What do you cherish most, and how easy would it be to take it from you?
By now, you've probably heard the interesting phrase "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy," thrown around. You've likely seen the above picture. This is from a video produced by the World Economic Forum, the latest organization of major politicians and financial elite to be targeted by conspiracy theorists and cowards.
Describing them as "conspiracy theorists and cowards" does not mean that I think the WEF's critics are wrong; at least not entirely. Although the original video by the WEF that contains the above picture has been taken down since it gained wider notoriety, you can still see it in all its sociopathic glory, archived here. They still have an article on their website that addresses the ideas of the infamous video, where they admit that such a thing sounds utopian, and yet "every move is tracked and outside the city live swathes of discontents, the ultimate depiction of a society split in two." They see that classic sci-fi dystopian trope as just the cost of doing business in their new world.
And don't think it is an idle threat. You will find that a surprisingly large portion of the leading politicians in major countries are members of the World Economic Forum. Far from the most prominent among them is Danish MP Ida Auken, who openly states the following:
I recommend that you take a look at who shows up at WEF meetings if you doubt that they have the resources and power to see it done. So, why do I address the conspiracy theorists and fearmongers so derisively, when they are probably right about our impending slavery? Why shouldn't we listen to the doomsayers who foresee the coming gulags and goosesteps?
Because they are not right. That's not how conquering is done these days. The jackboots will not be headed to every door, throwing us into camps. The people who rule our world, as depraved as they are, have no need to use the inefficient barbarism of previous centuries. Not when human psychology is so well understood.
You will submit willingly. You will ask for your subservience.
One might laugh at the foolishness of sociopaths wanting to rule over an empire of animals and robots, a wasteland devoid of the glory that humanity brings forth when expressing its greatest potential... but they certainly can do it. They've been doing it a little more every year. Every identity that humans naturally hold central to who they are – family, ethnicity, religion, nation, gender, productive roles in a community, etc. - are blurring and erasing at the hands of media companies, public school systems, corporate tech censorship, and any other major channel of information by which we learn to interpret our world. A deeper spiritual meaning to life itself seems almost nonsensical if you've gotten your view of reality from television and social media.
So, we're left searching for... something. Then, being both trapped and enraptured in the only system most of us have ever known, a system of information and experience controlled by very few hands... we search that very system for anything to make us feel, anything with a sense of worth. Not knowing anything better, we are incredibly weak to pressure, temptation, momentary excitement – all things that this modern world can offer endlessly.
How You Will Own Nothing
Nothing need be directly stolen from our hands, yet we are already starting to own nothing. One of many examples is housing, a very basic necessity. According to the St. Louis Fed, housing prices in the United States have multiplied 25x since 1965, far outstripping inflation. Yet Pew Research shows that the average wage has barely moved in real terms since 1965.
Of course, the push away from private ownership for normal people is prevalent in far less dramatic ways than that. Participating in everyday life is becoming a subscription service.
We spent the last couple of years seeing how easily governments can tell you that normal, healthy, law-abiding people can lose their access to society en masse if they won't participate in something as objectionable as experimental medical procedures. Booster shots become your means of renewing your subscription to society.
BMW has recently made headlines for selling cars that have the equipment for heated seating installed - as in, customers have already purchased seats capable of heating with all of the necessary tools to do so - but use software to lock heating functions unless you pay $18 per month.
And anyone who tries to distract themselves from the failings of this reality with video games is certainly aware of the industry quickly moving from purchasing complete games to microtransactions, season passes, and DLC. You're getting a business structure where you must continually pay to experience the same downloaded digital content, for which you only have licenses that can be revoked at any time.
You Will Be Some Approximation Of Happy
While we're on the topic of video games, let's talk about what happiness means in the modern world. Do you spend your days working to achieve lasting satisfaction? Are you building lives and worlds that will be greater than yourself and last beyond your own lifetime? Are you happy because you find great meaning in what you do?
No, that's not what happiness means. If you want to understand what happiness means today, you need to understand Skinner boxes and supernormal stimuli.
Skinner boxes are a research tool invented by famed 20th century behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner. Simply speaking, it is just an enclosed box with a lever in it, and something good might happen if you press the lever. Pigeons and rats would be placed in these boxes, and pressing the lever might give them food they like, or perhaps turn off a mild electric shock that they don't like. But the interesting part is that researchers used Skinner boxes to find that they could vary how often a lever press actually resulted in a reward, and what type of rewards were most effective… and eventually figure out how to turn animals into behavioral addicts. When manipulated properly, all that the animals wanted to do was press the lever over and over again, as often as they could, all day. Perhaps you are familiar with social media ‘likes’.
