Caterpillars rationally conclude that they cannot fly because they have never seen a flying caterpillar. They are right of course, but my point is that caterpillars can become something new altogether, something which can fly, though that process requires the uncomfortable process of death. People love stories of transformation, but going through the process themselves? Not so much.
People have opinions about their own opinions, those secondary opinions being that, of course, that they are correct and grounded in sensible values. The truth is that people believe in what they want to believe, and judge a lot of things based on first impressions. People are a lot more shallow than they want to admit, and this applies to "intellectual" people too, who very often just want to be liked or have influence over others.
And the most important truth with regards to opinions is that they hardly matter in life. Okay so you have an opinion on politics or religion, interesting, but how is your love life? How do you react when things don't go your way? And how are you living knowing that you're going to die one day?
The naive ones that is, which is most of them. You see headlines such as "Remember when we were supposed to run out of oil and everything was supposed to crash in an instant?", which is part of the doom and complacency cycle of the technological system. The idea that societal collapse might be real, but takes decades to unfold in any significant manner can hardly exist. As I mentioned in a previous entry about the consequence of short attention spans, our society by and large only pays attention to shocking events, big unexpected catastrophes that result in spectacular losses, not the slow erosion of everything that is good and that we need to maintain our society.
Wisdom is about being able to make changes without any sense of emergency. Seeing future problems ahead and calmly but surely make preparations, not out of panic, but out of foresight, because nothing lasts forever, because disasters might be rare in a given year but are common in a given lifetime, that type of stuff.
I am a doomer when it comes to civilization, but I hope it is clear that I am not preaching for panic, as I so often look down upon those who use such dishonest tactics to get others to listen to them. I am calling for radical acceptance of our collective predicament (not a problem, a predicament is something you cannot solve), for consciously enjoying whatever we still have, and for practical action whenever it is possible and sensible.
Both 1984 and Brave New World share a similarity in that they're fairly predictable and "stable" once you understand them. I think the newest form of control in our society is unpredictability itself, because it makes it impossible for any group of dissidents to even organize. Organize around what? We don't even know what the future will look like. Or as this Substack note puts it well:
It does this in tandem with isolating us materially, relationally, and individualistically. It atomizes community and replaces it with systems. And it keeps us all so socially incompetent and so desperate to secure our own livelihood that we are afraid to reach out to each other and form new communities that would bypass the system. We all suffer in separate silences.
Unpredictability is not designed by some cabal of evil people at the top, it is a natural consequence of the technological system that we live in and perpetuate, but it certainly is an important factor that anyone in power can exploit, because people can be very desperate when the future is gloomy and uncertain.
The lesson you should learn from revolutions is that the craziest, most sociopathic players will take control after the dust settles — not the good guys. The good guys do not prevail, the most selfish and unethical do. Which is why you should never be eager for a revolution. Being eager for revolution is as stupid as being eager for war.
Why does it work that way? Because a revolution amps up survival pressure, and survival pressure is what creates evil in the first place. By pushing for a revolution you heighten survival pressure yet you expect goodness out of it? That is the delusion. That is why Rosa Luxemburg was foolish. To think that a devil like Lenin will save you is foolishness. That is the classic deal with the Devil. Rosa Luxemburg wanted a revolution and she got it. But she didn't live long enough to see the error of her views. She was killed precisely because she was one of the good ones. Good, but foolish about the realities of survival.
It makes you wonder: are revolutionaries truly brave or are they just too stupid to understand that they are committing suicide? The only revolutionaries who survive are the ones who kill the rest. And that is not someone you want as your ruler.
From a blog post by Actualized.org.
I shared this because I totally agree with the point being made. I don't believe in revolutions because of the power vacuum that they create, and I also don't believe in reforms because the system will only compromise for the most pitifully useless concessions (smaller plastic caps, electric vehicles that end up costing more energy, freedom in surrogate activities) and because people in power, and even the not so powerful or wealthy, have too much to lose from serious changes to our society.
Once the tree of the alienated self grows tall enough, it manifests itself in opposite poles which fight one another until they can't anymore, and people are forced to choose one or another, but I fundamentally reject both of them, because neither are able to solve the problem at its roots, because doing so requires the destruction of the poisoned tree, and let something else grow in its stead. Politics will never solve our main societal issues because nothing can, our society is too bloated, fragile, extractive, opaque, power-hungry and detached from Reality to maintain itself, it can only suck up resources and exploit people until the whole thing falls apart.
The appeal of Trump seems mainly to do with how he responds to social shame, which is that he doesn't care at all. He is unabashedly selfish, egotistical, dishonest and hypocritical, which really triggers people whose ego (heh) is built around being, or at least appearing as, a caring, loving, just person. (leftists)
Leftists are oversocialized people who are very much bound by shame, and try to use it to correct the behaviors of others, such as in the case of activism. They are not really good people, it's more like they're afraid of appearing bad to other people, or in our times, to institutions and authority figures. They are terrified of authority, which is why they tend to comply so readily to draconian measures, and why they hate people who are free from that burden.
None of this means that the right-wing is virtuous, and certainly not that Trump is a good person making good political decisions. Again, just like revolutionists and reformists are both heavily misguided, so are the two wings of our political landscape. But the flaws of leftism are significantly more subtle, which is why intellectuals tend to lean towards the left—though that is changing because woke has been such a disaster—because the ideas of leftism seem so sensible.
