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Before I settled down in my current career, I went through about a two year phase where I kind of wandered around the world with a lot of digital nomad influencer types. I lived in a few countries, cities around America and I had a lot of life experience. I'm glad I lived it as a phase of my life, but I would not want to do so again, if you know what I mean. I think a lot of young people lived through something like that and and get it out of their system after the purposeful control of childhood and before the responsibility of adulthood. One of the interesting things I found is that lots of people liked doing activities which they didn't actually enjoy, but which they believed others would enjoy. I kept finding this with nightlife as an easy example in which I must have gone to like 50 clubs in those few years after grabbing dinner. The sort I hung out with would frequently go to the club as a sort of ritual or, or just a normal celebration. The thing I kept seeing which was especially so evident towards the end of the night is that very few of the people involved seemed to genuinely enjoy what they were doing. What I kept finding is that people would go out, party for a few hours and gyrate awkwardly without really talking to anyone where the music is just so loud that you can't talk. Secondly, no one actually knows how to dance and. And so you just shuffle your body awkwardly, hoping to catch a glance from the other sex that's innately pretty cringe by itself. I would ask guys why they were doing it and they would say that club life in itself wasn't enjoyable, but they would do this to get girls. However, I found nightlife was not actually a good way to meet women in that the success rate when you can't actually talk isn't very good unless you're incredibly attractive. I think it's been really understated how much nightclubs were used in 2000 and tens culture to denote something innately cool or interesting. If you watch pop music from that era and I'm a huge pop fan, to show a nightclub in a music video would imply that it's cool or current. There are a series of dances people tend to do when they want to show that something's cool and that there are others that they do when they want to show that something's lame. Both dances look remarkably similar. I've picked up contextually that these sort of clubs were fun back in the 20th century when they'd do stuff like play disco, 80s pop or other music with lyrics and instruments that you can actually dance to or talk to people with. However that doesn't have a bearing with people my age. Since I'm Gen Z, I've never lived through that. What I heard was mostly boring EDM and incoherent rapid God. The Danza Caduro is seared into my mind from Mexico. What I've picked up from context and body language is that this is a sort of event which everyone involved went to since they thought it was popular. A sort of anthropological bluff, but one in which everyone involved was part of the joke. I get that there are super extroverts who love this stuff, but that wasn't my impression for the vast majority of the people who were going to. I think Gen Z caught up with this where only a few years after there's been this huge trend of saying that zoomers don't like going to clubs and club attendance has radically collapsed with very few zoomers going. And it's always funny when the legacy older media will say stuff like Gen Z isn't drinking enough or isn't clubbing enough or isn't getting laid enough. And it's funny that when previous generations did those things, they the adults criticize them for doing it, but then when their kids don't do it, then they're criticizing Gen Z for not doing it. It's pretty ironic. And it's interesting that our moral authorities are trying to defend a sort of moral past that never claimed to have any respect or authority. The boomers are trying to project moral authority onto their children. While they have never tried to actually attain moral authority over the course of their lives, they don't get the wise sensei card. So some of you are probably thinking at this point, this nerd is criticizing nightclubs. That makes sense. Nerds hate clubs since they're antisocial losers. First of all, of course I don't agree with that because I'm the one saying it. And secondly, I don't condone the categories you are using to explain the world or your moral framework. However, I am using this to rage bait you into hearing my argument for the rest of this video for how much of our society is a sort of bluff. This entire civilization is a bluff. The way to call a bluff is to start being honest, which is what I'm trying to do here. I also don't care what you think, and I think trying to build your life around that is just innately cringe. The bluff that's going on is that our entire society is built around being cool and popular. However, in the process. We in fact are profoundly cringe and unpopular as a society. We we've built our entire society around a sort of critical lie which consumes everything. This is a video about the anthropology of popularity and how it's been used against the western world. In a society designed to pull people apart and make us feel alone, it's important to connect to others. And one of the best ways to build and maintain those connections is through gaming. Gaming with friends isn't just more fun, it actually makes the experience more meaningful and productive too. In fact, studies show that people who game some have better well being than those who don't game at all. But finding the right people is a pain, but then when you want to play, you have to actually remember everybody, reach out to all of them, and then they probably aren't even free anyway, so it's easier to just solo queue. I bet most of you don't even remember who most of your friends on Steam and Discord are. Gaming with friends is awesome, but actually making it happen is a losing battle. That's why a good friend of mine who's an expert in personality psychology built Game Tree, an app with a supporting Discord bot that makes playing with the right people easy. Basically, instead of getting matched with screaming 12 year olds telling you to kill yourself, Game Tree helps you automatically pull in your relevant online friends when you start a game or else finds new players you'll actually click with based on shared tastes, values and personality compatibility. It's great. And there are already over 1.5 million people signed up. You should use Game Tree in order to keep up with your old friends and to meet new gaming friends. And just search gametree in Google or the App Store today to make your gaming life more fun, meaningful and social. Peace Part 1 the Lonely Crowd this video is a sort of love note to a book which I read four years ago, that being the Lonely Crowd by David Reisman. It's become such an important mental note in how I process the world that I can't help but think of it pretty frequently. The book was written in the late 40s, right after World War II. It got so many predictions right that it's kind of just