I grew up in the suburbs; I found it really boring; I watched a lot of TV, especially cartoons.
For better or worse, a good portion of my sense of justice came from Bugs Bunny.
Which is actually a lot more healthy than what passes for justice these days, I’d say!
During that time artificial reality did not blur so readily with actual reality. Now when I watch any media I see cartoons everywhere. I see cartoons when I look at people, too. So many have created caricatures of themselves it is clear there is too little authentic left to matter in them anymore. It’s like a return to the primitive, only plastic. Surface obsessed–the inner world collapsed in order to buttress the phony outer world of a manufactured jungle.
The following I copied and/or jotted down from still more media consumption, from a writer I imagine is real, who calls himself Stylman. Interesting name. I stopped following, despite his many wise expressions, when he wrote he thought the crazy weather is being controlled by the fears of the people who believe in geoengineering. A lunatic, obviously. And yet, some prescient views nonetheless.
“And it’s a road to nowhere—a few winners, millions of casualties, and an entire generation taught that their value lies in their ability to perform rather than create, to influence rather than contribute, to be seen rather than to matter.”
Now we live in an era where TikTok influencers who dance for thirty seconds make more than teachers, nurses, or the engineers who build our bridges. We’ve moved from celebrating skill to monetizing attention, from honoring achievement to rewarding performance and exhibitionism.
The fame machine isn’t just anti-human—it’s filling the void left by our disconnection from authentic community and natural guidance, while simultaneously being the logical response to living under constant surveillance.
But this isn’t cultural drift – it’s social engineering. The same institutional forces that have systematically replaced real information, real money, and real community are now replacing authentic human development with performance for strangers. This reflects a broader pattern: we live in an era where every essential human system has been replaced with artificial substitutes designed to harvest our energy rather than nourish our souls.
We’ve built a system that teaches them to treat their lives like content. That tells them: if you’re not being seen, you’re not really here. That your private self has no value unless it’s validated by strangers. We’ve stripped away something essential—the right to exist without an audience.”
While I agree, it’s actually much worse, in my experience.
The invasion of privacy of public systems and the individuals willing to force this state on everyone have deeply influenced inter-personal relationships as well–corrupting them, disfiguring them into parallel invasions–where expectation, extraction, exploitation has become the nauseating norm, and accountability has become entirely absent.
The public and private realities mirroring each other. Recently when I was visiting a dear friend who is Uber-Tech-Attached I had a Truman Show Moment, where she was gushing over her new air-fryer and I got the uncomfortable and uncanny sense I was unvoluntarily in an infomercial.
It’s a very creepy feeling I knew she would not understand.
Folks are faking their way through life, and this will have continued disastrous consequences.
The invasions will continue, until the trespasses are rejected and honor is restored to privacy and to nature.
The dangers of such a system, where access is assumed–access to your private spaces, your private thoughts, from your micro-expressions to your quotidian habits–is a culture of mutual parasitism, not even close to mutual understanding. This is not a culture more connected, it’s a culture more devolved. Incapable of boundaries, non-chalant around respect and autonomy, mocking of custom and structure, collapsing into a decaying emptiness. The nothingness of perpetually dissolving illusions, like the garish carricatures of a cartoonish, substanceless life.
A life perpetually romanticising illusion.
Even as its entire life support system slips away.
I attract scorpions, I always have. It’s my sweet blood, I’m sure, I can be very irrestistible when I want.
There are a lot of us. You can imagine us as the frogs. Some of us let their hearts and wallets bleed out dry for stray cats, which then makes them act nasty toward fellow frogs. Others turn their skin to poison for protection, which doesn’t really work all that well, because it gets some scorpions really high.
And still others migrate to Florida, where they freeze in manufactured ice storms.
Scorpions on frogs has been a pretty common theme for a while. It’s so common in fact that a new language is being crafted as I live and breath, right now, in this very cyberworld, also manufactured by man, like the Florida ice storms.
In scorpion-speak, everything was working just fine until the frogs started complaining.
But, the message in the bottle is that there are far more frogs than scorpions and the messengers are dropping many truths right into our very laps all about them. All kinds of clandestine information is flowing, on how to uncover them, how to trap them, how to recognize the master scorpions and even how ship them off to a land far, far away.
It’s a very exciting time! It’s becoming fashionable even! Soon the frogs will be free from scorpion influence! Maybe even forever!!
I do tend to get too enthusiastic and hopeful, but the thing is, I really think it’s working this time. I think it might even be coordinated. But, you know, they call me a conspiracy theorist.
This time they’ve given us the words. The words are the map to the behavior. The behavior is the path to extermination. From what I’ve been able to work out so far, it’s a lot like used-car sales with them.
First, they get their foot in the door. Then, they try to sell you a lemon.
“Foot-in-the-door technique is a compliance tactic that aims at getting a person to agree to a large request by having them agree to a modest request first. This technique works by creating a connection between the person asking for a request and the person that is being asked. If a smaller request is granted, then the person who is agreeing feels like they are obligated to keep agreeing to larger requests to stay consistent with the original decision of agreeing.”
If you buy it, their quick onto your back, for as long as they feel like free-riding. They’ll expect you to cart them around everywhere without ever learning to paddle for themselves. They’ll expect to suck your life’s energy while you’re paddling them around, cooking for them, cleaning for them, while simultaneously entertaining them. When you complain you’re too drained and exhausted, they’ll snap at you that you are weak and that you should really try harder. Their drive matters far more than your fatigue.
Once they’ve got their claws in you, you’ll wish you were the frog freezing to death in Florida. They have all kinds of tricks, let me tell you!
If you try to pry them off your back once attached, here’s what you should expect to hear. They are, in fact, the true victims! They will actually try to persuade you this is true, even if they have to shapeshift before your very eyes, distort words just spoken, and throw you under the bus, all at the same time.
