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Why Weak Societies Choose Tyranny The pinnacle of tyranny would be a system that allows politicians, elites, and bureaucrats to control a population without force or coercion because the people love their servitude. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, an eerily relatable dystopian novel, with this idea at the forefront. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, there is no overt oppression. The state does not have to stamp on human faces with its jackboots or erect an inescapable surveillance state. Rather, the people of Brave New World happily chain themselves with meaningless pleasure and distractions. The authorities do not rule through terror and rage, the central elements of 1984, but instead give the people everything they ever wanted. A pharmaceutical called Soma becomes the opiate of the masses. Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, likens it to Christianity without tears. While religion requires years of moral training, Soma allows citizens to achieve peace simply by swallowing tablets. It is the perfect escape from reality, a holiday from the facts. Lenina, the female counterpart to the protagonist Bernard, cannot comprehend why he refuses Soma, preferring discomfort to something that can remove it. When Bernard states, “I’d rather be myself, myself and nasty, not somebody else, however jolly,” Lenina sees this as a sort of pathology and repeatedly encourages him to take the wonder drug. Bernard explains, “I want to know what passion is.” He understands that there is more to life than merely being content, craving genuine experience, including suffering and intensity, rather than being emotionally regulated by the World State. Lenina’s bewilderment stems from her conditioning to regard unhappiness as a technical problem, encapsulated in the society’s common saying that “a gram is better than a damn.” The people of Brave New World are not captives but satisfied customers. Children are produced by the scientific state, relieving people of the responsibility of parenthood. This grants them the ability to engage in promiscuity, where everyone belongs to everyone else, while filling their free time with cheap entertainment and endless sporting events—what would be referred to as slop today. As Neil Postman observed, Orwell saw totalitarianism through the lens of fear, while Huxley saw it through pleasure. There was no need to ban a book in Brave New Worldbecause there was no one who wanted to read one. An abundance of low-quality information rendered censorship unnecessary because no one could hear the truth through all the noise. Huxley threw shade at civil libertarians who passionately opposed tyranny because they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. Humanity in its rawest form is portrayed by John the Savage, an outsider free from the World State’s conditioning. Upon coming face-to-face with this spiritually neutered society, he completely rejects it: “I don’t want comfort, I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” Huxley’s dystopia is not imposed on an unwilling population but instead requested by a hollow one. Which leads us to the question: How do people become so weak that they get on their knees and beg for totalitarianism? Good times make bad times possible. Once a certain level of luxury and safety is achieved, people start to resemble the hobbits from the Shire. They are so far removed from evil that they forget it even exists and become defenseless in the face of it. Andrew Lobaczewski, who studied the psychology of totalitarianism from inside Poland’s communist takeover, wrote: “During good times, people progressively lose sight of the need for profound reflection. They lose the capacity to differentiate human nature, and emotion begins to dominate intellect. Once a critical mass starts operating on the pleasure principle, any excess mental effort seems like pointless labor.” Lobaczewski warned that it is not as simple as some people losing the ability to think rationally. It is worse, because those people then shame anyone capable of doing so. A clever, liberal, and merry individual is a good sport. A more far-sighted person predicting dire results becomes a wet blanket, a killjoy. The ability to have uncomfortable conversations without emotion taking over is, in Lobaczewski’s view, an indicator of whether a society’s future will be good or bad. It is easier to think about pleasant things. This leads people to eliminate any data or facts that cause them discomfort. That becomes a habit and eventually a custom accepted by society at large. Once the general populace accepts that inconvenient truths should be left unsaid, it becomes incapable of reaching correct conclusions. After all, how could you ever describe a picture that you refuse to look at? “Catastrophe waits in the wings of the communities that lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism,” Lobaczewski wrote. “It is on the other side of this weakening of thought that the processes of the generation of evil are intensified at every social scale until they give rise to bad times.” It is precisely man’s dreams of happiness that can lead to chaos and suffering. This hedonistic view of happiness contains the seeds of misery, feeding the eternal cycle whereby good times give birth to bad times. Friedrich Nietzsche viewed socialism as demanding comfort for the greatest number of people possible. To question whether it is good for the masses to live in comfort has become a form of heresy. This reveals the spiritual atrophy that so many suffer from. Considering only the weak believe comfort to be a virtue, it is what Carl Jung would describe as the infantile dream state of mass dependency: the desire to gently slip back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care. Except this lack of friction has consequences. The perfect state destroys the soil in which great intellect grows. Genius, struggle, passion, strength, and wisdom are required to build a safe and abundant society. Yet once a certain level of comfort is achieved, it can destroy the very virtues required to obtain it. Nietzsche observed that it is the warmest heart that aims to alleviate suffering and hardship but fails to realize that it thereby wills the destruction of its own foundation. Comfort breeds mediocrity, which is then called good. Small people want one thing above all: that no one hurt them. We have taken this pathology to such a degree that we now obsess over hurt feelings and call this virtue. Pleasure, in its proper place, is a byproduct of meaningful goals, not a goal in itself. Aristotle saw that pleasure and comfort distort perception and proper judgment. While they do not cause us to misjudge something like geometry or mathematics, they can destroy our ability to decide what is worth pursuing and, therefore, what to do. Consider The Odyssey. Homer depicts Odysseus’ men on the island of the Lotus-Eaters, where they taste the fruit and lose all desire to go home. Much like Huxley’s Brave New World, they are not imprisoned. Rather, they simply stop wanting anything more. Odysseus has to drag his men back to the ships while they weep to stay. This is what comfort can do to men. It empties them of purpose. We intuitively understand this but fail to apply it to our own lives. We must make the same choice as Odysseus when he refuses Calypso’s offer of endless comfort and immortality. He knows she is more beautiful than his wife Penelope waiting at home. He knows that he and Penelope will grow old and die, a fate he could avoid by staying with Calypso. No one who reads these stories wishes he had stayed. We want him to choose the hard way home because if he took the offer, he would stop being admirable. Yet staying is exactly what our modern society asks of us. We are told that the island is the good life. But what happens to the man who caves to this temptation? In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche imagines a risk-averse society taken to its logical endpoint. The elimination of all struggle produces a man so diminished that he fails to possess even self-contempt or higher aspiration. Safety and sameness become the highest goals, creating “no shepherd in one herd.” Anyone who seeks to be anything more than normal becomes an aberration to be dealt with. Or, as Nietzsche puts it, they have “made the wolf a dog in man himself, man’s best domestic animal.”

