’s not at all off-topic. I actually added a photo from They Live a few minutes after I posted! Maybe it didn´t arrive to your instance. I don´t know what you mean by inviting people over to “watch movies.” I’d invite people over to “watch movies” and I´d show them the Battlestar Galactica mini-series and I´d want to tell them about how BSG is implicitly a critique of Star Trek, from everything from social systems, to technology, to camera angles, but usually they´d want to fuck before we even got to Ragnar Anchorage. People are disappointing.
Makes me so grateful to have a girlfriend that excitedly asks to watch BSG with me. (Although I’m looking forward to being done with the new caprica arcs)
So here’s the thing: if you say anarchy to most people they have literally no clue what that means and associate it with riots and oppositional defiance. That’s intentional, of course. Because the idea of people working together without the threat from power is terrifying. What if people cooperated instead of being coerced to serve capital? Madness!
The common argument is that no one will do the hard or dirty jobs but that’s also not grounded in reality. It’s easy to ignore that people love contributing to the collective good and solving problems if you have never been an “unskilled” or “blue collar” worker or talked to them. If you take away the coercion of wage labour and lack of health and safety caused by the drive to cut expenses I can assure you that you will find people who enjoy and excel at any task imaginable.
You don’t need to call it anarchy and it isn’t all or nothing. I do my best to live my life according to my principles. Some examples: I’m an engineer. I do well at my job because I reject the hierarchy of engineers over operators or builders. I understand we are all part of a whole with the same goals and we all bring important skills, knowledge and experience. I don’t tell people I care about what a maintenance helper thinks because I am an anarchist. It just makes sense to gather everyone’s thoughts when solving problems. I garden and share my harvest with my community because I reject individualism. I volunteer to mentor young engineers and listen to their struggles and worries because it’s the right thing to do and I gain nothing by gate keeping. Media is full of maternal figures who make room at the table for kids who might not eat enough at home. The idea of “it takes a village” to raise a child. All of that is rejection of coercive control but it’s not a young man with a spiky mohawk so it doesn’t count?
Comrade, I’ve been poor. Does research include engaging in mutual aid with other poor people including the unhoused? Maybe I’m taking this too literally.
I saw the image which is why I mentioned it 🤭
Yes, I’ll admit I don’t really understad what anarchism is. I’m embarassed by it not because of Mohawks, but because if its incarnation in me as more radical libertarianism. I did do my due diligence–I read V for Vendetta cover to cover several times, and all I’ll learned is that even V didn’t know what the hell was or how to make it happen. “This isn’t anarchy, Evey, it’s chaos.”
So it’s just people working together absent coercion?
I just watching Office Space and they had that discussion of “what would you do with a million dollars?” and Michael Bolton (no relation) says “That’s a stupid question, if everyone had a million dollars, nobody would be a janitor.”
I really love my job at fast food. Everybody’s on a team working together to reach a goal and that’s a lot of fun–I think you may have replied to that topic. I might do it for free if I didn’t need to work for money. Ironically, the only thing that makes me not willing to do it for free is the MANAGER, who is just awful. Or maybe not ironically. Maybe management is there to make sure they are extracting every last bit of profit from you, so it makes perfect sense she’s the only reason I wouldn’t like my job.
No, you took it exactly as literally as I intended it. I keep looking for “mutual aid”, but all I’ve found are big agencies who’ve co-opted the phrase. Part of the issue with society now is everything needs a website and an SEO to be found, and then it’ll be found first by scammers….
But the question about homeless people is sort of a where-the-rubber-meets-the-road situation of organization. The problem, of course, is that homeless groups are not recognized and their ecampments are raised and tents maliciosly slashed and property maliciously seized. There ARE formal acknowledgments of sovereignty in some rare instances.
I haven’t been truly poor yet, my parents have always been there to bail me out, but I don’t hold a lot of hope for my future. I’m thinking my next vehicle is going to be a hybrid mini-van I can live out of if need be, but I don’t know how I’m going to afford one.
I get the feeling my light hearted tone came across as mocking or snarky so please accept my apology if that is the case.
One of the pitfalls (again, by design!) is that complex things are not served by imprecise labels. We are discouraged from understanding each other and instead sorted into teams. The world is framed as a series of debates that can be won. There is no winning an argument about how to care for each other!
