Karl

Humans have a hardwired instinct for forming in-groups, trust towards in-group members, and default distrust, or even hostility, towards anyone else. What isn't hardwired is the criteria around which these groups organize themselves. That appears to be programmable, and can base itself on anything people consider important. This is why two total strangers will sometimes come to blows over a children's ball game played by groups of millionaires who don't know either of them. Even purely cosmetic distinctions can tap into that tribal instinct, so long as those distinctions are treated as important. The instinct requires only that there be an ingroup, one or more outgroups, and a clearly evident distinguishing feature. And this is where the West got into trouble, the same way highly developed societies usually get into trouble. Rich high-tech societies usually get in trouble by considering themselves too good for human instinct. We don't engage in tribalism! Tribalism is for primitive spear-chuckers and cattle-herders! Not sophisticates like us! We embrace all ways of life, and don't care about silly things like skin color! And so you get eighty dolls singing "small world after all", and "progressive" bands singing: They shoot without shame In the name of a piece of dirt For a change of accent Or the colour of your shirt Better the pride that resides In a citizen of the world Than the pride that divides When a colourful rag is unfurled So proud. So self-satisfied. So smugly certain that they are superior, enlightened human beings who can transcend their base and primitive instincts. And that they are the natural leaders of humankind, who can not only refine themselves, but drag the rest of humanity along with them. But if you're that arrogant, it doesn't matter how smart you are, because you stop thinking. You believe you already have all the answers. And you end up dead wrong. Human beings are highly adaptable, but not infinitely adaptable. They have instincts that cannot be culturally erased. And if you program them against those instincts, they will destroy themselves and each other. Not only were the anti-tribalists unable to eradicate the tribalism of others, they couldn't even eradicate their own. They simply switched criteria. They formed a new tribe. The tribe of anti-tribalists. And both within and outside that tribe, they behaved in the exact same way that any other tribe does. Trust within, violence without. They didn't change anything. Their goal, of course, was to assimilate everyone into the anti-tribalist tribe, or at least disenfranchise and eventually kill those who resisted. They imagined that if they achieved this future, their vision would be realized, and there would be no more wars, and they could truly be those eighty singing dolls. Doesn't work that way. Because the definition of a tribe is, as I said, threefold: A ingroup. An outgroup. And a way to tell the difference. And the goal of the anti-tribalist tribe is to assimilate (or destroy) everyone. The moment they achieved this goal, there would be: No ingroup. No outgroup. No difference. Which means that their utopia of singing dolls would immediately fracture along new tribal lines. Bold prediction... but we know it's true, because they couldn't even eradicate the tribal instinct from themselves, so how could they possibly eradicate it from everyone? If you eradicate the target of tribal instinct, rather than the impulse, it will simply choose new targets, and chaos and violence will reign as existing treaties, barriers, and modes of coexistence are nullified, rendered irrelevant by the fact that tribes have been reshuffled. And your neighbor, who moved in next to you in the first place because having the same skin color and culture gave you a basis for coexistence, is now your mortal enemy because he cracks his eggs on the small end, or votes for the other candidate. I'll say it again: People physically arrange themselves according to tribal identity. If you redefine those tribal identities, you end up with hostile tribes mixed together. This is a civil war. And not a neat, gentlemanly conventional civil war, of one region against another, but a civil war of neighbor against neighbor, in every neighborhood across the world. Civil wars like this aren't fought by armies, with planes, and tanks, by soldiers, with negotiated terms of an armistice at the end. They are fought by entire populations, with AR15s and soda bottles full of gasoline, against women, children, and babies, and they end in genocide. This is teenagers in facemasks with AK47s stopping you at a roadblock, asking you "Protestant or Catholic?", and you don't know which answer is going to get you dragged into the nearest ditch and shot in the back of the head. This is your neighbors being kidnapped in the night, and their corpses turning up the next day lying on the street corner, missing their eyes, fingers, and toes. This may sound ridiculous to you. Too far-fetched to be real. But history doesn't stop because you have a cell phone. Remove the guard rails of civilization, and you get what those guardrails were designed to prevent. If it happened in Iraq and Somalia, it can happen here. The only things that could ever truly unify all of humanity would be extensive genetic engineering... or the appearance of a hostile extraterrestrial civilization. So you have two choices. Nationalism, or Rwandan Machete Party. Think about that before you try to rearrange society based on a Disneyland e-ticket ride.

