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State of the World, 2006

Behind the Veil

What we know as reality is limited to our senses. If some diabolical merchant of death plugged us into a computer designed to fake a reality, we'd never know, since when we reached out for the arm of a lover it would simulate the silken feel of scrubbed, youthful flesh. Most of us are confined even further because in a world of seven billion, we depend on other people to tell us what's happening in distant parts. This is why even the most cynical people read newspapers.

Thanks to the centralization of our society, both through government and business, we now have a mass media that in Soviet Russia would be called "State Media" but here is roughly the same. They show up at press conferences and, burdened by deadlines and the same mental insouciance that afflicts society at large, they scribble notes, call a couple sources, and then fabricate the news from that. If you think you're getting the whole story, you're insane, because at this point that's mathematically impossible as well as unlikely.

Do we need a conspiracy theory for this? No, we don't: it's business. Newspapers do not make money by devoting massive amounts of resources to stories; in the past, they could, but they were then a much larger voice. Same with television and radio. Now that we have newspaper, radio, television, magazine, internet, podcast and soon virtual TV, we've got many thousands of competing voices jockeying for market share. How do they get ahead? By cutting costs, glitzing up what they do have, and forging ahead. You don't make money by doing in-depth stories that no one has time to read anyway.

Awareness of this conspiracyless state of quasi-truth shows us a side of modern society that is inevitable and no one's fault: by the nature of its size and complexity, we are never directly in contact with events, and rely on others to portray to us a reality that is too complex and far-flung for us to investigate on our own. Think about it as a normal person: you graduate college and can then decide to spend ten years in libraries and laboratories and war zones finding "the truth," or you can pick the best news source you can find and get on with it. Problem is that even those "best" news sources are subject to the laws of the market, and as competition increases, get more hasty.

Although these stories vanished into the memory hole, a few years ago there were a number of scandals involving newspaper and magazine articles that plagiarized, or outright invented, stories including a few internet Trolls that somehow made page one. The press was shocked -- shocked, I tell you! -- that this could happen, in public. In private, they knew it was inevitable: the salary and the prestige of being a reporter has not even kept up with 1930s levels. The amount of time a reporter could thus spend on stories decreased, as did the type of person electing to make a career of reporting. End result: the hiring of scumbags, the rushing of half-cocked stories, and the generation of not-real "news" through a dysfunction system that is not a conspiracy and is nobody's fault.

It is important that we moderns remember that at all times we exist behind the veil of such non-fault, non-functional connection to reality, and that much of what we know as "truth" is nowhere near verified. Someone may categorize it as truth, esepcially if it originates in a trusted source like a religious or political or economic leader, but does that mean it is actually a part of physical reality? As the old song goes, "It ain't necessarily so." The veil is produced by this faulty system and, fortunate for those who lead, is easily manipulated. There is no conspiracy, but if I as a businessperson want to advance my cause by slipping a few thousand dollars into the right pockets for favorable media coverage, who is harmed? It isn't as if people mistake "the news-entertainment media" for real news, unless they're clueless proles.

Behind the veil is where the truth lies, but it's not a truth we will be able to actually observe, because to do so would require being in a thousand places at once, often behind closed doors. A true modern idiot -- the kind of thin intelligence that can fix a car, program a computer or sell stock funds but is blind to the implications of actions in reality as a whole -- will say, sagely, "Wuhl then you can't tell what the truth is." Incorrect: we don't know what the truth is now. We can conjecture based on historical tendencies and observed traits and from that actually get a better picture of what's happening than from a handful of people paid to make a product that's mostly entertainment although based in news. The modern idiot trusts the news; the person triumphing over modernity looks at history.

And what exists behind this veil, you might ask? Power, for one; biology, next; and finally, existential stress. Let's look at these in sequence.

