“Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.” – Fight Club
The ultimate participation award.
As humans, we’re wired wrong. Or right, depending on how you look at it.
We chase peace like it’s the ultimate prize at the carnival of life. We say that we want a world without war, without struggle, where everyone has a comfy couch, unlimited Wi-Fi, more liver capacity, and steak that cooks and delivers itself.
Sounds like Heaven, right?
Wrong. When I was a wee Wilder, Grandma McWilder would talk about how I should do nice things in life rather than bathing the cat in a paste made from DDT® and Lysol™ so I could go to Heaven. Obviously, I asked, “What is Heaven like?”
Grandma told me it was nice and peaceful and that nothing bad ever happened up there. I believe I said something like, “That sounds boring.” Grandma did not look pleased, but I don’t know if it was about my statement or the cat.
Let’s just say I was a technicolor handful as a kid. Oh, the stories I could tell.
But I wasn’t wrong.
But wait, there’s more!
Tranquility isn’t the goal. Tranquility is the trap.
Peace isn’t just boring; it is deadly to the human spirit. We need the fight, the blood, the steel. Without it, we rot from the inside out. And that’s not me, John Wilder making crap up again. We have actual studies where the government tortured mice to verify that I’m right.
Take John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiments, please. I’ve written about them a couple times before, you can use the search thingy in the upper right hand of the screen to find them. I would have done that for you but you’re not my supervisor and I could type this sentence way faster. Short summary:
In the 1960s, Calhoun built paradise for mice: unlimited food, water, space, unlimited beef jerky, no predators, SNAP benefits.
What happened? At first, boom, the population soared. But then, the weirdness set in. The mice stopped breeding normally. Males became either passive or hyper-aggressive or “beautiful ones,” preening themselves instead of fighting or mating.
Females abandoned pups. Society collapsed into violence, isolation, and extinction. All of this happened in a “utopia”.
No threats, no struggles: just free cheese forever. And they died out. Stop me if you’ve seen this recently in other mammals.
I’m not going sugarcoat my jokes about diabetes.
Humans aren’t mice, but we’re close enough if you ask my parole officer. Look at the downward spiral of the United States after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The Cold War ended. We “won.” Yay! No more Soviet boogeyman lurking with nukes and unibrows.
Instead? Peace! Prosperity!
What did we do? Got fat, lazy, bored and divided: music went from “I’m gonna kick your ass” in the 1980s to “Oh, man, I need lithium because I’m sad”. The ‘90s brought endless economic booms, but also the seeds of today’s mess: identity politics, endless entertainment, and a generation starting to get hooked on screens instead of life.
Without a real enemy, we turned inward, fighting over pronouns and safe spaces. Tranquility bred complacency, and complacency bred decay.
Same story with the Moon landing. July 20, 1969: Armstrong steps on the lunar surface. Humanity’s greatest leap. We beat gravity, the Soviets, and the odds. Then? Crickets as the ratings dropped.
We went back a few times, planted flags, played golf (shoutout to Alan Shepard), and then just . . .stopped.
And then she refused to talk to them for six hours.
NASA shifted to the gay space trucks shuttles and looking for non-binary muslims and lesbians to shoot into orbit. No more bold frontiers. Why? We won. The Sea of Tranquility turned space exploration into a budget line item.
Need another example: a Syrian teen in London.
Picture this: an eighteen-year-old from war-torn Syria, resettled in a taxpayer-funded flat in London. Free food. Free education. Free X-Box®.
Utopia, right?
Wrong. He drops the controller and goes to Syria andjoins ISIS or stays in London and joins a gang and becomes a rapefugee with a machete.
Why?
Blood calls to blood. Iron to Iron. That flat was Mouse Utopia 2.0: safe, soft, soulless and, let’s face it, that kid was inbred and not very bright to start with. He craved the jihad, the struggle, the validation of existence through fire and fight. Comfort didn’t kill his spirit, comfort starved it. In part, this is why allowing refugees from incompatible countries is immoral.
I played hide and seek and ended up in the hospital. ICU!
Why do we have wars?
We want wars. If they weren’t popular, we’d have stopped having them a very long time ago.
Why do we want them? Not because we’re monsters, but because we’re human. Struggle validates us. High stakes forge character. Leaders like Alexander or Churchill didn’t thrive in peace; they rose in the crises they created.
Without enemies, we manufacture them, internal or imaginary. Look at modern “wars”: culture wars, gender wars, class wars, cola wars. We can’t help it. Tranquility isn’t our default; it’s a rare condition that, when it lasts long enough we pop our collective corks.
