“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.” – The Matrix
I figured out how to turn Alexa® off. I walked through the room naked. (Only two memes are not “as found”)
Although he is certainly better known for other things (which I won’t defend), Ted Kaczyinski was very smart. He did spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the human condition when he was, um, not working on projects. One of the things that he wrote about was what he called The Power Process.
I’d be surprised if Ted was the first to point out The Power Process, since on its face it seems so . . . logical. I’ll let him tell the tale, though the added emphasis is mine:
The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone.
We’re skipping the fourth element (autonomy) because it doesn’t pertain to the post at hand. You can read it in Ted’s work. Remember my wife’s advice about reading Ted Kaczinski: it’s okay to be seen reading Ted, but never with a highlighter.
Yeah, that’s a picture I made of Ted in front of a Blockbuster®, with A.I.
I am not sure this is universal, but it seems to appear every time I look into human nature and why people aren’t happy. People like the struggle. I had a friend who I will call “Joe” because his name is Joe. Joe would often procrastinate at work, sometimes not doing much of anything for days. Then, when the deadline approached, he’d work incredible hours to finish.
John Wilder: “Joe, you did this on purpose.”
Joe: “Yeah, I wanted to wait until I didn’t know if I could do it.”
The game wasn’t sufficiently interesting to Joe to keep him going until he created the challenge. Since this was his job, the one he was getting the money necessary to eat and live from, he often flew pretty close to the flame. But he always managed to keep his wings from being singed too badly.
What do you call a primitive man who liked to take random walks? A meandertal.
For Joe, a very highly functioning human, effort was the key. And to get to enough effort to keep him happy, he needed to have real jeopardy. Without the required effort, it just wasn’t fulfilling for him. Imagine fighting a kitten. I mean, there’s no real effort involved, unless you give it rabies or a gun or make a genetically engineered kitten the size of a tank.
Ted goes on:
Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems. At first, he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent. This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power. But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.
This explains why so many actors today are whining GloboLeftists who turn their adopted vanity children into transexuals: they have everything they want, anything they could imagine, they don’t have to work for it – it’s just there. All the time. They (most of them) are fundamentally unhappy unless they have a goal to shoot for, and one that matters to them. Maybe winning an Oscar™. If you look at the youth of Robert Downey Jr. and Christian Slater, I can understand with their ludicrous early success why they went on crazy drug and violence benders: they had it all.
If Ma Wilder had divorced and married a Mongolian, would I have a steppe brother?
There is, of course, a flip side to this: the run of the mill GloboLeftist foot soldier. Ted talks about them:
Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with survival. Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.
I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: the vast majority of GloboLeftists are losers. They are awful people who hate themselves, the world, and God. They hate God because they look at how awful they are, and have to blame someone, anyone other than themselves.
See, Ted agrees with me. Is that good, or not?
Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.
Bingo. Life is struggle, and if we win that struggle, even a bit, we feel good. I would imagine this is hardwired into almost every living creature because otherwise they’d just give up like Mitt Romney’s spine.
In the current world, especially the First World, most of the struggles that used to occupy our lives are gone. We spend very little time worrying about starvation or running from bears. That leaves us in a weird position – we don’t have to fight to live, but we’re wired to like fighting to live. So we need something more.
Amish women use protection to stop the spread of Abes.
Thus, we come up with other things, hobbies, games, sports and other ways to build a goal, work for it, and achieve it (or not). One experiment I wrote about in the past (link below), the John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia where mice were placed in a habitat where they had food and were free from predation and . . .
His paper was called Death Squared because the mice, despite having all the food they could eat, died out. But before they died out, their society collapsed in upon itself. You can read Calhoun’s paper here (LINK), but it is as grim as remembering Biden is in the White House. The mice stopped acting as families, rape became rampant, some mice became pansexuals (mate anything, any time) there were gangs, some mice ignored everything and just groomed themselves, and mother mice stopped nurturing their young.
Another A.I. drawing I made.
Sound familiar?