POWER

Power is one thing that moderns do not like to touch. We are afraid of force, so we make moralities and rules and distinctions like good/evil in an attempt to manipulate each other, but what we're unintentionally doing is strengthening the mechanisms of control that will ultimately lead to the use of more force. Like drug addicts and criminals, we make our own fates by denying the obvious reality in exchange for that "feelgood" sensation of a few moments. We don't want to see ourselves as barbarians using the sword and famine to shape history, so we pretend we're "moral authorities" and through this dedication to peace and democracy end up overthrowing governments, using nuclear weapons on civilians and machine-gunning wedding parties. We're afraid of power. We would rather deal in big heart-happy symbols like peace, freedom, democracy, justice, but since we arbitrarily control the definitions of these to suit our power needs, we're simply deceiving ourselves (trust me: the people on the other end of the machine guns are not long deceived). The politicians drag out the sacred symbols of democracy and freedom and equality, and the voters charge forward to approve, and then six months later are "horrified" to see the carnage that results. Is it really a surprise? No: surprise is the pretense we use to obscure our fanaticism for power.

This parallels our Judeo-Christian morality, which is essentially passive aggression. It states that we are each free to do whatever we want, so long as we do not impede others, and ignores conveniently the fact that this is completely illogical when one thinks on the level of the direction of the whole. I want a society that produces great art; my neighbor wants Britney Spears. The two do not coexist. What wins out? Why, the simpler, more popular alternative... by virtue of the swing vote of the vast number of simple people out there. To them, symphonies are pretentious and fine art is above their heads and probably for rich people. Oh yeah? Well fuck the rich -- let's have something for The People. What the people do not realize of course is that they're being bought off, and that all the junk culture in the world does not change their slavery, in the largest part because they will always be enslaved by the fact that they are simpler in the head than others. Dumb people exist for the smarter to manipulate. Our morality, based on passive aggression as it is, only permits us to act against those who would impede our "freedom" -- this is the aggression part of passive aggression. Even if what someone is doing is destructive to all good things in life, it must be respected, and anyone who steps over the line and stops him -- whoah, dude, that person is an extremist or a terrorist or a bigot. That person is The Wrong. Let's go kill him -- for justice, freedom, and equality! It is for this reason that Judeo-Christian republics cannot exist without a Satanic enemy, because without an excuse to look outside themselves and blame someone they are forced to become introspective and -- well, let's just say that passive aggressive behavior becomes obvious with too much study.

Biology

There is a certain school of thought that says, left and right or Communist and Capitalist, all political dualities are in fact illusory because what we know of as "politics" has arisen in the modern time around a central theory: through categorical logic, we can channel all people toward a uniform, absolute, appropriate standard of behavior. The reason for this hybrid of the utilitarian and the egalitarian is that it is comforting to the lower ends of ability-intelligence spectrum, who find it useful to think that the same rules applied to all people produce the same effects, with only a small deviation for vast gaps in ability.

Sensible people know differently, of course, and point out how how geniuses break all the rules and get ahead of morons who obey every one, but society's response has been to dumb down the task so genius is no longer appreciated. Symphonies make some of us feel stupid? Here, have monoharmonic rock music. Literature makes some recognize their limitations? Here's the niche novel -- write about being a bisexual vegan astronaut Anarchist and the other 400,000 of your niche group will buy it. Forget genius; we've got inclusivity. And true to form, modern "careers" are paint by number and tend to eschew the organic learning that makes, for example, one carpenter an artisan and the other merely a laborer. We've got interchangeable parts. We've got standard memorandum formats. We've got hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation to specify the correct form archetype of anything from speeches to computer code to murals to rock songs. Don't focus on saying anything; get the form right, get good production, and you're the best "art" this time will produce.

With this in mind, modern output can be decoded into what it actually is. The "genius" postmodern novel becomes a series of linguistic tricks chained into a structure of mis en abime; the "genius" postmodern rock becomes an inversion of verse and chorus with "exciting" fills using esoteric scales. The business "genius" is someone who recognizes an opportunity that has not yet been written about in a trade publication. This is not to say that these people are not smart, but that their output is not exceptional. It follows the same categorical mandate as our politics, our machines, even our love affairs: external force applied uniformly to disparate elements produces uniform results. And while this works when manufacturing munitions or filling Coke bottles, it is of questionable application to humanity, not from some "it denies what makes us Individuals" garbage argument but from the mathematic that what inspires a simple person will bore a genius, and what inspires a genius will be inscrutable to a simple person, yet both exist.