Think about it: our history has wired us for survival, not spa days. Hunter-gatherers fought for food, territory, mates and because it was Tuesday. Civilizations brought people together and made a professional league and channeled that into empires, exploration, and innovations. Remove the fight?
We devolve.
Mouse Utopia showed it: no threats equates to no purpose. Humans need the arena, the sweat, the sand, and the blood. We were built for the Colosseum, not the couch.
But here’s the rub: the struggle creates a spot for growth, it’s literally the engine of history. Without high stakes, we fail to thrive.
We back ourselves into existential corners: depression epidemics, fertility crashes, societies crumbling under their own weight and people who need drugs to stop that nagging feeling that they should be doing something that matters. Oddly enough, our very humanity appears to be built upon the fight.
If you meet a dolphin and feel a connection, can you say that you just clicked?
So, what now?
We can’t “prosperity” the struggle out of us. We need leaders who rally us to real frontiers and put real goals out in front of us, not fake fights over tweets®. Stakes high enough to matter: colonize Mars, cure aging, harness fusion. And something for the masses to do, like watching re-runs of Ow, My Balls.
Something. If we don’t have something, we’ll make something. Give us blood (metaphorical or not), steel, the feel of it all. In the end, tranquility was never the goal.
The struggle is the point. It’s what makes us scream, fight, and conquer. As I’ve seen in memes: “I want to go out of this world the same way I came into it: screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.”
And Heaven?
I think it isn’t at all as Grandma Wilder described. I think it’s more like:
Player 1: Ready Level 2.
If people stopped being distracted for a few minutes they might turn on our overlords and that is why They endlessly ramp up the distraction levels.
“We want wars. If they weren’t popular, we’d have stopped having them a very long time ago.”
Yep.
“I want to go out of this world the same way I came into it: screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.”
Yep.
The problem with wars, though, is that once you find yourself actually IN one, you discover to your surprise that you are in fact covered in YOUR OWN blood.
Thus was born wartime propaganda. “Let’s you (Zelensky) and him (Putin) fight”.
Which mutated into peacetime advertising. “Buy this and you will be happy in your consumer utopia”.
Which led to credit. “Buy now, pay later”.
Which has led to a government debt crisis, a mortgage crisis, a student loan crisis, a P/E ratio crisis in the stock market, a rate crisis in the bond market, and overall a crisis of confidence in capitalism itself.
“We can’t “prosperity” the struggle out of us. We need leaders who rally us to real frontiers and put real goals out in front of us.”
Who wind up getting shot in the ear… and the neck.
“We want wars. If they weren’t popular, we’d have stopped having them a very long time ago.”
The rub indeed. I had an amazing professor way back in college. Can’t remember the context of his lecture unfortunately, but the thrust of his argument has stuck with me all these years. Roughly “life is friction, friction gives life”.
A lot of emphasis around how equilibrium in systems – or solving for efficiency, is about the balance between lubrication and friction. At one point he referred to our favorite pastime for a rather visceral example. Without friction, or too much friction, the egg sperm never meets the egg.
Life is incredibly complex. It’s easy to look from the top at all the hoses and manifolds and wires of this complex machine of our socio-political architecture and lose the fact that beneath all that is the smallest form of politics, the essential spark of life from which – and upon which, it all balances.
Our captors have been solving for this current sexual dystopia for a long time. We are seeing the effects of inverting and multiplying the laws friction/lubrication. Our Economy, as well as the sexual market of our young, is throwing a hotdog down a hallway. Success is when the hotdog is eaten by the dog.
It is clear to me that “they” see the problem being that of Man. Of being human. Rather than the system that injects oil into the cylinder and makes tires illegal.
In this we are long into a generational game of telephone in which the whispers into young ears recurse into absolute nonsense that becomes absolute facts to be whispered again to the next ear until electrolytes are what plants crave.
Meanwhile nobody is F’ing but were all getting F’d. Its a real drag. Which is terrible for mileage. Luckily Elon makes e-cars.
Sadly, I think we’re close to the Brawndo generation . . .
100% correct John and we are heading into one that is going to be a really big shoo…drones will not be making us happy
Heaven from the study I have done is going to have no couches, inhabitants will be WORKING for the King and I am quite sure He knows what we would #1 be good at and #2 what we will get satisfaction from
No, drones will be awful.
This is also why there should never be EBT cards or free money welfare. Unless you are severely debilitated, you should have to do some sort of work for any assistance you get. Even the people I know who are disabled, would rather have something to do to give their life purpose.
