What frustrates me about this world is that people just get away with bad behavior. There are just no actual consequences for lies, for fraud, for narcissism, for bullying, for betrayal or for incompetence. You can become president of America or the richest man in the world.
Remember that Denmark was ordered by the United States to give all its artillery shells to Ukraine. Now they’re being backstabbed by the Americans, who now want to seize Greenland from them. I could give you a whole story about all the fraud that Musk has engaged in, but others have done so before. You know what integrity gets you in this world? A grave.
This is the macrocosm, I only mention these two guys because everyone can see it happening in front of their own eyes. If you don’t see it, it’s because you’re a weak man who pledged submission to a tyrant. It means you choose not to see it.
But in day to day life the world works like this as well. Beauty, wealth, fame, sex, love and pleasure are all effectively handed out at random. There’s no real order to spot in any of it. There’s some broad correlation between intelligence, longevity and beauty because damaged genes hurts all three, but beyond that, gifts and curses are just seemingly handed out at random without justification.
It has effectively always been like this. Only rarely are tyrants punished. The Kim dynasty in Korea throws their population in concentration camps and dies happily in old age, just like Stalin and Pol Pot. Genghis Khan slaughtered entire villages and raped his way through Eurasia without ever facing any consequences.
You can choose to believe in reincarnation I suppose as justification, but reincarnation is a strange idea when you think about it. Genghis Khan did something right in his previous life, maybe he was Jesus, so now he gets to bang the prettiest Eastern European maidens. Then he racked up a high karmic debt, so in the next life he’s just an ugly nerd again.
But more importantly, how do you identify any sort of continuity between lives? If I lose all my memories, if my whole biology changes, how am I still the same person? It’s like this black mirror episode, where someone is continually tortured for doing something wrong, without being able to remember what they did wrong. How could that be considered fair?
Most people just choose to engage in cognitive dissonance about all of this, by aligning themselves with the winners. They identify a winner and then they decide that the winner must deserve his victory. Or more cruelly, they identify a loser and then they reason that the loser must deserve his loss.
This is how bullying happens for example. If you are mistreated by others you suffer. Your suffering then becomes seen as a sign of weakness and your weakness is interpreted as justification for bullying, resulting in further mistreatment. This is a kind of circle from which it tends to be impossible to escape. Discrimination works like this too.
The mistake tyrants tend to make is that they eventually just openly reveal how they operate and how they view the world. Hitler just openly announced he believes in the right of the strong, so the whole world unified against him. But that merely reveals a degree of integrity in Hitler. Bullies who deny being bullies don’t have the whole world turn against them.
People have all sorts of psychological mechanisms they use to make peace with the fundamental arbitrary unfairness of the world. The worst example has to be this mystical belief in the “law of attraction”. If your life sucks, it must be because you have too many negative thoughts! It can’t possibly be the other way around, that you have negative thoughts because your life sucks.
I often wonder if these charlatans who peddle the “law of attraction” never think to themselves: “Whoah, I must start making these Youtube videos in Masalit, so the people of Darfur can understand how to escape the slaughter by the RSF! Think positive thoughts and the Rapid Support Forces won’t rape you!”
No, the weirdest thing about it all is how successful and happy people rarely really think about why things worked out for them. It’s almost all down to childhood environment. If your childhood environment is happy and affluent, it cascades upwards like an explosion that lifts you to the top. If your childhood environment is negative, it works like a snowball that descends down a hill at ever greater speed and with ever greater mass.
The common example is someone who is sexually abused as a child. You look at homeless people and it’s almost always a story like this. They start to need drugs to quench their mental pain. The drugs are expensive and deplete their wallet. They also result in stigma and they become dependent on unsafe methods and alternatives.
In parts of the Greatest Country in the World, you can just find drug-addicted people sitting in wheelchairs in freezing cold, with oozing sores where they inject their fentanyl. Whose fault is this? Well Venezuela’s of course!
But most people never really give this second thought. In the Greatest Country in the World, the Greatest People in the World believe in something called “prosperity gospel”. God just blesses you with wealth if you’re a good person, this is what their Televangelists tell them.
So naturally, if you’re a homeless prostitute addicted to fentanyl it’s not because your uncle raped you or because the other kids spat beer at you at a party, it’s just your own fault for being a bad person.
Humans are irrational like this, because they need to be irrational to function. If they really understood how the world operates, they wouldn’t be able to cope with it. I talk to my happy friends sometimes and it’s always clear to me how they just don’t understand how the world works.
