The reason for the draconian neoliberal ideology

Many poor people don’t bother to vote, and those ones at least are clear-headed about what’s in their best interest. Poor people are easily exploited in any number of ways, which is frustrating but difficult to blame them for. A lot of middle-class people make the mistake of believing that because they have agency in their own lives, then poor people must have agency in their lives.

It’s relatively easy to understand modern political reality if we examine the expected future reality. By the end of the 21st century the world will only be able to support half a billion people (best case scenario, assuming the existing power structures continue). So something needs to kill 6.5 billion people between now and then. Some of that will happen “naturally”, from poor people being unable to migrate (ala the Congo or New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina) when either military or climate change devastation reaches them. But a lot of it will have to happen in some more direct way.

This is the fundamental reason for the draconian neoliberal ideology. The rulers understand that the only system they are capable of ruling is destroying the world, and that as the world dies it will support fewer and fewer people – therefore the logic is to devalue humanity because they are going to die soon anyway – and to build walls, gated communiities, and surveillance systems to maximize the security and well-being of the people who will be the last to die.

Running concurrently with this is technology as a religion – since technology has the very real possibility (not high possibility though) of allowing the rulers to live even longer, through medical science, genetic modification, and advances in colonization of other planets. It’s very difficult to see this extending the life of the species much beyond a few decades, at least if the ruling structures remain in place.

There’s a phrase to deeply consider the meaning of – “facts on the ground”. In principle this means that if the ruling structures remain in place long enough to make human catastrophe a certainty, then the ideology of the rulers will triumph – it’s difficult for ordinary people to stand against the rulers selecting which people will be left alive if the world simply can’t support additional people. In the Mad Max movies for example it’s “dog eat dog”, not because poor people had suddenly lost their morality but because the world had been made into a place where nothing more is functional.

Zombification in the 21st century

Over the coming decades environmental and military destruction combined with first world siege mentality will render parts of the world uninhabitable by today’s standards, with the unfortunate humans living (and more frequently, dying) there deemed sub-human by the “bubble dwellers” in protected and wealthy areas. Far from “fictional”, one name for these unfortunate humans outside “civilization” could very well be “zombie”. The Pentagon is preparing for the expected future reality.

We currently live in a largely globalized world, where even people who will shortly be starving to death are living in the same hegemonic system as you and I. At some point in this dying world this will no longer be the case, and the presentation of “zombies” in current culture is ideologically preparing people who hope to be wealthy in the future to dehumanize all humans outside “the system”. People inside the bubble are being trained to see themselves as “humanity’s last hope”, ala Zionists who “make the desert bloom”, while those outside the bubble are to be viewed as zombies for whom death is a blessing, with their protests registering as “gggarrrgggggh” to the keen, amazing, awesome, wealthy creatures holding the guns calling themselves “human”.

If things go well for what might be called the zombification of the world’s most mistreated people, the process for powerful institutions to call upon “bastions of humanity” to take up arms and “exterminate the zombies” will go down as easily as a fruit smoothie. In their minds they will afterwards be “repopulating the human race”, ala making the desert bloom. In reality they too, despite their many guns and much stolen wealth, will die. In the end the full terror of what they wrought will be upon them, so it could very well be a blessing that most humans will be dead by then.

By the end of the century the world will be capable of supporting half a billion people, notwithstanding possible political outcomes that could far reduce that number. So from now to then powerful people need to kill off billions of people, a massive project that they need a lot of help with. Turning poor humans into zombies in the minds of people terrorized into despising them could go a long way toward making such a project a success.

Remember the mottos: “Always shoot ’em in the head”, “Shoot first, ask questions never”, “Don’t get any of them on us”, and perhaps the most important one of all – “They aren’t human”.

And remember the emotion: fear. Always be afraid. Be terrorized, and only after you’ve blown enough of them away take a bit of a rest, until you blow more of them away. Be joyful for every one you kill, because you’re one step closer to “repopulating the human race”, making the desert bloom.

We’ll be saving the world, one corpse at a time, just like our video games teach us.

Virtual Reality in Declining Empires

The British Empire, in it’s day the greatest empire in world history, in it’s dying moment as the dominant world power gave rise to JRR Tolkien. Tolkien wrote about the militant (and non-militant) forces of good militarily (and non-militarily) defeating the forces of evil, at the precise moment when the British were no longer (in their eyes) going to be able to continue to do that.

In the United States Tolkien wasn’t popular until the Vietnam War, which began the decline of the American Empire, which followed the British as the dominant global power and eclipsed them, holding half of global wealth at it’s peak. The Society for Creative Anachronism, formed during the horrors of extensively applied chemical destruction in Vietnam, honored pre-industrial society (pointedly, the age before such chemicals could be mass produced) and Tolkien, with Dungeons and Dragons following shortly thereafter.

When Tolkien moved to the virtual, “fantasy” sphere he continued the British military tradition of cleansing the world of evil for the sake of the empire (again, how they saw it).

One can’t for the most part read a book over and over again. Dungeons and Dragons was a step up in technology from books, allowing players to experience the joys of cleansing evil many times over, initiated at the time when such cleansings were thought to no longer be possible in reality.

In neither society did people stop to question whether the cleansings are right to do in the first place. So of course when the cleansings stop being viable in reality they were merely moved to the virtual sphere, and this has continued to the present day with 80% of mainstream games featuring killing as the primary mode of gameplay, usually of either monsters or “the enemy” and often in effectively genocidal manner.