This is a problem we need to work on together. I am not saying this to suggest I have some wisdom others don’t. I am likely failing at upholding this value without knowing it because of the complexity and diversity of how individuals experience the world and how they express these experiences. I depend on my comrades to call me out when I fail. It’s a lot to ask someone to tell you when you fuck up but I feel like autistic people might be in the unique position to understand the value. It takes trust and care to make a space this can happen and to not make it a disproportionate burden to the marginalized.
I feel like I need to add a clarification: understanding each other means receiving the information a person is trying to share with you as they intend for it to be received instead of framing it according to ones own world view and interpretation. When I say that we need to understand each other instead of focusing on dogma people respond with concepts like the Paradox of Tolerance but I think the disconnect is the different meanings of the word understanding and they are stretching what I am saying into something it’s not.
I will explain with an cheeky example because I am so bored about talking about fascists: Lets say someone introduces themselves as a Marxist. An unhelpful gut reaction I have is that they buy in to the idea of the lumpenproletariat in a specific, narrow way that I find harmful. Instead of being like “they must be ableist, I will ignore them”, I will try to get to know them and understand them in the context of the bounds of our relationship. I’m not going to interrogate them on the subject. I don’t see a way that can be done that isn’t an attempt to shame them or placing myself above them. They gave me a simplified description of their philosophy, they didn’t say they take the writings of a wealthy dead white guy from almost 200 years ago and apply it as a literal road map to how the current world should be approached.
If what we are collaborating on includes the potential to do harm to others because they think the lumpen are worthless and a danger then yeah, we need to talk about it and clarify goals. If the example is Food not Bombs maybe collectively we agree this person isn’t the right person to be distributing the food to people as they come up because of the risk of making someone feel unwelcome. But it doesn’t mean they can’t be involved so long as we have the common goal of freely distributing vegan food. This discussion about roles and goals isn’t public and isn’t thrust upon unwilling people who will feel unsafe hearing it. I’m not “tolerating” the expression of ideas that harm others, I’m ensuring I understand if this person has ideas (biases?) that can harm others instead of assuming it from incomplete information. I don’t think it’s possible to be an anarchist without applying abolitionist principles to your daily life because the focus has to be on how we can care for each other versus who is “bad”.
Wow that was a lot of preface to reply to your questions 😅
The way I phrased it was sloppy. I just meant to say that society praises some forms of ignoring hierarchy (i.e. sharing) versus others (hair cuts people don’t like).
I struggle with the label of libertarianism. Depending on who you are talking to they might use that word instead of anarchy and have the same world view as I do, or they could mean that they get sad when capitalists are asked to fund social programs.
I find your anecdote very charming and illustrative! I would not have thought of that book as being a representation of anarchist thought. I will admit I only saw the movie and didn’t read the book because I had a visceral reaction to the whole “I tortured you to free your mind” thing. It is paternalistic and coercive and I don’t see it defendable as an anarchist action. Maybe I missed the authors point and it’s not intended to be seen as a good thing.
If I was going to recommend a book to people it would be The Conquest of Bread. More wealthy dead white guys from the 1800s lol! The utility of a book by someone like that is that it is a bit easier for privileged white people to make the connections because it is directly addressing a lot of the concepts that are used to defend individualistic capitalism. It’s not a manual, it’s an exploration of ideas at a time of great social change. It reflects one persons views in the context of the world as they experience it.
Maybe we can take a step back from that? Let’s say anarchy is the rejection of arbitrary and harmful hierarchy. I know I brought up coercive control but I think that is limiting to focus on. How people perceive hierarchy and how they apply the rejection of it to any number of situations is highly variable. Some concrete examples: think speciesism is an arbitrary and harmful hierarchy because it is used to permit and justify treating animals as commodities but the Hierarchy of Controls , while totally arbitrary is more of an agreed upon way of prioritizing approaches to safety. People can agree to use the hierarchy of controls but animals cannot agree to being commodified, if that makes sense?
I agree with your analysis. The problem is the threat that we must do what serves capital or we will be without our material needs. It’s hard to talk about this with people who are so worn down that they really do need a year or two of zero expectations and demands on them before they can start to think about what they enjoy doing. If you add on the way certain work is considered so worthless it is not compensated (like childcare, household management) it’s easy to understand why people see it as impossible. Engaging with anarchy needs room for creativity digging into concepts and words that have different meaning for different people.
I’m not sure if this is asking me to explain the concept so I am going to err on the side of doing it. Kropotkin presents mutual aid as the opposite to the idea of “survival of the fittest”. Charity and philanthropy is not mutual aid.
