It's not just that the emperor's new clothes are invisible, it's that it is not even the same emperor, and everyone was too busy deliberating whether his new clothes were a farce or not that they didn't even bother looking at the face of the one who rules us.
Having completed a couple of exit interviews now (for the same job, it's just that different people need to know different things from someone leaving the company), I am even more convinced that it is utterly impossible to have an honest relationship with a higher up. You benefit from bullshitting them and saying what they want to hear, and they benefit from having control over you and making you accept it (or pretending that it isn't the case).
I brought up the issues that I had with some aspects of my job with a higher-up, and they were instantly co-opted into the ideas that he thought were the real problems and his own ideas of what could be done about them. I proceeded to say that I disagree, but after a monologue on his part, it was obvious that nothing would change from just a conversation (not that I cared, after all I am leaving in a few weeks anyway).
Power allows people to not care about Reality, this is what the etymology of privilege highlights—privilege means 'private law', a law that is exclusive to a minority of people. Pretending that our world isn't entirely dictated by power dynamics is stupid, naive, dishonest, and in fact, likely something that people in power themselves want us to believe, because once again they benefit from hiding their own power.
A declining world has less real rewards to give, but it still has to maintain the pretense that everything is fine. Thus we should expect more and more bullshit rewards, from companies especially. Like being given a lot of small rewards (chocolates, random goodies) that amount to essentially nothing, instead of being paid more money. People's psychology is such that they appreciate gifts more than money, which is so abstract that it barely registers as a gift, and companies know this full well and take advantage of it. Those small rewards will then be given lots and lots of attention by the (internal) PR of the company, while the stagnation of salaries will be swept under the rug.
Likewise, the availability of parking spots around my company was treated in a particularly scummy way. Not that I drive a car, but most people need one to get to work. What happened was that we relocated to a new building last year, and because they knew that people used to be dissatisfied with the number of parking spots which simply wasn't enough for the number of people working there, they bought extra spots for the new building, but it seems that it was only for a year. When 2026 came around, people in the company had more trouble to get a parking spot to come to work and they didn't understand why, and a rumor spread (likely true) that they only bought extra parking spots just to avoid public complaints.
If this type of stuff happens in a company, we should expect it to happen in the world at large. Lots of noise over the small stuff that is utterly irrelevant, such as the space missions that won't bring anything tangible—nothing to get from the moon, traveling to Mars might be possible but it's a colossal amount of time and resources for no return on investment either, interstellar travel is impossible—or the Olympics which are oh so entertaining aren't they? 1
Animals play dead to survive, and humans play alive to fit in social environments.
People are stupid because they can afford to be. I was Thinking about that fire incident in that bar in the ski resort in Switzerland, where people filmed the whole thing while it was happening instead of leaving. And I think what it shows is that people can be so out of touch with Reality that they genuinely cannot think that harmful things could happen to them, because they have been so coddled by modernity that they cannot even conceive of what a real threat could look like, so they thought that the fire was a form of entertainment or something similar, because they are so out of touch with real, dangerous things like fire.
I guess the cliché of "strong men build easy times, easy times lead to weak men" is kind of true. Privilege makes you out of touch with Reality, and then large amounts of people get blind sided by it. Like romanticizing Nature and thinking it can't harm you.
Another way to think of what a "simulacrum" is is perhaps to think about the props in a theatre. Modernity treats Reality like a series of discrete and entirely passive objects that can be treated at will, rather than an interconnected whole that reacts to how we treat it.
We live in entirely mediated environments where things act in response to what we want but don't respond back, the way that screens obey our commands and sit idly if we don't do anything, which automatically leads to a sort of solipsistic and anthropocentric worldview because there is nothing beyond our thoughts and wills that we have to interact with.
People interact with the buttons of a microwave instead of using a fire, which can be potentially dangerous, or they interact with the commands of their car instead of having to use their legs, which confront them with their own limits, or nowadays they turn to an LLM to get an answer, instead of thinking about it on their own, which grows their capacity to think. People atrophy in mediated environments because they stop interacting with Reality, and this is a major factor in the ongoing societal collapse.
I didn't bother talking about electric cars in my piece about peak oil because they are a bit of a meme the way I see it. A cute idea but they won't solve anything fundamental, they just make people feel good about being in a declining world because they have access to cooler gadgets.
What I notice on top of that is how electric cars are inherently toys for privileged people to play with, not in any shape or form a scalable solution. For instance:
What all of this points to is that electric cars are toys for urban people by and large. It might seem strange that a collapsing society would produce all of the nifty gadgets that we see appearing, but in fact it is totally expected. There is no limit to how much in denial people can be, which means that technology will keep "progressing" more and more so that we can maintain the myth of progress for as long as possible. Until we can't.
'Free time' is a telling term isn't it? It implies that outside of it, you are not free, and that this is just how life is, better accept it. The prisons we should concern ourselves with are not just the external and obvious ones, the school, the office, or the screen, though of course all of them are very important to understand and liberate ourselves from. But it is also our relationships, with others, ourselves, with time, freedom, nature, beauty, and so much more.
The term 'free time' is one of the many ways that we take for granted the jailworld that we live in, similar to the question of 'what do you want to do when you grow up?' (implied: something within the system which pays), or how we think of 'wealth' as being within the confines of the system, or 'hard work' is about being good at doing alienating tasks. Speaking of which.
