This is part 2 of a small series on self-betrayal, see here for part 1 describing its main aspects. This piece also expands on a previous piece about the vaporous collective will, and how people defer their sovereignty.
Self-betrayal starts at school, to the surprise of no one whatsoever. For some children it starts even before this, in their dreadful family life, but school is the nail in the coffin for most people, a graveyard of the soul for which no one mourns, because to detect a soul and the lack thereof, one needs to have a soul to begin with, which is why so few people are able to relate to children as adults, even though they themselves were children! It's not just that they forgot how destabilizing it is to be a child in our confusing world, it's that they no longer have the sensitivity to share what the young child experiences.
School is when the fundamental disconnect between the individual and society becomes ingrained in the child, that the needs of society are more important than those of the individual, what I called the vaporous collective will: everyone talks about it, everyone has to submit to it, but no one can precisely locate or identify what it is. Like worshipping an invisible God in a world that pretends that Gods do not exist.
Because a child has no ability whatsoever to defend themselves against a collective, because they cannot live by themselves (even adults cannot), they have to submit to the demands of their society, no matter how insane they are. This is why in our collective imagination, we talk about how demons and monsters target children, because they have no way to defend themselves. To draw the metaphor further, it is not an exaggeration to say that society has something demonic about it, in the way that it targets children so as to maintain certain patterns of belief and behaviors.
What are those patterns? The easiest way to know those, and more generally the myths of our world, is to think about what we cannot question and go against, what is taken for granted. You can talk for instance about a reform of various institutions, but the idea of not having institutions to begin with is considered insane, totally backwards, the work of the devil (or in our times, the mentally ill). Some of the myths which are relevant here are:
§1. The necessity of institutions and professionals, or in general, mediation. The idea that, without some middleman who mediates the access to knowledge (a teacher), or health (a doctor), or the law (a lawyer, a judge), or sanity (a therapist), or God (a priest), that the masses would be stupid, sick, violent, insane and utterly selfish. We are not to live in small, convivial environments, from which we can directly learn from, organize ourselves to figure out harmony and justice at our scale and in a way that is appropriate to us, no, we are to live in massively complex societies in which all of use are powerless to meaningfully change, at the mercy of professionals who tell us what to do and how things are. This naturally leads to the next myth.
§2. The necessity of civilization, and the innate sinfulness of human beings. People in our secular times never explicitly talk about sin, but it is the implicit bedrock of many arguments and worldviews, that without top-down order, people would essentially eat one another and make a wreck out of everything. If this is true, one might wonder what makes the professional class, those who mediate our access to the things we need, so different from the ignorant, insane and violent pleb? The answer is that they are better because they are different, and they are different because they are better.
The professional class would never justify their position of power in such an obviously circular logic, but ultimately their argument is not much different: they say that they have been chosen by God, but also that only they can understand what God says, because the masses are too ignorant to have a direct revelation of the Truth.
Or in our times, they say that they are more "rational" than most people, but never do they actually tell you what this "rationality" is, or show to you why it is the most important trait in a person. Point out that the people in charge of our countries during the covid era were quite "rational", and yet they made the lives of everyone but the richest amongst us worse in every way, and you can expect to be dismissed on the grounds of being a "conspiracy theorist" or something similar.
Ultimately, their standards only apply to the extent that they can justify their position of power. The worldview of the professional class is ultimately one of might makes right, with the convoluted pretense that this isn't the case. 1
§3. The superiority of progress, another consequence of "might makes right". Technological progress is not better because it makes our life better, although within reasonable bounds it does, it's better because we have no choice but to increase our power. If we don't, the Chinese would have a superior military, and we can't allow that, hence the arms races which have dictated the past centuries. If we don't pursue progress, another company will outcompete us, and we can't allow that, hence the races to the bottom and the inherent corruption of the "free" market. If we don't pursue progress, people won't have anything to do and they might actually contemplate their life and the system they are in, and we can't allow that, hence bullshit and alienating work for everyone.
When technology is within the reach of our consciousness, then the improvements that we make are good and welcome. It would be silly to say no to the invention of fire, or sharp tools, or water containers, or slippers, and so on, because they do not alienate us, they still put conscious experience at the center of our lives, which is why those tools feel like extension of our sensate capacities, and why they feel integrated in a conscious whole, a real culture.
Tools are meaningfully distinct from machines however, which are autonomous in a way that conscious and sensate involvement are largely useless. We can master our selves and in that way feel more connected to our environment, but machines master us, they force everything else to be rearranged so as to fit their needs. This is how the invention of the car leads to roads and cities that accomodate them more than us, how mechanized agriculture has led to crops which are resistant to the machines, rather than being healthy and tasty for us, and how computers force everything to be captured within mere data, whether visual or literal, at the expense of the subtle, which is why dating apps kill the ineffable source of love, and force people to humiliate themselves and describe themselves in a list of bullet points, hoping to be matched to another person.
There are many more myths of course, and for a thoughtful explanation of those, see 33 myths of the system by Darren Allen, where he explores the falsehoods at the foundations of our world, such as those related to scarcity, equality and merit, competition, freedom, democracy, culture, entertainment, meaning, reform, authority, and of course education.
Circling back to the initial subject, I make an important distinction between schooling and education. To be educated means to learn more about yourself and the society you are a part of, so as to meaningfully participate in it. Schooling on the other hand is essentially an act of bullying, by an authority that forces you to do meaningless assignments—seriously, no one will ever read or care about what you wrote in 5th grade—under completely arbitrary constraints—remember how you couldn't even go to the bathroom as a kid without asking permission?
This is when people learn to internalize that this is how the world is, that there are people with the power to tell others what to do, and even what to think, and that living "well" is a matter of following those rules and pleasing the authority, who grades your worth on a linear scale of "bad" to "good". If you don't comply to this insane order, you are deemed a deviant, or "mentally ill" as they like to say these days, and must be put under rehabilitation so that you may be "normal" again and be a productive member of our society.
But notice the inherent asymmetry of our world. If there is a mismatch between our society and an individual, the blame is always put on the individual. The main reason for this is that the world has far more momentum and inertia than any individual does. It's far easier to change one person than it is to change the way things have "always" been done (in reality, only in the past century or so, and even then, with a wide variety depending on the decade and the location).
But what this means is that societies have no correcting feedback whatsoever, which is why they are so insane. They optimize for power and scale, not for any of the virtues that we care about as human beings, such as love, integrity, harmony, meaningfulness, conviviality and so much more. But because those societies are also incredibly powerful, they don't leave much room for people to be free, because they eradicate possibilities to live outside of them.
Some people might think at this point that I am being too dichotomous, that our civilization after the Cold War has largely become more peaceful, better at coordination and giving more freedom to the individual, more than they could have if they were rebellious and tried to live in small collectives like we have done previously as hunter gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years, at the mercy of nature.
But I do not agree with this frame, I think it is once again steeped in the myths of our world, and blind to a loss which is too subtle for the civilized self to perceive, the way in which we go from a world of external domination to one of internal coercion and capitulation, with the most subtle domain being the internal one. More on the next part.
1 Instead of the power of the individual, or the power of the king, or the power of the patriarchy, we have in the left-wing of politics the power of the mass (coordination instead of love or truth), or the power of the technological system, or the power of the institution, or more subtly, the power of rationality over Reality. All of those are ultimately top-down and deeply coercive of what they cannot grasp, which is why the response of the left to covid, the need to shut down everything even if it disproportionately affects the poor in the worst ways, was in hindsight not very surprising.
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Authenticity Selfbetrayal Consciouslife Zombieworld Obvioustruth Demons
2026-02-07