stunning. For example, it predicted a social code of politeness, a lot like political correctness. It predicted a corporate culture in which everything was code for something else, but but no one explains it. It's said that the lack of a clear direction in moral standards in the society would cause issues of alienation, anxiety and depression. This would create enormous psychological issues across the entire population. The book predicted that a culture war would start between red and blue states or rural and urban America. Rural America would maintain a value code ultimately stemming back from Christianity, while urban America would develop a moral cod from the New Deal into an all encompassing ideology. A lot of the authors at the time predicted that the ideology of the New Deal would grow to become an all encompassing religion, and they were right. Read the text wall for why I think that's the case. David Reisman also said that in this new America, the left would have a very sizable advantage in media, education, culture and large bureaucratic organizations. And it's said that this coming era of American history would be built off the ability to game bureaucratic systems rather than actually be able to achieve things in the real world. This would create a society based off popularity games in which signaling would matter more than accomplishment. This book is part of the reason I made my anthropological system of seven emotions across society, which is one of the theories I've developed that I'm most proud of. And in that the book posits something very similar to my shame, guilt and anxiety distinction that I use. It talks about the dominant motivation of modern society being anxiety, that the modern man is taken up by a sort of cosmic anxiety with an inability to figure out up from down, an inability to gain mastery of himself, feel anything real, or determine what was true or a lie, creating a person much like Nietzsche's Last Man. This would signal a long term civilizational decline for the west, which the author compares to Greece and Rome's earlier declines into decadence. This would also be correlated with population collapse across the Western world. This level of accuracy for predictions might shock a lot of people. I think that's fair in that this author clearly did something right and I do want to honor David Reisman's accomplishment for. However, I read a lot of authors from that time period and I would say there are about a dozen that really nailed predicting the future accurately. That would include Spengler, Carol Quigley, James Burnham, Amaury Duriancourt, John Brunner, C.S. lewis, Lewis Mumford, amongst others. What they have in common is that in the current context they would all or most of them would be conservatives, and they operate through the constrained view of human nature. What that means is that they believe human nature operates under the same principles today as it did for all of human history, and that human nature is innately fallible. They were able to make these predictions so accurately, since they understood human nature with enough wisdom from studying the past, that they could fairly accurately model the mental states of what people in the future would be like. This is an intensely difficult thing to do, and even the best authors frequently fail at it. I found the Lonely Crowd to be a chilling book to read. It felt like one of the most honest and accurate assessments of life today. One of the things I look at is that when an author gets a lot right, it normally means they've tapped into a true underlying current of the collective subconscious. And you can ride that current for a bit further but than the authors themselves realized at the time. This is often how certain predictions become so timely in the future. Fulfilling contexts that the authors themselves could not have possibly known at the era of their writing. For example, you look at Christianity or other religions where their writers and their teachings are applicable in contexts where Jesus never knew about the industrial revolution or the invention of the atom bomb. But Christianity still has useful lessons today. The main metaphor of the book is of course, the lonely crowd. The lonely crowd is a place in which everyone is part of a crowd, given they want connection. But since none of them are being authentic, it means they can't actually find it. This creates a permanent sense of listlessness and isolation which permeates the entire society. One of the points the author talks about is that the most densely populated societies in history are are also the loneliest. In a sort of paradox, there are certain cities where you can feel a sort of palpable loneliness in the air. Like New York City, Los Angeles or Shanghai. Cities where status seeking has consumed our own humanity. I was once having dinner with a friend of mine who used to work at the Fed. And my father and my friend asked my father how come people in elite coastal circles in America were would make staggering miscalculations either for what the effects of their actions would be across the world and the country, or they would do things that would clearly make them unhappy over the course of their life. And what my father replied is that they're all stuck in incredibly petty status games which consume their entire worldview. And so if it's not part of their internal status game, they're just not going to notice something. It's a very clear form of tunnel vision, which is one of modernity's greatest issues. I remember when I was in New York, where people would judge you if you were from New Jersey or the suburbs, which are objectively nicer. And it's just so strange. Same thing as Los Angeles. The exact neighborhood or weird details like what watch you have. That's how they assess you. But those are not good heuristics. And you're boxing out the entire world. Because what these people don't realize is it's not the neighboring suburbs that are issues. They're losing to Texas or Florida or those states, and they were completely unaware of realizing that, which is why these states are failing. And people in these blue states like Boston or Massachusetts or New York or Washington D.C. or California, they have such profound tunnel vision. They cannot understand why their areas are failing and why businesses are leaving and why people are leaving. And it's just strange. What all anthropologists who talk about modernity say, which is something that I think people can pick up intuitively but don't have the courage to admit, is that the main psychological issue with modernity is dehumanization, which loneliness is downstream from. Watch my video on the Unabomber for the full argument here. But industrial civilization has caused humans to become treated like cogs in an impersonal system, one in which humans are functionally zoo animals at best and hive creatures at worst. We didn't evolve for these conditions, and it's obvious that this is having enormous negative effects psychologically. I think this goes unstated, but humans haven't even close to adapted to the enormous