There is no United States federal government. It has been hollowed out and worn as a skinsuit by a criminal enterprise since before you were born. This criminal enterprise has no name. It has no leader. It has no long-term agenda. It is simply an ad-hoc collaboration between manipulative sociopaths, cooperating to steal as much as they can from you. This is why America is working as hard as it ever was, and far more technologically advanced than it ever was, and yet, for generation after generation, real wages, and the standard of living, have remained stagnant. Because every increase in American wealth production is being siphoned up by The Machine. And all this time, the magnitude of their crimes has been covered up... by the magnitude of their crimes. The evidence, not necessarily the proof, but the evidence, has always been there. You simply refused to believe it because of the sheer magnitude of evil that the "conspiracy theorists" were telling you about. Sure, you believed there was fraud and waste, because that was a moderate belief. It fit without requiring any modifications of your worldview. But you refused to believe that the Clintons were a crime family of serial murderers leaving a trail of bodies behind them. You refused to believe that SARS-Covid-19 was developed on purpose in a lab. You refused to believe that there was a deliberate effort to demographically replace the population of America. And you refused to believe that the federal government was sponsoring anti-American groups precisely so it would have another profitable war to fight. But now members of congress are admitting it, so you don't have any excuses anymore. That's right, we are at the point where you must admit that the federal government is nothing but a giant game of Pokemon. "Saddam Hussein, I choose you!" "Taliban, I choose you!" "Covid-19, I choose you!" Every response to these so-called threats has been immensely profitable for The Machine and its allies. Now you have to confront the obvious fact that The Machine hasn't left the creation of these threats to chance. It has nurtured them carefully with infusions of cash, and weapons, and whatever else they needed. What, you think that whoever was actually running the Biden administration left all that gear in Afghanistan by accident? The founders of our nation didn't warn us against standing armies because they could be used against the people. They warned us against standing armies because military budgets are fiscal black holes that suck in political influence and radiate corruption. The system is not incompetent. It is inefficient, but not incompetent. It is functioning as designed. And its purpose is to make you into a slave. You may be wondering, if all this is true, why aren't you already a slave? Why do you still have an amount of personal and ideological freedom that is unique throughout the world? Because the power of The Machine relies upon deception. It can send agents to arrest troublesome individuals. Or shoot them through the head while they are holding their infant children. Or trap them in a church with their kids and burn them alive. But it cannot physically force an entire nation into compliance. Washington DC is a swamp, you see. That's not a corruption metaphor. I mean it is literally a swamp that someone has paved over and built a city on. It has no real economic or strategic value. Nothing is produced there except pieces of paper with instructions written on them. If Americans, as a group, with one unified will, were to decide to ignore the instructions, there would be nothing The Machine could do. That's why they are so upset about January 6, 2021. Because a bunch of unarmed protestors barged into the capitol building. Yes, it was a setup, but it still made them afraid... because it revealed how personally vulnerable they all are. When a whole bunch of Navy SEALS and whatnot follow orders (because it allows them to flatter themselves that they are heroes instead of suckers), then The Machine is powerful. But without that compliance, they are just a bunch of geriatric perverts yelling at the internet. Imagine if those protestors hadn't left their AR15s at home. Or, better yet, imagine no one needing to storm the capitol at all, because the capitol, and the geriatric perverts, no longer matter. The power of The Machine depends on the power to make you disbelieve in The Machine. The Trump administration is an attempted countercoup against The Machine, by a real estate developer who was upset that it wouldn't leave America was a functioning economy to buy and sell real estate in. Aided by a techbro who was upset that it wouldn't let him launch his rockets in peace. The Machine is crying right now that the government has been hijacked by billionaires. But billionaires are more trustworthy than the government, because they need you alive, with disposable income in your pocket, so you can buy Starlink service and Teslas and expensive resort vacations. The Machine just wants to rob and enslave you, and if you die, it will replace you with someone else to rob and enslave. This choice isn't a head-scratcher. Now go apologize to your crazy ancap friend who was trying to warn you about this shit for decades.