No Way Out But Through

I'd been making loud noises about getting off of facebook since 2017 or so, finally, after two years of censorship and removed posts about first a very suspicious epidemic fuelled by social media-propagated hysteria - and then for “vaccines” which at the time, to me and others, it was obvious that they could not work to stop infection or prevent spread, along with creating often lethal “side effects”- and about six months after beginning my active use of Substack and reposting links back to my facebook page, to evade the censorship - I got booted off on February 1, 2022. The next two weeks were hell, I was cut off from nearly all family and friends. The same day I considered suicide I had a "What the Fuck?" moment - I've got this weird theory about suicide, it's that it doesn't work. Yeah, you end this lifeline, but you repeat it, over and over, like "Groundhog Day", until you finally work out the problem that you chose to present yourself with - or That Which Is chose to present you with - before you were born into this timeline. There is no way out but *through*...

So I actually met my nextdoor neighbors in person, when my neighbor across the street's wife died, I went over personally to express my condolences and offer of help if he should need it - none of this fake-ass "virtual community" shit. True, the internet can be used to create actual relationships as a starting point - especially with people far away, in places like Kyiv and Odessa, Ukraine and other faraway places - so it can be useful in that way, like the “pen pals” of older times, but not generally.

With our modern dystopia, non-social media personal contact is extremely difficult - but the "connections" you make through censored and mediated social media are evanescent, it's like they don't really exist. I still have no contact with family who are firmly stuck in the closed, walled-off dystopia of social media like facebook, truthsocial, twitter, and the rest. I get enticing emails from facebook and the rest every couple of days - "see what xxxx is saying about you" - but I haven't tried to get back for over three years now, the depression and the disharmony caused by anti-social social media - the Outrage Machine, as I called it back then - are simply too harmful for me to want to go back.

And this is nothing new, Jaron Lanier, one of the founders of the original internet wrote about it, in the days of USENET flamewars back in the 1980s - and then later, at the onset of the World Wide Web in the 1990s - and then more recently, when he set out his Ten Reasons To Get Rid Of Your Social Media -

"ARGUMENT TWO: QUITTING SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE MOST FINELY TARGETED WAY TO RESIST THE INSANITY OF OUR TIMES

THE BUMMER MACHINE: “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent”

BUMMER is a machine, a statistical machine that lives in the computing clouds. BUMMER is a machine with six moving parts:

A is for Attention Acquisition leading to Asshole supremacy

B is for Butting into everyone’s lives

C is for Cramming content down people’s throats

D is for Directing people’s behaviors in the sneakiest way possible

E is for Earning money from letting the worst assholes secretly screw with everyone else

F is for Fake mobs and Faker society

Customized feeds become optimized to “engage” each user, often with emotionally potent cues, leading to addiction. People don’t realize how they are being manipulated. The default purpose of manipulation is to get people more and more glued in, and to get them to spend more and more time in the system. But other purposes for manipulation are also tested. … The mass behavior modification machine is rented out to make money. BUMMER manipulations are not perfect, but they are powerful enough that it becomes suicidal for brands, politicians, and other competitive entities to forgo payments to BUMMER machines. Universal cognitive blackmail ensues, resulting in a rising global spend on BUMMER.” https://lanredahunsi.com/book-summary-ten-arguments-for-deleting-your-social-media-accounts-right-now-by-jaron-lanier/" cited by my post of two years ago, here: https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/social-media-is-addictive-and-it -

Lanier's words are all too true, his predictions of over thirty years ago were prescient - and much more attention should be paid to him, civilized society hangs in the balance... because otherwise, we’re stuck with our present Corporate State Pathocracy:

“A totalitarian form of government in which absolute political power is held by a psychopathic elite, and their effect on the people is such that the entire society is ruled and motivated by purely pathological values.

A pathocracy can take many forms and can insinuate itself covertly into any seemingly just system or ideology. As such it can masquerade under the guise of a democracy or theocracy as well as more openly oppressive regimes.

Characteristics

1. suppression of individualism and creativity.
2. impoverishment of artistic values.
3. impoverishment of moral values; a social structure based on self-interest and one-upmanship, rather than altruism.
4. fanatical ideology; often a corrupted form of a valid viable ‘trojan’ ideology which is perverted into a pathological form, bearing little resemblance to the substance of the original.
5. intolerance and suspicion of anyone who is different, or who disagrees with the state.
6. centralized control.
7. widespread corruption.
8. secret activities within government, but surveillance of the general population. (In contrast, a healthy society would have transparent government processes, and respect for privacy of the individual citizen).
9. paranoid and reactionary government.
10. excessive, arbitrary, unfair and inflexible legislation; the power of decision making is reduced/removed from the citizens’ everyday lives.
11. an attitude of hypocrisy and contempt demonstrated by the actions of the ruling class, towards the ideals they claim to follow, and towards the citizens they claim to represent.
12. controlled media, dominated by propaganda.
13. extreme inequality between the richest and poorest.
14. endemic use of corrupted psychological reasoning such as paramoralisms, conversive thinking and doubletalk.
15. rule by force and/or fear of force.
16. people are considered as a ‘resource’ to be exploited (hence the term “human resources”), rather than as individuals with intrinsic human worth.
17. spiritual life is restricted to inflexible and indoctrinare schemes. Anyone attempting to go beyond these boundaries is considered a heretic or insane, and therefore dangerous.
18. arbitrary divisions in the population (class, ethnicity, creed) are inflamed into conflict with one another.
19. suppression of free speech – public debate, demonstration, protest.
20. violation of basic human rights, for example: restriction or denial of basic life necessities such as food, water, shelter; detainment without charge; torture and abuse; slave labour.” https://pathocracy.wordpress.com/definition/

So many elements as mentioned above are manifest in today’s society, in government at all levels, with all major parties, with all movements seeking power over others. This pathology is contagious, infecting the whole of society, worldwide. Only when people become aware as individuals, in their inmost being, of what is going on, is there a way out…