FOMO

"Only a lunatic would like to see a skull crushed 

[...]
Who do you blame? It's a shame because the man's slain
He got caught in the chains of his own game
[...]
One day I'm gonna bust, blow up on this society
Why did you lie to me? I couldn't find a trace of equality"

 

2Pac - Trapped

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"ME AND MY FUCKING GUN!"

NIN - Big Man With A Gun

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"What maddens me,” he said, “is the democracy of the whole thing. White! I HATE this modern democracy. Democracy and inequality! Was there ever an absurder combination? What is the good of a social order in which the men at the top are commoner, meaner stuff than the men underneath, the same stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by prosperity and opportunity and the conceit that comes with advantage? This trouble wants so little, just a touch of aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, just an inkling of responsibility, and the place might rise instantly out of all this squalor and evil temper.... What does all this struggle here amount to? On one side unintelligent greed, unintelligent resentment on the other; suspicion everywhere...."
H.G. Wells - The Research Magnificent (1915)

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"The ultra-rich people who don't think they have a stake in the common good, and who think they can just jet off to New Zealand if things ever get really tough here. I mean, that's, one, it's just patently delusional, that's like I mean, if you're gaming out those end-of-the-world scenarios, you know, you have to think of who's gonna protect you and who you're gonna... Your pilot on your private plane is not going to leave without his family to go to New Zealand when the world ends, right? So you need to take the pilot's family, is that...? And what about your bodyguard's family, and who's gonna protect you from your bodyguards when your bodyguards understand that you really have no power now, you're just a guy who bought this compound in New Zealand? It's a ridiculous end-game to think that you can privately ensure your survival when the shit really hits the fan. So you have as much a stake in civilization not failing as anyone else

[...]

I mean, do you want to be surrounded by desperate, angry, envious people? Or do you want to be surrounded by people who are basically happy and thriving? And the answer is so obvious, at any level of wealth it's so obvious."

 

Sam Harris - Making Sense #430 

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You're right, Harris, the answer is obvious: desperate, angry and envious, all the way. It's all anyone ever wants, and to naively pretend otherwise is suicide and has yielded an inevitable global mass suicide. Powermongering is not a carefully valuated eightfold path to self-actualization. It is mindless animalistic impulse. How does a monkey know whether it has power? It doesn't. All it can do is exert power and measure its status by success in dominating others, and must do so constantly to verify, occasionally upping the ante because it cannot be entirely certain what dominance others might be politicking behind its back. It's safer to pre-empt.

 

Remember that wealth is always relative. It doesn't matter how much you lose so long as everyone else loses more. The rich in a modern society aware of at least a basic notion of individual rights always hit a ceiling in their application of power. What they'd like to do is whip some peasants to death before breakfast, spend lunch amusing themselves at the spectacle of starving beggars waiting for the lord to spit out a crust of bread for their sustenance, and maybe order their thugs to pillage, rape and burn an entire county to the ground for supper entertainment. But they can't, the poor dears, frustrated at every step. That glass ceiling is such a bitch. These pesky legal systems and minimum wages and checks and balances and antitrust acts and constitutional restrictions get in the way of their rightful monkey-business.

 

The end of the world is an opportunity to do away with limits on power, that's all. Put the pilot's child in a noose to ensure his compliance. Order one bodyguard to murder another for treasonous thought-crimes. Promise an orphan a place in your compound, then gut him on a hook from your castle walls when you get bored having your goons gang-rape him to ensure their continued loyalty via that all-important feeling of exerting power. Good, clean fun. Sure, if you accumulate a few hundred billion dollars you might simply bribe enough cops to look the other way to have your way without tearing the whole system down... but that takes time, and subtlety. You might not live long enough to truly reach the zenith of simian aspiration. Safer to eliminate all possible checks on your power rather than check them in turn. And sure, the rabble will turn on you eventually, you'll run out of bodyguards eventually, your own children will seize the throne eventually... but what is eventuality when compared to the more immediate promise of a decade of absolute power? Maybe... maybe even two decades. Imagine that. Just imagine yourself in that position.

 

What self-respecting, self-actualizing monkey would pass up the opportunity, I ask ya?

