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June 17, 2020 - Davis Aurini
01:00:55
Cost Disease: Poverty in the First World

Originally uploaded February, 2017.

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When I woke up this morning, the first article I read was a piece by Roosh, where he was linking to 15 significant and influential articles and videos that he'd run into recently.
And one of them really jumped out at me.
It was an article about Lyft, the rental car service, where you rent a car for the 30 or 40 minutes where you actually need it, and then you put it back into the car pool, and all you have to pay is the small rental fee.
And the article, it was pointing out that your average vehicle these days is only being used about 3% of the time.
The other 97% of the time, the vehicle is just sitting there in a parking lot or a garage somewhere doing and accomplishing absolutely nothing.
It was pointing out just how much infrastructure, how much space we devote to parking lots, not to mention roads and highways, to store these vehicles that are never being used.
And how this blows open the society, how you don't have storefronts anymore, aside from your rare neighborhood that's actually pedestrian-friendly, how it's more and more, it's billboards on the side of the highway.
And how these rental cars might just be changing that.
And you know what?
That's a completely valid conversation.
Are our cities pedestrian-friendly?
Are they bike-friendly?
Do we really want to be driving everywhere like we are currently?
Is this the way that we want to live?
Is this the best way to organize ourselves?
Wonderful conversation to be had.
But that's not what stood out to me.
That's not what stood out to me about this article.
First, well, the first thing obviously that stood out is the quote from Roosh, which is why he linked to it, where he pointed out that the future, the future that Silicon Valley is designing for us, is one where everybody rents and nobody owns.
And within the article itself, there was a quote saying that the current millennial generation, they no longer view the automobile as an opportunity, as a method of achieving freedom, the open road.
Go wherever the hell you want to go.
Quite the opposite, in fact, that millennials view automobiles as a ball and chain, a financial liability, something they can barely afford and they would get rid of at the drop of a hat if they could switch over to public transit.
And see, this really speaks to the future that we are rapidly entering into.
It's a future of technological wealth, but financial poverty.
And you know, this is something Slate Star Codex was writing about recently.
The cost disease, he calls it.
And actually, somebody else called it that.
He was responding to something more mainstream than he is.
But quite frankly, he's the one that provided all of the citations of how much things cost these days.
That when you adjust for inflation, your average cost of living has gone from doubling to being 10 or 12 times as much as it used to be.
He cited rent.
Your average rent 50 years ago was about, you know, inflation adjusted, was about $600 a month.
These days, the average rent, you're paying $1,000 a month.
Same thing for schooling.
You used to be able to work your way through school.
You know, not anymore.
Now you need these massive loans.
Same thing for medical expenses.
It keeps getting more and more expensive.
Putting your kids through grade school, maintaining an automobile, food prices, you name it.
Every single one of these things, inflation adjusted, has gone on the increase.
And I think we all sense this.
It's good that he, you know, God bless him for putting together the actual stats backing this up because, you know, you try and convince people sometimes.
It's very, very difficult.
But if you're paying attention, you can sense this.
You know, in my own life, things have become so much more expensive.
You know, back when I was a early 20s working minimum wage, I could go to the bar whenever I felt like it.
Nowadays, going to the bar is a luxury.
And see, trying to compare this, so much of it is apples and oranges, right?
Because these new products, these new devices we have, they have so many bells and whistles.
20 years ago, 50 years ago, we were more limited in what we could buy.
And there still are cheap options out there, but the cheap options are very, very bottom of the barrel.
And the simple fact of the matter is that when you look at the numbers across all industries, and yes, each one is going to vary a little bit, so it's hard to come up with a meaningful comparison.
But when you see every single industry with prices going up, and we're seeing results that aren't changing, life expectancy doesn't seem to be going up because we're spending more on medicine.
Education is costing more and more and more, but people don't seem to be better educated.
And by some arguments, they're even less educated.
They know a lot less Latin and calculus than they used to.