Yeah, I thought so. Men need quests. Society needs quests. We need something worth fighting for, something worth winning for life to have meaning. And, yes, I realize the irony of writing about Ted Kaczynski’s on a laptop and putting it on the Internet, but I think he’d understand.
Thank you for attending my Ted talk.
Some people now regarded as wackos began shaping their lives on can do. Acquiring knowledge and skills which would be necessary if present technology or change occurred which would be life changing. if you aren’t one of those people you better know some or you will die sooner than necessary
Yes. Always good to have the skills to go backwards instead of always forward. Ma Wilder says it came in handy during the Depression.
The Hunt for just the right challenges,, I Did that.. With zero understanding of Why. The Air Force told me to Go Home, honorably, The oil field offered $$, the work and outside nature of the job offered the Stuff to Overcome in order to Achieve, then a short time in a machine shop,then a body shop,, where I became a commission earning body man,starting out chasing parts and sweeping floors, seven years of copier and cash register repair, the only school was the Air Force ,Biloxi Mississippi, electronics.. And reading this article and what Ted thought about the need for challenges to overcome helps me understand Why I couldn’t just Do something and stay with it for life.
I Knew my car would Not be parked in the same parking lot for twenty years Anywhere even as a kid watching Leave it to Beaver. Dad was a Solid guy, stable, good job,,PHHHT,,, Glad I got to read this! Thanks..
It’s a good thing to live a life of adventure, especially if the progression leads to virtue.
This is the story of America. Having conquered the “bad guys” in World War II and then the Soviets in the Cold War, we had nothing left to focus on. We tried the Global War on Terror thing but that didn’t stick. With no challengers and no challenges, we as a people just kind of gave up and became obsessed with decadence and distraction.
….we have nothing left to focus on…… Hello??, the Kardashians aren’t going to watch themselves…..
Actually, I think they probably do.
Yup, you could start to see it in the 1990s with Cobain. What did he have to be upset about? Oh, and the drugs, I guess.
I was just like Joe – always waiting until deadline at work to create an artificial sense of urgency. I always justified my procrastination by noting that 90% of my work assignments were changed or modified into new ones before their deadline. I am thankful to be out of the work rat race, retired and sitting around doing nothing just like I did there. Or rather, sitting around surfing the intertubes for interesting tidbits of information, just like I did there.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
On the bright side from my corporate days, I had ample time to blog and manage my fantasy sports teams during the workday.
Ha! Yeah, I did scoot out of many a task that was DOA before the deadline – got pretty good at sniffing those out.
One meme I saw a long while ago (soI can’t remember where” said:
Losers talk about their successes whereas winners talk about their failures and setbacks.
It made me look at things through that lens and I have found that that is inevitably so.
Phil B
I like it. It’s true.
“Ted Kaczyinski: voting by mail before it was cool”
And making the FBI look foolish. Oh, wait . . .
Ted might very well have been referring specifically to 21st century young, White American females, who grow up as pampered princesses without ever knowing any significant hardships. Their families fawn over them, the Internet showers them with ‘likes’, their every trivial accomplishment is lauded and praised to high heaven, and with a single word (“Rape!”) they can ruin the life of any male, anywhere, deservedly or not.
Drunk with unearned power, is it any wonder that so many of them have become such insufferable, narcissistic shrews that young men are leaving the mating grounds en masse? It would be informative to see a longitudinal study demonstrating the correlation between frequency of selfie posting in the flower of youth and the likelihood of wine addiction and cat hoarding in twenty years.
I think the need for the Power Process is stronger in men than women, but I haven’t given that much study.
Check out the new name for Karens: AFWL = Affluent Female White Liberals.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=AWFL
Wife says it should be AWFUL = Affluent White Female Urban Leftists.
Should be, “Unmarried Urban Vagina-Having Leftist Losers”. No great acronym, but will make ’em even madder.
“I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.”
This is entirely correct. Actual Human Beings seem to define their reality not only through suffering and misery, but further, also need to believe they are oppressed, and hated, by their host populations, For No Reason At All ™. This helps to explain why they always overplay their hands. Power, wealth, and comfort are not enough, because their cultural self-conception requires that they are also Victims (FNRAA), so they must keep pushing until they are hated.
