Tag: history
A Millennial’s Observation
I hate to be “that guy”, but MAiD is going to become very popular as the Millennials age. There is no way to maintain dignity as you decline without adult children caring for you. Even money won’t protect you. MAiD will sadly be the reasonable choice for many single Millennials.
I suspect he’s correct. And it will likely be even worse for the softer side of Gen Z, unless the harder side revolts, goes full national survivalist, and forcibly removes every last vestige of Enlightenment philosophy from the West. It’s almost certainly going to be the leading cause of death in every jurisdiction where it is legal within 30 years.
Victimization culture + euthanasia = voluntary mass human sacrifice. Post-Christian culture, which is something very different than pre-Christian culture, is a satanic city of filth floating upon a sea of blood.
The World Inside the World
This is a really excellent post on the reality of the hidden aspect of human history. I’ll be posting at least one more link to another part of the post tomorrow:
Father Chad Ripperger describes how demons besiege the imagination and emotions to such a degree that the person cannot think outside the perceptual box that has colonized them. He calls this obsession in the clinical, theological sense. The person is not fully possessed. They function. They hold jobs. They make decisions. They simply cannot perceive anything outside the boundaries the besieging force has constructed around them. He has observed, publicly, that this pattern is identical to the psychology of ideological movements. He has said that when you strip the veneer away, communism and diabolic psychology operate on the same structural logic.
Now consider a different kind of morphing.
Watch a college freshman arrive at an elite university in September. Watch them again in June. The vocal fry has set in. The upswing at the end of declarative sentences, turning statements into questions. The flattened affect. The identical vocabulary deployed across thousands of individuals who believe themselves to be independent thinkers.
They did not choose this. It overtook them.
By the time they reach Silicon Valley, the morphing is complete. They speak as one voice. They believe they arrived at their opinions independently. Listen to the way Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, speaks. The measured cadence. The pauses calibrated to signal thoughtfulness. The vocal register that never rises and never breaks. It is the voice of a system, not a person.
Listen to how many in Generation Z now pronounce the word ‘women.’ The shift is uniform. It is not regional. It did not emerge from any dialect. Millions of people began mispronouncing the same word in the same way at the same time, and no one can identify the point of origin. Linguists call it a speech trend. The ancient world would have called it something else.
When millions of people begin speaking in the same cadence, using the same contractions, the same tonal shifts, the same moral vocabulary, at the same time, that is not culture. That is memetic synchronization. The ancient world had a name for it. The modern world calls it a meme and treats it as a joke. The word “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, as a deliberate parallel to “gene”: a unit of cultural transmission that replicates, mutates, and colonizes minds. Dawkins meant it as a scientific metaphor. The ancients would have recognized it as a description of exactly what they were warning about.
As I discussed in my recent piece, Money, Sex, and Sorcery, the word “glamour” comes from the Scots English alteration of “grammar,” which itself derives from “grimoire,” a book of spells. A glamour, in its original meaning, is a spell cast through language. It is the manipulation of perception through words. It makes the enchanted person see something other than what is actually there.
Ripperger describes the same dynamic from the exorcism room: demons, he says, put a perspective on your imagination. They alter how you perceive a person, a situation, a reality. The thing itself has not changed. Your perception of it has been replaced. He says this is how demons destroy marriages, careers, and institutions. They do not change the facts. They change how the possessed person sees the facts.
This is why it is very important to not only devote yourself to speaking the truth to the greatest extent possible, but also knowing your own mind. I once had what I am certain was a demonic dream, because not only were the dream-thoughts definitely not my own, but the characterizations of other people in the dream were intrinsically false and fundamentally different than what I absolutely know to be my true perspective on them. It was scripted to attempt to influence my thinking in a destructive direction, and the temptations offered were not of a sort that even appealed to me.
It was rather like seeing an email and immediately recognizing it to be spam. What the false non-science of modern psychology calls “the subconscious” is actually made up of several elements, and one of them is the pathway with which spirits, both good and evil, communicate with the mind.
And, of course, it’s even more important to avoid doing the sorts of things that open up one’s mind to alien influences. Keep those doors resolutely shut, and even if your personal weaknesses lead to you repeatedly open them again and again, never tire of going back and shutting them, every single time.
Science is considerably more fake than genuine. And history is considerably deeper and darker than is generally acknowledged. And not every individual with whom you speak is speaking for himself.
The MAGA Catastrophe
MAGA was supposed to be the alternative to the neocon-infested GOP, but it turned out to be MIGA, which thereby cements the probability that there will be no political fix for the USA prior to the anticipated failure in the 2033 timeframe.