Indeed, Frog, why have you been so dissappointing a carrier? Why are you so cruel and malintentioned that your energy and vitality are not infinitely enduring? Why are you holding back?
You said you wanted me to be comfortable, Frog, and I am no longer, so fix it! I want more!
And you see I’m not capable of crossing the river by myself, it’s so obvious, what are you, some kind of a dumbass? I suppose you’d be fine if I just drowned. You’re just mean, that’s it. You pretend to be kind and caring, but you don’t care, you’ll just leave me by the side of the river while you go off with your other frog friends.
I know plenty of other frogs who will help me, you know. Not that I need help, of course. Just with this one little thing about getting across the river. And you won’t even do that. But, another will. They always do. You’ll see.
I don’t know, Scorpion, the frogs, well, they’re catching on to your tricks. They’re starting to collectively block you. That can’t be fun! The young scorpions, they’re getting more and more lazy and entitled, while the young frogs are getting wiser and craftier. I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem to be looking too good for your kind anymore.
One fellow frog has even started selling deep-fried scorpion chips, and I tasted one, and wow, are they tasty!
Character is what’s left when no masks hold. We recognize it most often in its absence.
Give a one power and watch, do they use it to make others more comfortable, or do they use it to dominate?
Here is a perfect example of a wolf preying on men who love it. Look at who she is being, not who she says she is. She’s a self-proclaimed coach, for men, who have been abused by narcissistic women.
She’s wearing a black neglige and has an eroticised naked woman in the very obvious background. Her career took off when she started focusing on wounded men. Big surprise!
Here is your wolf in lamb’s clothing, men. Why do you love her? She talks the talk, she looks the part, you fall for it, again, and again. A poser, pretending, while on the hunt.
She will poison every healthy relationship you have as you long for the fantasy she creates with her makeup and her emotional manipulation. She speaks of her own clientele as objects while buoying their egos without any context.
A true Machivallean artisan maneuvering in plain site and getting applauded for it!
Pro-tip: No serious woman wears a black neglige to make her intellectual point. She’s fishing for vulnerable men, beware.
Narcissism has become a popular modern buzzword, but the dilution of its meaning from its mythological context and its misuse in clinical definitions has contributed to a lack of appreciation for the dire social and personal consequences of tolerating narcissistic abuse.
In modern times, when we think of narcissism we tend to point to “selfie culture” and a saturation of self-centeredness among those who enjoy it. Just yesterday I had the perfect opportunity to witness this while at a restaurant for lunch. A middle-aged woman with dyed black hair and matching bright red lips and nails had just entered her car, which was directly opposite the window where I was seated.
I watched, laughing to myself, as she spent the next five minutes taking pictures of herself in different poses: pouting, smiling, flipping her hair around, like she was a sexy actress on stage instead of a no-longer-attractive woman in a huge black SUV, just pretending. I imagine she has all the latest filters on her camera’s lens and wherever she’s headed next will be dark enough that the illusion is not prematurely disolved.
And while this is really cringy, its not particularly dangerous for anyone else but the poor sap she gets her hooks in next. Sorry dude, better luck next time!
Clinically, and even historically, this is not really the brand of narcissism that is causing so much mayhem in our world.
However, clinically the definitions are at once well-defined, and nebulous, and over-lapping, and found under the heading of the ‘dark triad’ personality disorders. While these are certainly interesting to study and are attempting to become more scientific with more data over time, they aren’t necessary to understanding why these personality disorders become so socially destructive.
The problem is not the cringy aging woman who wants to maintain the illusion of youth and beauty indefinitely in order to gain sexual approval in the marketplace. The problem is when the fantasy is allowed to trump the reality.
Society does still associate selfie-culture with the myth of narcississus, but only superficially. We correctly identify the beautiful youth who falls in love with his image in the water as narcississtic. But, we fail to look deeper into the lesson the ancient myth is attempting to teach us.
While there is no one official narcissus myth, one popular version includes his female companion, Echo. Whereas Narcissus is the disembodied face, Echo is the voice which mimics his, repeating, without agency, but symbolizing the intention of love and care through her adoration of him.
The real lesson is not just about the superficiality of beauty that fades, or the personal destructiveness of being overly-fascinated by one’s own appearance or superficial desires, but about the inherent dangers of illusion, especially when those illusions echo through the culture, without agency, repeating the words of the narcissist.
Reach out to touch the beautiful illusion in the water and it dissappears, and with it so does its echo, that’s the essence of the myth. There is no substance there, it’s a mirage. The face has no body, no core, no real form.
In popular culture today, Echo’s role represents the ‘flying monkeys,’ which are those figures doing the bidding of the narcissists, spreading his delusions. Narcissists are experts at manipulating others into doing their dirty work, whether that be their dishes or their crimes.
In psychoanalytical terms, this means the narcissistic personality has not done the difficult work of developing an authentic self. There is nothing behind the mask. S/he is a shape-shifter, a cameleon, the disembodied creature in a shared fantasy.
When these attributes become socially acceptable, indeed institutionalized, the culture itself becomes permeated with such types. Toxicity becomes the norm. Fantasy, being the preferred state of the masses, replaces reality. Narcississtic abuse becomes systemic.
At the societal level, Geoengineering presents a typical example of how this looks in action. And, there are a great many direct parallels between narcississtic abuse as it plays out in personal relationships and in the aggregate, that is, the public domain.
Empty promises like ‘safe and effective’ become accepted as truth. Meaningless words and slogans replace honest dialogue and debate. Hollow gestures replace accountability.
In the personal relationship this looks like the philandering spouse who swears they’ve cheated for the last time, over and over. Or the sister or friend who apologizes for wrongdoing, but then hides behind ignorance or innocence, or tries to blame shift and gaslight to get out of being held accountable for her poor actions or insensitive behavior.