Oh yes, equality, democracy, social justice, helping one another and the planet, all beautiful things in theory. In practice however, it's a mass of weak, apathetic people who can't do anything without someone making the decisions, and crucially, taking responsibility when things don't pan out. Leftism is the ideology of the keyboard warrior par excellence, people who don't want to put their neck out for anything, and who constantly talk about what they're going to do, but never go around to doing any of it. They hate real individuals, anyone who rises above the crowd, which is why leftism is a dead-end for anyone who wishes to live consciously.
This sports article, Soccer Assassins, describes two coaching styles, where the normal one is to use physically strong but uncreative players as chesspiece thugs. That wins more games in the short term, but in the long term, the best players and the best teams are built on a foundation of individual skill and improvisation.
This confounds modern thinking about "individualism" because it's about how a group can work better if everyone is doing their own thing. The trick is, they're doing their own thing in service to the group. They're thinking "I want my team to do as well as possible, but I'm not going to trust the coach to tell me what to do, I'm going to figure it out myself in the moment."
This is different from "Collectivism says that society thrives if I trust central planners." But it's also different from "Capitalism says that society thrives if I'm totally selfish." It's not a middle ground -- it's a whole other angle, difficult for our culture to imagine. That's when I realized that people like Ayn Rand ruined "individualism" by tying it to selfishness.
From a post by Ran Prieur, on the 17th of August 2026.
The key difference that healthy societies have, that neither collectivism nor capitalism have much of, and certainly do not promote, is responsibility. In collectivism (at least the version he describes), everyone abdicates or is forced to abdicate their responsibility, and everything is up to the central planners, who unsurprisingly are going to use it for all sorts of selfish purposes.
Likewise in capitalism, people use the prodigious amount of power that their society provides them with—wealthy people do not think much about this, but their wealth and social connections are only worth anything because of the accumulation of technology, resources, and the social structures that maintain those and keep dissidents at bay—to be utterly selfish, prioritizing their own gains over the well-being of anyone else. "I am not responsible for anything" says the capitalist, "the incentive structures just push me to do this. Don't blame me, it's what the market demands".
Same thing with collectivism, same with democracy, same with religion. Every large collective is unconsciously supported by people who are terrified of taking responsibility for their life, and who will do anything to have someone or some other group to blame. Hence, scapegoating, cowardice, fascism, and cuckoldry. The only dichotomy that matters when it comes to individuals and collectives is how much responsibility they are willing to take for their livelihood, which is why we are always sickened to see people who do everything they can to blame someone else instead of taking responsibility, no matter how clever or hard-working they might be, but on the other hand are far more forgiving to people who take responsibility for their own life, even if they might not be very bright. If only people had the same intuition about the collectives they support.
On my last trip to the land I noticed something: Getting into a groove of mindless repetitive work is centering. If you're feeling terrible, it makes you feel pretty good; if you're feeling super-hyped, it makes you feel pretty good. So what happens when an entire society has all mindless repetitive work done by machines? Now, instead of working wood with hand tools, which is meditative, we do it with power tools, which is stressful because you can kill yourself at any moment. It's the same with driving instead of walking.
We have made "progress" according to one narrow equation: more transformation of the world per human attention. In many other ways, machine power is a serious misstep. Of course it consumes more actual energy, which comes from hidden unsustainable sources. Also, more transformation per attention means more stress, and more and bigger mistakes. And finally, without the centering effect of meditative physical work, depressed people stay depressed and fanatical people stay fanatical, all of them pushing us toward apocalypse.
From a post by Ran Prieur, on the 30th of July 2026.
This is a really good observation about how increased complexity creates a growing divide in people. Not just inequality obviously, but the way that the few who somehow fit the sick society that we create are better at navigating the complex systems and not being on its bad side, whereas more and more people fall from the disappearing middle grounds, and are relinquished to the lower classes, not just in terms of money, but in terms of their interaction with society.
A faster paced society rewards obsessives and neurotics, and punishes sensitive and grounded types. This means it creates a feedback loop of neuroticism, until the baseline of what is expected of people shifts, and most of the people either have to force themselves into the desired shapes, or they suffer by falling out of the systems of modernity. I see this with cars—driving is incredibly disregulating for some people—and the internet, and bureaucracy, and possibly much more. Modernity is not just ecologically unsustainable, it is somatically unsustainable.
People in the past didn't talk about "nervous system regulation", because they simply engaged in activities that would naturally ground and calm them: walking, knitting, baking, cleaning, etc. There wasn't a sense of needing to do things as quickly as possible in order to waste away your mind (and body) in front of a screen, people did what they had to do, at their own pace in their free time.
The term 'job market' is kind of a psyop to hide the fact that there are tons of asymmetries between the workers and the employers, and that by and large, the employers have the upper hand in the most important things.
And I realize writing and reading this that many guys have made similar complaints about the dating 'market', and how skewed it is towards women. I haven't experienced that, and I am not very keen on treading on the grounds of the culture war, but that sounds about right to me.
Go back to the list of blog posts
Monthly Collapse Shame Revolution Uncertainty Responsibility Work
2026-08-30