Okay, I think I understand. I have heard the term “informal economy” used to describe ways people who are excluded from participating in the dominant society address their needs. I don’t like the term but I use it to answer your question with yes 😊 While I never lived in an encampment my personal experiences with surviving in the margins and comradeship with others who have had similar challenges have given me first and second hand experience with the topic. I continue to work towards finding “informal” solutions to reduce barriers.
I am sorry to hear about your worries and hope for a happy future for you.
There surely must be a BEST way to care for each other, though? I think my way of caring about other is clearly superior to your way. /s
I’m not a my-team/your-team type person, or, at least, I want the broadest “team” possible, starkly contrasted. For instance, I used to go to an open mic at an LGBTQ coffee house. I thought being a leftist minority with an interesting personal history would be enough to get me “in”, but despite my best efforts, I couldn’t be accepted, probaby because I was too old for most of the 20-somethings. I personally feel a kinship with anyone who has been excluded, but it seems like most people don’t identify with anyone who hasn’t been excluded for the same reason. “What we learn from being excluded by others for who we are is to form our own group to exclude others for not being exactly like us.” I think I’ve shared that with you before (?) but I low-key hate humanity now.
I used to be very defensive about criticism, but now I crave it; largely because I can (better) consider criticism without taking it to be devaluing my humanity. I’m playing some songs tonight, and I’m curious what other musicians think, but I’m very happy with what I’ve done, so I would be looking at their criticisms as, “What could I do to improve this?” and not “I suck and everyone hates me.”
But, and again I’m sorry to retread things with you if we’ve already discussed it before, but my willingness to critique was a fatal liability in my last job.
Your lumpenprole-believer is a bit of a funny example; I’m sure those guys are out there. Terry Pratchett has a delightlful takedown of a certain brand of communist revolutionary who has absolute contempt for the people they are trying to “liberate.” I think maybe a more interesting example would be the type of person that thinks killing villagers to terrorize them into supporting the revolution would be a more apt test of your tolerance.
I think the problem with V is that what he really is a combination of Nietzschean Superman and avenging spirit, and the anarchy is just sort of tacked on… But there doesn’t seem to be very many good guides to Anarchism–maybe because it’s more of an approach than a program? I’ll have a look at your book. But I do remember the anarchists at the turn of the century, I learned about them in highschool, but they never really taught us what they believed–which is a curious oversight, no?
Re: Mutual aid. I know what it is, and I also social welfare agencies love to get on bandwagons, so they’ll reframe a clothing drive as “mutual aid” when there’s really nothing mutual about it.
I’m going to dig around to see if I can find that podcast I was listening to. Check for edits.
Edit: Check out this podcast: Understanding Homelessness Podcast https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/understanding-homelessness-podcast/6502775 via @PodcastAddict
Episode 6, I think, is the one that talks about organizing groups for self determination.
<3 10/10, flawless.
Have you read any Marxist literature? Even if you don’t follow the ideas beyond a criticism of capitalism I think you’d benefit from being able to see through a lense of historical and dialectical materialism.
You definitely have some unaddressed contradictions. An appeal to “Human nature” being the obvious one. An unsatisfactory answer, personally for me, that is about as helpful as “God did it”.
Most of what you are talking about are structures of hierarchy within a patriarchal, white supremacist, class system. These are very much not “human nature” and have not existed for most of humans evolutionary history.
I haven´t read Marx directly, but I know what his ideas are.
As far as “inevitability” goes, I’m saying systems and institutions are part of human nature and we build them without thinking about them, and we likewise serve them without thought. What forms those systems take is a result of culture and history, sure, but they will always be there to some extent.
And what is the difference between something being inevitable, and something giving a huge evolutionary advantage to one society over another? Even if you could somehow eliminate white supremacy, and patriarchy, and all that, what’s to say that something equally totalitarian and tyrannical wouldn’t spring up in its place? The inevitability is that shitty systems that enslave people are GOOD for crop yields to feed armies to invade free people who might just grow enough for themselves and spend the rest of their time fucking around and enjoying life.
Has that, you know, ever occurred to you, man?
This sentence tells me you need to read Marx or modern day Marxist literature for yourself. You likely have a major misconception of what Marx wrote or Marxist that expanded it. Dialectical and Historical materialist thought are the people “thinking about” the things you’re saying people aren’t talking about.