Things are getting more expensive even as we are developing technology that is increasing the work we're able to do.
An accountant nowadays can do a lot more accounting using software than an accountant 50 years ago.
So what the hell is going on?
And you know, Aaron Clary, some time ago, he published an article demonstrating that it was the great society.
If not for the great society, this giant social welfare state, the average income would be about twice what it is today.
And that's true, and that's the short answer.
But it doesn't really get to the meat.
What's the reason everything's so much more bloody expensive?
You know, you might expect a 20% increase from socializing healthcare, but at the end of the day, you're still paying the doctor to cut the tumor out.
So why the hell is everything so much more bloody expensive?
And why are we simultaneously living in the lap of luxury and yet pinching pennies?
Why do we have so much poverty in the first world?
And it boils down to three big things, three major shifts that have happened over the past 50 years, each of which fuels the other.
The first of these is cheap credit.
And now for each of these examples, I'm going to really be oversimplifying.
I'm going to be giving you one example of how each one of these things works, because if I gave you more than one, I could keep talking all night about things that just drive me up the wall.
But the increase in credit.
50 years ago, credit was very, very uncommon.
People tended to spend cash on things.
If they wanted to buy a bloody TV, they would save up the money to get the TV.
Nowadays, there's an easy payment plan.
And there is a shift in behavior.
There's a moral threat when you go from cash to credit.
It's subtle, but it is very, very much there.
And to illustrate this, let's just consider what's been happening with quantitative easing.
Now, the theory behind quantitative easing is that the economy is doing really poorly, and people don't have enough money to go spend on consumer products, and so this is destroying the manufacturing industry.
And if we give people access to easy credit, we say, hey, everybody's doing pretty rough right now, so we're going to be a little bit looser with our lending standards.
The idea is that the consumers will go spend more money than they would otherwise, thus keeping a lifeline of money, a trickle of money, going to the manufacturing sector.
That is the theory behind it.
In actual practice, what happens?
What happens when you lower the standards for lending, when you lower the prime interest rate, you make borrowing cheaper for everybody, not just consumers, not just homeowners.
You make it cheaper for everybody.
And so you have a bunch of companies out there, companies A, B, C, and D.
And when there was the huge glut, when there was the huge bull market, everybody was making money hand over fist.
Okay, every website was popular.
Everybody was booming.
Doesn't mean that everybody was making good stuff, however.
And what is supposed to happen during the contraction, during the bear market, is all of the companies that did not have a good business plan, they did not have a good product, they were not actually satisfying their customers.
And the only reason the customers put up with their BS with their low-quality products is because the customers were so rich that they'd like, oh, the coffee maker broke, that's okay, I'll just buy another one.
I'm not going to complain, I'm not going to demand my money back, I'm just going to buy another one.
During the bear market, during the winter, this is when you're supposed to call the herd.
All those companies that were being mismanaged, all those companies making bad products, are supposed to go out of business.
And their assets, their factories, their employees, you name it, they will get picked up by other companies.
They will get repurposed by a company that knows what the hell they're doing.
That is what is supposed to happen in a healthy economy.
But what happens when you make credit cheap, when you make credit universal?
Those companies no longer go out of business.
Those companies continue to produce the exact same garbage because they can afford to go into debt to keep producing it instead of declaring bankruptcy and selling off their assets.
So at this point, you have the same garbage, consumer goods, flooding the marketplace, and the good company, you know, they're seeing a decrease as well.
They're hurting in this bad economy as well.
The only way they can survive is by resorting to the exact same scam game as the bad company.
So the guys making the coffee maker that actually lasts you 50 years, they need to lower the quality of their product, and so now it's a five-year coffee maker.
Same thing goes for the consumers.
When you are spending money on credit cards, you're spending it differently.
You have a different attitude towards it.
You're not thinking about assets you've earned.
You're not thinking about saving up money to buy that TV that you really want, and you're going to do the research and make sure it's a good, bloody TV.