Our modern thinkers, who are usually "thin intelligences" with ability in one area but a total lack of the kind of application of theory to the whole of reality that distinguishes our best philosophers, will counter with some "Average" as in "The average person responds well to this categorical action." And where do we find this average person? It does not exist -- instead, we have many different people inconvenienced to the degree they deviate from average, including the comedy of "Army" clothing sizes that make large men look like giants and small men look tiny. The average person is motivated like a whore by televisions -- if you're not, then you'll be inconvenienced. The average person wants to spend most of their money on cars and entertainment -- if you're not, too bad, because you'll need these things anyway, since society is designed to work with the average.

In fact, through the multiple reflective layers of response that produces natural reality, the response of nature to categories is a breaking of averages, because if reality indeed were able to be manipulated by categories, there would rapidly be no room left for variation, and thus no ability to respond to change or error. If an average mouse was never eaten by the average eagle, the ecosystem would shut down; instead, the average mouse gets eaten an average number of times, and this causes the mouse to keep evolving to try to get that average predation factor (APF) closer to zero. But what happens to creatures without predators? They lose the ability to fly, like the Dodo bird, and get fat and lazy like modern humans. Categorical-average thinking creates stagnation and reality disconnects wherever it goes. Further, it creates the illusion that we can run society like a machine: anonymously, uniformly, functionally, causing us to separate local communities and thus subtract lifelong friendships from our existences, remove the ability to be good at something unique to our personalities, and thus boring us to tears in interminable jobs that become more an exercise in personnel politics that being good at anything, and finally, our functionalism removes the focus in finding meaning in life, for individuals or the whole, thus we go through motions and avoid having any kind of goal at all, dropping us into a boredom of like mechanics discussing variations of machines that will never be replaced. We have made an external paradise, in that we've got "freedom" and luxury and plastic gadgets and entertainment, at the cost of making our inner worlds a hell -- but this only influences people above the average, which means we do not all share this discontent!

In fact, ever since global warming "sneaked up on us" and we awoke to find ourselves on the verge of a first-world versus third-world WWIII, an increasing number of people have been laying a charge against modern politics: that it's detached from reality and the only reason we tolerate it is that the greatest number of our people cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy, and thus do not find the system offensive. This is why genius activists burn churches, mail letterbombs, nerve gas subways and crash planes into underinsured towers. The number of people who can receive a message is dwarfed by the number of people who cannot understand it, and since every decision in society is made by counting the ayes and nayes, this means the system itself will never elect to make a change.

The truth is unpopular. Even worse, the truth is understood by on average 2-5 of 100 people, and they get shouted down by the crowd around them who want more SUVs, cheaper televisions, complimentary beer at work and more "freedom" to have cheap sex, take drugs, slack off, and pursue pleasures of an unhealthy nature, because you only need "freedom" when you're doing something that needs explanation. E.g. people never need "freedom" to raise their families; they need to be left alone. There's a difference. The people who cry loudest for "freedom" are the ones doing something that should not be trusted. This is in contrast to what most decent intelligent people want, which is to be left alone, meaning to be independent of unwarranted interruptions by government, lynch mob, or intrusive business predator.

No one both intelligent and experienced trusts "freedom" because they know that any system dedicated to "freedom" will spend its time defending deviants, criminals, perverts and morons while allowing us boring middle-of-the-road types to get walked all over. "Freedom" is a justification, not an actual state of existence. Words like "freedom" and "justice" and "tolerance" are popular concepts that mean almost nothing, but because they sound good are universally acclaimed. If the truth is unpopular, we'll invent popular "truths" and use those like the red cape of a matador on a bull: while the population goes charging forward screaming FREEDOM, we'll lure them away from the actual issues which we'll poke into them until they're too tired to resist anymore. More people are unable to see beyond this state than will recognize it, so once again, popularity obscures a truth.

