“Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Another young man has figured out that the American Dream is fiction. Willy Wonka writes on the truth of success in “the land of the free”:
My brother is an Engineering major with a high GPA. He’s about to graduate, and doesn’t have a job offer.
Everybody else he knows in Engineering – is in Engineering because their dad is an Engineer.
Seriously.
They have a network in the field by association. Before they even go to school.
It makes me wonder what suburbia is really like.
It makes me wonder if a college degree is really worth anything.
I was told a degree from the school I got it from was “goldâ€.
Literally.
That’s what I was told.
Well, I graduated 2.5 years ago and haven’t seen any gold yet.
I haven’t seen any money yet either for that matter.
I have friends with college degrees waitressing at restaurants, working at call centers making $10 an hour.
Gee, isn’t the USA the land of freedom and opportunity? A country where anyone can be what they want to be so long as they work hard and achieve? And yet, intelligent and capable American men languish in obscurity and poverty every day while dullards and morons get promoted to prominence based on their family connections and friends in high places. Horatio Alger LIED to us!
America is no different than European countries where success is determined by your last name and your class. Except that while Europeans acknowledge their reality, Americans cover theirs in a blanket of pious Puritan lies. If you succeed in America, it’s not because you were born rich, you got lucky or you cheated and stole from people, it’s because you “pulled yourself up by your bootstraps.” And if you fail, it’s not because you were hamstrung by con men and scam artists, it’s because you’re just too stupid and lazy to make the grade. Get a job, slob! Nobody owes you anything! America is the land of the free and the home of the brave, and if you don’t like it, you can get out of my country!
To be deemed a loser in America is to sign your own death warrant. God may be dead, but the cubicle jockeys and castrated middle-class drones of this land still think of themselves as part of a warped Calvinist elect. To them, their willingness to have their humanity stripped away day by day sucking at Mammon’s teat is proof that they are God’s chosen people. Anyone who questions the presuppositions of the American cult of “hard work” and “self-reliance” is ostracized from polite society. Hippies, commies, degenerates, bums they’re called. The U.S. may not have any gulags or KGB torture chambers, but Americans are still frighteningly Soviet in their treatment of anyone who dissents from the party line. Both of the major political factions in America worship the myth of the American Dream, whether its CONservatives preaching about the “bootstrap” bullshit or LIEbrals encouraging illegal immigration because Mexican aliens “do the jobs Americans don’t want to do.”
The only way to escape is to leave.
…
Last Christmas, I went home to see my family. Over dinner, I told them that I was quitting my job and moving. Their reaction was collective shock. Here’s the CliffsNotes version of the conversation:
Mom: You QUIT?
Ferdinand Bardamu: Yeah. I couldn’t take it anymore. I…just…couldn’t take it. I got a new job in Burlington, Vermont. I’m going to start living the way I want now.
M: So, how much does it pay?
FB: [Figure notably smaller than what I made at my old job]
Dad: So what sparked this crisis of conscience?
FB: I can’t TAKE those idiots any more. If I put up with that job any longer, I’d go insane.
Cécile (sanctimoniously): You’re so STUPID, Ferd. Why would you throw away a high-paying job in the middle of a recession?
FB (deadpan): Because I would have gone postal if I stayed there any longer.
Cécile: So you like being poor? God, you’re just…ugh… (to Mom) I always said you were too soft on him…
Mom: Ferd’s a grown man, he can make his own decisions.
A bit of background – my little sis Cécile is studying to be a speech therapist, an occupation that requires a master’s degree at the bare minimum to get a job in the greater New York area. By the time she graduates, she’ll be in her mid-20′s and have in the neighborhood of $100,000 worth of student loans to pay off.
Later that night, I was talking with my dad when he mentioned his quest to find an owner’s manual for his ancient, hand-me-down snowmobile.
FB: Why can’t you just search for one on Ebay at work?
D: Ferd, our supervisors monitor our Internet usage. The company fired a whole bunch of people after examining the cookies on their browser and seeing that they were visiting sites they weren’t supposed to be visiting.
FB: They check your COOKIES?
D: Oh yeah. They’ve got a whole IT department who gets paid to read our emails and do things like that.
FB: They read your emails? And you let them do that?
D: Their equipment, their time. It’s even spelled out in our contracts. They’re allowed to fire us for misusing our Internet access and we can’t do anything about it.
