Search

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.”

🎬 Un mensaje muy especial de @Lookmheewang y @sonyasarann desde Tailandia!! 🇹🇭 Sabemos que tenéis muchísimas ganas de verlas y conocerlas en persona, así que hoy os traemos una pequeña sorpresa: un vídeo único grabado por ellas para todas vosotras. No os vamos a contar más. Dadle al play y disfrutadlo 💌 ¡Vedlo hasta el final! 🤭 Y sí, estamos bastante seguras de que alguna sonrisa (y quizá alguna lagrimita 👀) va a caer, bestie. Cada vez queda menos para tenerlas en Madrid 🇪🇸✨ 🎬 A very special message from @Lookmheewang and @sonyasarann, straight from Thailand!! 🇹🇭 We know you’re all so excited to see them and meet them in person, so today we have a little surprise for you: a special video recorded by them just for all of you. We won’t say anything else. Just hit play and enjoy it 💌 Watch it until the end! 🤭 And yes, we’re pretty sure there’ll be a few smiles (and maybe even a few tears 👀), bestie. It won’t be long until they’re in Madrid! 🇪🇸✨ #LMSY #LMSYMadrid #LookmheeSonya #LMSY #LookmheeSonya #Madrid

Jesse Ed Davis (September 21, 1944 – June 22, 1988) was a Native American guitarist. He was well regarded as a session artist and solo performer, was a member of Taj Mahal's backing band and played with musicians such as Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Jackson Browne. Davis was born in Norman, Oklahoma. His father, Jesse Edwin "Bus" Davis II, was a citizen of the Comanche Nation and a Muscogee and Seminole descendant. His father was also a prominent Native American artist whose nome d'arte was Asawoya or Running Wolf. His mother, Vivian Mae (Bea) Saunkeah, was Kiowa. Davis began his musical career in the late 1950s in Oklahoma City and surrounding cities with John Ware (later a drummer for Emmylou Harris and Michael Nesmith); John Selk (later a bass player for Donovan); Jerry Fisher (later a vocalist with Blood, Sweat & Tears); and drummer Bill Maxwell (later with Andrae Crouch). https://hvdommelen.nl/d/DavisJE.html

Why can't we humans be allowed to enjoy ourselves in "safe" areas. Why do we always have to be on the verge of tears and look over our shoulders. My thoughts go out to all the citizens of Berlin.🇩🇪🏳️‍🌈🇩🇰 ​​Next month it's Copenhagen's turn to hold PRIDE events from August 8th to August 16th. I'll keep my fingers crossed for the best for everyone participating in PRIDE. I hope for a "safe" and security is in order. I know that the police are in place.

🐰: j'ai passé un bon moment avec vous ce soir (i had a great time with you tonight) 🐰: merci pour ces précieux souvenirs (thank you for these precious memories) 🐰: je n'oublierai pas (i won't forget) 🐰: faites attention en rentrant (be careful going home) 🐰: vous allez beaucoup me manquer (i'm gonna miss you so much) 🐰: je t'aime (i love you) when i tell you jungkook's pronunciation is perfect i'm not kidding with you. i had tears in my eyes as he was talking. the amount of love he has for us, to take the time to learn an entire speech in a language he doesn't know, and as difficult as french too, whilst delivering it so perfectly, is just beyond me. jungkook i love you endlessly. words will never be enough to describe my love for you, though i hear and feel yours so well. you made me so happy. ♡ #Jungkook #BTS #Love

Πέθανε ο Ντέιβιντ Κλέιτον-Τόμας, frontman των Blood, Sweat & Tears, σε ηλικία 84 ετών, μετά από μια ζωή που ξεκίνησε από τους δρόμους και τις φυλακές και τον οδήγησε στην κορυφή της μουσικής βιομηχανίας με το διάσημο τραγούδι «Spinning Wheel» και την κατάκτηση Grammy. #ΝτέιβιντΚλέιτονΤόμας #BloodSweatTears #Grammy

Die deutschen „Kremlsprecher“ ändern ihre Strategie. Da ihr sonstiges appellieren zurecht auf Taube Ohren trifft, versucht man anstatt der üblichen #Atomsau Panik-Mache mal die gefühlsduselige Variante, mit jeder Menge Vatnik-Tears.😭— die Kreml-Botschaft bleibt aber die Gleiche. https://t.co/8e5NNTYamO #Politik #Russland #Kreml