The fundamental idea of modern politics -- that we can apply a categorical, external logic to all people and come up with a uniform result -- is a popularization of a half-truth, and has nothing to do with reality. This has been noticed by the same critics of our society that noticed global warming is having real world effects while our "intelligent" leaders debate its actuality. Increasing numbers of voices are claiming that our mental tools of modern politics have, instead of guaranteeing better lives for all of us, created a political system that instead of dealing with real problems creates a fantasy interpretation of existence and addresses its problems instead, since the truth is never popular and no one gets elected, or their product bought, or becomes a popular socialite for telling the ugly truth. So we create fantasies. Freedom, justice, tolerance. Prosperity, democracy, progress. Love, equality, victory. And what do they mean? They are red capes in front of our bullish eyes.

In contrast to this fantasy world of mental-emotional symbols, there is biological politics: that some individuals have more ability than others and that if we are to survive as a species, we must gradually shift ourselves toward that end of the spectrum rather than the spectrum closer to apes. And because it's a hot-button issue, let me say that I'm not talking about race here: there are "good white people" who are closer to apes than most black people. Are Andrew Fastow and Ken Lay and Janet Reno and Bill Clinton closer to monkeys than higher-order humans? You bet: they're power-hungry, small-minded, ruthless manipulators who put on a public facade of having "your best interests" in mind. If they could, they'd dot the i's with little hearts so you know what warm, caring, good people they are -- deep down inside, when they're not busy stealing, burning heretics and cripping American foreign operations by cutting off money when their deceit is "discovered" by the press (hint: to have the press discover your opponents are up to no good, phone them with the obvious truth but spun and a few thousand dollars). No, race isn't a determiner, although each race has evolved differently and with different abilities, and within each of those races, each ethnic group has evolved differently (compare Russia's 94 average IQ -- on par with Mexico -- with Germany's 107 -- who would you rather have leading you? Oh, I forgot: those Germans are amoral; but what if they're right? Well, we don't care about that -- only popular truths admitted here!).

For all of our bluster about justice and democracy, all of our fascination with symbols and international politics, and all of our ranting about a better future for all people, biological politics matters more: it determines the future of the species. We will always need intelligent leaders and capable people. Technology breaks. Empires fall. Flags burn. Even democracy collapses (as is historically 100% consistent) into authoritarian states. The only thing that can save us is having intelligent, capable, noble-minded people who can lead us; this is the reality of biological politics, and it's one our modern politicians choose to ignore because it offends the proles by reminding them that, white-as-snow or not, they're closer to apes in mentality.

Existential

It's a fact of life that most people are not writers because they are not articulators. You ask them why they did something, and they tell you words without meaning; "It seemed like the right thing to do" is a statement of preference, not logic. They don't know. Theirs are not minds that put things into words and logical argument, and this is not necessarily a failing of intelligence; some of the most intelligent musicians and visual artists have been hilariously incompetent at explaining their motives and ideas. Among the normal population, people are generally not inclined to articulate; they can state a preference but not tell you why. It is for this reason that our existential crisis is not widely recognized.

The West exhausted itself with conflict for what was right because, thanks to its prosperity, it grew within; as is the rule in nature, those of lesser intelligence have more children and give less attention to each one, thus the West swelled with peasants. If you can get past the bullshit that somehow a mass of peasants will magically choose the right option through democracy, you can see what happened next: the peasants put pressure on their leaders for things they did not need, and the leaders retaliated with increasing force, until the peasants by virtue of "passive aggression" in turn retaliated and thanks to superior numbers, could kill their leaders and take over. In Russia, the serfs did not want to be freed, at first; they had no debts, no obligations, and someone made sure they were taken care of at every turn. After a few years of revolutionary rhetoric, they decided to revolt, and spent the next century in abject poverty ruled by not aristocrats but those taken from among their ranks -- and as it turns out, peasant rulers like Stalin defined new levels of cruelty. Stalin himself admired the Czars for their ruthless rule, but thought they were too soft. And what happened in France? The peasants outbred a reasonable level of population, and then became starving; the aristocracy, recognizing that the best solution would be a die-off of extra people, did nothing and was overthrown. Despite a few flarings of Napoleonic aspiration, France never regained its military or cultural preeminence after that time, having murdered its best minds for the single reason that they were prosperous and the peasants wanted revenge.