Contrast the above with the rest of us Subhumans (mere animals that happen to speak, that G-d created only to serve Actual Human Beings). We Subhumans thrive on Challenge (and perhaps novelty) but don’t require being hated.
Me? I’m enjoying a beer right now. So, there’s that.
I’ve often said that true success is measured by what you have overcome, not by what you have achieved.
Outcome independence is important.
John, I struggle a fair amount with “Joe’s” issue. What I have come to learn is that it means there is not enough challenge in my life, something which I am working on.
All smart dudes in modern bullshit work do the same thing, if they’re smart enough to not take others’ loads on as well.
The ones that take on others’ work are usually the midwits that got advanced degrees to prove they were smart, and feel only they can provide the most pure bullshit that somebody somewhere might someday use and therefor their lives have true meaning.
They also are fully vaxxed and boosted, can”t change oil on a vehicle, and have never built so much as a birdhouse because they aren’t intellectually or physically curious enough to even try.
The actual smart ones work to live, and have at least a couple serious backup work plans disguised as hobbies. Just in case. With or without power.
Or maybe I’m too retarded to imagine what smart people do, because they wouldn’t stay at a boring job.
Make your challenges elsewhere. Why do you think I write?
Sociopaths and psychopaths like Kaczynski are frequently very intelligent. They have a unique and clear perspective on reality. It’s how they respond and react to their take on reality that’s the problem.
Lots of people like drama, they need it and some thrive on it. So they often deliberately place themselves into stressful situations to gain the drama they crave. Challenges are dramatic. And meeting them successfully grants a psychological reward that is tough to match.
Modern society and the technological wonders we have have made survival almost childs play for many, especially when you add in welfare where many don’t even have to put in effort to keep from starving. This creates an unhealthy society. And we are seeing the results of that societal pathology on a daily basis.
Great Ted Talk!
Tree Mike
If for me, Thanks!
I wonder what would have happened if Ted would have met a nerdy girl he liked. Probably, we never would have heard of him . . .
I think there is a lot of accuracy with the previous comments and the ideal that when everything is handed to someone they lose the capacity to take care of themselves. What is that old saying, Hard times create hard men, hard men create good times and good times create weak men? While I’m not totally convinced that the idea of a society that is growing is creating weakness I do think that it fosters a lot of people to be lazy as they are going to be taken care of instead of well, figure it out bucko or starve. While I don’t advocate for starvation there’s a lot of stuff that casts a wide net for people out there that perhaps are just going to use it as a hand out instead of a hand up.
It really does bring everything together.
Great post, Great call back to the 2019 Calhoun post!
I learned something today. The Secrets of NIHM was always a movie of mine as a kid, I never knew the background of the stories origins.
Time to bust that one out of the vault and give it a nostalgia look.
Thanks! I learned a lot about humans from the experiment. Good times are tough times.
There was an original star Trek episode with this theme. The robots could do everything for people. The people blew their minds (literally) by explaining that we need struggle, strife, and hard work to survive.
“I, Mudd”
Great episode . . . “Stella, shut up!”
Jack Williamson also wrote a novel about it in ’49, The Humanoids. Good stuff.
State of the Union
Are we the target?
I would suggest that we all watch Tucker Carlson’s Commentary of that most hateful state of the union we will ever witness. I was reminded of the bloodlust of the Nazi followers, with glass-eyed trances, rabidly cheering for war in Ukraine. These people are desperately trying to stay in power. It’s personal to them now as many undoubtedly think they will be prosecuted by the next administration, should they lose. Sure, they want the graft to continue, the unbridled power, the favoritism. But now they have committed so many crimes that they are fearful for their future.
So they push for war. But along the way, the seek a group to blame. This is always the case in any failing and immoral dynasty. A scapegoat must be found.
This is the point of today’s discussion and what we can do.
WE ARE THE SCAPEGOATS.
This is not paranoia. Listen to all of Tucker’s commentary.
