The Low Life

Does fear/caution serve a purpose?

People who have become slaves to their fear will tell you yes. If you surrender it is easy to rationalize, to tell yourself that this is to some extent reasonable.

Let me be clear what I am not talking about here: I do not mean the fear you feel when you walk in the door and see your three year-old playing with a loaded gun, or the fear that motivates you to get your prostate examined. Such fears are be legitimate to a certain extent, possibly logical. They won’t help you deal with the situation, but it’s hard to not imagine yourself being afraid in such circumstances, and once the immediate situation is handled properly, the fear goes away. This is different from the fear of what might happen. The fear of what might happen is not tied to reality or to reasonable solutions, it is tied to your imagination. Because there is no immediate reason to be afraid, you can’t get rid of it. Yes, somebody might break in your window and rape you or your wife tonight. Because they haven’t, and because you have know real knowledge on which to base it, you can’t reason it away. It’s easy to rationalize it as “caution”. You can now think of yourself as prudent and pragmatic because you are pussy.

The minute you surrender to it, you are setting up a rule for everything else in your life. Once you open the door to treating things unreasonable things as fact, you start down a road where you have to keep accepting other unreasonable things. If you start believing that at any moment aliens are going to invade planet Earth, then when somebody tells you that the zombie holocaust might be underway, you won’t have a basis in logical-thinking from which to refute it, you have to panic. Your thought system is the kind in which zombie holocausts are legitimate fears. This kind of fear will swallow your life, it will determine how you do everything, it will rule your job, your relationships, your ambitions. You will live your fearful life in a box, and then you will die a fearful death.

Facing your fears doesn’t always work
Facing your fears only works if nothing bad happens. Let’s say your great fear is of women, so one day you muster up the courage and you approach some vicious hormonal bitch and she basically does her best to shred your confidence and humiliate you in front of people. You, completely unused to dealing with people have no snappy comebacks, no smart answers, you just have to stand there and take it. In that instance, you were right to be afraid. If you are afraid of heights and you fall off the roof it kind of proves your point. Even if nothing bad happens facing it does not automatically take the fear away since it doesn’t involve dealing with your unreasonable mental issues. If you are afraid of flying and you summon up the balls to take a flight, it does not mean that the return trip should be any easier, it could still crash. Danger is always real, the question is whether it matters or not.

What it takes to overcome
I have observed a curious thing about humans in my time on this planet, it’s one very important thing that very few of you seem to actually notice and yet it affects everybody. The odd phenomenon is this: you all die. The minute you really, truly grasp the fact that you are on your way to an aneurysm, or a bullet, or a car-crash, or being raped and strangled in the back of a van, or Hodgkins or Multiple sclerosis, or rabies, or suicide, or a heart attack, and that those things are absolutely certain to happen to you on a certain day in the future, in a certain month, in a certain year, all of which is unknown to you, and that this thing is going to happen, then you stop thinking so much about uncertainties. All those fears about burglars possibly breaking into your home at night melt away when there is a real live gun pointed at your face. Everything between now and the day you die is absolutely irrelevant. The cure for fear of hypothetical dangers is a certain doom. It takes all the ifs out of it. The fact is that your cancer has already started. The guy who is going to hit your car while drunk has already started looking forward to the party he will be attending that night, the bullet that will blow the back of your head off is now sitting on the shelf at your local Wal-Mart.

Heroes=propaganda

By redacting all the details that make a man human you can turn him into a hero. You simply make the conscious decision to forget all the bad, messy things about him, erase them from history, and highlight only the things that you want remembered. Sentiment and the desire to have a hero will take you the rest of the way. People want heroes. They want to believe anything that makes them feel good about themselves, including being of the same race or nationality as a superman, a great and ambitious leader who fought for his people, a visionary. If they owned slaves or molested their daughters or drank their own urine then those things might divert from the heroism, from the feel-good propaganda, so no, those don’t get passed on to the public pool of knowledge. Heroes have to be good guys or they do not join us together in worship, they do not arouse nationalistic fervor.