In the public sphere this normalized behavior becomes the governments and institutions who are granted immunity, the banks that are too big to fail, and the laws that are twisted to absolve the guilty and victimize the innocent.
What have we been told for the last decades about Geoengineering? At first we were told not to believe our lying eyes, nothing is happening, ‘chemtrails’ aren’t real, and you are all gullible conspiracy-believing nutjobs.
Next, we are told that it’s actually benevolent, they are trying to fix the broken climate. Totally safe and effective. We just need the states to put a few crucial laws in place, then everyone will be happy. Fantasies and illusions replace accountability.
More empty promises, more hollow gestures — like the states stalling with laws that will never stop the assault, but will get a new market brewing for all the attorneys and advocacy groups and health care professionals, who will make a lot of money from the fallout. Entrepreneurship, that will solve it. More tech, better tech, that will solve it.
The argument gets twisted around intentionality, did they mean to harm, or not? Let me go out on a huge limb here and suggest that every single person involved will say they didn’t intend to harm. That’s rocket science.
That question itself serves the abusers. The real question, the one the victim would ask is, “Should abusers be able to hide behind innocence, ignorance or incompetence?”
Solar Geoengineering and the Global Commons—What Role for Ecocide Law? | Springer Nature Link “As a result, initially peaceful, yet ultimately harmful geoengineering projects could exemplify unintentional hostile use of weather modification technologies. However, ENMOD does not take this form of use into account, so cannot provide a viable tool.”
Meaningless words–words that magically transform, or lose and gain significance depending on whims and propaganda shifts–global warming, global cooling, climate change, abrupt climate shift, climate remediation.
These parallel the meaningless words and hollow gestures of the narcissitic abuser — I’m sorry, I didn’t meant to, it’s really not that bad, it’s just your impression. The dog ate my homework.
It’s not my fault. No agency. No accoutability.
You’re not perceiving what you think you are perceiving! You’re not feeling what you think you’re feeling! it’s just your impression! Your subjective experience! If it were true, everyone would be experiencing it exactly the same like you!
Plausible deniability is the safe space for abusers of all kinds.
They will even go as far as admit the wrongdoing, but still not be held accountable for it. Like Narcissus, all image with no substance, all face with no body.
Other common tricks of the trade: manipulation of perception, moving the goal post, feigning, finessing, presenting harmful acts as benevolent–it’s for your own good, for the good of the community, because they are so concerned about you, about the environment.
What do you mean we can’t flood your home? But the farmers need rain, you’re being selfish. Isn’t that why you bought insurance? Why aren’t you more resilient? Why should you be so upskittled by a tornado or two, they happen all the time. We were just doing our job!
I will NOT end this post, or this life, drowning in their sea of dysfunctions, because that’s exactly what works best, FOR THEM.
I truly believe that if the individual will stop accepting such abuses in their personal lives, what’s acceptable on the societal level will assuredly, eventually, shift as well, and very dramatically.
Stop approving of the toxic behavior, stop believing the lies, stop being their Echo, because narcissistic abusers are pathological attention-seekers. Call them out, demand accountability, do not accept empty promises and meaningless words, and watch as the little rats start to scurry.
Learn about narcississtic abuse and root it out of your life, personally and professionally. Achieve greater levels of discernment through diligence and determination. Real resilience comes from principled positions rigorously and consistently applied. Insist others practice what they preach, as you yourself do the same.
This is not idealism, this is the tough work of forcing reality to win over illusion. It is the tough work of embodiment, of authentic Self creation.
“We’re often told that narcissism doesn’t exist or that we’ve attracted these people into our lives because of our own issues. This harmful victim-shaming keeps people trapped in abusive dynamics.
In this episode, Dr Peter Salerno explains that narcissism is real and identifiable. Narcissists are invested in their image at the expense of their true self, and they intentionally seek out environments where they can exploit others.
This conversation will help you identify if you’re dealing with a narcissist, trust your body’s reaction to mistreatment, and begin to think about whether it’s a relationship you want to remain in.”
We may still be victims of their floods and tornadoes and varied toxic tampering, but we don’t have to accept their delusional fantasies and their illusions of control. And that WILL make a difference.
(A re-post of one from 2016, happy 10 year anniversary to Kensho! Funny-not funny, my viewpoint has not changed a bit!)
I wish I could say I was not guilty of it. I watched on two different days last week as a coyote trotted off contentedly first with a duck, then a chicken. The latter time I was outside, with our very large Dane-Mastiff guarding, reading on the deck as the coyote pranced by 200 feet from us, without any chicken ever making a sound to alert our attention.
I did shoot at it, far too late, but I was so slow and stunned I hardly had a chance. I asked on social media whether, had they been faster than me, if they would have choosen to shoot the thieving coyote with their cameras or their guns. Most chose cameras, which demonstrates a double-bind, I believe.
We have lost sight of the predator/prey relationship. In fact, when we look closely into New Age groups and the major push in education currently, the prey has been deluded into believing they can transform the predator into something ‘better’ or “safer” or at least less scary.
The prey goes into school and later even therapy so as to come out better adapted at the game and to his role as prey. The predators understand perfectly this relationship can be best described by the old parable of ‘the frog and the scorpion.’ Since at least Biblical times, it has always been the same game. The predator/prey relationship is easily paralleled to our more civilized equivalent of Master/slave, which can be extended further to our current neo-serf system of Parent/child and State/citizen.
