"Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know. " -Lao Tsu
The people with the least interesting things to say are the ones who speak the loudest, and the average mind can easily grasp the content, so they agree. In the information age (and no attention span as a result), those who produce the most content about themselves take the stage. They are their own hype men, claiming greatness in a total self-involvement, a hall of mirrors.
In a lack of humility, the social media influencers engage in total delusion, claiming they know life and others should follow. In this self-vanity, there is an engagement in philosnikea, the love of victory. The victory is capturing mass attention, which becomes a cash cow.
It is a pity we have forgotten philosophia, the love of wisdom. The wise are silent and stand in the corner. They are unsure of their brilliance and because they’re smart, they doubt. They do not try to outsource recognition, so they are less visible.
“We are led by the least among us; the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary and we do not fight back against the dehumanising values that are handed down as control icons.” – Terence McKenna
And because the smart people doubt, and the mediocre run full force we are led into a murky place. Human progress is not progress as we believe it to be, we are accelerating into complete idiocy, therefore destruction. Twenty eight year old bloggers can coach a person on “life” for $5k a month. A digital strategist who is good at marketing, can call himself a guru because he knows how to sell his spiritualized content. A man like Warren Harding can become president simply because he looks the part; authoritative, strong, and white. The 29th president of America is now remembered as the worst president in history, and he was fairly elected. We choose our own destruction.
"They muddy the water, to make it seem deep." -Nietzsche
Most conversations in politics keep the masses trapped in gender and identity politics to distract them from the most pressing issues. Our youth is numbed with information, dumbed by Tik Tok videos fed by China to keep Americans in gold fish brain.
The primary joy we have is in consumption; consuming tech, consuming clothing, consuming whatever makes us feel like we are more. We are buying a flaming Earth and think this is progress. Is freedom the ability to do whatever we want?
The door is ajar and with a slight push we will land ourselves in dystopia. We are living simultaneously in both the hell realms Orwell and Huxley warned us about. In 1984, Orwell feared the loss of truth through censorship and heightened surveillance.
In Brave New World, Huxley warned about the numbing through pleasure, afraid that even smart people would be so distracted with the frivolous that they wouldn’t see truth. Books would not need to be burned, nobody would read them in the first place.
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” -George Orwell
What is consciousness if it is polluted by trivialities and condensed for a ten second attention span? What is worth knowing if the majority of media is fed through the drip of propaganda? Is our life our own if our moods and interests are commodified?
When we end, it will not be through global warming or a nuclear bomb. The cerebral end is much closer. It is when consciousness is suffocated under worldly matter. We need a new cosmology desperately.
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