Friday, December 22, 2023

Selifshness as a social movement

 There is a strong argument to be made that the current churn of topics in the red-pill, feminism, progressive,mgtow spaces is all cirling around the same ideas, just using different language. 

I would posit that a feminism is more developed because it has been running longest and the arguments and ideas have had a lot longer to settle, so it makes the easiest case study, but the others are following the same play book. 

The key idea is the ability to control a population of "believers" by appealing to their worst childish instincts.  The easiest one to appeal to is "selfishness".  

 If you consider what the messages were in the early days of feminism, there were many vague concepts of small liberties and specific fights to be had on various topics.  This made it hard to generlise about the strategy.  I doubt anyone at that time could have even conceptualised of any generalisation between the various small battles.  However, 100 years later and with the speed and reach of the internet, the messages are getting blended and re-blended at the speed of keyboards and they are all starting to sound the same. 

"You can do it all, be the boss babe..."

"Take some personal time"

"Live your own life"

"You are the boss of it all"

"if you don't like it.. leave" (job, relationship, etc)

Etc.  All of these messages are subtle or not-so subtle appeals to be selfish.  None of them are about contributing to a common good. Or joining a team, or being part of a family, country or any other of the many old messages about comming together (even if its all woman together)  These messages are all about the individual looking after themselves. In this case the message is targeted at women, but the pattern applies in the other social movements. 

Within the man-o-sphere there is the same harping on about mgtow or "men going their own way" which is essentially choosing to live a solo life.  

I think the message is easier to sell to men and will take a shorter time to work as there has always been a subtext of that message availible to men as part of the social pressure to offer some message to men who are not able to pair up.  But the obvious lack in this message is about joining anything or finding a team or family.  The mgtow messaging is focused on "work on yourself"  which is just another appeal to selfishness.  It contains no plan for the furture or social cohesion, it just feeds the angry child the message about satisfying the now and entertaining themselves. 

Contrast this with the "passport bro" message which is about going to foreign lands to meet and marry.  This idea still strongly contains the idea of finding a girl and settling down to build a family. 

So the question is why have these messages been so successful?  We all start as children.  Its very easy to appeal to the child within as very few young people have much sense of the value of rexponsibility. Its a hard argument to make to a young person.  Without the wealth of experiences of a hard life, they are going to take a very long time to understand that there are benefits to working together and sharing their life. 

So what has been the consequence?  Breakdown in personal relationships, breakdown in communiies, breakdown in nationstates.  Once you start looking for confirmation bias... I mean evidence, you can find it everywhere you look.  But the contary arguments an also be made, so thats not really a good argument. 

There are lots of ways to try to see the consequences, but the picture gets very blurry as soon as you try to zoom out, because the vast majority of this selfish behaviour is limited to the loud and the obvious.  Down at the coal face, the majority of people are still functionally cooperating and instinctivly getting on with their lives becasue they instinctivly know it works and they "can't do it all".  This behaviour keeps the majority of the systems of society working.  However, those with easier lives and some leisure time, have the resources to start to play games and think deep thoughts and can engage with socially progressive ideas.  They are the ones who are the fertile ground for this kind of messaging. 

So we have the bored middle classes, the young and the wealthy who all have various resouces (time, energy and or money which is both) availible which are picking up these ideas and have run with them. 

With a concentration of these people in the urban centres this results in high concentrations of people who want to explore these "new ideas" all sitting around trying to figure ouf if the grass is really greener on the other side of a concept and talking shit with their similarly afflicted neighbours.  Historically the problem of having time and luxury to consider the deeper life problems was limited to social elites who were few in number and communicated between themselves.  The working folk were virtually immune to it as the ideas just did not work for them in a harsh world.  It was only with the growth of the middle class and especially the social gap beween middle class parents and middle class children (one who had a harsh life to become middle class and the other who was gifted the benefits of being middle class without the harsh bit) where these simplistic ideas could suddenly take hold.

The problem is that the message does not stay confined to the elite anymore.  Its availible to everyone who has a phone and can get reasonable bandwidth and has the time and luxury to play pretend.  The real poison is "free time".  Bordem and lonliness are very fertile grounds.  People are just not very well adapted to these states.  We are social animals and cooperation is a very strong survival pattern.  But what fills the space when we have "time"?  This is the curse of the "modern world". 

The interesting question is whether the message created the problem or the problem created the message. 

The really scary realisation comes when you consider that the only historial solution to this problem that humanity has discovered (repeatedly..) is war.  conflict is the emergent solution to an excess of free time and resources at all levels of society. 

Within a personal relationship when there is bordem and too much free time... eventually conflict emerges as a behaviour that entertains or occupies. Within workplaces, the same pattern emerges, bored middle managers start territory battles and invent personal animosity to occupy themselves. States with too many resources and no reason to cooperate play out petty squabbles that make no rational sense because they have nothing better to do.  Every so often it blows up into all out conflict... but not clearly over essential resources... just .. "reasons"... 

So is this a fundamental aspect of human nature?  As society evolves towards utopia will we all just get bored and start shit? Or is this just another evolutionary step that the majority of the population will fail at?  Darwin's principle is very hard to beat. 

Those who are not well adapted to the environment will not be as successful... 

So what is the environment?  What is it to be successful within it? 

If the environment is one of selfishness, bordem, leisure time etc.  Its no longer a physically harsh environment, but an internally bleak emotional landscape.  We need to look around for people who have figured out how to live and thrive within these environments.  

I give you the geek.  King amoung men. Lost in their internal imaginations, lovers of books, games and self-created amusments.  Those who can occupy themselves as needed.  

The opposite are the "socials" those who need people to exist within and to swim between.  They are the ones who are failing in this new bored, people less environment. The social vacume of the internet and "social media".  There is a strange paradox that we have invented a technology that is so destructive for social behaviours and named it "social media".  Its like the worst skinner box for "social" type people, more additictive than crack but less fulfilling.

One of the interesting issues is the "post" behaviour.  Looking at the ways that geeks socialise vs the socials has always been interesting. There are still social patterns that geeks create to try to scratch the itch of needing others.  They start businesses, passion projects, conventions to share they passions, video channelse etc.  Its curious to see these same patterns starting to fill the time of the socials.  

but thats a rant for another day. 



 


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