You're buying the TV saying, oh, well, you know, I've got my job and my credit card.
My payment's only $150 a month.
You go just, you buy the TV.
You start buying a lot of stuff that you don't need.
You start buying temporary stuff.
Life becomes very, very temporary.
The whole world becomes about renting.
You become consumerist.
You become short-term.
You become cheap.
And so instead of buying a coffee maker that lasts you 50 years, instead of buying a television that lasts you 10 or 15 years, after all, like, are the flat screens they're selling these days not good enough?
You know, in five years, in 10 years' time, do you really need a new one?
Do you need an extra 1080p squared?
No, so people buy cheaper.
They buy temporary.
They are no longer investing.
Similar effect, by the way, with the taxes being deducted from your payroll.
If they didn't deduct taxes from your payroll, every time tax season rolled around, you'd get rather pissed off, saying, geez, I owe how much money to the government.
But because they deduct money from your tax roll, from your payroll, when tax season comes around, you say, oh, yay, I'm getting a refund.
A refund of money that you already paid in.
without interest either.
So this increase in credit, this change from like 1950, when we barely ever used credit cards, to the present day where a lot of places, they won't accept cash.
You know, go try and get a hotel.
You know, if you don't have a credit card, they want a $400 deposit.
Now, credit is assumed.
Everything is assumed to be credit, and it changes our perspective on money.
It changes how we behave, how we spend it.
And we spend it on cheaper things that don't last.
We no longer invest in assets.
We buy whatever we feel like in the moment.
So, that's the first major shift that has caused all of this, caused all of the prices to start going up.
Because they might be going down, but you buy the cheap stuff more often.
The second, second big effect, which has caused this first world poverty, is the HR attitude, the corporate attitude to regulation.
Now, our corporations are...
Are they inclusive or are they exclusive?
And the correct answer is they're both.
Everything is both.
Okay, sports ball is simultaneously competition and cooperation because everybody agrees to follow the rules of sports ball when they play it within the teams.
The team is competing, but each player is also cooperating, but they're also competing with one another to be the MVP.
And how do you become the MVP?
do the best job cooperating while also competing.
Now, the exclusivity-inclusivity of a corporation.
As many have pointed out ad nauseum lately, freedom of speech does not apply with private companies.
Freedom of speech is about the government, da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
Yeah.
Yeah, because it's exclusive.
Freedom of speech is your guarantee as a citizen.
It's not your guarantee as an employee of XYZ Corporation.
You sign on board, you join that exclusive organization, and you agree to follow their rules.
At the same time, the corporation is very inclusive.
They're all about diversity.
They want everybody to get along.
They've got one purpose in mind: make widgets.
And if you're part of the exclusive team making widgets, you're going to be very inclusive.
And so the corporation, the HR department, is all about the sort of inclusivity that mitigates risk.
The HR department, in a corporation, they can pass any damn law they want for their employees.
They can say mandatory sexual harassment training.
They can do whatever the hell they want.
And if it makes it more inclusive, then all the power to them.
They are producing better widgets because that multicultural rainbow spectrum employees Happier, even though they're all quietly miserable.
And so they mitigate risk.
For example, the corporation is probably going to do a criminal background check.
Heck, a lot of them now are demanding a piss test to work at the corporation.
And I don't know.
Maybe you've been piss tested.
I haven't.
I would like to think I'd refuse, but, you know, I don't have a child that I'm paying for.
So, you know, go for me.
I get to stand by my principles.
They can demand a piss test if they want to make sure that you don't do any drugs and that you don't have any criminal background.
You never urinated in public.
You never got into a fist fight.
Whatever.
And they can do whatever the hell they want.
Until the free market says otherwise.
Until the free market says, I'm not going to go work at your piss test company.
I'm not going to go work at your criminal background check company.
Like I'm flipping a burger at McDonald's.
Okay, you don't need to know whether or not I ever gone to a fist fight.
Get lost.
Get bent.
Get out of here.