When people push the idea of patriotism, love of country, what they really mean is love of government. Fire-men and soldiers and police officers they represent the protective arm of government, the part that is there to make you feel safe, not because they do anything much to protect you, but because you think they can. These “heroes” are there to tell you to respect and love authority because authority loves you like a mother loves her little children. You are to love the uniform and to support it uncritically. You are supposed to forget the fact that these people are human and therefore inclined to be crooked, sloppy, lazy, selfish, stupid, and hypocritical.

An alternative explanation of why Blag is everywhere

(Now Former) Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, originally uploaded by Taekwonweirdo.

I am quite probably not the first person to come up with this, but I have an alternate explanation for Rod Blagojevich’s attention-whoring antics: I think that somebody believes that he is desperate enough to spill some beans. I have no idea what kinds of beans, but bad beans. Beans worth killing for. So let’s say Mr Blag is on a hit-list. What would be a better way to ensure that he did not meet an unfortunate accident than to stay in the public eye? Always a good thing. The minute you drop off the radar then people forget about you and you are subject to having heart attacks or plane crashes. When you are no longer a public figure, no longer identified as being the subject of massive controversy nobody cares how you died.

Look, before you dismiss me as a raving conspiracy nut, let me point out that the government has to have some kind of mechanism for carrying out assassinations that look like anything but. It would be too useful, too obviously necessary. Hell, I a don’t have trillions of dollars at my disposal, nor am I perpetually embroiled in high stakes espionage but even I have need of this kind of thing. There are people I know that the world, and my life, would be better off without. You have them too.

Maybe Blag, instead of just being an annoying little gadfly is trying to stay alive. Helmet hair or not you can’t fault the man. I strongly suspect that when we stop hearing about him we will shortly thereafter find out that he passed away peacefully in his sleep or something.

Hypocrites and “the greater good”

If you believe that somebody can rationalize sending their fellow-citizens to their deaths so as to get cheaper oil by which they can personally profit, then it should not be a problem believing that they could bankrupt their own country and plunge everybody into a dark age of poverty that the First World has never seen before. I am not saying that this is what is happening or has happened, I am just saying that if you believe they are amoral enough, evil enough to do one, it should not be a problem to believe that they would do the other.

We are talking about cognitive dissonance here, and the ability to deny the obvious contradiction between professed values and actions. When it is proven beyond a shred of doubt, you have to still be able to deny. You deny because admission would not suit you, and you know that if you deny long enough and fervently enough, people will start to consider the possibility that maybe you are telling the truth. Maybe your tortuous, tendentious retelling of the facts is the truth.

The thing about evil is that it never comes right out and admits to being what it is, it just goes along acting in it’s own best interest until everybody decides to stop it. If they are evil, merely telling them that is not going to change anything. Merely accusing them is pointless. People who rationalize have already worked out their actions with their conscience of whatever passes for one with them. In their minds they have twisted the nature of their actions to where they “had no choice” and “were for the greater good”. They love the greater good. The long-term good. You can do anything for the long term good. The term being as long as you like. You can make anything a “reasonable course of action given”, and fill in the space after “given” with any historical precedent that suits your immediate goals.

Why you will be useless in a genuine disaster

1. You cannot live without the Internet
Most of you reading this cannot yet conceive of how big a deal this is. It’s one thing to know that you are going to be away from it for a few hours or a few days, or even, possibly, weeks. The idea of a future where it does not exist for you at all is unthinkable. Technology has become a substitute for having big things in your life, a diversion that fools you into thinking that it has everything you need. The Internet is no longer a mere a tool, it’s a lifestyle, and when cut off from it people will be forced to faced reality, only without the callouses they would have built up had they been spending their time outside and around people instead of surfing.
In Korea, a Boot Camp Cure for Web Obsession

Internet Addiction Disorder: Causes, Symptoms,and Consequences

2. Too sedentary
If you are used to a life of sitting on your ass all day and moving at your own pace, you will have a hard time adjusting to a life where movement is absolutely necessary. Hardship usually involves having to do stuff, run, hide, forage, find or build shelter. Note also that there will be no place comfortable to sit and while away the hours anymore. No ergonomic chairs, no memory-foam mattress. Your whole world will be turned into an uncomfortable and unfamiliar place.
Lazy cat