It’s rather sickening that CONservative and LIEbertarian assholes who spend their time inveighing against the evils of communism (even arguing that Soviet Russia was a greater evil than Nazi Germany and claiming we should have fought them instead) excuse and defend the exact same behavior at home, so long as its committed by the sainted private sector. After all, if you don’t like being spied on by the corporate Stasi, you can just get another job. Don’t let things like a mortgage to pay, student loans, kids to feed, or the fact that EVERY SINGLE EMPLOYER in the country is equally inhumane to its workers get in the way of the neo-Calvinist cult’s lies.
Just get back in the cotton field, you dumb nigger. It’s where you belong.
…
They call my generation the Millennials. It’s a somewhat appropriate term, though not for the reasons most think. A far better name, too close to reality for mainstream mediocrities to handle, would be Generation Zero. Zero not only in the eyes of American secular Calvinism, but zero in terms of philosophy and beliefs. We are the first generation fully baptized in the holy waters of nihilism, the first to experience the full force of an entire civilization’s supporting pillars being torn down.
Generation Zero was born into a world in which white people were totally deracinated, the heroes and icons of old libeled and shoved aside for new phony saints deified by multiculturalist dogma. We came of age when the feminist project reached its apogee, drugging bright boys with Ritalin and crushing men with laws that denied their very humanity. We were thrust into a nation that had made “greed is good” into its national motto, empowering corporate sociopaths and destroying labor protections according to the lies of the Chicago School and its prophet Milton Friedman. We were made the heirs of a society that had replaced authentic culture with ersatz pop drivel, community with atomization, refinement and education with boorishness and indoctrination.
And the very people who were responsible for all of this have the sheer unadulterated BALLS to blame US for the decline of civilization! They call us “entitled” for demanding that our government and employers treat us with a modicum of dignity. They call us “lazy” for not wanting to slave away like starving peasants even though we live in a world of plenty. They call us
“immature” for delaying adulthood due to the financial pressures they forced on US as a requirement to get a decent job. They call us “narcissistic” for putting ourselves first in a world where naked self-interest is the state religion. They call us “degenerate” for not believing that venial sins like drug use mandate a stay in a federal rape camp.
It’s like the gluttonous condemning the lustful for being immoral.
Generation Zero is the Omega Generation – omega not in a game sense, but in a Revelation sense. We are the end of your civilization, the chickens of your poisonous gestalt coming home to roost. Like the East Germans who tore down the Berlin Wall, we are the ones who will expose your pious myths and your pretty lies, who will push your decrepit, corrupt empire into its grave. Thanks to the Internet, your fabrications and narratives are dying like worms in a rain storm. Like the man said, we’re very, very pissed off.
Generation Zero is not innocent and is far from being comprised of saints, but their detractors aren’t any better. This is a war that no one can win, but it is the Zeroes who will lose the least. You can’t lose what you never had to begin with.
To be continued…
{ 79 comments… read them below or add one }
Lo! I show you the Last Man.
“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” — so asks the Last Man, and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest.
“We have discovered happiness” — say the Last Men, and they blink.
They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loves one’s neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth.
Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or men!
A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death.
One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.
One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.
No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.
“Formerly all the world was insane,” — say the subtlest of them, and they blink.
They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision. People still quarrel, but are soon reconciled — otherwise it upsets their stomachs.
They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.
“We have discovered happiness,” — say the Last Men, and they blink.
Nearly got fired for blogging while I worked at Citigroup. They didn’t actually care that I made fun of CEO Vikram Pandit as much as they cared that I was using their computers. They checked my cookies but I had cleared everything. I told them I posted my blogs from my phone while on the toilet. Fucking idiots.
Point being, yes, big firms monitor internet usage.
But I went through that same shit from people as you when I quit my job right at the beginning of the recession. I make shit money and have absolutely no status but I’m happier toiling away at a restaurant and writing for fun. “How can you do that?” some people asked; they invoked the economic downturn as well. “How can I not? I’ll kill myself if I have to work at that place much longer.”
Yes, it is a sad irony that Hitler and Stalin ‘won’ and the vast majority of Americans are unaware of this situation.
I’m no better off $$$ wise than I was just over a decade ago. However, I can’t say either party really helps me to obtain the financial goals I would like. I still pay more in taxes than I do to have shelter with basic utilities like water and electricity. I’m a ‘classical liberal’, and feel like if the government would get out of my wallet and stop inflating the damn money I could do a lot better for myself.