Now, the issue is, we are applying this form of exclusivity, inclusivity.
We're applying this to society as a whole.
So again, credit is not just about whether or not you want a credit card, because that's not optional these days.
These days, everybody wants you to have a credit card.
Everybody wants to check your credit score.
Which incidentally has nothing, almost nothing to do with how trustworthy you are.
It has to do with how deeply in debt you are, how enslaved to the system you are.
And so we are applying this HR policy of mitigating risk, of custom designing your workforce.
Because if you're a corporation, yeah, sure, I only want single women with cats because they are desperate for meaning and they will slave away desperately for my corporation.
Okay, yeah, fine.
That's a great business plan.
But when it comes to society, when it comes to civilization, the exclusivity, inclusivity, we've got it completely on its head.
We're using the corporate model.
The inclusivity that we're using is not all the people that were born in Canada and know the national anthem.
That's no longer the inclusivity.
The inclusivity is anybody that conforms to the corporate stereotype.
And the exclusivity, the healthy civilization has an exclusivity of you, you 1-3% of the population that just can't get your act together and you engage in drugs that we've deemed prohibited.
You engage in murder and violence and public urination, you name it.
You people, like, we're going to hit you with a stick, but then we'll bring you back into the fold afterwards.
Unless if you do it again, then we hit you with a stick some more.
We are no longer using a nationalist definition of who is a citizen, who is a member of the nation.
We are using the corporate definition of who is a useful corporate throne.
And as a people, we are no longer talking.
When we have a disagreement with somebody, with some behavior, something irks us, something irritates us, the conversation is no longer, let's go over and talk to him and say, hey, buddy, you know, you're kind of keeping my kids up at night because you turn the music down.
Instead, the conversation is: somebody needs to do something about that.
Somebody needs to fix that problem.
And I'll give you one example of this because the examples are absolutely endless, especially if we start getting into healthcare for crying out loud.
One example of this is the push to make snow tires mandatory to get insurance.
Quebec has already done this.
And the other day on conservative radio, allegedly conservative radio, I heard some idiot phoning in and talking to the mayor saying that, hey, why don't we do that in Alberta?
And you know, what a perfect world if everybody had snow tires.
Right?
There'd be so many fewer accidents on the damned highway if everybody had snow tires.
If everybody had the extra $400 to drop on snow tires.
What a wonderful world.
And so this moron.
Now, again, for the corporation, for the corporation, it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
The corporation passes a rule saying that all of our employees have to have snow tires on their vehicles.
You know, and all of our employees, they need to be sober for two days before they fly a plane, etc.
That makes great sense for the corporation because it's a sub-community within the nation.
They can have those standards.
They can say everybody needs to have a degree to be hired to this corporation.
When you start applying that to the civilization, when you start saying that you need to have snow tires on your vehicle before we allow you to have insurance...
what is the result of this?
What's going to happen when you pass that rule?
All that rule does is guarantee that poor people, poor people driving older cars that are less reliable, that can't afford to get into an accident, all you're doing is guaranteeing that they can no longer afford insurance.
And they will be driving without insurance.
Well done.
The people who most need to be insured are now less likely to be insured.
And that's just one example of the insanity.
You know, if you want to talk about healthcare, it's like if you have a healthcare plan, you're covered for everything in the kitchen sink.
You know, it's like, oh, I've got depression.
I need to see a therapist for five years running at 200 bucks a session.
The insurance company will pay for that.
If you can't afford insurance, you are punished in the United States and you have an extra tax applied to you for not paying for the entire damned kitchen sink.
Wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where everybody could afford everything plus the kitchen sink?
But we don't.
And because we're demanding that everybody buy that, We're getting poorer.
You know, we start off with catalytic converters on the car being mandatory, which makes a lot of sense.
They really do reduce smog.
We start with that, and far enough down the road, you know, the corporate policy is we only buy cars with air conditioning because it improves employee performance.
Wonderful for the corporation, terrible for the civilization.