shifts brought about by the industrial Revolution, and I find it remarkable. Folks today will look back on the traditions of the 20th century with any reverence, as if the 20th century wasn't just making shit up on the spot. The world of the 20th century was a Plato's cave of comfortable illusions and lies. It must come crashing down soon if we want to survive. However, this also means that the social structures we take for granted are significantly more fragile than we imagine. The main issue implicit in the Lonely Crowd is the attempt and failure to form genuine connections in an urban environment. The reason David Reisman predicted a culture war between rural and urban America in which rural America would keep something closer to America's Christian based guilt morality which we had in the 19th century. While the urban cities would try to experiment, more would be due to the unprecedented nature of majority urban societies, he said. This value code would be driven off anxiety, which is very clearly true as the media and institutions constantly whip up anxiety and hysteria to control their base of followers. People are in the crowd since they want connection. However, real connection comes from a lengthy shared context in which you and your companion have faced difficult experiences together. Since the urban environment is totally artificial and recent and people tend to naturally project their physical environments around them onto the rest of the world. City people imagine the entire human race is recent, artificial and held together by large governments. Since that's how city people live. This makes natural ties like nation, family, religion and regional seem alien to city people. This is why Spengler always said the rise of cities to dominance is a variable that causes civilizational decay. One of the points people don't understand yet is that all things have balance. I'm not trying to knock cities here. They're the engine of human civilization and progress. We'd be in prehistory without them. But as the Greek genre of tragedy or Aristotle would suggest, all life forms have their own life cycles where their greatest strength becomes their greatest downfall. For human societies, the cities are both our greatest strength and also our downfall. Modernity has had a cultural issue with isolation and nihilism ever since the modernist ideologies first arose around the time of the French Revolution. Modernity deals with the issue of the human soul and human condition by ignoring it. The thing, though, is that only worked as long as science caused increases in standard of living to go up in life to get better. Once science became divorced from actual improvements in quality in life, modernity just caused nihilism and hatred of life among its own people. All the things your parents talked about, like meeting girls in clubs, socializing in college, chatting to people in public and that stuff, were band aids on modernity's crisis of meaning and connection. This is something I don't get about this whole dating and social discourse. The idea that you'd meet your wife at the bar or you'd meet her friends at a hobby group would be totally alien to the rest of human history. They would want you to socialize among people with your shared biological self interest, whether social class, ethnic, religious or regional interests. They saw marriage as a continuation of a family line in which it was your responsibility to pass it on and pick a partner where you could do so. I'm always shocked at how attached we are to the social forms of the mid to the late 20th century. That was just a brief moment built out of a lot of coincidences and weird variables. But we've sort of fossilized it as the standard to assess life against today. I think it was since quality of life was so good. I'm tired of both the right and left wingers either talking about the 1950s, 60s, or World War II. I was born in the 21st century, and I'm unclear why I should care about that era of history rather than others. Can't we draw parallels to the Greeks of the medievals? That would be way more interesting and cool. One of the things Nietzsche talked about writing in the 19th century. Is that how with the end of the Age of the Last Men, which he predicted would occur in the early 21st century, he said that the new cultural reaction would tear down the dragon of traditional from that era for a frame of reference. Nietzsche's Age of the Last Men is the idea that due to a combination of the Industrial Revolution and the degeneration of an originally Christian moral code through envy, is that you would see a society that would glorify weakness, conformity, docility and mediocrity. And the thing that confused me is that the Age of the Last Men was supposed to be a hyper egalitarian, conformist modernist society which rejected tradition, one which tries to avoid suffering, depth or consequences at all costs. A society by design divorced from history or tradition, but which itself is completely weighed down by arbitrary traditions. It just invented God. This is stupid. None of this makes sense. I mean, these people say they don't believe in tradition or social structures, then they're completely controlled by their own arbitrary traditions and social structures, which they refuse to let you analyze. When you're seeing a lonely crowd, you're seeing people who are too scared to actually relate to others on an honest level, which would demonstrate a degree of vulnerability. You can't have real relationships in your life without vulnerability, but much of modern life suggests that you should. I find especially boomers and leftists suggest this attitude of permanent positivity, which just comes across to me as insane. They don't ever want to talk about anything uncomfortable or deep. If you ever bring up something difficult, they'll just tell you to change the topic. There's always this implicit assumption that there's this sort of comfortable baseline that you can always default back onto. There's always a warm, safe house and family and society to return to. But for a lot of the population, that's just not true where it's been taken away from them. And so when you don't want them to talk about uncomfortable things, you've effectively removed them from the entire discourse because they don't have anything to talk about. Where the Overton window of things you can talk about has also shrunk. Where we can't talk about politics, you can't talk about religion, you can't talk about philosophy or anything deeper complex, because our society looks down on those things. You can't talk about geopolitics. And to go to more basic levels, pop culture should be the most normie thing ever. But if you bring up dissident opinions on pop culture, people will say, oh, it's just Fun. Don't overthink it. It isn't there to be smart. And what that means is that we can't really talk about anything in our culture because our culture is so innately dysfunctional and we're completely unwilling to look at any level of the dysfunction or to take responsibility. The problem is that this isn't living. Living