For example, my happy friends will say that climate change is a good thing, because more people die of cold than of heat. Or they will say that Trump is a good president. This is how happy people operate. They look at how things are and they start making up reasons as to why it’s a good thing for things to be the way that they are.
Happy people tend to live in a state of delusion, entirely divorced with their minds from reality, particularly from the suffering that exists around them. Unhappy people on the other hand, tend to be keenly aware of how things actually work. Often they are vegan and they tend to have a very leftist and atheist view of the world.
The problem of course is that once you’ve seen how the world works, you can’t unsee it. Happy people live in a kind of state of fundamental ignorance about how things work. Once you’ve seen how things actually work in the world, it starts contributing to the unraveling of your happiness.
So why am I bothering to explain this to you? Well the problem with ignorant bliss is that it requires other people’s insight to sustain it. You can’t have a Kim Kardashian or a Donald Trump without a thousand people dying of infected injection wounds in the cold winter of Philadelphia. It’s a natural other side of the coin that inevitably has to exist.
Great article.
Some inspiration for the downtrodden and brokenhearted:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO1n7MWCMrQ/?l=1
(sound on please)
Indeed, this article was great.
I liked this real too. What an absolute chad comeback David Goggins went though! You are right that the sound is important, the music really does make that video.
Every wrongdoing must have its punishment. Otherwise, society ceases to function.
Justice is exactly the same as medical care. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Going private and paying for the service yourself, with cash from your own pocket, is always orders of magnitude better than simply relying upon the taxpayer funded state run system.
Rintrah, I think you’re blinded by people who are just pretending to be happy.
I found only one kind of people who are happy, those with a natural happiness, but they are rare.
All others, the poor and the rich, those with “success” and without, are mostly unhappy.
Having to constantly pretend to yourself and others that you are happy and successful must be hell. I prefer to only suffer from depressions.
The more you know about the world, the more you suffer. That’s a cosmic rule and the curse of the curious.
The world is fallen. That’s why Christ had to come.
Christians for all their faults have slowly improved the places where they went to. Tom Hollands “Dominion” Book explains this.
The term some have for your behavior is “justice sensitivity”. They argue that wanting justice is a problem to be medicalized. The political theory blogger Aurelien claims that medicalizing others is a method of deniably attacking them under conditions of mass Schmittian nihilism, but they also claim that this mass Schmittian nihilism is a mass delusion that we suffer under.
I’m fond of the late 1900s evolutionary theory from just before Dawkins – GC Williams, Dobzhansky and the like – which argues broadly that we are stuck in species-wide cycles of overcorrecting towards too much prosperity and too little, because there is a optimal amount of prosperity for ensuring the rate of genetic evolution closely tracks the rate of environmental evolution, without any care for the well-being of the organisms who are mere gene-carriers. The boomers raised in wealth being so quick to start wars and pathetic imitations of civil wars are just like the sociopaths pathologising justice; they are following the best interests of their genes.
*Humans are irrational like this, because they need to be irrational to function. If they really understood how the world operates, they wouldn’t be able to cope with it. I talk to my happy friends sometimes and it’s always clear to me how they just don’t understand how the world works.
Then dont talk to them about this.
Duh.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that we are living in a simulation that was created from a collective consciousness. It basically explains why people do horrific things to each other. This is all ment to be an experience that we go through (good or bad) in order for our souls to grow. This explains near death experiences and the life review they experience. The guy who wrote my big toe explains it very well but many theoretical thinkers are leaning towards simulation theory.