Good news! The #IFNiebla is now CONTROLLED. The final extinguishing work continues to progress. The work of @Plan_INFOCA in the face of one of the most complex wildfires is admirable. They have saved lives and homes, and they have prevented it from spreading much further. THANK YOU. (translated)

Quiero decir una cosa porque ya me están dando. Porqué creo que Sol no tiene que ganar? Salió cuando quiso volvió cuando quiso y no se la sancionó con la misma vara que a otros. Dio info de afuera, hizo complot, etc. Hasta se dio un tour por México en medio del certamen. Que lo gane una de las que aguantó 6 meses sin abrazar a sus seres queridos ni tener info, una de las que soportó hambre incertidumbre y juego. Uno empatiza o no empatiza con un jugador, compra o no compra y no tiene que ver con moralina el juego es juego y al show lo amamos. Eso no es odiar, no me interesa odiar ni tendría porqué, es una persona que no conozco. Sol tiene un montón de cosas admirables, es hermosa es inteligente, simplemente no quiero que ella se lleve el trofeo, lo merecen más cualquiera de las otras finalistas. Dicho esto, no avalo los agravios denigrantes que leo hacia ella, ni que le tiren con lo del ex ni que insulten a su hija ni que la traten den trol*. Pero... que se vacha ES AHORA. Perdón por escribir largo pero me gusta expresarme 😅 SOL AL 9009 #RealityShow #Competencia #Empatía

#ADMIRABLE 🙌 Cristian Kuperbank, miembro de la brigada internacional de rescate Los Topos Azteca, logró rescatar con vida a un perrito que había quedado atrapado bajo los escombros de una vivienda colapsada en Cali tras el fuerte terremoto de magnitud 7,4 que sacudió el país. 📹 [ https://t.co/8CU4z6WtQp ] #Rescate #Solidaridad #Héroes

À 37 ans, Russ se retire donc du monde de la NBA... ◾️ 18 saisons ◾️ 1'436 matchs au total (SR & Playoffs cumulés) ◾️ 5ᵉ meilleur passeur all time - 10'351 ◾️ 14ᵉ meilleur scoreur all time - 27'176 ◾️ 14ᵉ meilleur intercepteur all time - 2'038 ◾️ 60ᵉ meilleur rebondeur all time - 9'025 ◾️ 209 Triple-Doubles, record all time ◾️ 4 saisons en Triple-Double de moyenne 😵‍💫 ◾️ MVP 2017 ◾️ 9x All-Star ◾️ 9x All-NBA ◾️ 3x Assists Leader ◾️ 2x Scoring Champion 🥇 World Cup 2010 🥇 JO 2012 Clivant mais électrisant, critiquable mais admirable, l'incarnation du don de soi, parfois même un peu trop 🫶 #NBA #Basketball #RussellWestbrook

Little by little, the first responders are reducing the spread of #IFNiebla. It is a hopeful step forward. The work being done by @Plan_INFOCA, @UMEgob, and all the deployed professionals is admirable. But we must still be very cautious. There is work ahead. Much. (translated)

Yipio: “Sol es elegante, los outfits que tiene son muy lindos, es estética, tiene esa capacidad de estar siempre bien, el pelo impoluto, el maquillaje excelente, estilismo, yo intento estar peinada y muchas veces no puedo, ósea es algo admirable y encima no tiene vergüenza a nada” PLOT TWIST: YIPIO SIEMPRE ESTUVO ENAMORADA DE SOL ✊😭 #GranHermano #fashion #estilo #amor