Amen, good brother. Amen.
FB,
Comparing Stalin and Hitler to corporate sociopaths is so wrong. Both were far more straightforward, honest and trustworthy in a way that corporate shysters can never be.
After 35 years in the IT business, I’ve had it. Last fall I started seminary classes part time. It is going to take several years, but I’m getting out of the corporate world. I’m hoping I can do some good and help some people as a minister.
Just to show how screwed up things are, it’s going to take me about three times as long to get a M.Div. as it would for me to get a MBA.
FB, you are a hero.
I’m from the first wave of Generation X; we began to notice what the Boomers were perpetrating, but never managed to stop them. Now I’ve got children, and you and the generation you described will help me save them.
FB et. al., here is the exact explanation of what happened in our America, the America post-70′s: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/18-2
Ferd –
Best rant ever (though as an aside, Stalin far outdid Hitler in mass murder), and even though I’m one of those presumed to be horrid “Boomers”, my beliefs were virtually identical to yours back in the early seventies. Rejecting everything you so properly identified, my life goal became a quest for self-sufficiency, and with that, the physical relocation from the trappings of the modern world.
Hello Northern Rockies twenty years ago. This country is currently passing through Purgatory on the Highway to Hell and traveling way over the speed limit. Arguably, what happens to the majority of the people in this country full of narcissists ruled by elected psychopaths after impact is going to be well deserved, their plaintiff wailing and gnashing of teeth to the contrary. Being careful in the use of a movie to illustrate my point, all I think of is Clint Eastwood’s line in Unforgiven – “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
Damn, Ferd, you’re really on a roll. Preach it, brother, preach it!
O/T:
Ferd, your ears should be burning; just posted up the definitive reply as to the nature of my previous “demise”; you and your readers can check it out here:
An Open Letter To Timothy “Prolific” Jones: The Sistahood’s Whiteknight, Or Useful Idiot?
http://obsidianraw.bravejournal.com/entry/60666
More to come on your recent post mentioning my name soon…stay tuned…
O.
Look on the bright side. No, seriously.
If there are no rules or no loyalties anymore between the generations or classes in the US, then there are NO rules or loyalties anymore between the generations or classes in the US. That’s a two-way street brother.
If the old people and “the system” writ large treat everyone else like shit, then there’s no reason to treat them both as anything other than as resources to be used, abused and tossed aside when they’re no longer useful. The situation is similar to game, feminism and women in my estimation, or nationalism for that matter, although some sure won’t agree with those analogies. Fair enough.
At this point, it’s absolutely clear to me that people who play by the old rules are sheep who deserve nothing other than to get sheared. Loyalty requires reciprocity or it’s just self-imposed slavery.
So the fundamental question is do you want to be a slave or do you want to get ahead under the new system, however you want to define getting ahead? And if you want to get ahead, are you willing to do whatever it takes? If you truly will the ends, then are you committed to carrying out the means?
Personally I began to see a massive amount of opportunity in every area of life once I finally unshackled my mind from the old constraints. A whole lot.
Fight Club was always something of a bible for me and C-bass growing up. Since I’m quite a bit younger than C-bass I think it had a greater impact on me than it did him. Back when I was still writing regularly, working on my “memoirs,” I had a chapter where I apologized for being a white man (and thus the harbinger of destruction and social decay). What you’ve written here is like a much better version of what I was attempting there. Bravo!
You’ve got a point, and yeah, the Boomers have a lot to answer for, but comparing corporate monitoring of email to mass murdering fuckers like Hitler and Stalin is a bit much.
[So you're telling me that corporate espionage of their employees is different than state espionage of their citizens? - ed.]
Which is why I now suspect these propagandized automatons shall never revolt against the status quo. No 1776 – just Roman decay.
The Calvin/Chicago School/Friedman references are lost on them; it’s gibberish to these modern Eloi.
