Where would you rather be and what is your improvement on the “system”? Sorry to pose questions at you but I see so many strange comments on the internet that sound like “red-pilled” nonsense. If you have a good personal value proposition to society and aren’t completely entropic, life is good. If you aren’t, it’s hard. That’s been modern western life for a while now and it’s not bad. Could it be better and is there room for improvement? Absolutely. But living in parallel red pill reality is an absolutely unhelpful endeavor.
I’m reminded of the Oracle at Delphi. “Know who you are” which means know your place in society (father, son, farmer, king etc and your responsibilities) and “everything in moderation”.
Red pillers ignore that ancient wisdom and live in and obsess over an alternate almost completely fabricated virtual reality of no real value. Hanging out with suspicious and cynical strangers on the internet who share deep distrust of reality is depressing and isolating. After-all, you use the real system to have a life and so does everyone else. Might as well face that fact and truly engage with flesh and blood in the meat space rather than whatever or whoever is on red pill virtual land.
Some examples (I could write indefinitely):
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/ponzi-hospitals-and-count... (section "Bank Error In Our Favor" is particularly offensive, to me)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War (this sort of thing (which is fairly common) is offensive to me, as is our culture's complacency towards it)
How it is (in part) perpetuated, in my estimation:
- I’m sure whatever the system is it isn’t perfect. But here I am using the “system” and living my life. [rationalization]
- I see so many strange comments on the internet that sound like “red-pilled” nonsense. [training-based heuristic pattern matching to ~bad/dumb/wrong]
- Could it be better and is there room for improvement? Absolutely. But living in parallel red pill reality is an absolutely unhelpful endeavor. [training-based heuristic pattern matching to ~bad/dumb/wrong + cultural normalization of hallucination of reality (in this case: the future)]
- After-all, you use the real system to have a life and so does everyone else. Might as well face that fact and truly engage with flesh and blood in the meat space rather than whatever or whoever is on red pill virtual land. [Stay within the Overton Window of ideas and behaviors one has been trained on]
> Where would you rather be and what is your improvement on the “system”?
a) How about something like "The contents of the tin (upon substantial, fine-grained inspection) matches what's on the label"?
b) we shall see, maybe
> If you have a good personal value proposition to society and aren’t completely entropic, life is good. If you aren’t, it’s hard.
Simplistically, and largely only in theory (as I don't doubt you'd agree with if we were to dig into the nitty gritty details, which we won't as that is contrary to well-established cultural norms, at least).
> That’s been modern western life for a while now and it’s not bad.
Not bad for a subset, of Westerners....but we are only a minority slice of the whole.
> I’m reminded of the Oracle at Delphi. “Know who you are” which means know your place in society (father, son, farmer, king etc and your responsibilities) and “everything in moderation”.
I will decide my place in society, despite where society [has been trained to] believe I "should" fit in, and behave. I like the "Oracle at Delphi" idea though, perhaps there's some unharvested utility there.
> Red pillers ignore that ancient wisdom and live in and obsess over an alternate almost completely fabricated virtual reality of no real value. Hanging out with suspicious and cynical strangers on the internet who share deep distrust of reality is depressing and isolating.
Know what's interesting about this: you don't actually know who red-pillers are, or what they are or believe. And you do not know you do not know, because of culture (which is composed of many things, most of them sub-perceptual, and many of them downright taboo).
Possibly relevant:
You and I are peasants in the last western empire, you have to deal with that reality. Not everything is a fraud. Simply go to the grocery store and look around. Do you know how each of those products is produced from field, processed, packaged, and shipped? Do that for ICE and EV vehicles and anything else you want.
Also I absolutely know who red-pillers are and it’s trivially easy to identify them. I couldn’t “white pill” you here.
Did you understand the video?
Is there a list of specific people here, who have aggrieved you so? Who are you even talking about?
The quiet consensus of those taking action, yes, absolutely. That's part of my point. The adjustments are being made all over the place.
Those who have banked a lot on talking up globalization for the past 20-30 years will get there too. It will just be a slow process of very gradually tweaking their position a little bit every year at the maximum speed they can get away with while making it look like it's just little tweaks and they were never at any point actually wrong.
There was also never 100% globalization; tariffs never went to zero, etc. But a lot of that would still fall under the class of quiet actions under the hood, while the loud rhetoric was all about free trade. I've actually interacted with plenty of people on HN over the years who didn't realize that tariffs were in fact a thing, always had been, and were engaged in by all countries in the world to at least some extent, depending on their local needs. The rhetoric was "free trade! free trade! free trade!", but the reality has always been more complex.