3. Destitution is boring
Basically, when you are not moving you get to sit around and think about how fucked you are and how the future can only be worse. When you are moving you are doing mundane, repetitive tasks that you have no choice but to do. Try to start are fire, pick some more maggots out of your wounds, try to find an effective toilet-paper substitute etc.. This is why homeless people start smoking crack. There comes a point where life feels like a failed enterprise so why not? Why not just admit that there is no way out of this and do the only thing you can to make yourself happy? But what if things are so bad that there isn’t even crack to be had or you are too broke to afford it? Then there is sex, which is why poor people have more AIDS and babies and also why you get raped in prison.
“Patterns of drug use after becoming homeless varied considerably. Changes in the company kept, increased availability or boredom were offered as reasons for increased use.”


4. Too much competition
You presently have no idea what competition is. You have not competed till you have fought for food with a bunch of other starving refugees. Picture being in a battle with people for the most important thing in their lives at that very moment. In a large-scale tragedy you will face a lot of this. When you are down on the ground amongst the other desperate people you will know what “cutthroat” means. This kind of thing calls for ruthlessness and selfishness of the highest order. Like it or not there are situations in life where the only choices are to be the lowest kind asshole, or die.
Displaced

5. Not ready to do what it takes
You are probably not ready to surrender and suck one guy’s dick, or fight and get fucked by twenty. You are not ready to eat out of a garbage can or steal food. You are unprepared for the occasions that call for you to throw out all your values and previously held ideas of things you would not resort to. Bad situations destroy your ego and all ideas of self-righteousness. The people who survive things are not nice people. They are snitches and thieves and murderers.
Hiker Recovering After Amputating Own Arm

6. Your skill-set is useless
Ok, so you are an excellent web-designer. Awesome. Now imagine you and your children starving starving. Are you going to eat your knowledge of PHP? Imagine yourself in a refugee camp in a destitute nation at war, no Internet in a hundred square miles. Imagine yourself living on the street, an educated homeless person among thousands of educated homeless people.

You have the skills to survive within a certain framework, one with roads and local government and order. Should that framework be destroyed an illiterate Mexican field-worker or a deranged veteran who has been homeless for years are more functional than you.
Wilderness Survival Skills

7. You expect reasonable behavior
You expect people to abide by certain rules, to be governed by basic logic, except when people are bitter and violent that does not happen. You know those abusive husbands who beat the crap out of their wives for some little irrational thing? It’s not that it makes sense to them, but they feel they have the right to do it even when it doesn’t make sense, just because they feel like beating somebody up, causing some pain. Well the world is full of them, and when things get desperate and and ugly for everybody, they multiply. Some people are governed simply by whim, by the need to vent some malice, and if you are the most convenient thing on which to vent then you get hit. You, on the other hand, who expect people a warning when people are going to do something bad. You who are ready to believe that most people are good, you get sucker punched, you get your ass kicked and are left bleeding in the street wondering what you did to provoke that.
Restaurateur stabbed to death in random attack

8. You take luxuries for granted
The people with shit to sell have succeeded in convincing much of humanity that a cell-phone is a necessity. It is not. It is a convenience, and a minor one at that. A car is a big, significant convenience, but still not a necessity. There is a difference really awesome shit and the essentials for survival. You can live quite well without a cellphone or a car. Without antibiotics, or shelter in a cold climate, not so much. Thanks to big business the lines between necessity and luxury have been blurred. Few people these days know what they absolutely need, so they go broke buying all kinds of shit that is less important.
Deluxe Emergency Kit-2 Person, Emergency Zone, Disaster Survival Kit, Emergency Preparedness

9. You have not suffered enough
You are pampered, soft, genteel, used to a life where the worst possible thing is your car breaking down, or gaining a few pounds. When the really ugly shit starts happening suddenly you are out of your depth with no tools for handling a real, drastic change in circumstances. Weekends camping in a park do not train you for a life of homelessness where there is no reasonable hope of ever having permanent shelter again. A few quick fights in high school do not prepare you for having to defend your life with your own hands at 30. Like everything in life, being able handle sudden hardship is a skill. You don’t learn it by playing with your little toys, entertaining yourself or getting fat. You get it by not being complacent. By being ready and having experience.