I fancy myself aware, self-reliant, pro-active, resourceful. Yet, in my ‘truth quest,’ which a great many of us have been on for many years now, I’ve demonstrated my talent at pointing fingers, shifting responsibility, projecting, and most grievous and destructive of all, further nurturing an identification complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_%28psychology%29
An identification complex is plaguing seemingly all of society right now so I have plenty of company. We are all pointing our fingers at the 1%, or in the case of “truthers” or “conspiracy theorists” the .001%, as the core problem with the world. We criticize from one side of our mouths and go along with the other. We go along in hundreds of different ways every day. We fall for their fashion and entertainment, we sit in their schools and on their boards and in their governments. On the surface there seems to be little other choice. When someone opens their eyes wide enough to see this is the same master/slave relationship indoctrinated and institutionalized at ever level of the system that has existed since the beginning of history, we are then met with the next inconvenient truth: We are only looking at the gameboard, we are not understanding the game.
We the slaves both despise and envy the master, and the master knows this and uses it against us. Obedience is the price and the master sets the terms. Our role is to remain passive and uncomplaining against the unspoken contract. When the noose tightens, some slaves become restless and resentful, while others adapt by learning to breathe more shallowly. Livestock breeders use identical methods. This is how the system perpetuates and exacerbates to such an imbalance that an excess of predators disrupt the natural order until collapse is inevitable.
Of course the game is rigged! And if you had your way, it would be rigged in your favor. Your preference might be: I want it to be fair and safe for everyone, for there to be no predators or prey, nomasters or slaves, and many might support you, to the point they’d be willing to become the predators in order to preserve your collective safe-space.
What we see politically we are also allowing in our personal and professional lives. We feel the boot, there are fewer in denial everyday. We know we are being surveilled and minimized and made obsolete. We know we are victims and we react in one of the many ways they know we will, as prey always will: Fight, Flight, Fawn, or Freeze. If one can find another courageous enough to rebel, he is also lost eventually, because to rebel is to remain still inside the game. They have plenty of room for rebellion, they count on it, they thrive on it.
“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” Jay Gould
Obedience is the prey’s cost in the master/slave, State/citizen relationship, making the passive society become increasingly easy prey; little more than a flock of smiling depressives. These easiest of prey develop a quintessential need for their one-season world, for un-natural order, until passivity replaces fear and we all become the woman watching the coyote trot by with one of her ducks, too slow and maladapted and untrained to stop him.
When one is lucky enough to find another who has the courage to change the game, or at least give it a go, one has met the Fool soon to replace the Father. The game changes when we ourselves change, it’s an inside-out process, not an outside-in. We choose en masse, to not be prey or predator. We choose to have no rulers. We choose Autonomy, Sovereignty and Self-government.
The ones who understand you must stop the predator or soon all your poultry will perish are the ones rebelling, which the masters then flaunt in front of the more passive prey to get them focused toward each other. The fawns point fingers at the fights, the freezes blame the flights, and around and around we go.
Where will we stop? Does somebody know?
When the most passive meets the predator enface they realize their only hope is one they’ve been trying to avoid all along. Because the most unpleasant truth of the human condition from the mindset of the frog is that not every frog has to become aware of the nature of the scorpion, they just have to become aware faster than the last frog.
Here’s some research links I know could really benefit some of my fellow frogs.
For your personal life and relationships: Ollie Mathews, an ingenious entrepreneur helping victims of narcissistic abuse by reading their often painful letters on Youtube. Understanding this co-dependent dysfunctional relationship is crucial to understanding how it’s playing out in the Big Game:
“Papers, please!” was a running joke among Western expats living in Eastern Europe. I wonder how many of them now carry a permanent spying device with great pleasure or perhaps even cheerfully signed on to the digital passport program, first in line, buying into the ploys of safety and convenience.
The Globe was supposed to move in the other direction entirely! We won the Cold War, supposedly, in order to NOT be treated like the perpetual citizen-criminals of Kafka’s stories.
Eastern Europe in 1989 was a surreal place for a young university sophmore voyaging long distances by train alone for the first time. It was at once charming and derelict, welcoming and suspicious, familiar and mysterious.
On the one hand I never felt physically threatened, not even as flaneuse on the city streets at night. On the other hand the decrepid state of the infrastructure whispered danger somehow, because neglect itself is a dark force.
On the one hand the relative poverty was palpable, though my midwest suburban upbringing was middle class, great food variety and consumer goods were far more available. On the other hand their resourcefullness has had a lifelong impact on me and was my first critical look at the innate and corrupting consumerism of my little world.
I didn’t speak the languages and there were very few English speakers. I got by, barely, with French, rudimentary German and smiling, mostly. Americans were considered automatically suspect, so some travelers would claim to be Canadian at any venue not requiring their passports.
Already on the issue of passports I was laughingly naive.
A variety of stamp collecting, or paving the way for the Global digital gulag? It was an especially exciting moment in the expats life when your passport got so full of stamps you had to go pronto to the nearest embassy to get new blank pages stapled into the back of the official document.
Interestingly, while Americans were considered automatically suspect, there was still a sort of cult following that adored America and those who were positively thrilled to meet one, and I made it a point of meeting those unique sorts.
I went on to be a Peace Corps volunteer there a few years later precisely because of my immediate attraction to this region. I felt compelled to know it better and the fact I had the opportunity to spend three more years there, mostly in Czech Republic, but traveling the region extensively, was in fulfillment of my deepest desires and longings at that time.
For all that I loved it, there I also felt my greatest repulsions.
The dystopian Kafkaesque bureaucrocy I experienced was not just fiction. The general acceptance of the populace, while not exactly Stolkholm Sydrome toward their Soviet occupiers, was still a quiet resignation which struck me as particularly pathetic considering their far more astute knowledge of history.
My old passports are the best symbol with which I can try to express my current level of despair seeing my greatest repulsions come to fruition all around me, even as we ‘the Capitalist West’ were the supposed winners of the Cold War.