This is hardly one of my favorite songs/albums by them, but the lyrics are apposite: https://youtu.be/KEchSjyhRqY?si=yEwkAISc9M432T4O If we’re so much the same like I always hear Why such different fortunes and fates? Some of us live in a cloud of fear Some live behind iron gates Why such different fortunes and fates? Some are blessed and some are cursed Some live behind iron gates While others only see the worst Some are blessed and some are cursed The Golden One, or scarred from birth While others only see the worst Such a lot of pain on the Earth The Golden One, or scarred from birth Some things can never be changed Such a lot of pain on this Earth It’s somehow so badly arranged Some things can never be changed Some reasons will never come clear It’s somehow so badly arranged If we’re so much the same like I always hear Some are blessed and some are cursed The Golden One, or scarred from birth While others only see the worst Such a lot of pain on the Earth Some are blessed and some are cursed The Golden One, or scarred from birth While others only see the worst Such… Read more »
On a somewhat more “hopeful”(?) note, here is their final song from their final album. The lyricist died of glioblastoma in January 2020, just before the entire world went to shit. Most fans consider this track a “return to form” for them (Karen might appreciate this one): https://youtu.be/uZodbmC6Mxc?si=ZGOteSZ8sLEsCdRK In this, one of many possible worlds All for the best? Or some bizarre test? It is what it is, and whatever Time is still the infinite jest The arrow flies when you dream The hours tick away The cells take away The Watchmaker keeps to his schemes The hours tick away They tick away The measure of a life is a measure of love and respect So hard to earn, so easily burned The measure of a life is a measure of love and respect So hard to earn, so easily burned In the fullness of time A garden to nurture and protect In the rise and the set of the sun ‘Til the stars go spinning, spinning round the night Oh, it is what is it is, and forever Each moment, a memory in flight The arrow flies while you dream The hours tick away The cells tick away The… Read more »
It seems like you are flirting with the nihilistic conclusions I am all too familar with. In the past, I’ve recommended Thomas Ligotti’s magnum opus on the subject, “The Conspiracy Against The Human Race”: Amazon.com: The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror: 9780984480272: Ligotti, Thomas: Books One of the top-rated reviews comes from user “The Evil Hat” (I recommend reading his critical review in full). One section of his review puts Ligotti on the ropes: “But this idea only works under the (frankly bizarre) supposition that all suffering and happiness are equal. While there are some lives, I’ll admit, that contain absolutely no happiness (death soon after birth, say), the majority will experience some kind of joy in their lives, and a good many of them will say that the pleasure in their lives outweighs the pain. So while more may, numerically, experience pain than pleasure, it is illogical to say that pain overweighs pleasure overall, rendering the conclusion that, in order to benefit the majority we must end birth, unattainable. Which brings us to the key problem that I have with antinatalist arguments. I agree with the nihilism of, say, Lovecraft (though there we’d likely be… Read more »
One last thing: I think something that would benefit your mental health is a touch more epistemic humility on your part. Despite your formidable intelligence and knowledge, you as an organism did not evolve to ascertain “pure truth”. If we assume evolution by natural selection, then it could be said that we as humans are biased towards survival, not some rarefied “pure knowledge.” — particularly regarding complex systems like climate or vaccinology. Or human biology, for that matter. One thing the Covid pandemic taught me is that not all “experts” are what they seem — EVEN IF they were portrayed as “dissident truth tellers” (I’m thinking here of “Harvard From The Big House” and Geert van de Bosche as just two examples) I let my emotions get the better of me. I’m much more of a “Radical Skeptic” these days, regarding the possibility of having ANY accurate knowledge of domains outside the scope of my immediate environment. I don’t mean to diminish the value of “intelligence” or “knowledge”, but it seems to me that those who claim to have certitude of the inner-workings of abstract entities like “government” or “climate” or “biology” tend to be mentally unwell. I’ve repeatedly said… Read more »
Seem a bit fatalistic here mate? All of it just arbitrary, blind, directionless, self-organizing, amoral. . . Just one vast and mindless smooth and slimy Shoggoth oozing and flowing down forced choices in black subterranean tunnels. . . I recall Zizek talking about this train of thought and how it can lead to obscenity. I remember him describing a Zen Budhist soldier who feels no guilt for his actions, instead he reasons: “In the cosmic flow of events, your eye just happens to fall on my knife” I.e. there was no subject – just the flow of things – the slimy cosmic shoggoth, just so happened to flow through me. “There was a disturbance. Then there was violence.” Not: “I chose to stab you in the eye!” No subject, no “I did this”, so no guilt, no remorse, no anxiety, no one decides. . . Shit just happens in the smooth flow of cause and effect. But no one is accountable, no one is responsible. . . Ethics happens when we there is break in the smooth flow and the subject appears: “I did this.” “I am responsible” “I am accountable” Etc. A point of ‘roughness’ that disturbs the smooth… Read more »
That said, I agree that there is plenty of suffering as a result of ‘arbitrary’ thinking and victimization, etc.
Although, in my unfortunately rather extensive personal dealings with psychopaths, they are not so much ‘arbitrary’ (although I can see how it seems that way) as they are ‘instrumental’ in their thinking.
To a healthy human they may seem to act ‘arbitrarily’, as they go about ignoring notions of fairness etc. but in the sick internal world of the psychopath it’s more a case of “everything is a means to an end” in the pursuit of their personal goals rather than being a function of chaos,
It’s not really arbitrary as such, more that they are deeply Machiavellian.
This is not random chance. It’s not really a case of: “I just so happened to get struck by lightning”. It’s not as chaotic as that kind of randomness. Instead, these guys know what they are doing. They just don’t think about things like moral consequences like healthy people.