America has more people in jail than Russia. So I’d say it’s a bit of an understatement. He is being kind, because, as people with sense say:”You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”
How about this:
http://dissention.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/real-life-fps-police-state/
From the speed of the kill, I’d have to say it’s fairly likely the cop who shot him “didn’t like him” and wanted to kill him. He had a golf club… which isn’t even really dangerous, and wasn’t moving towards them. And by “not that dangerous” I mean that if I was unarmed, UNARMED mind you, and ALONE, not with many armed people backing me up, I wouldn’t be worried about someone “with a golf club”. He isn’t going to accidentally kill me, and there is a good chance I can kick his *bleep* anyway.
The raid was carried out quickly…. but why quickly?
Cause they were worried the Tod Blair would what? Buy more drugs and get stoned? Why the speed? He lived in his parents house and wasn’t going anywhere.
The probable answer is Mr. Kill-On-Sight was angry at Tod Blair for some reason. Perhaps lack of Respect for Mr. Kill-On-Sight. So he let out a howl to his fellow officers, and they packed up to go on a kill. Lack of Respect is an offence with the death penalty in Soviet Utah.
That Soviet Police State enough for your exacting standards?
Well, it’s certainly obvious that quitting your job and moving to a place has put you in a better frame of mind that has benefited your muse…your blogging has been top notch as of late.
And didn’t Tyler Durden also say something about his generation being the first one raised by women (and/or manginas)?
Ferd: The only mistake you made was not leaning over the table and bitch slapping that sister of yours. The first letter in her name is the same letter that fronts the best word to describe her and it ain’t considerate.
[Not worth it. I still love her, but no action on my part is going to get her out of the Matrix. She'll have to take that fall herself. - ed.]
FB,
More material for you..
—
http://jezebel.com/5737695/hot-list-author-delivers-creepy-woman+hating-rant
Yet another Facebook “hot list” recently made the rounds at a high school — and its author’s scary rantings show the connection between such lists and outright woman-hating.
Generation Zero…
Half of us are waking up the realization that two degrees and a lifetime spent ticking the right boxes is a straight ticket to unemployment, like Willy Wonka. The other half are lucky (?) enough to have found bullshit jobs that we know deep down are meaningless.
Worse than that though, we have no heroes, no purpose, no guidance in life. We’re just thrashing around, desperately searching for role models. Men are especially fucked, but generation zero women have a shitty road ahead of them too… a decade and a half of pump and dumps, then marriage to a pussy when they’re 40 and infertile, all the while being told she is”supposed to feel happy with her high-status job and non-traditional, 50-50, SWPL relationship.
So what the hell do we do? Well, we could live in mom’s basement and play video games. Seems to work for about a quarter of us. We could brainwash ourselves to buy into the liberal order and keep scraping, clawing for the last drops of blood from western civilization. Or, we take up the challenge laid at our feet by history and rebuild the world that previous generations destroyed.
How do we do it? Fuck me if I know. As of now, I’m focusing on developing myself into a better person and correcting as much of the bullshit I’ve been taught as possible. That seems to be what everyone in the Game/Roissy/Ferd/Steve/Reaction/What-fucking-ever Sphere is doing.
Hopefully we’ll figure out the rest later on…
Btw, I wrote about why most “good” jobs suck and how I feel about my life as a 9-5 drone .
Never happen chief.
Those East Germans just attacked a concrete facade – rendered into a symbol- because it was abandoned. No People’s Army conquered the wall. TRUE revolutionaries would have chafed and breached it years before. Not so *brave* to stand upon it for a photo op…after all the armed troops fled their posts.
No. Your “generation ZERO” will take no action. They’ve proven themselves incapable. If to “push your decrepit, corrupt empire into its grave” means to continue playing COD while the house burns around you, then – yes.
The only way a genzerokid is roused is when there’s a power outage.
[Inaction in a system that requires action to survive works just as well. - ed.]
You achieve satisfaction for your grievances by reading ACTUAL historic accounts of how real people accomplished the American Revolution. How Ho Chi Minh conquered America in Vietnam. Not by quoting Yoda – fictional conduit of George Lucas.
Ferd,
You remind me of the MGTOW guys, only economic instead of sexual.
Growing up someone told you how the economy works; they were wrong; you got wise and disillusioned; but rather than master they system you bail on it.
I can’t say that’s my style. You’re right about how the economy isn’t a pure meritocracy, and that one more Master’s Degree is no the guaranteed ticket to a life of plenty, but I think your solution is wrong. Taken to it’s logical conclusion, you’re living in a shack halfway between Walden Pond and the Unabomber.