What did we win? A military industrial complex acting against the best interests of its people. A Corporatocracy run by corrupt public-private partnerships which pretends not to be a fascistic system. Progress that is defined entirely by blind acceptance of anything stamped with the Technocrat seal of approval. Endless paving over of the countryside for roads and minimalls and condos and tourist traps in the ugliest construction ever known to ‘civilized’ man.
Civilization itself has morphed into something totally uncivil, hideous and expanding entirely out of control.
I, like many other intrepid travelers, thought of the passport merely as the modern equivalent of the old travel trunks stamped fashionably with destinations. We thought of them as a collection of strange signs and symbols we’d forever associate with our new memories of far-off places. They were the paper images of our wanderlust we planned to show one day to the grandkids, not knowing they would be holding a digital scrolling device we’d rarely be able to pry from their clutches.
Just a decade ago this was all ranch land
“Once traditional farming systems have been destabilised by the debt-trap of subsidised loans, structural adjustment policies, corporate input regimes, global supply chains, patented seeds and monocultural production, mass migration to cities becomes an inevitability engineered from above. The city thus absorbs the displaced because the countryside has been systematically stripped of opportunities or carved up for infrastructure or real estate schemes.”
What if we’d been given the actual choice, not the strategically invented one, between our current paradigm of progress as a global militarized surveillance state and the ‘stagnation’ where the Eastern Bloc resided for half a century?
This, or this?
Electric prison bars or progress?
Do folks really think WHEN this whole shitshow goes tits-up there will be government funding for the clean-up and restoration of this once beautiful land?
That I don’t want this EVER, for ANYONE makes me some kind of bitter-clinger communist?
“ALA’s annual State of the Air report found that 156.1 million people—46 percent of the population—now live in counties with failing grades for ozone or particle pollution, nearly 25 million higher than last year. Previously less-affected areas, such as Minneapolis, saw significant spikes in unhealthy air days tied to climate-exacerbated wildfires and particle pollution, such as dust.”
Universities funded by public-private partnerships clandestinely tamper with our atmosphere using euphemistically-named scientific jargon like ‘Plume dispersions’ as if this is not mass poisoning?
A hellscape of ‘progress’ in the form of the most ugly, extractive and intrusive landscapes imaginable?
How did ‘WE’ win in this global game that began long before I was born?
What kind of twisted minds call this progress? We have 70 years of documented atmospheric tampering while officialdom continues in denying its impact, which is now going into overdrive while the voices of the livid citizenry, especially those losing their livliehoods in the rural regions, get squashed. Same as it always was.
“Similarly, Gerard Winstanley, writing in the 17th century, envisioned a society in which land and labour were shared as a common good, not commodities to be exploited. His insistence on communal responsibility and ecological justice underscores the radical, enduring potential of agrarian ethics against the logic of extraction and profit.
In this light, the critique of urban-centric development becomes more than an economic critique. It represents a challenge to the very definition of progress. The rejection of the celebratory narrative of neoliberal modernity is a philosophical insistence that a society cannot be judged by its technological prowess while its ecological foundations crumble and its people are alienated from the sources of life.
The modern city, therefore, becomes a battleground where two visions of civilisation confront one another: the dominant model of corporate-led, centrally managed growth and the fragile but persistent ethic of stewardship, locality and shared responsibility. As made clear in my new open access book, The Agrarian Imagination: Development and the Art of the Impossible (available here), genuine human development cannot be measured by urban skylines or GDP figures but by the survival of relationships between people, land and community that give meaning to life.”
Two parallel stories, one personal from two days ago, one political repeated through time and space.
Individual behaviors mirror political failures, or vice versa.
I went for a haircut at the only somewhat nice hotel in our closest small city. I haven’t had a professional haircut in over five years, it was my birthday treat to myself. My hair was really long and wild. I’d come to like it like that, though I knew it needed some taming. While working, Hubby and I kept professional-looking hairstyles, it was expected. Now that we don’t work for wages anymore, it’s kinda fun to let it all grow out, right before it all falls out in old age.
I told the stylist what I wanted. When I was young they called it the ‘long shag’; these days, according to my Youtube search, it’s called the ‘long wolf cut’. The stylist said she understood what I wanted–long layers. I even specified: “I want the waves and curls to be enhanced.” I was thinking–“Big 80s hair, Baby!” Why not! It’s my birthday celebration style, and that’s what I want!
The sytlist proceeded to chop over 6 inches from my hair, blow it dry to pin straight with the help of 3 stinky products, and then to top it off, tried to convince me that’s what I asked for.
Do you need a special license to notice these are not the same?
When I tried to explain to her that a “medium bob” cut is not the same thing as a “long wolf” cut, she started in on the gaslighting. She was very skilled at it.
Perception management is not the same as taking accountability.
My hair was so damaged, she had no choice. I wasn’t sitting straight and so she had to keep cutting. It was too puffy before, it was too frizzy before, it looks so much better now. “You look so pretty!” She kept repeating this, as I kept repeating, “Yes, it looks good, you are a talented stylist, but it’s not what I asked for!”
“The weakness of every utopia is the same. It demands that men believe what they can see with their own eyes to be false. The slogans change — “justice,” “progress,” “sustainability” — but the pattern does not. Sooner or later, the ration card, the empty shop, or the failed harvest breaks through the illusion. The lie may govern for a season, but reality always delivers the final verdict.”
Perhaps she only knows how to cut one style? Perhaps, and this is probably true, the short bob looks much better on me, objectively speaking, from a professional standard. Perhaps it is healthier looking and shinier and smoother now, all true.
“But you are still missing the point: It’s not what I asked for, and it’s not what I paid you to do!”
She refused to get my point. Flat out refused. I was not trying to get a refund or even a discount. I’d already tipped her, the transaction was complete. I just wanted her to recognize what she’d done.