You know, you demand air conditioning in every vehicle.
Soon enough, people can't afford vehicles.
You increase poverty by forcing people to pay for stuff that they might want but can't afford.
So that's the second reason we're getting poor.
Is this this HR style of regulation, of demanding that everybody conform, everybody has to get 70% on the test?
Everybody below that is now kicked out into the cold.
They can't even afford to live because to live, you need that fancy car.
You're not allowed to drive a cheap car anymore.
And the third cause behind all of this, behind this increase in poverty, and probably the biggest one: education.
50 years ago, a high school diploma was, that's all you needed.
These days, these days, you need a bachelor's degree, which technically only takes four years, but is usually going to take five or six when you switch majors.
And for anything particularly interesting, you need a master's degree.
The over-credentialization of society, the amount of money that we are throwing into education is absolutely insane.
And it's been discussed at length.
I don't think I need to justify to you guys the fact that if you're going to work at some non-profit and you're on the phone raising funds for people, you don't need a degree in philosophy to do that.
So, first of all, here's number one loss is the money spent on that degree, which is what, about 80,000, 100,000 down in the States.
It's cheaper here in Canada because it's subsidized, but you're still paying for it.
Somebody is paying for that.
Okay, somebody is paying for you to go to university and get a completely useless degree that has no application to your job.
That's the first cost.
The second cost is opportunity cost.
All of that time you spent in school, all that time you spent in university.
Heck, even high school.
Do most of the people out there, do they need high school degrees?
Do they really need 12 years of education to do whatever the hell they're doing?
12 years of education plus two years of specialization trade skills?
No, they don't.
So we are keeping people as dependents up until their mid-20s or even early 30s.
They are dependents upon the number of people that are actually producing stuff and generating revenue for civilization.
So we've increased the load of dependents by 50%.
So these are the three big reasons that things are so damned expensive nowadays.
Number one, credit leads us to spend money on crap.
Okay, we're buying low-quality stuff that doesn't last.
We're buying new stuff all the time.
We're moving around all over the place.
We're renting.
All very expensive ways of dealing with things.
Okay?
You're not like the idea of capitalism versus communism.
Capitalism, you'd take care of your car.
Communism, you know, you'd drive it like a rented mule.
So credit leads to more rental type behavior.
Less investment, more consumerism.
Next, we have the idea, this HR idea, that we can legislate morality, that we can just make the entire world perfect if we start passing laws demanding that people do things.
So nowadays, like 1950s to get a job, all you needed was a car.
In today's world, you need a car that has some stupid radar on the front so you don't rear-end the idiot in front of you and you need air conditioning and you need winter tires and you better pass this certification and da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
So the threshold for minimum accepted behavior has become that much higher.
And the third one is over-credentialism.
Because everybody else got a university degree, if you don't have one, they look at you and say, what, are you stupid or something?
You didn't blow $100,000 on a degree?
What are you, dumb?
And see, all three of these, they feed into one another at the same time.
So easy credit means you can go and blow $100,000 on university.
And because you've blown $100,000 and you're massively in debt, you are desperate to have any sort of income.
So you sign up for all the rules the HR department demands upon you.
And you know, the HR department, they've got all these bloody rules, which means you'd better have some credit behind you, and to get that, you get a university.
Like, they're all interrelated.
We are pissing away so much energy on things that don't matter, things that don't actually benefit civilization as a whole.
And you know, there's the why is all of this happening.
Why are we pissing all of this energy away on getting useless degrees, on making sure everybody and their kid brother is like seriously, if you don't have snow tires, you just keep a longer following distance on the highway.
You don't have airbags, you try not to get into an accident.
I mean, there's even evidence that airbags increase the number of rear-end collisions because people are less afraid of them.
It's all interrelated.
And there's a conspiracy theory explanation of all of this.
See, when you have cheap credit, credit cards accelerate the rate of inflation.
And inflation benefits those that are lending the money before it benefits everybody else.