The better solution (IMO) is to get Game. Economic Game, that is. Business savvy. Some guys are naturals, but it can be learned. Be an entrepreneur. You don’t need to IPO, make billions and retire. You can try for that if you want, but just making a nice cash generating business where you make the rules is perfectly good too.
Uh, that’s like the Redcoats and King George calling Minutemen “ruffians” for hiding behind trees.
You make it sound like a cheap eBay Make Bazillions commercial; if becoming rich were so easy, would not everyone be doing it?
FB: I agree with the whole article, but I don’t understand the connection you make between Charlton’s argument that the Soviet Union was worse than Nazi Germany (which I agree with) and accepting modern corporatism. It seems to me that a conservative like Charlton would be against that too.
[It coincided with my own writing. I really didn't want to have to reach into the bowels of libertarian depravity for better examples. - ed.]
arguing over
minutiae
MOUT
Does the portion of Frost’s post you excerpted contain a Yoda quote?
The only way any revolutionaries ever won anything was with the sympathies of their enemies. Good luck with that in this scenario.
I suppose you mean no revolutionaries ever won anything without the sympathy of at least part of the population. Either that or you are a retard.
I think that the Calvinist/bootstraps mode was more valid in a time of more winners and more losers. After multiple generations begging the government to save them from the consequences of stupidity, laziness, bad luck, etc. there is now only the bland in-between. The only way to win economically now is to worm your way into the government and live off graft. Of course, the pain of ennui is the luxury of those with no real hardship. If generation zero ever gets out of their parent’s basements and get hungry maybe things will turn around.
Heathcliff,
Who will pay for the rapidly aging “bootstraps” crowd? The best way to make the system fail is depriving it of new resources. In any case, what is the motivation to work hard if you are not going to treated well?
1. You had the freedom and ability to leave your job
2. You had the freedom and ability to move to a new area
3. You had the freedom and ability to accept a new job in this new area
4. You have the freedom and ability to live your life as you please. It’s not easy listening to your family’s protestations and negativity, but that’s life and the decision is ultimately YOURS.
Just because the American dream has been distorted and co-opted does not mean it is dead. Some elements remain as evidenced in your story. American culture is in a very bad place right now. Tyler Durden was right…”We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars….â€
At what point, with all the avenues and access to philosophy, opinion and thought do we stop blaming society and start blaming the people that actually swallow this crap?
[Don't forget to be grateful to Massa! - ed.]
I can never decide if people today have too much or too little. On the one hand, wages have been stagnant since the mid 70s, on the other hand people want to quit their jobs because they cant blog at work. Maybe you should ask your granddad what job he did at your age. See if it wasn’t low paying, dirty, and dangerous. Don’t buy the glamourized, Hollywood concept of work. The law of supply and demand says that if a job didn’t suck then everyone would do it and it wouldn’t pay anything.
As for starving the system, that’s what Rand seems to advocate in Atlas Shrugged. I’m not sure it works in practice. I think you just end up with a smaller but still shitty system. I don’t think that Hugo Chavez (or for that matter Barak Obama) are sitting around and worrying that they will be brought down by rampant slacking.
By the time she graduates, she’ll be in her mid-20′s and have in the neighborhood of $100,000 worth of student loans to pay off.
*chic noir dead faints*
Why would anyone go into that much student loan debt unless they were going to med school and even that isn’t always so good.
[I tried to talk her out of it. She won't listen to me, and my parents don't care since they're not footing the bill. She's in for a real rough fall. - ed.]
funfact: 25% of all US doctors are foreign born.In Great Briton the number is 50%. Do you have any idea what this means for native born Americans??? The door is shutting ladies and gentleman.
I see in the future back to multiple family one room living for many American families. The birthrate will further shrink.
*chic noir comes in and takes a seat in the immalafide salon*
*orders peach daiquiri from passing wattress*
That Tyler Durden quote is thrown around quite a lot in these parts and I’m not sure how I feel about.
No purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.
I mean really, does anyone want to live thru a Great Depression??? If people are already bitching & moaning about how hard it is and we aren’t to the point of a Great Depression I can only imagine what a state most of these people will be in.
If anything, it will be harder this time around since far fewer people have farmland holding relatives which means more people may starve. Besides most people in our age group can’t do much with their hands so what will they do when their clothes wear out and they can’t afford new ones or when appliances break down and their is no money to get things fixed.