We circled around her excuses, and I left, saying I’d return in 6 weeks, which obviously I never will.
“But populations are not passive. They respond not with submission, but with defense — of security, autonomy, and cultural identity. Citizens resist when they sense erosion of their freedoms, dilution of their traditions, or manipulation of their choices. The result is a Nash equilibrium: a tense standoff where each actor maximizes its own interest, constrained by the anticipated reaction of the other.”
Such is modern political life as well. Was she modeling the behavior of the politicians she sees on TV? Does she think, because she’s the professional, her opinion on what my hair should look like trumps my own, even though I’m not a child, but am in fact a middle aged woman who knows what she wants, has requested it clearly, and is paying her quite handsomely?
“Each generation births new architects of destiny — technocrats, visionaries, committees — convinced that this time, the blueprint will hold. That this time, the people will follow. That this time, the outcome will be different.
But history is not kind to central planners. Grand designs imposed from above, no matter how noble their language, inevitably collide with the stubborn complexity of human life. People are not data points. Cultures are not spreadsheets. Societies do not bend neatly to metrics and milestones.
Agenda 2030–2050, like earlier initiatives, assumes global consensus is possible, centralized governance will surpass local challenges, and large-scale ecological and social changes can occur without resistance. These are not lessons learned — they are lessons ignored.”
Lessons ignored, like my stylist. Her job is to do what I pay her to do, not to re-interpret my desires. Even when I expressed clearly, in a non-threatening manner, after paying her, that she did not give me the haircut I paid for, she refused to see her culpability. She blamed my hair and my poor posture.
Her insistance that I recognize and declare how pretty it looks is akin to the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe as they were insisting how they deserve to be compensated for all the expertise they brought with their occupying forces and for the infrastructure they built. But of course, not to be held liable for all that they destroyed, lives nor infrastructure.
“Historical Lessons Attempts to impose totalizing visions from above have repeatedly failed. Examples include: • The fall of Robespierre (Boudoiseau, 2003) during the French Revolution (Britannica, 2003c). • The collapse of Ceaușescu’s regime in Romania (Britannica, 2003b). • The Nazi pursuit of Lebensraum (Britannica, 2003l), which ended in destruction. • Mao’s Great Leap Forward (Britannica, 2003e) and the Cultural Revolution (Lieberthal, 2003), which caused massive human suffering. Each case shows that utopias enforced by elites end in failure, often violently.”
“Socially, the plan underestimates resistance. People do not change because a summit declares it. Habits are resilient. Traditions run deep. When transformation is mandated rather than chosen, it breeds resentment, not renewal.”
The choices and desires of those paying for services must necessarily be a higher priority than that of those performing the services. That includes politicians, and hairstylists.
“4. Restructuring of Daily Life From how we travel to what we eat, the Agenda seeks to reshape daily habits in the name of sustainability. But these are not abstract metrics — they are intimate choices. Mobility restrictions, dietary mandates, and housing redesigns touch the core of personal freedom. The assumption that populations will comply quietly with lifestyle engineering is not just naive — it is politically combustible.”
“State incentives — subsidies, surveillance, social scoring — aim to steer behavior. But when these incentives clash with core values like freedom, identity, and sovereignty, they lose traction. Compliance becomes brittle. Trust erodes.”
I can’t help but wonder if her other clients have always bowed to her bullying style of perception management? Does she insist all her clients praise her work, whether or not they really liked the results?
Just grin and bear it, everyone?
“The Nash equilibrium here is not stable. It is volatile, held together by mutual constraint rather than mutual agreement. Elites cannot push too far without triggering rebellion. Populations cannot fully disengage without risking exclusion or punishment. Populations remain bound to the system because withdrawal carries a price — exclusion, punishment, loss of rights. The equilibrium holds only so long as resistance is isolated. But once enough people disengage together, the balance shifts: punishment loses its sting, and the system itself begins to collapse.”
I suppose only time will tell the truth. Eventually. If I ever run into that hairstylist next time I’m at the hotel I’m inclined to say: “I’m fine with it, it might even grow back before it all falls out. But just for the record, not everyone wants to look like your vision of the sleek middle-aged professional. Some of us have outgrown that look.”
“Agenda 2030–2050 treats the human species as a single actor, capable of coordinated transformation. But humanity is not a monolith. It is a constellation of cultures, histories, and identities. The anthropogenic hypothesis, when stripped of nuance, becomes a justification for centralized control — see here — a mandate for elites to redesign society in the name of planetary health — see here. This is where the danger lies. When ecological urgency overrides democratic process, when sustainability becomes a pretext for surveillance, when global goals erase local voices — the result is not cooperation, but coercion.”
From Kenya to Llano, Berit pictured with Kath, visiting from the UK
Hunters often get a bad rap and it’s not always for good reason. I had a chance to learn something about this on a recent trip to the Texas Hill Country where I was led to question the difference between a hunter and a poacher.
Before assuming this is a niche topic and of little interest to the vast majority of folks whom are neither hunters nor poachers, consider it’s a matter of philosophy as well, along with colonialism, globalism, human nature and modern life.
A wall of hunting ‘trophies’ not uncommon in Texas homes.
Mostly they have much in common, the hunter and the poacher. There is a similar skillset, clearly, but one I know nothing about, so I’ll leave that to the hobbyists and professionals. As strictly an occassional observer I imagine it to require more patience than I’ve ever mustered, more tenacity than most and more courage than the vast majority.
We might say the poacher is lawless and greedy and violent, and in some cases that may well be true. It may also be true that some hunters share such qualities as well.
But again, I’m coming to this as a complete outsider to their world, strictly an observer, and occasionally a beneficiary.
The differences between the hunter and the poacher must lie somewhere between intrepid and genteel, I figure. And so it is most apropos that I should think of it with a hunter who fits the bill for both adjectives.
