It’s that “60% of people have embraced toxic nihilism.” Shaped from years of scrolling, overdosing on dopamine, reading and participating in contentious debates on the internet that never lead to an outcome, reading clickbait headlines that stopped making sense years ago, going home and sitting in front of a monitor instead of going out with friends to hang out and just talk about life, of eating the most addictive foods and getting all manner of drugs over the counter to alter their moods, their feelings, their perceptions.
We have everything to placate us and make us happy and it’s killing everyone.
Many years ago I once sat with a local captain (like a constable) of a village in Southeast Asia. We were drinking gin and looking at the stars and he said “You know why gin here is cheap? And sold on every corner? Because as long as everyone makes their number one priority at the end of the day to come home and get drunk, you won’t get people coming together and forming groups, of protesting the injustices, of changing the system” he said with a smile as he tossed back another shot.
Since then I’ve actually pursued this and have found evidence over and over how capital uses numbing agents to keep populations subdued, from the overt tactics well recorded and planned like the use of Opium in China, all the way through more modern places like Russia and vodka. And it works. And we have a lot more numbing agents around us now than just ingestible substances.
In places with fewer numbing agents, people are still having kids, still throwing parties and looking forward to poker every night with their grown siblings, of building a new barn or getting together to open a new store, or instead of spending 12 hours a day getting better at Marvel Rivals, they’re playing basketball. Sure it happens here still, but it’s in such radical decline that we have a dictator in charge and nobody cares. This is manufactured nihilism and don’t mistake it for something else because that’s exactly what the numbing agents want you to do.
It’s not that 60% was “okay with fascism.”
It’s that “60% of people have embraced toxic nihilism.” Shaped from years of scrolling, overdosing on dopamine, reading and participating in contentious debates on the internet that never lead to an outcome, reading clickbait headlines that stopped making sense years ago, going home and sitting in front of a monitor instead of going out with friends to hang out and just talk about life, of eating the most addictive foods and getting all manner of drugs over the counter to alter their moods, their feelings, their perceptions.
We have everything to placate us and make us happy and it’s killing everyone.
Many years ago I once sat with a local captain (like a constable) of a village in Southeast Asia. We were drinking gin and looking at the stars and he said “You know why gin here is cheap? And sold on every corner? Because as long as everyone makes their number one priority at the end of the day to come home and get drunk, you won’t get people coming together and forming groups, of protesting the injustices, of changing the system” he said with a smile as he tossed back another shot.
Since then I’ve actually pursued this and have found evidence over and over how capital uses numbing agents to keep populations subdued, from the overt tactics well recorded and planned like the use of Opium in China, all the way through more modern places like Russia and vodka. And it works. And we have a lot more numbing agents around us now than just ingestible substances.
In places with fewer numbing agents, people are still having kids, still throwing parties and looking forward to poker every night with their grown siblings, of building a new barn or getting together to open a new store, or instead of spending 12 hours a day getting better at Marvel Rivals, they’re playing basketball. Sure it happens here still, but it’s in such radical decline that we have a dictator in charge and nobody cares. This is manufactured nihilism and don’t mistake it for something else because that’s exactly what the numbing agents want you to do.