In some ways, our lives are far better than those lives of people who lived 100 years ago. You have more forms of entertainment, a more literate population, healthcare(vaccines ,hand washing, sanitation) etc, social safety nets.
no Great War
no Great War??? who the hell wants to live thru another world war? Do you guys have any idea how tore up Europe was after the two world wars? Imagine how nasty things can get today with all the advanced weapondry at our disposal.
SMH
really we have a group of young men who are bored.
in life you won’t always be happy and this is something people just need to get over. You will be bored or indifferent for large streches of time.
*chic noir gives ferdy her thanks for having a good time and puts on pea coat to leave*
(even arguing that Soviet Russia was a greater evil than Nazi Germany and claiming we should have fought them instead) excuse
You guys are reading too far into this. Ferdy’s didn’t mention Hi.ler or Stalin. He’s talking about surveillance communism in Germany,Russia and China was able to survive so long because the people were under constant surveillance so if you even dared to open your mouth and speak wrong about the leader, the police were at your door 30 minutes later dragging you out into the streets.
those who dared to speak or act against those in charge were ostracized, lost their jobs, thrown into work camps, and otherwise had their lives destroyed.
Except that while Europeans acknowledge their reality, Americans cover theirs in a blanket of pious Puritan lies.
This is why Europeans have 5 weeks vacation, low college tuition and a load of other welfare benefits. They know the game and demand their share.
I agree with most of this, but the attacks on Milton Friedman are way wrong, man. Every society on earth restricted trade to force men into certain occupations and keep the status quo. Free trade allows you to do what you want, enabling freedom. You don’t have to be materialistic; it just allows you to follow your values.
[It also enables you to be ass-raped by greedy rich fucks who want another Gulfstream Five. - ed.]
Im GenX. Our fortunate distinction is that we are too young to have had the SegregationJimCrowTheSouthCivilRightsMartyrs thing beat us over the head with, and old enough to remember a pre-Political Correctness America.
The problem is three-fold.
First, Joe Average White guy has been told he’s both “racist” (that championship belt now belongs to Blacks, hands down) and worthless. Unless he’s Brad Pitt or thereabouts. No heroes, constant PC groveling, and the like. It predictably generates a backlash and rage.
Second, the growth in consumer income has been almost exclusively in ever-cheaper electronic trash, mostly, not real income gains like housing, food, energy, etc. No “Affordable Family Formation” ala Sailer. This creates another huge beef — not being even able to be a Beta Chump provider, for most guys.
MADE WORSE BY AA/PC/Diversity preferences and tons of illegal aliens and the preferences for them.
Third, female hypergamy run wild accelerated by popular culture, which is female-gay dominated.
What is coming is a crack-up of infinite proportions. American weakness invites foreign adventurism where the US had kept the peace: the Korean peninsula, Western Pacific, Persian Gulf, North Africa, etc. Creating a mad scramble for resources as a global double-dip depression creates “lifeboat economics” and “Survivor” (vote others “off the island” to maintain prosperity/resources) politics.
Man, this is a masterpeice, and it’s something i’ve wanted to write about for a long time, and do i guess. But you said all i wanted to say elegantly and succintly. The Rebellion will be brutal but neccessary.
I’ve been telling people that we’re all slaves, but they don’t want to hear it. It’s called wage slavery, and it’s equivelant to serfdom. Our kings or lords are the owners of corporations. You can leave one, but like you said, it’s the same everywhere.
We in fact have no country(ies) – just lords. We need the masses to understand this and accept it. Loans for school was a lie to force us into wage slavery and capatalism has just been filled of Nazi inspired (they teach it in advertising classes) propaganda to keep you in the wage slavery. Since the nineties its been the same.
It’s why i live a simple life. i make enough to cover my expenses – i dont put into rrsp’s, i don’t have student loans, i don’t have massive amounts of debt – i don’t need cars and houses. It’s all to keep you a slave.
I love hard work, but i love the idea of freedom and being able to do what i want, and have the chance of success, but that chance died a long time ago. I’m wondering if it really ever existed.
Heathcliff January 19, 2011 at 5:17 pm
I can never decide if people today have too much or too little. On the one hand, wages have been stagnant since the mid 70s, on the other hand people want to quit their jobs because they cant blog at work.
That’s a symptom of a deeper problem – being micromanaged.