There is significantly more to Marxism than a criticism of capitalism. Marx and Engels develop Historical materialism to analyze and explain how and why systems develop. This includes feudal and prehistoric ways in which humans organize themselves into class structures and structures of government.
A lot of what you’re saying people don’t think has been described and thought about by Marxist for centuries.
Convergently Marx-pilled, then?
Where do I say that “people don’t think” about this? I’m not saying i invented it; I’m probably just regurgitating half-digested strands of thought I’ve collected around my travels; I’m just wondering what to call it. For instance, I’m guessing the critiques of “great men” history are largely informed by what you’re talking about.
I’m also not sure where you’re disagreeing with me. You say Marx talks about prehistoric class structures, etc., which certainly doesn´t contradict my comment than humans create and serve systems wherever they go.
I maybe misunderstood what you meant by “not thinking about them”. But, yes, it sounds like you should take a dive into historical materialism.
Oh, I see, yes, I mean people instictively do all kinds of things outside of their conscious awareness, like building their identity around opposition to or difference from others (guilty). Not that some people aren’t going to notice, but it would take the awareness of an unlikely number of people to change things.
I completely agree humans build these systems specifically with self interest in mind
The way i learned to live with it is to aim for creating leverage and renting it for a change in the system that strips the self gaining aspects from it
If i can’t get leverage like that i just avoid the system and if i can’t or already part of it i resist it every chance i get, systems are upheld cause they’re efficient, and they’re efficient because i allow them to be
Obviously all of this comes at the cost of your own self gain before anyone else’s so coming to terms that your purpose in life is just to fix the world, that’s the first crack in the system, you’d never do it willingly the system has to engineer your failure first
This makes you enemy of so many people because all communities are systems of self interest so even if you wanted to you’ll have to work on that change while being everywhere and belonging nowhere, or you’ll end up as part of one
OT: I was just talking to another potato, @Arcanepotato@crazypeople.online. Does potato hold some significance other than as a starchy tuber?
Could you give an example?
No i just name my accounts whatever is on my mind(thought idea sensation feeling) at the time to make it impossible to trace them across platforms, i was just thinking of food back then
Leverage can come in many ways, dependence, reliance, expertise, friendships, anything really
I’m part of a community with very niche skill and i’ve always hated hierarchies but i play along if they prove to be good or fair, i climbed up the ladder through expertise and i practically had no friends in it cause i’m anti social, eventually i was told if i wanted to progress more i should take a look into the inner circle and i did
It was all connections, i thought this is where experts would be but no it’s just more same level skilled people that are just really really well connected in this circle, i have no connections and nobody knew me so the logical thing would be to hang on to someone and be their pet lol, we’re in autism community though and because i think gaining position through connections is corrupt i didn’t kiss anyone’s ass when they kept offering them
For some reason they don’t like this though which doesn’t make sense and eventually hierarchy needed to be established through legitimate means, expertise, i won, most people would already avoid me or talking to me at all costs to not be kicked out of the circle but after this it turned malicious and they wanted to get rid of me, i’m talking a really niche community and skill so this was a closed closed circle
How do you get rid of people in a system? You abuse it and swear everyone with you into silence, everything actively offered to everyone is excluded to me, everything available to me specifically is now only accessible privately, this is the public community system not like private it’s the standard one, so i called them out, all swore into silence, their self interest is with the system, and now the system is for their self interest as well
So i left started my own system by now i’m even more skilled than most of the inner circle and i offered skills to people for free while telling them exactly what took place, leverage here is connections which i normally avoid lmao, and the expertise, they’re leverage because they can’t be taken away or are costly to do so, you keep this up for months(nearing multi years now) self gain is not the goal it’s change like i said, you offer the skills and you keep improving
Eventually the leverage of connections and expertise becomes so dangerous it has to be confronted and it comes at the cost of concessions of self gain for me, i refused it i was not even considering it, the cost has to be the system, which no one would allow, but the good thing is, only one of us benefits from stability because again i do not have interest in self gain and eventually system is going to be forced to change
That’s what leverage means, anything that moves people away from the system(VPN, EV, word of mouth) and can’t be stopped is leverage
Stopping it through force sets precedence for arming against it(boycotts, shaming…) and again the system does not benefit from instability