It's essentially they are taking a little bit of a skim off of the top every time the currency inflates.
Education.
More and more education benefits people that are giving the education.
It allows more and more professors to exist teaching stuff that's completely useless.
And at the same time, brainwashing people into whatever their pet theory of social order is.
And HR.
When you have an entire society run on corporate HR rules, you have a society that is more obedient, more desperate, more satisfied with whatever they get.
You might demand something from your government.
You might demand that they actually plow the bloody roads.
But your HR department, you don't have any demands there, do you?
No, you just accept whatever you can get.
At most, you go put your resume somewhere else to see if they will give you more gimme debts.
So yes, if we're talking about the elites, the 1%, the whatever, yeah, they benefit from all of this.
Hugely.
At the expense of the rest of us.
But you know what?
I don't think that's an adequate explanation.
It's a case of which came first, the chicken or the egg.
I mean, when society is this idiotic, of course you're going to have a bunch of psychopaths at the top benefiting from it.
But did they create the system or did the system create them?
The merchant sells because the guy buys.
And I think the real explanation, it's not about some shadowy elite per se.
it's about all of us.
Let's revisit education for a second, because this is the one directly under our own control.
Like we you don't really decide whether or not you want Obamacare.
You got it.
Deal with it.
You don't really decide whether or not you want credit scores and credit cards because if you don't have a credit card, well, screw you, hippie.
Get out of here.
But education.
This one's really up to us.
And you know, it's bad enough.
It's bad enough that we have all these all these young men getting over-credentialed, spending their youth, like the bit where they have the highest energy, where they can go without sleeping for a few days, and they're spending all that time getting useless degrees instead of going and working and making money for themselves.
But what's really shocking about this is the women.
There was an article I read a few years ago about the National Health Service, the NHS in Britain.
talking about how it's going through a crisis right now because there's been so much emphasis on getting women to become doctors.
And what's happening is that most of those women, like being a doctor, is not an easy job, especially nowadays when they're working you to death.
What was happening?
They were putting all of these resources into getting female doctors, and those female doctors were going part-time.
Most women, most people actually, but this is, we're talking about economics here.
Statistically, men and women will find this economic balance where one makes the money, the other raises the kids.
And 99 times out of 100, it tends to be the woman raising the kids.
Women are spending their most fertile years in school.
They are going massively into debt, forcing them to either find a really rich boyfriend, which is, again, her boyfriend went to the same school, statistically.
He's not going to be a millionaire.
This forces them to work.
So a woman is spending all of her 20s, first in school, then in the workforce, full-time, when most women want to have children.
It's not very sexy or cool to have children nowadays because, well, who's having children?
Yeah.
Any woman worth her salt is too busy in school and then she's too busy paying off her student loans to have fucking children.
The women who are having children are methamphetamine addicts for crying out loud.
So yeah, it's not a very cool thing to associate with, but this is what people's instincts naturally are.
Men want to have wives, wives want to have children, and usually the first one happens by accident when you're drunk, but then you have like two or three more, so you can't really blame that on the alcohol anymore, can you?
This is what people naturally want.
And, you know, if you say this to people, if you say this to people, immediately their hackles go up.
Are you saying women shouldn't be educated?
Are you saying that their hackles go right up?
As soon as you point out that as bad as it is that men are getting these useless educations, it's even worse for women, especially since their ovaries are a ticking time bomb.
Their hackles go right up.
And now it would be very easy to credit this, the hackles.
This is just feminist brainwashing.
This is just Illuminati convincing women that they need to have a career to be a real person.
No, it's more than that.
Why do women want to go to college?
Why do women want to be doctors?
I would submit to you that the reason women want to be doctors is because they want to marry a doctor.
And what's the best way to meet a doctor?
It's to go to medical school with him.
When you say to a woman, you should not go to university since you're not going to use that damn degree in the first place, what she's hearing, what her gut instinct is hearing, is you shouldn't associate with successful men.
