Citizen Disposal: “Mimetic theory teaches us, and neuroscience and studies on human imitation have confirmed, that all desire is mediated. There is no way to desire without emulating some other. In his 2017 book Strange Contagion, Lee Daniel Kravetz explores the phenomenon of social contagions, noting especially the terrible fact that suicide itself is contagious…Social contagions, mild and severe, can profoundly shape the behaviours of people such that their desires can override even their instinct for self-preservation. We know about social contagions just by living in the world and paying attention.”
Consequences Minus Truth: “A society hostile to truth can’t possibly remain civilized, because it will also be hostile to reality. That appears to be the disposition of the people running things in the USA these days. The problem, of course, is that this is not a reality-optional world, despite the wishes of many Americans (and other peoples of Western Civ) who wish it would be.”
George Floyd vs. the People: “Unlike the Holocaust™, the ‘George Floyd murder’ was indisputably a hoax. It involved the cynical exploitation of a genuinely ‘tragic’ (i.e., deadly) event. It required suppressing a major body of evidence (the camera footage and testimonies of the police actually involved, and even some civilian witnesses, as seen in the footage). The void of the suppressed evidence was filled via the use of a few carefully selected items of evidence, strategically rearranged to create the impression of something that seemingly (I would say observably) never happened (Floyd’s racially-motivated murder).”
Memento Mori: “Everything is erased by time. Even genocides. Medieval monks, trying to imbibe this principle more deeply, developed the habit of keeping human skulls upon their desks. Skulls of friends. Family. Maybe the skull of a mentor or a person who had raised them. When they would die the monks would have a funeral and bury them, and then, later, come revisit the grave after the decay and recover the skulls and pop them on the table. Like Hamlet speaking to the skull of Yorick, there, within those bones there had once been a brain with a memory and a soul that had given them wisdom and tutelage and love.”
Why Civilizations Collapse: “The collapse of the Roman Empire was much less the constant burning of cities so much as it was GDP-equivalent shrinking by about 1% per year, while remaining more or less the same on the books, for two hundred years in a row.”