The US has created a class of people never before seen in history, namely multi-generational welfare families. That has led to broken down neighborhoods where most of the kids end up in gangs or crime precisely because they have no purpose. And it’s all because politicians are more interested in harvesting votes than fixing problems.
We have created, perhaps, the worst incentive structure in the history of mankind.
Spot on about how “music” changed circa 1989. Whitesnake degraded into Nirvana. Ironic name, to say the least. Similarly, Tawny morphed into a blue-haired trans with a nose ring.
At 72, I’ve a sense of foreboding for the upcoming year. As the left sees their support crumbling, next summer/fall will get interesting. Violence in the blue cities. Truckers refuse to deliver, the 9 meals theory will be verified.
Hopefully.
Speaking of music, very interesting study released about how it has changed over the last fifty years…
https://studyfinds.org/pop-music-darker-over-50-years/
If you’re into spreadsheets (and wow, do I love a good spreadsheet), the study authors have put a 1.3 gigabyte spreadsheet online containing the complete lyrics of the 25,000+ songs they analyzed. I am busy loading these into an AI to generate my first country music hit.
“Nashvillllllllllllle….
Just up the road,
I’m dumpin’ my truck,
I know my AI
Can get me there…”
(chord change)
https://osf.io/2k7ut/files/osfstorage
Ricky-
Read the article – in agreement. One omission was that most rock musicians 50 years ago were educated musicians, usually coming from 6-7 years experience in middle & high school bands. I’d hazard the guess that most “rock stars” these days don’t know the difference between melody & harmony.
Rap and music is pure cog diss.
LOL. Rap and COUNTRY music is pure cog diss. And getting churned out by AI.
https://apnews.com/article/walk-my-walk-blanco-brown-2c9bbde6e88434365640c50e2998cfe2
Lamont,
I don’t think it is a lack of talent, as much as the fact that there is no clear path for rock bands to be discovered anymore. I can’t speak for other regions, but we haven’t had a current rock station in over a decade. We’ve got lots of oldies stations though. All new music here is either rap/pop or country.
The sad part is that I can go out to any local bar and see amazing musicians any night of the week. But these bands have zero chance of being signed into a record deal because there is no station that would even play their music.
JB
The high school dork in Band transmogs into Rock Star. Where ugly don’t matter..
We may be looking at a cliff . . . .
Testosterone makes things happen. Males want achievement, females want security.
Which might explain why they wanna shove soy into everything.
‘colonize Mars, cure aging, harness fusion’
Candy solutions, glitz solutions, none of which would help humanity in the slightest. Have you learned nothing of human nature? Cure aging? Have you thought that through, John? In 300 years you would be climbing the walls and begging for death . . . a death that endlessly eludes you. On this front, you will have your ‘cure’ soon. It’ll be pure-D hell.
O yeah great, bring on the cold fusion, as if they wouldn’t all immediately scheme and squabble over that! lol Find ways to make it hurt people.
Your nations are ruled over by women in a rising totalitarian matriarchate, who are ruled over by intel psyops directed by the elite, who are ruled over by fallen principalities. THERE — and nowhere else — is your challenge and your war. You want some manly challenge? There it is, for the satans and the whole world is against you. P.S. Mars doesn’t want you.
Ray gets it.
Start the war today. Tell her “no”.
Yup, a lot of women need to be told “no”.
Reminds me of the exhortation (or rank propaganda, perhaps) found in my high school auditorium build right after WWTwo.
.
Across the wooden frieze, above the stage/curtains in letters carved two foot in height was this saying:
WORK IS HEAVEN’s BEST GIFT TO MANKIND
As teenagers living in The Cold War mid-1960’s we knew of the communist nations who posted propaganda banners with slogans and exhortations and saw the school exhortation as a similar ploy.
I realized the truths contained therein only after finishing college and after a few years in the Army (including all expense paid tropical vacation where guys we didn’t know tried to stop our enjoyment….).
Your missive is spot on in reinforcing that long ago carved sentiment.
Thanks.
Great quote. It takes a while to figure that out . . .
I am frankly astonished that you didn’t cite the scene in The Matrix for this article where Morpheus explains to Neo how the first iteration, Matrix 1.0, failed, because it created that rat utopia for the masses. No struggles, no challenges, all needs and wants met led to…misery.
We’d all like to win a billion dollars in the lottery, but look at what happens to people who somehow manage to amass obscene wealth – they become troublesome miscreants. Soros. Bezos. Gates. Zuckerberg. You’re actually better off having to budget and plan, and temper your impulsiveness. To paraphrase the otherwise abominable Henry Kissinger, absolute wealth corrupts absolutely.