You should go associate with, I don't know, like, you should go be a bartender and associate with drunken idiots like Davis Arrini.
And, you know, this applies to the men just as much.
See, when you say, when you speak in general terms about people being over-credentialed, in general terms, people will agree with you.
As soon as you talk about the specific, people get defensive.
You know, I wasted my time getting a history degree.
And my colleague, Matt Forney, he wasted his time getting an English degree.
And yet, if you said that to us directly, we get defensive.
And what are we defensive about?
Because let's be frank.
It's not like college is hard.
College is about getting drunk with a bunch of semi-intellectual people.
90% of college is the college experience.
It's not about the damned education.
People are not going to college to get educated.
They're going to college A to get drunk and party and make friends and B to say they went to college.
And that, that right there is the foundational problem with all of this.
The problem is that we have divorced style and substance.
We have become so rich as a civilization that it's let's put it this way: who gets laid more?
The engineer or the starving artist?
We've become so rich that we have the freedom to go blow our money on useless signaling peacock feathers.
and that's what it all is.
We'd rather have a credit card than an income.
We'd rather have a piece of paper than an education, than an employable skill.
We'd rather lease the latest toy than own something effective.
And the entire market is coming to reflect that.
That we don't want actual success.
We don't want actual capital in our lives.
What we want is frivolities, and people are getting what they demand.
You know, I read an argument recently.
What's the point of liberalism?
What is the point of this whole idiotic ideology they espouse?
And the argument was, I think it was Brett Stevens, America with a K. org, arguing this.
He was saying, the point is that if you believe in something as idiotic as liberalism, you know, you believe that everybody is exactly the same and the only difference is education or some nonsense like that.
There's no racial differences, there's no differences between individuals.
No, no, no, no, nothing like that.
That is such an idiotic, pants-shittingly stupid stance to take that you need to be really frickin' smart to justify it.
Global warming is another one of them.
You know, because it's not global warming anymore, it's climate change, because there's no damned evidence of the climate getting any warmer.
All the evidence contradicts, nothing but corruption with all the circles.
Every single plan they have is nothing but, well, let's tax Western countries for some reason.
Trying to justify that, trying to justify that idiocy requires some damned intelligence, doesn't it?
Which shows that you are a fit mate.
Look at how clever I am.
I know all these shibboleths to speak.
Hipsters.
It's another perfect example of this modern disease.
Hipsters.
They want to dress really nice.
They want to focus on their appearance and whatnot.
But, you know, focusing on your appearance, that's lame.
That's whatever.
So we're going to ironically obsess over our appearance.
Oh, I'm not waxing my beard because I like to look good.
I'm waxing my beard because I'm doing it ironically.
And you know what?
Let's look at the alt-right, too, because the exact same toxicity is present within these circles.
The alt-right, right now, we've got the moderates.
Okay, we've got the moderates that are just putting their finger in the wind, figuring out which way it's blowing and jumping in front of the parade to say that they're leading it.
You know, so we've got these classical liberals.
They don't know what a classical liberal is.
They don't.
But they're Donald Trump supporters.
Go subscribe to them.
Then you've got the counter-signaling hipsters.
You've got the 1488ers.
You've got the fashy gois.
Do they have any sort of plan to win?
Do they have any sort of end state, end goal of where this is all heading?
No, no, the point of being a neo-Nazi isn't to clone Hitler and put his brain in the computer and make him the guy that's not the point of being a neo-Nazi.
The point of being a neo-Nazi is being a neo-Nazi and look at how fashy my haircut is.
Pay attention to me.
give me sex.
Then you've got, I will say whatever edgy shit will make me popular and make me money, and I'll contradict myself every three months.
They've got those guys running rampant.
Very, very few actually have a sense of integrity, of genuineness, of long-term planning, of goals, of, you know, like, here's the world I'd like to live in, but here's the world I will accept if we can accomplish this.
And you know what?
This is one of the things that's been really bumming me out lately.