There were two schools of thought on the Spanish Right in the lead-up to the civil war: Accidentalism and Catastrophism. Accidentalists believed that the serious issues facing the Spanish Republic were not baked into the institution itself, but rather an accident that could be attributed to the early Marxist bent of the first government. The Republic had gotten off on the wrong foot, but Conservatives could and would steer the ship in the right direction once they peacefully won political power through the electoral process and formed a government capable of addressing the Right’s concerns regarding government attacks on the Church and private property. They were strictly committed to following the rule of law and operating within the constitutional framework.
The second group believed the Republic was a catastrophe from the start, and that there could be no saving the Republic from itself. They asserted that the Left would never recognize any non-Leftist government, no matter how much they claimed to uphold the rule of law, because the problem was not with the Republic’s legalistic procedures but rather with the fact that the entire system was merely a facade to facilitate a Socialist and eventually Communist state that would permanently exclude Conservatives from power.
These two camps were largely united in their politics but divided in how to engage in politics. One pursued reform, while the other waited for an opportunity to overthrow the system itself once enough of the Right realized that there would be no voting their way out of this mess. After the Right won the 1933 elections and were met with: 1) Legalistic stonewalling when they attempted to form a government, and 2) An attempted Left-wing revolution in Asturias in 1934, the Catastrophists were proven to be correct.
As a general rule, the social and political optimists are wrong and the technogical optimists are right.
The Hobbit 1977
The Dark Herald explains how the 1977 Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit came to be:
There is no getting across to kids of later generations what a TV Special meant to us. You had no control over it whatsoever. None. You either watched it at the exact time the network scheduled it for or you didn’t watch it at all that year. You could possibly catch a missed episode of a regular show during reruns in the summer but not a Special. Miss it and it was gone, no place to rent it, and streaming it was decades away. When you heard that Special fanfare from the TV you dropped everything and ran!
A few guitar strings were plucked, one by one, and then John Huston’s unmistakable cadence read the first words Tolkien published about the world that would become Middle-earth. There was a respect there for what J.R.R. Tolkien began with that sentence.
The “Many ages ago” that followed was intended to draw children into myth and it worked magnificently. Tolkien nerds used to regard it as heresy because Tolkien didn’t write it but then they had no idea what horrors the future held.
Even at the time it was hardly the worst version of The Hobbit. That would be the Hobbit (1966) a 12 minute “rights retainer” featuring Princess Mika and Slaag the Dragon whom Bilbo kills at the end. There had been radio and play adaptations before 1977, mostly British naturally. The rights to Hobbit had been sold separately by Tolkien then parceled out again and again after that.
By 1977 The Hobbit’s rights were such a trainwreck that Arthur Rankin was able to snatch up the TV rights for pennies with the following opening credit “Based on the Original Version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.” The rights for that being distinct from the 1951 revision, which is what the TV special was actually based on. In the 1937 edition, Elves were called, Gnomes” (from the Greek gnosis for “knowledge.” And Bilbo won the ring from Gollum fair and square, they even parted on friendly terms. Those and some other changes were enough to make it legally distinct.
And the Rankin/Bass version was certainly distinct in its own right. It looks like something made by Studio Ghibli – Because it was made by Studio Ghibli.
Okay, fine. It was made by Topcraft although, when that studio failed the remains became Studio Ghibli, and you can absolutely see the design DNA in The Hobbit.
You can also see Tolkien’s come to that, his own Thrór’s Map was used directly in the TV show and was part of the influence of the design aesthetic. J.R.R Tolkien approved of Arthur Rackham artwork and it was clearly another strong influence. The Hobbit (1977) was a Japanese take on the Western fairytale as grotesque. You can see its influence in Nausicaä. Rankin/Bass helped keep the lights on at Topcraft until Nausicaä came out. The Japanese approach isn’t interested in cleaning the fairy tale up, it leans into the distortions. Faces stretch, bodies warp, and the line between the comic and the unsettling disappears. What reads as “off” to a Western eye is often deliberate: characters are designed to move, to emote, to perform, even if that means abandoning symmetry or beauty. It turned what was supposed to be a children’s story into something just a little grimdark – perfect for its Generation X audience.
It was an art design for Tolkien when no one agreed what that looked like and there weren’t any brand managers ruining it. There was also some leftover hippy influence clinging to it, like your older sister’s boyfriend’s van that still smelled “funny.” College age-Boomers had first experienced Tolkien – differently.
It’s such a pity that after doing a very good job of bringing THE LORD OF THE RINGS to life, Peter Jackson wasn’t able to avoid screwing up THE HOBBIT even though he had a perfectly good template from which to work on the basis of the 1977 version.
And perhaps his biggest mistake wasn’t expanding it to three films, but not licensing the original music.
The Power of the C64
It’s rather astonishing to think that with all this computer power at our disposal in the 1980s, we used it to play Pac-man and Seven Cities of Gold.
I let a Commodore 64 run for three and a half days straight. 87 billion instructions, 303 billion clock cycles, 5.9 million candidate settings tested. It cracked an Enigma message in German without knowing a single character of the plaintext.