Maybe you should ask your granddad what job he did at your age. See if it wasn’t low paying, dirty, and dangerous.
My grandfather worked on a railroad. He didn’t get micromanaged there. So did my own dad for a while. He said he was treated pretty well. There simply weren’t enough available workers around at the time for management to casually mistreat.
Don’t buy the glamourized, Hollywood concept of work.
Working 70 plus hours a week doing system administration, manning a helpdesk line (Help, me I’ve got a hangnail and I can’t type!), and writing code at the same time permanently disabused me of that notion.
The law of supply and demand says that if a job didn’t suck then everyone would do it and it wouldn’t pay anything.
Doesn’t explain why the head honchess in my group used to leave at 3:30 every day to go horseback riding. It also wasn’t clear to me what value she added to the company that justified her six-figure income.
As for starving the system, that’s what Rand seems to advocate in Atlas Shrugged. I’m not sure it works in practice.
Rampant slacking brought the formerly mighty Soviet Union to its knees. And in the 21st century the system is more dependent on technology than ever. I suspect over the next 5 or 10 years we’ll see how well it responds to a critical mass of people acting in bad faith.
I think
Could have fooled me.
you just end up with a smaller but still shitty system.
Opinions are like assholes, everyone’s got one and they tend to stink. You have yet to give me a reason to think that you depart from this norm.
I don’t think that Hugo Chavez (or for that matter Barak Obama) are sitting around and worrying that they will be brought down by rampant slacking.
It doesn’t matter what they worry about any more than it matters that King Canute ordered the tide to stop coming in.
Top notch entry Ferd, you’re on a roll lately.
With that said, the most depressing part about all of this is that I completely agree with firepower (post #22, specifically). Indeed, there will be no great uprising or revolution of any kind any time soon, at least not in North America. I’m not sure if this is due to cultural/generational (re: nurture) factors, or if it’s because the majority of humans across all lands and epochs have always been pussies, as firepower’s Berlin Wall explanation would suggest. It is what it is.
Heathcliff sums it up best in subsequent comments. However dire we perceive our future to be (economic and otherwise), and however accurate those predictions may be, there’s absolutely no doubt we’ve lived comparatively luxurious lives so far. Fight Club is correct that we have in most respects been sold a bill of false hopes. But how is the average SWPL beta prole a proxy for a member of Fight Club? What I mean is that revolutionaries aren’t bred from affluent households, no matter how shitty the future may look. I’m sure there’s a great quote for that somewhere, but it’s not coming to me right now.
Brainwashed idiot at best, disillusioned pussy at worse. Or maybe it’s the other way around, I’m not really sure which is worse. Generation ZERO indeed.
There are people who are mad because they hate being in the corporations, there are others who are mad because they can’t get into them. I speak to the former, not the latter.
I don’t think the problem is the corporation, I think the problem is me.
I do think there are loads of people out there making a killing, call them captains of industry or whatever, and it isn’t right for them to profit like that, but I also do not think they engineered the beast, they just exist on its finer shores.
Culturally – I don’t think we can blame. I think work is good. Even work for a soulless corporation is good, if you have the soul.
I started consulting at a company I used to work for at the start of the recession and ran into an old colleague in the hall after a week or so there and I asked how he was. He just answered, “better in here than out there” and he smiled like he really meant it. Millions of unemployed people who can’t find work – that’s worse, it really is.
I always think of that guy now when I see someone get angry about the soulless corporation or their job. It’s work. It’s better than not work, just like warm is better than cold, full is better than hungry. Think a cubicle is soulless? Try an alley under a cardboard blanket, at night. No, really, before you scoff your answer and get mad at me for pontificating: pick up, head to the alley and write me back tomorrow.
Work is good. Yeah, too much of the wrong work is bad, but work is good. Often it isn’t good now, or in 2 or 5 years, but in 8, 12 or 15, you can see that it actually did go somewhere over the long run that was not easily measurable – you are just stuck in the day to day, where you can’t measure. Doctors can measure the value of their work in inches, feet and yards. That’s a privilege. We cannot all be doctors. At a corporation, you may not be able to measure it in miles, but the value is still there, usually.
And if you really truly are totally certain that 3 and 6 years in it will be the same, and worthless, then what is the point complaining? What holds you down?