We white, Christian, self-reliant, constitutionally knowledgeable, defenders of liberty, once what all Americans were encouraged to be, whatever your race or religion, are now the enemy of the state. They cannot abide by us not bowing to their direction. They will not tolerate our quest for God given rights carefully enumerated in the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Ten Commandments.
The IRS, DOJ, CIA, DHS, EPA, FDA and many more are all setting their sights of new regulations and focus, along with their newly acquired and barely functional Glocks on us.
Again. Not paranoia. Fact.
So what are we scapegoats to do?
It’s very tempting to give them a double-fisted, one finger salute but I’ll keep my actions and ideas positive.
We need a good retreat. It is incumbent on us to find a place in a freedom loving Constitutional abiding state. ID, WY, UT, probably MT, SD, TN will do., maybe TX, some of these meet most of the requirements but fail or are lacking in others. There’s good places in many states in the south and midwest to varying degrees. Preferably a state that recognizes gold and silver as legal tender and might even have its own depository. These are the best. Within these states, we need areas that are secluded but not so remote that it’s too burdensome in bad weather. We need a small city, less than 15,000 I believe within 30 miles but not much closer, and definitely no where near a city of 100,000. In this area, we need to have a few neighbors but not too many that are of the same mindset. This place needs a sustainable water source, a sustainable fuel source, a decent enough climate to grow food, large enough to support some livestock. Cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, even rabbits and fish will help.
It has to be defendable, preferably far out of site from passer-by’s. On this property you will need a sturdy structure or several with wood heat and cooking capabilities. Solar is good but I think it’s uncertain how the electronic circuitry will withstand an EMP. But definitely useful if smaller units are hardened. We need cast iron cookware, tools, some building materials and fasteners, lighting capability, good sturdy clothes and boots, some heavy equipment and a good supply of fuel is a good thing for the beginning of these possible calamities, draft animal power and some horse drawn equipment even better. Food preservation skills and necessary supplies. Salt, jars, canners, pressure cookers, grinders, smokehouse, etc.
Defensive measures are a must, anything and everything to give us as much advanced warning as possible. Sandbags, sheets of 1/2” AR 500 steel, native material for cover – anything to help as much as possible.
Etc etc etc – we’ve talked about most of this already. I thought it worth discussing again, given the tone of that state of the union. They have made themselves very clear for several administrations. They are destroying the banking system and USD to make us cry uncle and beg for a CBDC. They are destroying our food supply and production to cripple our will. They are draining our oil reserves and banning our own oil production so we are dependent on their power – or lack thereof to weaken our resolve. We see the effects of their geo-engineering on so many facets of life. We see they have promoted fear with a manmade disease and forced a killing and maiming shot on the world, the effects of which are still forthcoming. We see what they are doing to our Constitution in the article last week. They want us all to be wards of the state, constantly surveilled, incessantly harassed. Some will quit. The burden is tough. Hungry kids will bring poorly prepared but good men to their knees.
So – sorry for this long talk. I apologize for the redundancy. If you aren’t in the position to secure a place like we’ve discussed, then meet up with people that are. But do not go there empty minded and empty handed with no skills and nothing to add. Strong, good minded, mentally and physically tough with at least enough food and supplies to take care of those in your family are an absolute minimum. In addition to that, medical skills, comms skills, carpentry, welding, are a strong plus to be accepted. Military training in the right minded person is a huge plus and benefit.
Basically we need to be practical people that know how to do practical things, with good attitudes and resilient natures. No snowflakes need apply – that is key. That’s what we should work on. Or – at the very least, be happy to haul water, chop wood (not feet), clean livestock pens, and other chores like that, that will need attended to.
Please don’t take this lightly. These people are evil. They hate America. They hate self-reliant Americans. They are in a corner and dealing desperate – so they are dangerous.
It’s our duty to make sure that we win and they lose, so this great republic can carry on as designed. Pray that God stays with us and gives us the strength and wisdom to persevere in what I believe might look a lot like the 24th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.
The times, they are a changin’. And we have to with them.