Doing things that you hate is good, because it signals to other people what a good person you are, which is what matters. There is no intrinsic value in anything, but doing things that you hate is a good extrinsic motivation because it makes you more employable, more able to do all of the other things that you hate and that society requires you to do, which is good.
There is also no such thing as the present. Those who talk about the "present" and how the Kingdom of Heaven is always there, right in front of us, are speaking in the name of the Devil. There is only a past which controls us, and from which we can free ourselves by turning to the future and directing our work towards. This is the only thing that matters, doing difficult things to build a future that never comes.
Difficulty is good. Struggle is good. Discipline is good. Beware of questioning those ideas because that confuses your mind, in such a way that the grace of God can no longer enter it. Questioning minds are hermetic to the Truth, which is why one needs to believe in order to be a good person, believe us and you will find salvation.
Generosity is another key virtue. Not to your peers, the people you actually live with, but an abstract system or priesthood that mediates all of your life and gives nothing of it back to you. Give, give and give my children, give us your money, time, attention and devotion, and you will get nothing back. This is what being a good person is, self-sacrifice for an insane society.
I used to be scared of all forms authority, whether in school, at work, or in administration, and to an important degree I still am, but they do not have the same hold on my mind and body as they used to.
I'm not sure what exactly caused the switch, but now I have this unshakeable sense that the people "above" me are just as clueless as everyone else, and they just so happened to be in this position because they have nothing better to do in life, because they are so out of touch with what genuinely matters that they can't think of (and can't follow) a better way to live than to be a manager, or a bureaucrat, or a school teacher. What leads them to be in "authority" is mostly ignorance, or an idiosyncratic set of circumstances, or just plain luck, nothing about their virtues or character, because institutions are fundamentally anti-consciousness.
It's like finding yourself in a maze, but realizing that the walls are made of thin paper, except that everyone around you has been pretending all along that the walls are very solid, and that the most important thing in life is to find your way to the cheese. Not only can you just tear the "walls" down, but you realize that the rewards too are bullshit. A bullshit game with bullshit rewards.
I guess one minor realization was that school tests are utterly valueless compared to the fruits that you get from earnestly engaging in the process of learning. I didn't have to worry about the result of some formal test if I had a proper attitude and discipline with regards to learning. Because when you focus only on school marks, you start to get worried at the small ways in which what you write might be misinterpreted, or what exactly the teachers asks of you, but when you are internally focused on learning itself, those things become laughably irrelevant. It's not the end of the world to miss out on a few meaningless marks just because the teacher didn't understand what you wrote, the learning and the value are still there for you. Nothing can take that away from you.
Another realization is that as I got older, the people teaching me seemed less and less "big" in a sense. I realized that if I wanted to, I could simply leave a class in the middle, and there wasn't anything they could really do about it.
In fact there is very little that anyone can do anything to you. They could become violent of course, 2 but very few people ever take it to violence, because it would get them in trouble, and they could potentially be hurt in response.
No, violence rarely happens, and that's not why we are afraid of people. We are afraid of their judgement because we are not secure in ourselves. The only way that people can coerce you is either by, one, being the person who pays you, and even then, you could say 'no' if what they asked was particularly egregious. Or two, by inducing in you certain feelings which you cannot tolerate, or at least tell yourself that you cannot tolerate.
They start to look at you funny for wearing something that they don't like, and you feel like you have to change your outfit as a result, but really, if you had no problem whatsoever with the sense of being watched in a funny manner, there would be no problem at all. A way to say this is that there is hardly any social causation, actual mechanisms that force you to respond to how people behave. The main one is how you react to body sensations! Shame is not found out there, it's a sensation you can deal in yourself and let go of.
Likewise with so many things. We are not actually controlled by people. That frame puts far too much power in their hands. We are controlled by what we imagine them to think of us, and the sensations that we feel as a result. It's (basically) all internal. If you can sit with the discomfort, you become unshakeable.
Not that you should never feel affected by other people of course. As everything you can take this too far. But I've been the type of person who was far too affected by what others felt, or rather what I imagined that they felt, through the filter of fear, that I never allowed myself to be me. It's about having healthy boundaries, and realizing that you are not controlled by other people.
You can say 'no' to invitations to things you don't want to go to. You don't even need to justify yourself. You can just say 'no'.
Likewise you can just leave a class or a meeting if you find it a waste of time, and spend your time on something you do find meaningful. You can just talk to people on the street.
You can just do the things you've wanted to do for a long time, even if they turn out bad. There is no actual punishment for making bad art, again it's all internal.
It really is crazy how open-ended life actually is. Maybe this is why so many people deny their own freedom, because they prefer a familiar prison, because being free is so unfamiliar to them. Freedom asks responsibility and courage from you, whereas being in the prison turns you into a victim of the world, something which you can then turn into a romantic narrative of oppression and unfairness. Samsara is built and maintained from the sense of unfairness.
1 Likes with sports in general
2 Which is a real thing that should be taken seriously, there is a way in which people who grow into confidence start overestimating themselves and think that nothing whatsoever could harm them, hence the piece above about how stupidity is unpunished privilege. There are violent people and I wouldn't mess with them.
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Monthly Authority Bullshit Privilege Samsara
2026-04-10