Maybe they don’t have souls, or their souls are puny and weak.
I reckon they have an outsized impact for all that though.
So, where am I going with this? I guess what I am trying to say is that the curses are not all handed out arbitrarily and randomly. Instead, the curses are often cast intentionally, by many pscyhos acting instrumentally within systems that reward harm and dissolve individual responsibility.
Resisting these systems and ‘smoothing’ narratives that suggest it’s all inevitable and outside of human control/agency is important.
Justice is human beings insisting that people answer for their actions when smoothing systems would otherwise dissolve responsibility.
“it happened because of market forces”
“I was just following orders”
“Nobody could have seen this coming”
“It was all just inevitable”
Etc.
Smooth lines like those are just not good enough, because causality is more complex than just smooth ‘bureaucratic’ flow where events just ‘happen’ – instead there are decision points, rough patches and cracks in the flow where people ask themselves: “is this really the right thing to do?” Etc.
The world is broken and mankind is fallen, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no justice at all. Instead, it means that resistance and justice are necessary.
Something like that anyway. . .
Sounds exhausting.
A few blog posts back, I shared a link to the little-known book “The Owner Of All Infernal Names”: The Owner of All Infernal Names: A treatise on the existence of our Omnimalevolent Creator – Kindle edition by Zande, John. Humor & Entertainment Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. Standing apart from the reductionist materialism of Thomas Ligotti (who, it must be remembered, was a writer of horror FICTION of a SUPERNATURAL bent), John Zande’s work takes the bleak nihilism of Ligotti and reinterprets it through a non-materialistic, theistic lens, arriving at the inevitable conclusion that whatever “God” or “Higher Intelligence” animating and giving Breath to this world is unmistakably malevolent. I disagree slightly with Zande, because our puny human conceptions of “good and evil” are probably not applicable to whatever “Higher Intelligence” is animating this world and humans. If I were to subscribe to Zande’s point of view, I would describe our “Creator” as utterly ALIEN in its nature — its ultimate goals are as far removed from our petty little individual concerns as my desire to be a famous rockstar is from one of the cells of my liver. Some people whisper that Zande’s book is a work of satire,… Read more »
From the beginning of my presence on this blog I’ve at various times shared excerpts from my mentor Christopher Hyatt’s “The Psychopath’s Bible” book(s).
My intention was not necessarily to encourage or endorse the prescriptions contained within those pages, but to give my fellow good-hearted brethren here a “leg up” in a world that they might not fully comprehend due to their biases and neurodivergence
I’m certainly not an “Asura” or whatever it was SYM/Cyber Viking once accused me of lol
>Or more cruelly, they identify a loser and then they reason that the loser must deserve his loss.
I think this is basically how “incel” was changed by sleight of hand from “involuntary celibate” to “evil contemptible misogynist who deserves his misery because xyz.” Social Darwinism strongarmed into being framed as social justice basically.
Hi Radagast, thanks for being so open – I would answer: But there is also love in the world. Maybe you could pet a cat or a dog sometimes? They just love you no matter what… sure, there are many reasons to despair, but it’s not reasonable to go into despair – because that leads one into dark places…. So I’d rather pet a cat if I were you. Take care
President Donald J. Trump (God bless him) didn’t just come up with the idea of ACQUIRING Greenland for the United States of America out of his head on his own. It’s destiny.
The Andrew Johnson administration in 1867 wanted Greenland at the same time as the Alaska Purchase. The Taft administration lusted after Greenland in 1910. Harry Truman gave it serious thought in 1946.
It’s no joke and has been on the docket for over 160 years.
There are a mere 50,000 people in an immense terriritory over triple the size of Texas that allegedly belong to the King of Denmark based on something something 1200 years ago. They can all be millionaires.
Time’s up, and the Empire wants it.
It WILL happen soon, within the next three months, before the midterm elections. We can can do this the easy way, or the hard way, but DJT isn’t letting it go. I tell you this as an expert on American politics.
Remember my last prediction here, in which I was correct and RR was very wrong.
Your odd passage about Ghenghis Khan truly baffles me.
The mongols destroyed not villages, but major cities and entire civilizations; millions and millions of people were butchered through fire and sword, and for what? The mongols killed an estimated 10% of the entire population of the planet and unlike the Romans contributed nothing in return. They murdered so many people that the climate of the Earth changed because there was less human activity, and for what?
The US will put Greenland to good use and I’m all for it.
You are SO superior to the rest of us. So much smarter. Please lecture us on *how the world works*.
After that, please explain why even worse situations were just fine under Biden and Obama. Millions of you are suddenly outraged because Trump.