On the other hand, what were we going to do with a few messages sent by U-boat commanders to the German naval command forty years beforehand?
That Sounds like Anathema
The Dark Herald explains why JRR Tolkien should be forgotten?
The Timeline Where Tolkien Dies
Let’s take a look at what should have happened to The Lord of the Rings without support before we look at how that support changed its fate.In the 1960s, LotR has cult status among the counterculture. This was its peak.
Along come the 1970s, still riding the paperback boom. LotR stays hot on campuses, word of mouth stays strong. Tolkien is hot… But contained.
By the mid-seventies the boom has tapered off. Sales are still there, but the counterculture is dying off. It’s turning into The Thing Older Guys Are Into.
Now it’s the 80s. Generation X is in college and there has been no real generational handoff. Boomer stuff equals dull and dim. Fantasy has matured and expanded, but Gen X is reading Michael Moorcock, Tanith Lee, and Terry Brooks. All of them have been influenced by Tolkien, so there is a certain degree of backtrack—but The Lord of the Rings is becoming a niche, connoisseur’s market.
In the 1990s, the light has distinctly dimmed. Generation X has switched to grim-dark, urban fantasy. Neil Gaiman, Tanya Huff, Charles de Lint are ascendant. Tolkien is still influential, still respected, but has entered pre-obscurity.
With the 2000s come the Millennials. J.K. Rowling is blowing it so far out of the water you can’t see the ocean from space. Jim Butcher and Laurell K. Hamilton aren’t doing quite that well, but their impact is felt—while Tolkien’s is not. Sales of The Lord of the Rings are now a few thousand a year, mostly library editions. He’s known to the field, but invisible to pop culture.
He’s the guy Boomers won’t shut up about—like Timmy Hendricks or whoever.
2026—The torch has not been passed for three generations. Tolkien’s publisher dropped The Lord of the Rings a while back. The Tolkien Estate has long ago accepted market reality and self-publishes The Lord of the Rings on Kindle for $2.99 a copy or FREE on Kindle Unlimited.***
The Three Pillars of Tolkien’s Survival
There were three reasons that this alternate history never happened. And Tolkien fans only like one of them.
Hmmm… he does make a few salient points. Certainly the total failure of ARTS AND DARK AND LIGHT to break through to any sort of popular awareness despite the massive popularity of other, lesser epic fantasies tends to support this reasoning.
However, on a related note, I am pleased to be able to say that the German translation of A SEA OF SKULLS by Urs Hildebrandt is now complete, and we’ll be releasing all three AODAL books in German this summer.
Literary Relevance is Not Guaranteed
The Dark Herald explains how the modern exploitation of the Tolkien legendarium is likely to reduce the chances of JRR Tolkien’s future literary relevance, and provides a rather devastating example of how that decline in relevance takes place:
In his prime, Roger Zelazny wasn’t some niche cult figure, he was one of the biggest names in speculative fiction, standing shoulder to shoulder with the New Wave heavyweights of the 1960s and 70s. His novel Lord of Light is often remembered as his breakout, and it was certainly his most decorated, winning the Hugo (when it meant something) and cementing his reputation, but Zelazny’s real impact was broader and more sustained. He was a constant presence in the major magazines, a multiple Hugo and Nebula winner, and one of the few writers equally comfortable blending myth, science fiction, and fantasy into something distinctly his own. By the time The Chronicles of Amber hit in the 1970s, he wasn’t emerging… He was already established, and Amber became the work that proved he could translate that critical acclaim into lasting popular success.
Except it didn’t last.
Roger Zelzney’s old hard covers frequently go for three digit figures and I’m not talking Easton Press editions either. But his works are mostly published directly by his estate on Kindle.
Roger Zelzny is moving from the thing everyone knew about to the guy who is studied by writers. Most of his works have six figure sales ranks on Amazon.
And when Gen X is gone, he’ll be forgotten.
Zelazny, at his best, was very good. He wasn’t a first-rank SF/F author, but he was at the top of the second rank. And it’s true, he has been largely forgotten today, which is deeply unfortunate.
As an author, I’m aware of this phenomenon, which is why it has been my intention to release my books into the public domain upon my demise. The advent of AI and the lowering of barriers to entry in the video market may inspire me to rethink that, but at present, the way in which copyright guarantees that all literary properties are eventually acquired and controlled by corporate interests inimical to the long-term interests of an author’s literary legacy means that the best way to combat that is to put one’s works into the public domain immediately upon one’s death.
The problem isn’t that the corporate interests can alter the original works, but rather, the way in which they alter the common perception of the author’s works. How does the average Gen Alpha individual distinguish between The Hobbit and The Rings of Power, or between The Two Towers and whatever abomination Stephen Colbert and Peter Jackson end up concocting?