By the way they still refuse to allow me in, got all other similar inner circles in on exclusion, targeted all my connections and me with harassment and just spread lies about me and were forced to purge and stretch the circle many times to keep it intact but everyone(much large outer circle) openly knows it has bad reputation not even for the original reasons just for their own demands, the inner circle now isn’t bothered and are more comfortable with open threats and power abuse against anyone and are banking on the monopoly over the skill and the outer circle’s dependence on it, i’m working on an alternative though and when they knew about it they just banned me from any platform they could pressure with the monopoly, the alternative is another leverage they can’t control so they have to confront me and the change
Idk, maybe the bad reputation(i’m talking going from leaders hard-working rare -> lazy corrupt common) was too much for them because everything i do i make sure it can’t be undone plus changes to the system(inner circle goes from picking it’s members to outer circle choosing them) was what made them unwilling to ever tolerate me in power
Edit: for this example what i mean by not joining another system is i was offered to take part in other circles cause they also have competition with the original one but i’d have to do it while degraded and constantly needing to prove myself, and you can do that for the sake of taking down circle1 but then who’s going to deal with circle2 which has the same issues, you have to be ok with just doing your own thing solo and everyone coming to contact with you being targeted or controlled when you resist systems, which is super cool i’m not gonna lie
Dang, I wish my field had expertise that mattered! But it’s largely an unaccountable profession that gets by on PR and guild protections, I have no shot to do what you’re doing.
There was an old show, MAS*H, and the lead character was a catanekrous, unhappy, often rebellious surgeon who get away with almost anything because he was so needed in the operating theater. I always wanted to be that good at something.
ANd, you know what, in reflection, as someone who has worked his way out of a bipolar diagnosis and off of disability, I am actually kind of “that good,” or at least the system has a choice to put me in a position to help people at the expense of itself, and it chooses not to give me interviews.
But, looking at it now with my new eyes, I see that there is no amount of skill that would allow Hawkeye to exist in the system. The conceit of the show is that the military, for all its flaws, actually cares more about the welfare of its soldiers than for maintaining hiearchy and order, and I think that, at this point, that is categorically false. Nothing is every more important than the system to the system.
But you’re experience certainly does highlight how systems do work and also benefit themselves. Like you point that the people in group1 are no more skilled than people outside of it, but because they have established credibility, they can charge more money, harm their enemies, etc.
Holy fuck that sounds exhausting.
I’d rather just be okay with where I’m at and the fact that nobody in the work world wants to be my friend. They can tell themselves whatever story they like to rationalize their feelings about me, don’t care.
At some point, its a waste of energy to climb the professional ladder any further. Find a comfortable spot where you can reasonably support your life, and then focus on the life.
Honestly fair this is just my thing, i’m a moral objectivist i think meanings comes from being right, so i just live however i can and resist whenever i can
I admit i’m all sorts of screwed up lmao, when i’m not pushing back against evil i just feel weird now, like i’m overly enjoying life, which means i’m making roots in it, which means i can be controlled through them, and i just kick in to limit or assess how much dependence i’ve built and if i’d be ready to let go of it to be good if i had to or not
One weird thing though is nobody can understand this way of thinking, they just get confused like i did something unexpected when it’s the most logical thing to do, being part of an evil machine has just been too normalized and it’s why i look insane to everyone
Well, I mean, you gotta live according to your values in order to be happy with yourself.
I’ve really disengaged with the idea that I need to compete with or assert my own views of what is righteous over what society presents for me as the template to follow. Rejecting that template for myself and accepting that others prefer it, accept it or are just unconcious altogether doesn’t really cause any kind of issue for me.
Everyone has a right to their own reasonable way of life; judging their ways is a cope for my own ego that I try to resist.
All this to say, I think I understand your position. You’ve thought quite deeply on it, and it sounds like an okay way to be.. but not for me.
Dunno what it’s called but I have shared a similar viewpoint for quite some time. The only ‘solution’ I’ve found for myself is to try to gain happiness and life satisfaction from my interests and that’s about it. I don’t believe things will ‘change’ on a grand scale unless conditions force it.
Can you tell me how you came to have this dreadful opinion with me?
I’ve heard blackpilled used to describe something similar to this, but the internet there doesn’t seem to be a definitive definition.
Similar to most people, life experiences not aligning with what we are led to believe when we are young, and just general observations.
Damn, I had to be hit over the head repeatedly with a sledgehammer. I’m not too bright lol.
Anyway, good luck navigating this reality we’re in.