has some stakes in reality. What people are doing is being stuck in a permanent state of psychological listlessness in which nothing is differentiated from anything else. I remember when I was in Thailand's Indian Ocean coastline thinking this looks exactly like Florida. Reisman talks about how 19th century man's concept of formality and strictness gave them the psychological space to really cut loose when they weren't working. He said that the new man of the 20th and 21st centuries would lack any deep passions or obsessions. He says that 19th century man was like a self directed helicopter and 20th century man would be like floating in water, constantly shuffled around without any real attachment to anything. This is why young people today are super dysfunctional with terrible mental health. I've seen the lonely crowd too many times to count now. It's a sort of sad feeling when you look out over a group of people who are standing around with their phones out, ignoring each other and all dressed identically with a T shirt and jeans. You could figure out all of their social or political views by just figuring out which Internet algorithm they're in. It's so depressing. What happened to authenticity, personality, courage or having a reason to live? I find this conformity is actively enforced by the entire society. Whether schools, the workplace, families or friend groups. Very few people today actually want you to succeed or be happy. We're a society built around hurting others and tearing others down. And then we don't even have the decency to say it. Where it's the entire society is this sort of constant listlessness. It's not okay. The worst part of it is that they're in complete denial about it. If you asked any of them, they'd say that they were individuals with their own dreams or hopes and aspirations, that they're rational, free thinkers. I'd be willing to accept this if we were some Asian society in which conformity was a stated virtue of the culture, where everyone had been raised to submit to family, tradition and government. I'm not a huge fan of societies like that, but they do work. Instead, we're just complete and utter hypocrites. For every single value we pretend to have, we're actually the opposite. The best way to Understand our society's moral code is to look at what our stated morals were like a decade or two ago and then just do the exact opposite. For every single value we pretend to have, we're actually the opposite. Read this text wall for more information. We're a society built off strangling our fellow countrymen while forcing everyone to smile as we do it. I find it really shocking that when I talk about this, a lot of people assume that it's my psychological fault that I'm not happy about a society which is actively built to screw me over in every way possible. It's like people can't admit that reality exists. I find when I talk to a lot of people psychologically and I say something, they'll always view it as a reflection of the person speaking. They'll never view the things people say as a reflection of reality because we're just so detached from reality that the idea that people do things because reality exists is incomprehensible to people. The west is committing suicide before our own eyes and no one says a thing. Just that is a beyond damning incrimination of our era of history. Being cool. One of the most important parts of growing up is being able to disentangle which of the influences on your development as a person were useful and and which ones weren't. The adults around you when you're a child give you a certain cultural operating system, and as an adult, you test if it actually works for you. Both of my parents, the people around me versus the town I grew up in, and then the school and media, to just say a few, all had different narratives of the world. I was a child, and so no one explained this to me. So I had to figure out how to code switch between each context and and then to figure out how they thought. One of the interesting divisions was that my parents had a very different concept of life than the media in schools, which tended to agree with each other. My parents moved out to the woods and always told me to be an individual and not to listen to what the crowd and the public said. My father would tell me growing up that people would frequently sacrifice their entire lives to have transitory popularity with people who didn't even like them. He said that there were two kinds of people in this those who liked you for what you did and for what you own. He said to root out and remove the second group from your life as soon as possible. He said the way to build good relationships was to cultivate a strong character. And then people similar to you would congregate around you wherever you lived. Both of my parents said that honor, courage and self reliance were the most important things in life. My mother was especially prescient. My mom said that in my lifetime industrial civilization would break down due to an inability to route the machine through human nature, especially the reproductive and social. She said that this would cause a sociological breakdown and that since we did not respect the divine Mother Nature would start destroying the western world for our disrespect. She said that class divisions would grow greater and that the elite had used the left to cut out social mobility. This was all in 2010 too, where she said the elite used pedophilia to control their own networks through people they had compromised. She said that the social norms of the society would grow more and more constrictive. Where she said I would have to carve out my own way outside the normal structures of society. She said social rules would become so cumbersome and as to make living nigh impossible. She said I should grow up to become a documentary historic filmmaker and that I should make my own media company. Both of my parents cheered me on when I dropped out of college after a semester. My father said, all of your ancestors came to America by boat on a several month voyage to a continent where they had nothing. They were able to figure it out. So you'll be able to. Or he said, you'll have my blood. You'll figure it out somehow. I'm not trying to pretend my family is perfect. They're very much not. And those who know my story know that they have serious issues. But they got at least something right. Meanwhile, the society around me had the exact opposite message. My parents told me to be strong and independent, while the society told me to be loose and malleable. I was a problem kid at school where I constantly caused issues for the teachers. I was nearly held back for a few years in elementary school and I barely passed middle school or the start of high school. As a child, I processed a lot of the ways teachers talked to me as an insult to my honor, since I was told at home that if someone condescended to me, it was an insult. Where a negative trait of many women is to condescend to children, seeing them as sort of dolls rather than mini adults. I hated school. However, all the adults around