"𝗟'𝗘𝗦𝗣𝗔𝗚𝗡𝗘 𝗩𝗔 𝗕𝗔𝗧𝗧𝗥𝗘 𝗙𝗔𝗖𝗜𝗟𝗘𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝗟'𝗔𝗥𝗚𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗘 !" R9 N'A AUCUN DOUTE SUR LE VAINQUEUR DE LA FINALE DE DEMAIN : CE SERA LA ROJA ! 🤯🇪🇸 "Je pense que l'Espagne va gagner le match et FACILEMENT ! Mes favoris ont toujours été l'Espagne ET la FRANCE ! Et j'avais dit lors de notre dernière émission que le vainqueur de cette demi-finale en question allait être CHAMPION DU MONDE. Je le répète : la Roja va gagner facilement avec un football extraordinaire. Ce n'est pas un jeu qui a été pratiqué seulement dans cette Coupe du Monde. ILS JOUENT COMME ÇA DEPUIS TRÈS LONGTEMPS ! C'est une philosophie qui vient de Pep Guardiola. Je ne crois pas que l'Argentine va avoir la force pour revenir au score si ils sont menés 1-0 ou 2-0 face à l'Espagne. Pourquoi ? Car l'Espagne aura la possession du ballon pendant tout le match. Mais cette Coupe du Monde de l'Argentine reste un SUCCÈS ABSOLU ! Ils ont fait des remontada folles. Lionel Messi écrit une nouvelle belle histoire dans un Mondial. Et c'est une sélection qui montre un caractère ADMIRABLE ! Sauf que l'Espagne sait ce qu'elle doit faire lors de n'importe quelle phase de jeu." (@ESPNBrasil) #ESPAGNE #FOOTBALL #MONDIAL

Vamos a ver… Como resulta que soy español y me siento muy español, estoy en contra de las corruptelas federativas de ayer, hoy y mañana. Y del mamoneo (trincón o simplemente observador) de los alrededores. Y hay muchos alrededores. Por eso la desafección, como les pasa a muchos otros, con la selección. Porque es, en mi opinión, legitimar y perpetuar un SISTEMA completamente corrupto y clientelar. Uno que ojalá cambie. Independientemente de si hay 7 de FCB, 4 del Madrid, ninguno de ambos y 15 del Logroñés. España siempre será mi equipo, esta selección, totalmente admirable en lo deportivo, no la siento así. Máximo respeto al grupo de jugadores que la forman. De todos los clubes. Mucha admiración por casi todos y simpatía por bastantes, sean de mi equipo o no. Esto no va de eso. Como todo el mundo sabe. Espero, sinceramente, que gane el Mundial. Pero, tanto si lo hace como si no… pues será un lunes normal. Este sistema (con tantas ramificaciones) ha conseguido eso… y creo que no sólo conmigo. ¡Disfruten y viva España! #España #Fútbol #Corrupción

🚨 Daniel Riolo : « CE QUE FAIT LE MAROC 🇲🇦 DEPUIS QUELQUES ANNÉES EST ADMIRABLE. 👏 Le Maroc 🇲🇦 est devenu UNE NATION PHARE DU FOOTBALL parce que le travail qui a été fait est BON et a été récompensé. BRAVO À EUX. » 🎙️ @AfterRMC https://t.co/C6xqiF3cvT #Maroc #Football #Sport

El trabajo que está haciendo Yummy es admirable. Igualan tu donación con 25% extra, son transparentes y ayudan operativamente con su red de repartidores. Ya han recaudado más de $800.000 entre donaciones y matches. https://t.co/ohlb6gxU00 #Solidaridad #Donaciones #Transparencia

🗣️TOMÁS ARANDA en @ElCanaldeBoca: "Estar con la Selección Argentina es único e inolvidable, la primera vez nunca se olvida. Agradecido con #Paredes y me va formando, allá me acompañó mucho en la Selección. #Scaloni 1 dia antes me dijo que iba al banco, que esté tranquilo, que no tengo que demostrar nada y que disfrute, que lo iba a hacer bien. Después con lo del chicle, ya me quedó el apodo 'chicle'. Yo trato de hacer lo que sé: me caracterizo por agarrar la pelota, ir para adelante, pase entrelíneas pegarle al arco. Hablé con el 10 (#Messi) y me dijo que si iba un poco más esquinada mi remate, entraba. Me aconsejó mucho y estoy totalmente agradecido, es una persona increíble y admirable, lo admiro mucho por cómo es como persona, y como jugador no hay nada que decir, es una locura verlo en cancha, en cada entrenamiento él se exige cada vez más y por eso está donde está, lo hace tan grande como es, el mejor del mundo. Enzo Fernández, Mac Allister, Palacios, Thiago Almada, son excelentes jugadores y uno aprende de ellos". #SelecciónArgentina #Fútbol #Messi