And so what the hell are we supposed to do in a world of obsequious liberals and fasci goys?
Because this is the modernist disease.
Okay, this is the disease of I'm so desperate to be fucking unique, important, special, whatever, whether it's a goddamn credit card, whether it's making it rain in bottles of Crystal, or if it's yelling 1488 slogans while having a fashion haircut.
It's all the same damn thing.
It's people that have divorced the style from the substance, the means from the ends.
Because we're so frickin' rich these days that we can afford to be impoverished.
Now what about those of us that don't want to be a really cool loser?
Well the first thing to realize is that we're not the ones going black pill.
Black pill is when life becomes so meaningless that you sacrifice yourself on the altar of a failed cause.
So if you are one of these people that are saying whatever you need to say to be popular, you know, whether you are a goddamn Democrat that is mouthing Hillary Clinton platitudes just to fit in with the tech circle in, you know, San Francisco.
And again, I don't mean fit in.
Like you know, I got a family to pay for and sure yeah, I agree with you.
Whatever asshole.
No no I'm I mean the the the true believers the people that really live this lifestyle They've sacrificed themselves on the altar of popularity.
And the same goddamn thing goes for anybody out there that's saying whatever the hell their audience wants them to say, whatever their friends want them to say, their family.
They are throwing away, they are burning up their soul for the sake of what, a little bit of money, a little bit of validation, a little bit of ego?
What a way to piss your life away.
Now, certainly, all of us, we need to be politically aware.
We need to be aware of what's going on in our family, our community, our church, our city, our society.
All of these things affect us.
And dropping out of the system is not a solution.
At the same time, attacking the entire system because it feels good to explode, that's not a solution either.
The solution is being genuine.
It's about keeping your feet on the ground.
It's about focusing on your bottom line.
Fortune can be very, very outrageous at times.
And none of us knows, ultimately, we don't know where we're going to go and what we're going to become.
Fortune can reverse herself overnight.
and there's nothing we can do to predict or understand or all we can do is accept that but here's the thing if you have cultivated real relationships real knowledge
Now, see, all those things can be taken away from you as well.
You know, somebody can come and shoot your dog.
They can lock in prison, so it doesn't matter how good you are at driving a car.
They can do whatever the hell they want to do to you.
But if you had a genuine relationship there, if you have genuine knowledge, if you have an understanding of history, of yourself, of whatever it is that gives you meaning in life, they can't take that away from you.
Whereas take one of these fashy goys, or take one of these ex-Hillary supporters, or Bernie Sanders supporters.
You know, Bernie Sanders, the guy that spent, he had all these people donating money to him.
Guys that could barely afford rent were giving him $10, $50.
He spent that on a lakeside manor in a brand new sports car.
You know, and then it comes out, comes out through the, I believe, the Podesta email leaks, that he agreed to throw the election to Hillary Clinton.
Now, if you're one of these people that have put all of their energy into being a Bernie Sanders supporter and that comes out, you have sacrificed yourself for the sake of this false belief.
what do you have left?
As much as we plan, there's an old saying, men plan and the gods left.
As much as we all plan for the future, you really can't plan for the future.
don't know what's going to happen and if you invest yourself into into ego into into pomp and circumstance well okay maybe you'll be the most popular fashigoy You know, maybe you get to be Hillary Clinton, but these people are naturally slaves.
They have absolutely nothing.
They always have to be what their audience demands them to be.
They are actors that only ever get to play one role.
Whereas if you actually decide to play yourself, to be yourself, to find genuine relationships, and participate in the body politic to some degree, don't completely drop out and become a homeless person.
That's the other extreme of stupid, isn't it?
You're still responding to it.
No, no.
Focus on your bottom line.
Focus on skills.
Focus on relationships.
Focus on knowledge.
Focus on actually appreciating the life that you're living in.
Not on the pretenses and trappings of a failing civilization.
And ironically enough, that's the only way we can stop it from failing.
Thanks for listening, folks.
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