me told me that school was good and I should be grateful that I got to attend. As I became an adult, in a greater irony, there was a complete collapse in faith in the school system. Most of my friend network want to homeschool their children. While 90% of the audience of this YouTube channel either wants to or is open to it. I personally would like to homeschool my kids if I have the opportunity when I have them. I think the schools were better in the 20th century, but when I went, people left school without any knowledge of the world history, science, or the reality of the human condition or how to live as an adult. Almost no one in my high school could name three battles in World War II or how India works. The purpose of the school system is social control and indoctrination. This was really bad when I was a child. My teachers called my parents in since I drew images with swords and knights when I was in fourth grade since they were worried I might become violent. Helicopter parenting was absolutely terrible, in which I knew lots of parents who gave their kids no independence at all until age 18. They weren't even allowed to spend their own money or leave the house to go on a walk until college. This produced completely dysfunctional adults. The point I'm trying to make here is that the Lonely Crowd isn't some normal outcome of human nature. We've had the personality and soul beaten out of us by a cruel totalitarian system which controls us from cradle to grave. I was always confused by Hollywood in the media. California was a sort of uncanny valley for me culturally. Coming from Pennsylvania, I could pick up there, even as a kid that Californians were very different from Pennsylvanians, but they were also Americans, so they seemed close at times. There was an idea of a unified American ness when I was growing up, which has since collapsed. The message implicit in every Hollywood movie, especially a decade or so ago, is to become weaker, more immature and submissive. I've checked this in which each Hollywood movie I've watched over the last few years and it generally never fails. In practically every Hollywood movie, the characters are rewarded for making completely irresponsible emotional decisions and taking actions which would completely backfire in real life. You can't take them seriously because it's not a reflection of actual adult life. My best friend and I have a running joke that we're waiting for a Disney movie where the princess goes through with her arranged marriage since she respects the family line in her parents. Hollywood never tells you to be strong and smart. This all speaks to the recent mate suppression video I've made. We operate in an elaborate system of psychological control which we're not allowed to mention. People, especially in left wing states, talk like there's always Stalin in the room. These days if they say the slightest thing wrong, their Life is over. The problem is it's often true enough in which insane, suicidal, delusional Marxists run all of America's major institutions, including corporations, media and education. This means no one knows who they can trust. This is what I figured out as a Pennsylvanian. That these cultural shifts were forced on normal Americans by a cruel system of social control which wants us dead, which enabled the biological mouse utopia switch even more by twisting the knife. The reason that people are so lonely is that we've made deep social ties uncool. When I was a kid, being close with your parents was cringe. Caring about your ethnic identity if you're white is taboo. Your hometown or religion is seen as hopelessly provincial and behind the times. Associations along class lines like country clubs or working class men meeting at the bar are also discouraged. I see the British government trying to pass laws against pubs and it's the exact same thing. I got lots of shit for having a real passion or studying history when I was a child in school. The school system actively penalized me for having active intellectual interest or for thinking for myself. We discourage any depth in this culture. It annoys me. Whenever I tried to post something deep online, the top response is always nihilism, like sir, this is a Wendy's, or why don't you just touch grass? It's not even funny. I would get it if it was irreverent, but it's funny. But there's not even a joke there. We have no place for meaning in this culture. The wedge of not cool is used to control people. This is an alliance of the bureaucracy which wants to control society with toxic femininity, which greedily wants to consume all social interactions for their own attention seeking or materialism. I remember reading Carlisle where he said something quite profound, that men like John Calvin, one of the leading figures of the Protestant Reformation, would view our desire for them to care about our approval with contempt. Carlyle, writing 200 years ago, said that history was made by men who knew what they wanted out of life with ironclad certainty and carried it out. Carlyle viewed cynical modernists with contempt. Since a life without attachment is a life that has never truly been lived. The man without conviction does not truly exist, for he is brushed around by other forces without his own consciousness. As the years have come to pass, I've realized my parents, even with all of their issues, were correct. Here I learned more from them than I did from school by an enormous margin. It makes sense in context, given the Darwinistic selection is for your parents to give you correct Advice and then for the authorities to give you incorrect advice since you're a form of their competitor. The managerial class which dominates the modern west, actively benefits from the population hurting by making us weaker, socialized, nihilistic, poor and lonely. I don't want to lose responsibility for how America put itself in this mess, but this is being enforced on us against our own consent. Something I've spoken about many times before is this fits with the deliberate stated Marxist desire to take over the institutions and destroy Western civilization. As I tried to push up against the social system of control, I realized it's all smoke and mirrors. You try to find the grounding of the reality or some stable truth which you can use to understand our society honestly. However, once you do, you find out that there literally are none, since this age believes that humans yet to determine reality, which is absolute nonsense in insanity. I studied every major discipline at least a little, whether history, biology, physics, anthropology and religion, to find out that when tested, modernity never provided arguments for what it believed, it just forced you what to believe after rationalizing why it wanted you to. Even so, the publicly stated opinion pushed by the government or academia is not even what the science says now. And these tend to be completely unequivocal beliefs in the science. If you question modernity, that's not cool. It's the same mechanism that's being used to control us. It's like everyone agreed to some sort of social