And then there is supernormal stimuli. It's an interesting result of animal psychology and biology. Essentially, a supernormal stimulus is something that produces a normal instinctual response in an animal, but the stimulus is artificially exaggerated beyond what the animal would ever experience in nature. Because of this, the animal does not naturally have an appropriately moderated response to the stimulus. This is often to the detriment of the animal, even though they are doing what they want of their own free will.
For example, researchers have found that certain birds will nest and nurture their eggs, focusing most on the eggs that show the greatest physical signals of health - size and spot coloration. So, if you place ridiculously oversized fake eggs with unrealistically bright spots near their nest, the birds will invariably let all their offspring die in order to go sit on the fake eggs that they couldn’t have possibly laid themselves. Researchers also found fish that, during mating season, will spend all day attacking giant wooden fish that are painted with exaggerated markings of their rivals, to the point that they will never actually bother mating.
Certainly you have made the obvious connection by this point, but in case you have not - these phenomena apply to humans. And they consume us when we try to pursue happiness in the modern world. There are video game companies that are well-documented in studying the Skinner box effect of rewards in their products. While you lose your nations and families without a whimper, you pay to express rampant in-group preference when you see your favorite professional sports teams selling your natural tribalism back to you. How many adventures, social interactions, and dramas have we lived out on the television screen while really sitting by ourselves and doing nothing? And hopefully there is no need to mention the perfect drug that is virtually infinite internet pornography.
How Are We Fighting This Degeneration?
To anyone living in Western civilization, I hope that was an obviously rhetorical question. Put down your Funko Pops for a second, and let's discuss this.
In America, 1 in 5 young adults is considered NEET - that is, "Not Employed, in Education, or in Training". Perhaps, after what has been done to our economy over the last couple of years, you might think that these are simply people stuck in a situation with no opportunity, and certainly some of them are exactly that. Yet we've just seen a record spike to 12 million job openings in 2022, nearly 2 jobs for every person counted as unemployed.
The government reports that marriage rates have been dropping consistently since the 1980s, and overall since the 20th century peak in the 1940s. In the two year period from 2016-2018, nearly 31% of men aged 18 to 24 have had zero sexual activity in the past year, up from less than 19% less than two decades prior. This is has assuredly increased since the two years of lockdowns.
We are not fighting. We haven't found anything of meaning to fight for in this society. In fact, we are dropping out of society, and losing life altogether. We grasp at momentary comfort and pleasure in the artificial. When Virtual Reality video games and porn are of high quality and widely available, how many young men do you think that society will lose entirely? When Universal Basic Income means that you can have your meal of bugs delivered directly to your studio apartment without ever having to step outside to go to work, how many shells of human beings will functionally disappear? Certainly there will be millions who choose that rather than struggling at the office and being berated by the outside world for their carbon footprint, while getting no more benefit for enduring it.
It's A Challenge, So Go Win
This is the challenge of our age. Every cultural and social authority you ever should have trusted in this world has given you every reason that you should accept this fate. It will be easy to do so. And there will be plenty of immediate benefits for doing so. And when I tell you to deny this fate and fight, know that it will be hard and unpleasant.
But you can and should fight this. This is the challenge of our age. This is the defining movement of our generation. The entire future will be defined by which people can survive this and continue.
The people who disappear into the Metaverse or whatever - they will be completely forgotten within their own lifetimes. The people who slowly, silently acquiesce to the growing demands packaged as temptations and conveniences - they will be remembered as little more than statistics. The elites who think they have the authority to rewrite the reality of the human experience, purely because they've found themselves with the power to do so - their arrogance will destroy them, as always happens with rulers who think themselves gods but live like parasites. It's tragic enough to cry, but how can you not laugh?
Yet, anyone who abandons comfort and takes ownership of their own mind... well, many of them will not make it, because that is always the reality of life. But they are the only ones with a chance. The families they protect, the philosophies and worldviews and religions they uphold, the communities that they build - those will be the only materials left with which to build the future, once the rest of this has fallen under its own weight. You can and should overcome this.
Victory
So, how do you overcome this? There's a few rules you can live by. Stay out of debt, and stop willingly signing your life over to the banks. Stay away from the growing subscription/microtransaction-based economy, and own what is yours. Build skills that are useful to the community around you, become self-sufficient, and live within your means. Join with other people to form communities that can outlast this. Spend your time focused on life, rather than distracted from it.
But, most importantly, you MUST pursue meaning. You must have a deeper reason for life. You must have a reason to get up every morning and establish yourself in reality, even when reality is hard. They cannot tempt you with pleasurable obliteration... not when you are pursuing a higher priority here in existence, anyway. They cannot pressure you to submit to their comfortable demise... not when you've abandoned comfort to accomplish your life's real work, anyway. The spirit of who you should become is the thing you must prioritize before all else, and you should defend it with everything you are.
Conquering yourself so that they cannot conquer your world - that is what you must cherish most, and they will never be able to take it from you.