When one looks at history in these terms, it is easy to see why the West is exhausted: we are so tired of internal conflict between our best and our most generic that we want to roll over, offer up our asses for passive anal intercourse, and ignore the rape and go about distracting ourselves. We'll pick wallpaper as the dong slides in, maybe watch television during the grunting and thrusting, and afterwards talk about equality and justice while drinking ethical coffee. Anal rape? Well, yes, it happens, but by allowing it, at least we don't have to oppress people. The West is so exhausted by the conflict between its aristocrats (average IQ: 120-150) and its proles (average IQ: 94-98) that it is has even maneuvered itself, by being passive and then aggressive when other people recognize the illegitimate insanity of its passivity, into a future war between the first world (average IQ: 104) and the third world (average IQ: 94). Existentially, we're exhausted; we wish the obligation to fight for what is right would just go away and leave us to distract ourselves with alcohol, television, sex and gadgets.

Yet exhaustion is paradoxical, because being exhausted makes one more exhausted, where having a sense of levity and joy in life gives energy that keeps on giving. If one thinks about modern society on its own terms, one is not looking behind the veil but at the veil, and as everyone knows if you stare at a mesh it appears to be solid when it is in fact translucent. Follow the light and it will take you through the veil, and you will see reality as it is. When this happens you can cast aside the massive load of baggage you carry in the form of lies, passive aggression, manipulative symbols and expectations; you see that instead of having a massive task before you -- converting the world to democracy and capitalism and "educating" them into having the right opinions (which they of course choose of their own "free will") -- you have a small task: find the people who are biologically of a higher caliber, get them into power, and remove the authority of the proles. This sounds harder until you realize that the people you wish to overthrow are entirely distracted by a lack of reality, thus if you simply act upon reality, you will triumph while they will still be befuddled by illusion.

ACTIVISM

"Well, I really don't like the direction society is going..."

Stop: most of the people who say these words mean nothing by them. More specifically, they may believe them, but they will never act on them. For some it's that emotionally and intellectually they are too immature (or limited) to get over the ideas that big symbols like democracy, freedom, capitalism, etc. are what we need. For most it is that they like most people are not ready to function independently; they are herd creatures. The greatest of all herd creatures are those who pretend to be independent thinkers but actually lack any sense of direction or will to act.

You, if you're still reading this far, may have the will to act. First you need clarity of ideology, and next you need practical goals; finally, you need to begin a regular course of working closer toward those goals. However this should not be a duty but a joy. After all, you see that modern society is despite "doing okay" right now headed toward a conflict with reality: it has a lack of real values, it denies our inner need for meaningful experience, it overpopulates and overconsumes and pollutes, it replaces all higher people and ideas with low-brow versions for the proles. You are not "oppressed" by this society as much as made ill by it, the way one is when watching any idea that will end badly when most people are oblivious to this fact. It's like watching a horror movie and wanting to scream "Don't go into the room!" as the blithe idiot character approaches his or her doom. When you watch the world, that's what you see -- a constant state of imminent horror.

To have the will to act you must first transcend your seriousness. Recognize that in all likelihood your species has, in a desire to avoid conflict by pandering to the individualism of the crowd which thus unites itself into a mob because its only ideology is that individuals want absolute freedom from interruption of their pursuits no matter how moronic, given itself to a final conflict in which the have-nots, with the technology of the haves, will initiate a war against the haves which no one will win; either that or the haves, exhausted by years of fighting off hordes of have-nots, will acquiesce to passive rape and simply be bred into the have-nots, creating a future third-world society of IQ 94 that will produce none of the greatness of the past. This society will nonetheless be able to breed to the fullest extremes, and will populate every nook and cranny of this earth, thus guaranteeing its slow attrition. Either way, what is important to remember is this: modern society, on its current course, will never escape itself and will slowly whittle itself down into more and more mediocre versions of itself. Do not think of it as a conspiracy; think of itself as a cancerous smoker who cannot stop because, what else does it have? Inhale.