game without having explained it to my demographic. Subconscious choices were made in the 20th century which were disastrous. But modernity was so immature it didn't pass them on to the next generation, since they passed nothing onto the next generation. This is mouse utopia, the behavioral sink. Watch my video on the topic if you want to know more. You aren't supposed to question if God is dead or why our ancestors conversed with the gods with ease. The gods were real enough for our ancestors that they built their entire civilizations around them. You're not supposed to ask why our society is at complete odds with the rest of history, who built stable societies off the opposite principles of us, such as family, masculinity, honor, God, tradition and land. When you push back against this even a little, you realize it's all a charade. There's a great book called the Myth of Disenchantment by Strom. It goes through every major philosopher who spoke about the death of God. The fascinating thing is that no major philosopher ever posited why God. And for the nerds out there, you can substitute the idea of a universal natural laws of reward for human nature, which obviously do exist and physics is a parallel, for example, don't exist. People just assumed that God was dead, and asking why was just not cool. Since modernity had made a collective agreement on the topic. It's almost as if we thought, if we refused to believe that God was real, that we could build a psychic wall of human stubbornness to avoid reality. If we put our fingers in our ear ears and said that we could get out of reality. Even if you don't believe in God, you should understand that there are things like human nature or universal laws of human life or patterns in history, but we just deny all of that, which is just madness. I hope you can see why I'm connecting this to nightclub culture. It's all the same factor in which everyone today is in a civilizational nightclub. Much like the nightclub, everyone involved is there since others told them that others thought it was cool. It's unclear who was the first person who got people into clubbing, but that was before the society's collective memory, which doesn't go further back than like 30 years now. The music or societal noise pollution is so great, you can't actually communicate anything of note to others. You kind of jostle around awkwardly and so everyone involved is cringe. People are so insensate, they've kind of stopped doing anything since the noise is too loud. This is our society. We're all in the club getting ripped off for cover fees and drinks since we think we might meet our future wife, but we won't. Even if we do, she'll be a terrible person. You guys know I'm speaking metaphorically, right? One of the things that always shocks me is how easy men are to manipulate. Using sexual shaming, you can get men to deny anything, even for the slightest hint that they're sexually inadequate. If you criticize the system, you're called an incel or a loser, even if it makes zero sense in your context, like you're married or you're successful. And even if you're not talking about anything even remotely sexual. You criticize the economy, you're a loser who should just work harder. You criticize the religion, you should just go to church more until you learn to like it. You don't like school? Well, you should just shut up and do what the teacher says. I find it disgusting. A decade ago, the entire culture was supposedly about authenticity. The movies and music would constantly talk about the importance of authenticity. But then those very same people, years later, fell into lockstep with one of the most brutal and nihilistic tyrannies ever in human history. I can't forgive that the baby boomers talked about freedom in their youth and then became totalitarians in their old age. Just a brief story here. I remember one of my buddies invited me to what he said was one of the most prestigious nightclubs in New York. I waited in line and paid a cover charge I'm not proud of, but I was richer back then than now. Cries Then I entered and it was worse than a random pub I'd go to. The music was super loud, none of the girls were that attractive and everyone seemed super high strung. I got drunk and started roasting the people around me when they were about to put up a disco ball. I climbed up the ladder before they could and they pulled me off. I then laughed and walked 10 blocks home drunk. This is why I'm saying I think nightclubs suck. You're not allowed to say it in our culture since everyone is trying to pretend to be cool. Being cool is our ultimate religion. Being cool consists of conformity in their book. In reality that's not the case and this is why no one respects old media Hollywood types anymore. I have no interest in being cool. I don't care. You shouldn't either. The way to be respected is to be proud of who you are and your accomplishments and to try your best in the context. This is another heads up too, which I'm surprised people don't talk about. Partying is only fun when it's with people you care about. If you're drinking with your close friends, you will already have a lot of shared ties and vibe with. Life is about people and the people you're going with matter as much as the journey. If you want people to be happy, which is borne out very strongly from the anthropological data, you should cultivate deep relationships. This is the strongest single variable for human happiness according to the science and is partly why alongside religion, the scientifically second most important variable for happiness is why people in the past lived in poverty, but they were happier than people today by any metric you'd pick. I see all these young guys try to live the Andrew Tate lifestyle and I'm like, bro, you're a white guy from Indiana. This isn't right for you. I think men should try to attain mastery, responsibility and power. I also fully sort guys getting rich and getting laid. As I like to say, you're gonna die anyway, so it's better to die rich than poor. However, you should use the great men of Western history as role models, not degenerates on Instagram. This whole lifestyle of obsession with social media status, which I think has destroyed the minds of so many young people, especially women, will just come across as so cringe in the future. If you want to be cringe, please be cringe. In an interesting way, our descendants will see us with utter contempt for our shallowness, stupidity and tunnel vision. We are the period in history that in the future family genealogies will try to blot out what their ancestors were doing in this time period or that they benefited from this era at all. We are in a civilizational crash out of epic proportions and and we focus on petty bullshit so we don't have to realize it. We are in complete denial and we use petty hedonism to ignore it. Whenever as a child I tried to approach something deep, I would just get told to get rich and to get laid by culture. I have both been rich and had sex. I can recommend both as activities, but building your life around them is just