 

Why else would anyone get rich? What other impetus can you cite? In preindustrial eras, it used to be only the rich could afford medicine and protection to live to a ripe old age. Only the rich could afford books, art and music. But we have MP3s and MP4s now, and my tablet stores a thousand books more than I'll ever read. Pharmacy shelves groan under mass-produced antibiotics. If self-actualization were the goal, then one need not move past a modest, low-pressure middle-class existence, and instead maximize free time to play games, listen to music and maybe do a bit of creative writing. Further accumulation of wealth serves no purpose other than powermongering, and always greater power beyond that.

 

And please, don't accuse me of indulging in any salt of the earth fallacy about the nobility of the underclass. They would if they could. What has rap and hip-hop, the soundtrack of street culture, ever been but a constant stream of demands to buy this track so you can make me rich enough to shit down your throats you pathetic plebs. Consider the other reason the rich cannot afford to miss the grand opportunity: if they don't tear everything down now, some other parvenu will do it five years later. They know better than anyone the dirty truth that they did nothing special to earn their privilege, just drew the lucky straw while remaining ruthless, and conversely that 99.99+% of the populace truly is just like them. Every revolutionary, once successful, will turn dictator in turn. Poverty and humility are Christian values only insomuch as Christians preach them to each other. Any falsified pretext for wealth accumulation like "effective altruism" soon betrays its transparent subterfuge (when I'm king of the world, everyone will be happy) as just that, a pretext, and any pretext will do, so long as it leads to power. The impulse to out-earn others is the same as the impulse to humiliate and torture, merely sublimated for polite company, man. And every man dreams to be a company.

 

I seized the chance to re-watch V for Vendetta's film adaptation before Netflix let its license lapse, and couldn't suppress a smirk at the universal self-delusion one sees in all such dystopian fiction (cf. Equilibrium, Snowpiercer, etc.) the core fiction, in fact, of such dystopias: the plucky fight by the underdog majority against a figurehead tyrant. Oppression is being imposed from above; the poor trampled masses are just waiting for a moment to break free. Sure, how else would you sell movies? Never paint the audience surrogates as guilty; give them a convenient boogeyman, an Emmanuel Goldstein to hate for two minutes at a time. Except, hold on, who's the tyrant's army? Who's the secret police? Who voted the tyrant into power? Who cheered at every rally? Who wore/were the red caps? Look up some statistics collected after such systems collapse in the real world, especially the number of salt-of-the-earth plucky underdog citizens who informed on their fellows to the secret police. Numbers routinely break 20%, 25%, over a third of the populace. Snitches get stitches? Well, it's never stopped them.

 

But we're not talking mere collaboration. The rabble originate oppression. I'd heard Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? as a stock phrase all my life, naturally. Strange that until now I had not known it originated as a song refrain from a failed 1932 Broadway musical. Not a bad little ditty either. I think I like Al Jolson's version so far. Unraveling into spoken word would seem lazy normally but works here within the theme of dissolution. But when you hear the idealized everyman warbling "once I built a tower to the sun" you have to ask, was he not aware he was building a palace for tyrants? That he was aiding the centralization of power for a fatter paycheck than he could get stacking bricks for his neighbour? Or did he think the Empire State building would be filled with mom&pop bakeries and employee-owned bookstores? And ain't it funny all the lines we're leaving out of that "just us chickens" litany?

Like:

"once I skimmed steaks off cow carcasses while butchering them"

"once I bribed the referee to throw out the opposing forward"

"once I was breaking knees for Al Capone"

"once I was a swindler hawking patent medicines"

"once I was an investor, bankrupting businesses for 0.1% interest more than the investor in the cubicle next to me, now I'm jumping out a window"

- all valid early 20th-century Americana!

 

How do you act in your own sphere of influence? Did Diogenes ever find honesty in the marketplace? Is there any monkey in the world that won't cheat at cards? And, as I've said before, if you cheat at cards, you'll cheat at stock markets too. Any teenage girl that lords her new purse over her friends will skin those friends alive once she climbs high enough in the social ladder to do so with impunity. Such opportunities don't come often. Better grab for them while you can. Life's too short to deny yourself the little pleasures.