When you see society in these terms, you are freed from the "seriousness" of brain-dead leftist activists who rant about how people need to "just wake up" and talk about the apocalypse as something exciting and active. You are also freed from the tired priggish speeches of the conservatives who bemoan a loss of traditional values, while rushing off to get busy earning money and buying plastic. "Seriousness" can be an enemy here; the game is already lost, but we have a chance to win after all. So joyfully move forward! If you fail, nothing is lost -- if you succeed, everything is. (And remember, that should humanity snuff itself, there are nearly infinite planets out there that could support intelligent life...)

Most modern "solutions" in fact begin like this:

1. Wake everyone up to the truth.
2. We all get together like the end of a Hollywood movie and demand justice.
3. The music starts playing and everyone gets "freedom."

Our modern solution is different:

1. Recruit among the 2-5% of society that actually are capable of independent action.
2. Have them agree on the basics of an ideology and implement it at every level of society simultaneously.
3. Seize power by deception, and separate the proles from power by peaceful means.

Why peaceful means you ask? Has our author succumbed to the aforementioned liberal democratic illusion -- no, but violent revolutions tend to be destructive and most commonly get out of hand. Further, there is no strategic benefit to harming the proles. We desire government of real leadership, which democracy will not provide -- not now, not ever. The honest and functional course toward this goal doesn't include proles, but with their ability to vote and purchase junky plastic products that later crowd landfills eliminated, proles are not a large problem. They will keep living as they always have, which means spending their money on stupid things, denying reality, breeding too much, etc. In a society that no longer views them as the root of political power, they will have to face the consequences of these actions alone -- which will return them to natural selection, and over the course of generations, breed them into something more than proles. Let nature do this winnowing. If we get involved in revenge politics such as murdering proles (or religious-ethnic groups) we have removed our focus from the goal -- a saner society -- and sidetracked it toward some kind of transient, temporal satisfaction.

In modern society, as in all human societies, biological politics remains constant behind our drama and our propaganda, our economics and symbolism. Most people go to jobs, then go home and watch TV. They do this because they are not capable of anything else. There are a handful of people, perhaps as many as five per hundred, who do the exciting stuff: create computer programs, write books, teach classes, build bombs, paint art, have sex with horses. Many of these are also thin intelligences but if pointed in the right direction can be quite effective. The first goal of our anti-revolution is to show these people what is behind the veil, and take note of those who are brave/capable enough to follow that truth.

The essence of all political power is consensus among these people, who represent in the caste system the highest rank of Kshatyria: they are the doers, the independent actors, the foundations of what is new versus what is old in any generation. Many of them are broken people -- molested children, alcoholic wrecks, shattered self-confidence -- but there are those who are not. If consensus among any sizable percentage of those is achieved, they will by the nature of doing what they always do -- seize positions of influence in society -- spread that doctrine to the point where it is implemented. Forget "ordinary people"; they are politically inactive except in cases of greed and revenge. Go for the doers. And do not bend the truth to pander to them, because then you'll invite incompetents into your inner circle. Tell them what reality is and if they cannot handle it, either abandon them or keep working on them, but do not change your vision of reality to become politically acceptable. Among other things, this means that they will respect you as truthful unlike others.

At this point, if you need further detail, you're making excuses -- most people make excuses instead of acting. You can spread knowledge through the internet or real life; there are documents detailing that on this site. You can promote a political goal via conversation, via flyers, via community radio or television or cable, via blog, even through public marches if you have to. Dishonest people make a token effort -- "OK, I posted this to a few blogs" -- where honest people stay on task. You may not know how to be honest, but you can learn, unless you do not believe in yourself at all. Your goal is to find other thinking people and influence them, and the first stage toward that goal is to get people talking about your ideas. Ignore your doubts, and have fun, because being an agent provocateur of truth in a time of lies is one of the most paradoxical and amusing roles ever possible. But remind yourself that each day you do something to forward this goal, you're becoming less of a helpless rape victim and more of an independent, powerful person who is fixing what plagues them about the world -- where others whine, make excuses, and ultimately revert to the same entertainment and political fallacies that got them in that position.