Our hunter in question, Berit, at her home in Llano, Texas
I’d never have taken this fair, mild-mannered, small and slender woman as a big game hunter, that’s for sure, and I suspect that made her something of an attraction at her home in Kenya, kind of like a pretty little sparrow among bulls. Though looking at the full and adventurous life she’s led, we mustn’t think a sparrow at anyone’s mercy.
A beautiful display of African artefacts collected during their time there.
I met her with her second husband, an avid big game hunter, but her first husband was a professional one. They had a business together leading safaris until the laws were changed in an instant, hunting banned by the government, their livelihood lost.
Neither were Americans, but he had a prospect in Texas. So, with young children in tow, they moved to the Hill Country, to Llano, and started anew.
That was in 1977. It is still illegal to hunt in Kenya.
What’s more interesting, Kenya has remained on the fast track ever since, to full-tilt modernization. They have been an international fore-runner for all the Global Village United Nations WEF grand schemes for their ideal Future: ESG scores, vaccines, digital IDs, carbon credits.
That’s the great gift of compliance. Or, as the old adage goes, “Give the devil a finger . . .”
“Esc’s analysis, backed by meticulous documentation, sets the stage for understanding a system already operational, where resistance is economically suicidal and socially ostracized. Esc details how development programs in nations like Kenya test governance technologies—digital IDs, carbon credits—later exported to the West, ensuring global compliance under the guise of progress. The Earth Charter, as esc notes, serves as a global constitution, subordinating individual rights to expert-defined collective responsibilities, a theme echoed in The Invisible Empire’s critique of sustainability metrics overriding democratic will. We need to recognize this system before the window for democratic resistance closes, as each institutional capture—from ESG compliance to AI-driven surveillance—tightens the web.” The Complete Architecture – by esc
“For 130 years, a coordinated network of institutions has been systematically replicating the same control structure across every domain of human life – from healthcare to education, from banking to environmental policy. This structure, originally perfected in British banking, creates the appearance of local autonomy while concentrating ultimate decision-making power at higher levels run by credentialed experts. The breakthrough came when science claimed moral authority over all aspects of human experience through the 1986 Venice Declaration, positioning scientific expertise not just as informing ethical decisions, but as the source of ethics itself. This created the intellectual foundation for what we now see operational: a system where questioning expert consensus isn’t just wrong – it’s scientifically illiterate, ethically irresponsible, and potentially pathological.”
How close is your country’s hunting policy to Kenya’s? Is hunting policy about creating the lines between hunter and poacher, or obscuring them? Because, if everything is forbidden except to a tiny few, aren’t we pretty much all destined to become poachers?
“And the pity is that it will do nothing for the wildlife, controlled licensed hunting has never been a threat to wildlife. When elephant hunting was closed a few years ago, I wrote to the East African Standard and pointed out that poaching was the problem, not licensed hunting, and that if poaching were not stopped, the elephants would disappear anyway, whether licensed hunting were allowed or not. Unfortunately I have been proved right, and since that time the elephants have been exterminated all over large areas of Kenya. For this licensed hunting can in no way be blames, as legal hunting of elephants was closed.”
Finn, Berit’s husband
Should hunting be allowed in Kenya? | davidlansing.com
“When I was in Kenya a few years ago I stayed on the edge of the plateau overlooking the Mara. About a mile away one night, a leopard broke into a Maasai boma and killed a cow. The game officials came by two days later, photographed the pug marks on the ground and the carcasses, payed the elder a pittance for his loss, reminded them that they were forbidden to kill the leopard, and disappeared. A couple of nights later, it happened again. So they staked out a goat and speared the leopard to death and buried him. That same leopard could have brought in tens of thousands of dollars in fees to Kenya and the local economy – now it’s a skeleton. When the wild game is seen only as a nuisance and is not allowed to pay its own way in a crowded land, it will always end like that.”
I can relate, I fail them all the time. But that’s not this post.
Here we have two excellent essays that make me think, if this is the new level of social programming, I finally might abide!
Can they teach this in the schools? I might even go back to teaching! (Ok, let’s not exaggerate. We prefer our wee homestead life, even through the weather disasters, great many failures and physical pain.)
I’ve selected my favorite bits, there’s much more to appreciate on each of these Substacks, just follow the links.
The Coward’s Bargain: How We Taught a Generation To Live In Fear by Josh Stylman
“This wasn’t an accident or an overreaction. This was a stress test of how quickly a free society could be transformed into something unrecognizable, and we failed spectacularly. Anyone who actually followed the science understood the only pandemic was one of cowardice. Worse, most people didn’t even notice we were being tested. They thought they were just “following the science”—never mind that the data kept changing to match the politics, or that questioning anything had somehow become heretical. The beautiful thing about this system is that it’s self-sustaining. Once you’ve participated in the mob mentality, once you’ve policed your neighbors and canceled your friends and stayed silent when you should have spoken up, you become invested in maintaining the fiction that you were right all along. Admitting you were wrong isn’t just embarrassing—it’s an admission that you participated in something monstrous. So instead, you double down. You disappear when confronted with inconvenient facts.
Raising Prisoners And this brings us back to the children. They’re watching all of this. But more than that—they’re growing up inside this surveillance infrastructure from birth. The Stasi’s victims at least had some years of normal psychological development before the surveillance state kicked in. These kids never get that. They’re born into a world where every thought might be public, every mistake permanent, every unpopular opinion potentially life-destroying. The psychological impact is devastating. Research shows that children who grow up under constant surveillance—even well-meaning parental surveillance—show higher rates of anxiety, depression, and what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” They never develop internal locus of control because they never get to make real choices with real consequences. But this goes far deeper than helicopter parenting. The ability to hold unpopular opinions, to think through problems independently, to risk being wrong—these aren’t just nice-to-haves. They’re core to psychological maturity. When you eliminate those possibilities, you don’t just get more compliant people; you get people who literally can’t think for themselves anymore. They outsource their judgment to the crowd because they never developed their own.”