The only way to level the playing field between the community that loves the literary creation and the corporate interests is the public domain. Indeed, the public domain is the only reason that classic, but hitherto unknown works from the likes of Yoshikawa Eiji and Benito Pérez Galdós are able to be published in English, which is a project you can support via the Castalia Library. We’ve already translated nine works by these two authors, in addition to other amazing novels by Ozaki Koro, Oguri Mushitaro, Naoki Sanjūgo, and Luigi Capuano.
Who are they, you ask?
Exactly…
The Lost America
From a discussion at SG about Boomers and their destruction of the American way of life.
It’s hard for the younger generation to even conceive of what the generations that preceded the Boomers were like. I am speaking of the USA. Let me try to give you a taste. They loved their families, they were a cohesive civilized team, willing to put significant skin in the game to make things better. They wanted their kids to do better than they did. It was a common motto. They did try to actively curb the worst tendencies of the Boomers until they died off. You can see this in the cultural decline acceleration around 2005.
Any adult anywhere, as a member of the societal team, could and would correct me or any child when badly behaved. If you accidentally dented someone’s car you left a note, as examples. High trust, universally known unwritten rules. Everyone knew the shared history and traditions. It felt like One Great Extended Family rowing the boat together. As Gen z (and the younger generations) you very likely have not even know the experience of your own family as a team, from which experience you might imagine what a unified and cohesive broader society was. Gen X got to experience the discontinuity with in their own families, in most cases, and within society. It was a sudden mass plunge for many. Working Moms, latch key neglect, mass divorce, single parenthood, abortion. We had an apples and oranges comparison that was not subtile. Gen X suffers the grief of having lost something phenomenal that we were unable to stop and are unable to reverse.
What broke can not be fixed but maybe something that rhymes can be rebuilt. To try to do that, the Boomers need to be out of the way and the younger generations need to know what can be from what was.
The preceding generations did a lot of good, and you can be sure that their hearts and minds were in the right place even when they were spectacularly wrong. This you can easily forgive. They were human. They did their best. You loved them and they loved you.
If you want to get a taste of what it was like, look at the old cover art by Norman Rockwell, watch the old Captain America, Casablanca, anything by Frank Capra, anything with John Wayne. Look at the old Bugs Bunny cartoons and know that Bugs was the average American, modeled after Clark Gable, particularly in “It happened one night”. And we did NOT think of ourselves as a “nation of immigrants”. We were NOT full of rootless recents that only have this slogan as some common touch point. We were Americans, with both national and ingrained, globally dominant culture. Before USA USA was a “MAGA chant” it was just normal. Blue jeans were American and were like dollars. You could trade them anywhere in the world for almost anything. We also had regional dress, dialects and traditions because people were here in one place long enough for that stuff to be there. Assimilation in most places meant you weren’t “us” until the third generation, where the second married a townie and had kids. The kids were us. We didn’t think about anywhere else besides the the US much, if at all, but we did have some decorations modeled on the 17th century we used for Thanks Giving that included Indians as we knew them going back over 500 years, and I don’t mean the hyphenated come lately people named by the East India Company. It’s baloney to say we didn’t have a culture. We had a culture and national identity that was so globally dominant, so coveted that the dress and speech of the entire globe has been impacted to reflect
Why Three Dimensions are Required
I know the interest in Veriphysics is limited here, hence the separate site devoted to the philosophy, but since this question has popped up in several places, I thought I should at least mention that it has been answered in substantive detail over there.
I don’t understand why it is necessary for there to be three different elements of the Triveritas. Aren’t L and M basically the same thing, because math is logic?
Here is the abridged version of the complete answer to it.
Each of the three dimensions of the Triveritas has characteristic failure modes that the other two dimensions cannot detect from within their own domain. That is why relying on any one, or even any two, leaves a structural blind spot that historically produces false confidence…
The critical insight from the historical record is that false claims survive by trading on their strong dimensions to deflect scrutiny from their weak one. The defenders of phlogiston pointed to its empirical success and quantitative accounting to avoid the question of logical coherence. The defenders of caloric theory pointed to Fourier’s mathematics and the theory’s logical elegance to deflect Rumford’s empirical challenge. The defenders of Ptolemy pointed to centuries of accurate predictions to deflect the question of explanatory unity.
And in every resolved historical case, the refutation arrived from the specific dimension that was missing. Not from a random direction, but from the precise blind spot the theory’s defenders were trying to hide. Newtonian mechanics, steady-state cosmology, and caloric theory all satisfied L and M but failed E, and all three were killed by empirical observation. Continental drift and the plum pudding model satisfied L and E but failed M, and both were killed by mathematical incoherence. Ptolemaic epicycles, phlogiston, and miasma theory satisfied M and E but failed L, and all three were killed by the arrival of logically coherent replacements.
Also, for those who are interested in applying the Triveritas, the reference scales for L, M, and E are all now complete.