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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.”

🚨 LA PLUIE POURRAIT PERTURBER LE QUART DE FINALE ENTRE ARTHUR FILS ET RAFAEL JODAR À MONTRÉAL ! ⛈️ Le match est programmé à partir de 18h à Montréal 🇨🇦 (00h en France), alors que des averses et des orages sont attendus en début de soirée. ⚠️ https://t.co/c4ZGeRoJ65 #Montreal #Tennis #Meteo

This tragic case is a reminder of why clinical trials and risk-averse regulatory agencies matter. And why unregulated "anti-aging" treatments should concern us all. What the longevity field needs is more rigorous science, not more hype. #ClinicalTrials #AntiAging #LongevityResearch #Therearenospecificcountrymentionsinthetweet #sotherearenocountrycodestoreturn.

🔥Incendie en cours en #Gironde | Point de situation du jeudi 30 juillet à 06h00 ✔️ La nuit a été plutôt calme. Ce matin le feu est toujours stabilisé. ➡️ La surface brûlée n'a pas évolué (42 000 hectares). ➡️ Poursuite traitement des lisières et des départs de feu actifs. 6 feux actifs avec une attention particulière cette nuit : - Le secteur dunaire Grand Crohot-Le Porge - Le sud du Lac de Lacanau 🔵Météo plutôt favorable aujourd’hui - Quelques averses attendues sur le littoral entre 5 et 9 h qui pourraient toucher la zone du feu, - Des orages secs pourraient éclater sur le Nord-Ouest du département, - 80 % humidité ce matin en baisse à la mi-journée à 50 % puis jusqu’à 30 %, - Températures maximum 27° sur le littoral et 34° à Bordeaux. 🟠Fin de l’alerte canicule orange à 6 h ce matin ➡️Ordre public : 2 interpellations dans la nuit pour suspicion de mise à feu ➡️Les restrictions de circulation restent inchangées La mobilisation reste totale 📸 SDIS 33 #Gironde #Incendie #Feu

🏆 QUIZ CULTURE GÉNÉRALE N°579 : ⬇️ Partage & Aime le quiz avant de jouer ! 😉 1. Quel type de nuage est responsable des averses et des orages ? #Quiz #CultureGénérale #Nuages

Les autorités locales ont ordonné de nouvelles évacuations dans plusieurs communes près de Bordeaux en raison d'un incendie toujours non maîtrisé en Gironde, menaçant environ 220.000 personnes et ayant déjà blessé 84 pompiers, bien que des conditions météorologiques légèrement favorables aient été observées avec la chute du vent et une petite averse. #Incendie #Gironde #Bordeaux

Administrația Națională de Meteorologie a emis o avertizare cod portocaliu de vijelii și averse torențiale valabilă pentru județul Ilfov, inclusiv municipiul București, unde se așteaptă ploi de 25-40 l/mp, rafale de vânt de 60-70 km/h și posibile intensificări ale fenomenelor meteorologice, cauzând deja inundații în capitală. #CodPortocaliu #Ploaie #Inundatie

Administrația Națională de Meteorologie (ANM) a emise atenționări de Cod galben pentru instabilitate atmosferică, vijelii și averse torențiale în 28 de județe și Municipiul București, valabile joi și vineri, cu intensificări ale vântului și posibile căderi de grindină. #CodGalben #VremeInstabila #AverseTorențiale

Administraţia Naţională de Meteorologie a emis un Cod roşu de ploi şi vijelii pentru judeţul Tulcea, valabil până joi dimineaţa, cu prognoze de averse torenţiale, intensificări ale vântului şi cantităţi de apă ce pot depăşi 120 l/mp, alături de alte avertizări similare în mai multe zone ale ţării. #CodRoșu #VremeRea #Tulcea

Bucureștiul și mai multe județe din România se află sub avertizare meteorologică Cod portocaliu din cauza furtunilor puternice, autoritățile emițând mesaje RO-ALERT pentru a avertiza populația despre averse torențiale și descărcări electrice, cu riscuri de vânt puternic și grindină. #CodPortocaliu #Furtuni #AlerteMeteo

Administrația Națională de Meteorologie (ANM) a emis noi alerte cod galben și portocaliu pentru furtuni și vijelii, vizând 24 de județe și Bucureștiul, cu prognoze de averse torențiale, descărcări electrice și grindină, iar în unele zone cantitățile de apă ar putea depăși 70 l/mp. #meteo #codgalben #furtuni

Administrația Națională de Meteorologie (ANM) a emis avertizări Cod portocaliu și Cod galben pentru furtuni în mai multe zone din România, prognozând averse torențiale, vijelii și grindină, cu temperaturi ridicate în sudul țării și o tranziție către instabilitate atmosferică accentuată în următoarele zile. #CodPortocaliu #Furtuni #InstabilitateAtmosferică