The COVID Conformity Test This is how totalitarian thinking takes root—not through jackbooted thugs, but through a million small acts of self-censorship. When a venture capitalist whispers his concerns about immigration policy like he’s confessing to a thought crime. When successful professionals agree with dissenting views privately but would never defend them publicly. When speaking obvious truths becomes an act of courage rather than basic citizenship. Orwell understood this perfectly. In 1984, the Party’s greatest achievement wasn’t forcing people to say things they didn’t believe—it was making them afraid to believe things they weren’t supposed to say. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” O’Brien explains to Winston. “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.” But the real genius was making citizens complicit in their own oppression, turning everyone into both prisoner and guard.”
Neutralization: How Bureaucracies Silence Dissent Through Legal Fuses and Narrative Control by Luc Lelievre
Institutional power rarely reveals its full mechanics in one stroke. Instead, it unfolds in sequences—calculated, procedural, and often cloaked in the language of neutrality. Neutralization, the fourth installment in Luc Lelièvre’s Unbekoming series, dissects this final movement in the choreography of bureaucratic suppression. Building on prior analyses—Heresy, which outlined how dissent is ideologically framed as deviant; Suppression, which explored institutional mechanisms of exclusion; and Omission, which detailed the structural design behind silencing—this essay turns its attention to the silent sophistication of neutralization: the use of legal fuses, narrative gatekeepers, and administrative dead-ends to reroute dissent and erase its public trace.
7. Administrative Gaslighting and the “Fuse Effect”: When Bureaucracy Becomes Theatre
Modern bureaucracies rarely operate through overt acts of repression. Instead, their preferred mode of silencing is procedural — a form of administrative gaslighting that cloaks itself in language of due process while subtly eroding the dissident’s credibility. This technique is not accidental; it is designed.
One illustrative method is what could be termed the “fuse effect”: low-visibility actors within the institutional machinery are positioned to execute decisions that carry legal or symbolic consequences, thus absorbing the potential fallout. These operatives — often legal clerks, junior lawyers, or regional representatives — function as buffers. When the dissident challenges a structural injustice, it is these intermediaries who respond, allowing higher-level decision-makers to remain untouched by controversy. The system insulates itself from reputational risk while continuing its work of marginalization.
But when these “fuses” begin to fail — either through overreach or exposure — institutions escalate. They deploy higher-profile agents, such as communications directors or legal executives, who are tasked with closing the file definitively. In my own case, the surprising intervention of a top-level official from a legal commission — someone with no adjudicative mandate — reveals just how far the institution was willing to go to protect the official narrative. Rather than engage the constitutional merits of my claim, it chose to obscure them through authority signaling and symbolic closure.
This bureaucratic theatre plays out under the guise of objectivity. But for those of us who have documented each step, the pattern is unmistakable: delegitimize the voice, dilute the argument, displace responsibility. These are not failures of oversight; they are evidence of design.
The question, then, is no longer whether the dissident is “right” or “wrong” by institutional standards. It is whether he can endure — and expose — the machinery that seeks to erase him. In that sense, the public record becomes not only a site of resistance, but a form of protection.
The Millennial Gardner gave a great little pep talk at the end of this confessional concerning his myriad gardening mistakes over the years. There should be more such vids as this. The positivity movement is dead, in my opinion, though MG is still a devoted adherent.
Positivity–Capitalism couldn’t survive without it!
He’s not yet reached the ripe age of bitterness. He thinks he will be able to continuously throw money at the problem, and I rather doubt that’s a viable long-term solution. I hope I’m wrong.
But overall I really appreciate his rejection of the typical appraoch to problems today: The Head in the Sand vs The Pie in the Sky. That’s what I see most often, and on that I think he’d agree with me.
So, more power to him!
We all need a pep talk now and then and Millennials especially it seems to me are inheriting the ends of the Shitshow and are expected to pull it all together again after the wrecking ball.
Hardly a lesson in equity, or perhaps the best lesson that could be.
The gist of his little pep talk is valid–anyone who excels at anything worthwhile has experienced, and learned from, the greatest teacher of all–Failure.
It’s not nice or pleasant or fun or comfortable to learn the lessons of failure. And we live in a culture addicted to nice and pleasant and fun and comfortable.
Not really a conducive atmosphere for learning.
Yet, sometimes the results of the lessons are far more pleasant than we might expect. Like, in my case, my greatest lesson in gardening so far has been flowers.
Flowers and ‘weeds’.
I had no idea the delight they offer when I first started gardening and I made little room for them in my garden, whether the classic garden cultivars or the wild weeds who long to make themselves welcomed. HUGE mistake!
I’ve been working on correcting that for many years now, and it’s absolutely paid off in myriad forms: more bees, more joy, more pleasure, more beauty, more sense of wonder.
The garden feels like less of a chore and more of a privilege with every bloom. The attraction is magnetic, to insects, to birds, to me. I observe better, I take more time, I allow my natural esthetic sense to align with the food crops and converge into a very satisfying balance of food and fancy.
Somehow, whether in my heart, or soul, or imagination, co-mingling the wild in with the crops has engaged me in a way that is a continual wellspring of curiousity and desire, even in the worst of times.
The rapture of emergent colors, the allure of fragrance on the breeze, the dance of the petals and the delight of the bees, I think what my early garden experience was missing was in fact the essence of ME. Because you don’t get that from books.
Learn from our failures dear ones, that’s why we tell y’all about them. Don’t let them dim your spirits, but use them in good faith, and find a way.