contrary to happiness, good sense or taste. People talk a lot about how porn destroys the brains of young men, which I think there's a degree of validity to it. But no one has the guts to talk about how social media has destroyed young women's brains. It's especially bad for certain sub areas like California, where I'll constantly see people livestreaming in public. Here, social media has driven young women literally crazy. Where a majority of Gen Z women have a diagnosed mental illness and traps them in cycles of selfless loathing and relational warfare, crushing their mental health, fertility. And their sense of self is attached to numbers on a screen that's just not living. And by not dealing with this, we're causing an entire generation of young women enormous amounts of psychological damage. And the fact that we're not intervening shows that we just have no moral sense. People act like they're too cool to live. They're too cool to do anything. They're too cool to have kids, read a book, take care of their country, worship God or make art. I guess you're just supposed to consume content, not think about it, eat, slop and work in your box like a good little Wagey rat. Who's a good Wagey? Who's a good Wagey? Oh yes, you are. Oh yes. This is beneath you. You're a f. Ing human, so act like it. You're not too cool for human life since you're a f Ck human. What's wrong with you people? The Crowd One of the most important books I've read over the last few years is the crowd by 19th century French writer Gustave Le Bon. It's a study of crowd psychology, which was something France had a lot of experience with due to how many revolutions it had in that century. I loved that book so much. And then I ordered Gustave Le Bon's entire back catalog. I read like 10 of his books in the last few months, including six of his books in a row. I've now read his entire catalog. He's a very diverse writer covering ancient Indian or Islamic history, the role of ethnic consciousness in history, the evolution of human consciousness, or the psychology of socialism in the French Revolution. His book on predicting the future of socialism was much like Nietzsche's in being incredibly prescient. Writing in 1880, he said that Europe would succumb to socialism which would kill the continent's multi century dominance of the world, while the 20th century would belong to a America which would incorporate socialism to a lesser degree due to America's more individualistic culture. And America would become the next technological powerhouse. He predicted the rise of enormous socially constrictive, government oriented cultures which would push lies and conformity to control the public, since the natural culmination of communism is slavery to the state. He also predicted Asia's industrialization in World War I. He said the moral foundation of socialism is envy, not helping others. His other book on crowd psychology is also incredible. The first point he makes is that crowd psychology exists in its own right, in that humans in crowds literally have distinct psychological traits from individual humans. For example, humans in a crowd will often cause crimes and try to tear down governments, something those same individual humans would not do as individuals. Taking someone else's property isn't acceptable unless it's socialism when the crowd does it. John Haidt, the greatest social scientist of our day, likes to say that humans have a hive mind switch, which much like bees or insects do. This is clearly true over human history, where young men will happily die for their nations. Under the correct context, which is triggered by the shared drill or basic training. These same humans would be far more careful with their lives on a personal basis. But humans evolved the hive switch since tribes which lost in war got genocided. Thus, humans had to evolve group psychology for our own survival. However, at the same time, the crowd exists at several rungs lower of intellectual development than the human individual. This is since given responsibility is abdicated in a group. Since it's harder to hold a large group accountable than an individual and responsibility is the force that powers evolution. Crowds have the level of intellectual development of what individuals had a few million years ago. Crowds cannot differentiate between images and realities. Due to this, crowds can only be communicated complex concepts through symbols. Crowds also accept things uncritically if they provide social glue for their shared cooperation. All of the great human movements over history have occurred in large group settings such as churches or political rallies, where the crowd function shuts down the logically critical brain so that humans can interact with the ideal world more easily. I also recently read another very brilliant book on crowd psychology by a World War I era British author named Trotter, which says that humans are biologically gregarious or social, so that the social rules we use to coordinate end up having enormous power over us. They often become the overriding principle in human societies because they're the connecting variable. This is partly why religions are completely central to the identity of most societies in history, since they operate as the gregarious social connecting principle. Since humans are emotionally and internally complicated creatures, we use social signals like dress, religion, accents, or whatever to assess how culturally easy someone else is to cooperate with. If someone is of a similar social class to you, from the same area, and with a similar fashion sense, you can immediately intuitively pick up that they might share your genetic interests or have similar values. This is why groups often police fairly petty stuff like dress or dogma, since they're trying to pull you into their easy to cooperate or easy to control framework. Some societies wire people in very conformist ways and others don't, both of which have their own issues due to the innate fallibility of the human condition. What modernity did, I would guess, due to universal suffrage, where they had to please all the adults in the country, was build its social code off completely incorrect principles in a dishonest way in order to maintain as broad tense a coalition as possible. If you start asking questions, the entire facade is going to fall down. What this means is that the system deflects deep questions by telling you to go back to the crowd. I watch a lot of music videos, and in music videos from the 2010s, wherever they wanted to glorify something, they would show a crowd. If they wanted to show something was cool, they'd show some people dancing in a club, shuffling around insensate. I remember Avicii's song Wake Me up, which is about a girl fleeing a stuck up cultish small town to dance at an EDM rave, which in the subtext of the story, is her awakening to enlightenment. One of the things Gustave Le Bon talks about is that writing in the late 19th century that the crowd would gain total dominance over the Western world since the Rise of our form of democracy had gotten rid of all