When suffering is new to you, real, horrible deprivation, you need an adjustment-period to get over the shock, but real life, especially when it gets to be real and unpleasant, does not give you one. It moves at it’s own pace and usually you do not get to prepare yourself for the next awful thing, they just keep coming and coming. It always gets worse.
They’re often clean-shaven, well dressed and utterly desperate

10. Depression/panic
You do not deal well with change, especially of the calamitous sort. That’s because your life is relatively stable. You may worry about it coming, try to visualize it, but you still can’t see the reality because you have never faced anything truly disastrous before. Those people that you see on the 9/11 videos running from the collapsing WTC towers know what I mean. To a certain extent the ability to build and maintain a stable nation is a good thing, except when that stability is damaged or destroyed. The people in war-torn African nations would have been able to handle 9/11 better. They know that life involves, sudden horrible episodes, they know that no period of peace ever lasts for long. The soft people who take peace for granted, who go long stretches without losing anybody they know, they are the ones who get hysterical, who kill themselves when the bad shit happens.
Suicide Spreads as One Solution to the Debt Crisis

The fools and their money

Hummer H2 HDR (II),
originally uploaded by GTM Photography (M. Alreshaid.).

It would seem to me that prosperity always comes at somebody else’s expense. The fool and his money are soon parted, what happens when this fool-money gets into the hands of the people who are smarter? Obviously, they become the wealthy members of society. The more fools with money you have the more money there is to go into the hands of those smart enough to take advantage of them.

First of all, you need to have employment for the fools, ways for them to make their money so that they can spend it on stupid shit. Then you need smarter people to come along and sell them Hummers. Then those smarter people need an even smarter set to come along and take the Hummer-money, and use it in their pyramid schemes, and so on. This is how money gets circulated, with indiscretion and status symbols, greed and materialism, the lust for the high of owning stuff.

You don’t need “wise spenders” in your economy, you need a bunch of people with empty lives and poor judgment. You need people who are going to buy the prettiest, biggest, most extravagant thing because they want to feel like the people on TV just for once in their lives.

Talking to strange girls

The big deal is that you don’t know her and she might reject you. She might do so in a mocking manner, or worse, with pity, thus causing you to hateyourself even more than you already do. The memory of this rejection will haunt you for weeks, her face, that expression of amused loathing along with a dullness that you had not seen before (or you would not have bothered). You will regret doing it. You are more afraid of the regret than of the rejection because regret means that you made a mistake, you mistimed it, misread her, was delusional, in denial. You still might be without knowing it.

Talking to strange girl is a reflection of all your failings as a heterosexual man. It is you looking at yourself, your desirability, through a woman’s eyes, the only ones that matter, and seeing where you fall short. You get to see that what you think you are may be just a figment of your imagination.

You get used to it the way you get used to looking at yourself in a mirror even after you realize how unattractive you are. You do it because the alternatives to that mirror are unworkable (shaving by touch is difficult and stressful). Do it enough, though, and eventually what you see in their rejection does not really matter. It loses its sting. If that one does not like you, you move on. You continue the search for the one who will see you the way you want to see you.

Why you need a posse

If you are wealthy and famous then you are going to need someone to protect you from the autograph-seeking masses. To drive you where you need to go so that you avoid accidents and lawsuits, to pave the way by handling all the little details of going outdoors that people of your caliber should not be expected to do.

If you were once poor you want to find people who knew you back then so that you have somebody to stand witness to how awesome you are for pulling yourself up out of poverty. Somebody to applaud all the little feats of awesomeness that the regular public would never get to see.

An entourage is a status symbol. It says that you have so much money that you can afford to pay people just to hang around and do meaningless shit.

If you are poor you need to appear en masse so as to be seen, to draw attention to yourself, to intimidate and feel powerful. One poor person intimidates no one, several, however might be out to rob the place or cause trouble. The anonymity of poverty is a great enough burden that even the stare of a security guard is worth something. Better to be seen by them than by nobody at all.

william shatner
Originally uploaded by NateFischPix