the other stabilizing variables such as church, regional powers, the nobility, monarchy or powerful merchant guild interests. The political scientists of the pre industrial world especially so, the classical authors and the Founding Fathers were violently against the mob. Even in the 18th century, before the rise of modern socialism, the Founding Fathers predicted that socialism would erode rise in the future as a side effect of the rise of democracy which they had seen through Greco Roman civilization. You could view most premodern political philosophy as the attempt to avoid forming crowds. The Founding Fathers saw the ultimate threat to democracy being the mob voting to destroy the high achievers of society, thus creating cultures of mediocrity and decline. Decline. They built all of America's institutions like the Senate which was built up by appointment by state legislatures. Initially party candidates being chosen by the party, the electoral college and states rights, all as balancing forces against the rise of mobs. We removed most of these which just turned our entire society into the whims of the mob. One of the fascinating points Gustave Le Bon makes is that the crowd is profoundly conservative. What I mean by that is not that it's right wing, but rather it doesn't like change. He said that the Industrial revolution couldn't have happened with universal suffrage, which was totally true in the European context. Since when Europe did put universal suffrage in place, they voted in socialism, which destroyed Europe's multi century dominance over the world over the course of the 20th century, as well as destroying Europe's technological progress. By any objective measurement, technological advancement has been in decline since the 19th century, whether through patents, creation of new intellectual disciplines, breakthroughs, quality of life increases, amongst others. Modernists just treat the idea that technological advance goes up with modernity as a sort of religious belief for granted. Granted, but it's obviously not true if you study this objectively. The rise of modernity killed Europe's technological advancement. As we can see, with Europe currently having no AI research to speak of, they're trying to do the same in America today with regulations where the left is almost entirely technologically de accelerationist. I know lots of leftists personally who actively want to use the state to de industrialize the society for climate reasons. If this is the cost of being cool, what's the point? That since innovation requires courage and leadership, innovations are made by brave individuals challenging the herd. Since the herd doesn't believe things logically, but rather through conformity bias, it doesn't matter if it makes any logical sense, the herd will believe it because the others in the herd do. You can see Trans as a very easy example example of that. Through removing leadership and masculinity, our culture has become fossilized. We got rid of church leadership, we attack strong masculine CEOs, we attack young men for trying to live. We try to crush small businesses with regulations. The nobilities were destroyed long ago and we do everything possible to stop the rise of new dynasties or new elites. It's paradoxical for the modernist, but the more they push for progress, the less progress happens. Nothing changes in our culture and we're stuck rehashing art from the 20th century, while fashion, the economy, philosophy and art and everything else is stuck. There's literally no new ideas, music or movies worth watching. I read so many old books since there are no new interesting books to read, or nowhere near enough. That's since the crowd attacks anyone who tries to think for themselves. Any independence or self respect is automatically attacked. In this culture. Innovation requires standing for something and trying to be better, which is the greatest taboo in our culture. When you read enough anthropology books, there's always this sort of attitude, even among leftist anthropologists. Especially so in their context, is that they'll look at tribal peoples and see their taboos and customs as stupid. But we're the exact same. Our taboos and customs are even more stupid than the tribal peoples. But we're such hypocrites, we lack the self awareness to realize it. One of the points Gustave Lebon makes is that the singular individual will always beat the crowd. We tend to think that the more numbers you add to something, it's going to end up better. But that's just not true. We trust the auteur to make good art more than the committee. We trust Elon to make new technology more than the university system. Napoleon tore down the entire bureaucratic directory of the French Revolution. This system is weak and is a balloon to be popped. Nietzsche said that the age of the last men would be so weak that a hundred men of fiber could tear it down. The society being this conformist and stupid is an amazing opportunity for those willing to push back. Once you have these committees, the way they resolve issues is always through consensus. That since when you need 10 people to agree to something, they default onto a baseline answer not for its correctness, but rather how agreeable it is. With the removal of leadership and the rise of committees, this has become our entire culture. The selection pressure for committee based culture is literally whatever idea shuts up the most people as fast as possible because people are tired. Having listened to the committee, you saw academia's independence crushed with peer review after World War II. Proud, multi generational companies, the kind which nations try to cultivate, are so much harder to produce anymore, since shareholders are too rapacious in the short term. It's the same reason why private capital doesn't make real art or innovations. It's since those require courage and vision which committees don't have. This is why earlier societies preferred the nobility to committees, which are just a obsession of an envious, hypercritical modernity. One of the worst elements of the crowd, according to Gustave Lebon, is its utter lack of gratitude. The crowd is incapable of thinking over time and is only influenced by four things, according to Le Bon, those being suggestion, prestige, repetition and contagion. The crowd is not rational and in fact, reason is anathema to it. It does not want to be reasoned with. It wants to loosen its passions. However, the crowd also hates itself. Historically, these sorts of eras of crowd politics, and there have been several between Revolutionary France, Republican Rome, parts of ancient Greece or Latin America, always devolve into Caesarism. The crowd, by its nature, is always separated from responsibility. It is too stupid and lacks gratitude, which it knows unless it craves a master. It prefers a master to be more cruel and can't distinguish between generosity and weakness. The crowd's favorite one day will be their sacrificial victim the next week. The only way the crowd ends is in tyranny, which is why our ancestors tried to avoid them at all costs.