We need to get by with less. We need to buy less, with more money that we have, and less money that we borrow. I’m guilty. We need to sublimate our work into some kind of meaning in life. We should raise people with an expectation of at least a measure of serendipity in their careers, rather than an unattainable standard of career planning.
No one is trapped in a dead end corporate job by the corporation that employs them.
Life choices did that. Hate the life choices. Hate the culture and peer pressure that made you succumb to them. Take responsibility for your role in making the choices. Accept that it may take years to dig out. Then, if you are REALLY a believer, plan your exit strategy and work on it, maybe for years, but keep up the faith and hope that when you pay your dues, you can move on and do what you really want. Watch out – distractions will rise on every side to set you back, often in the form of a fine member of the opposite gender.
Go on a “no complaints about the company” patch. Drop the complaints to 1/day, then 1/week, then 1/month, whatever – point is, keep it positive and focus on your goal. Be positive so you can be happy. Your negativity doesn’t help or change anything. Be so positive that when your dues are paid and you make your exit down the road, everyone will be surprised, because they thought you were happy – and they’ll be right, you were, but more important than happy, you were a believer who believed in himself and believed himself out of what he hated and into what he loves.
“Firepower said:
if becoming rich were so easy, would not everyone be doing it?”
Game works, but not everyone uses it. Why? Idiots, I guess. Maybe they just don’t want to believe it can work; believing that might damage the pretty lies they tell themselves. Maybe they’re afraid if they try and fail, everyone will know they’re a failure; better to not try. Fuck if I know. I’m not their shrink.
Men have been making their fortune for millennia in all the same ways. It’s not a hard formula learn, just tedious to execute well. And it requires a bit of imagination. But most people have what it takes; they just prefer the easy, predictable path of employment with the government or a large company. And then habits set in.
Thanks for the linkage.
Yeah, that Tyler Durden speech was great.
I’m honestly considering moving to Europe.. If only it wasnt so hard to work in the EU without being a national.
Maybe I could trick some young Polish girl to marry me and become a national that way….
Cool story… not gonna happen
“Game works, but not everyone uses it. Why? Idiots, I guess.”
No, many people just don’t want anything to do with today’s flock of hypergamous women. Some of us decided that learning manipulation to bed sluts isn’t worth the trouble.
I’m selling out for the $$$. The scientific establishment isn’t any more honorable than corporate America, so why not jump ship and make some money?
“If only it wasnt so hard to work in the EU without being a national.”
Look at various countries’ immigration/work visa websites and notice the commonalities that everyone wants but are in short supply. There are common skillsets that can land you a good to great job in any city or town in the world, if you have the gumption to get one (or two).
An interesting example of how a person customized his lifestyle to suit his desires is the noted security vulnerability researcher/USCG Master Mariner’s licensed yacht deliverer “Moxie Marlinspike.” Google him.
Sure he’s very exceptional in terms of his abilities, but he’s a fucking inspiring example of what a motivated individual can do if he’s willing to put the time and effort into achieving his dreams.
Ferd: You should check out Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work. It’s unlikely and implausable, but unlike most dreary leftist “utopias” it’s a beautiful vision to keep in the back of your mind.
Black’s other stuff is great too — he’s an anarchist who attacks libertarianism and traditional leftism from the “lunatic fringe,” but unlike most self-professed “anarchists” he doesn’t cower before PC/feminism and he knows how to write.
Squared: What I mean is that revolutionaries aren’t bred from affluent households, no matter how shitty the future may look.
Marx? Son of a lawyer, married the daughter of a Prussian baron.
Engels? Son of a factory owner, inherited the family business after his father’s death.
Lenin? Son of a high-ranking official in the Tsarist civil service.
Che? Son of an educated bourgeois leftist — a lawyer, IIRC, although Wikipedia doesn’t say.
For better or worse, most modern revolutions begin with a disaffected intelligentsia. The average member of the masses shows up for a riot or two during the endgame, then submits to whoever comes out on top — usually (Stalin, Mao) a cunning, ambitious prole without any squeamishness about killing the upper-class intellectuals once they start to get in his way.
IMO, as obnoxious as the present system is, the evidence of history is the best possible argument against “revolutionary” solutions and for a strategy of self-improvement and personal withdrawal. You’re a lot less likely to end up in front of a firing squad that way.
But yeah, the real problem is finding a way past the opposing alternatives of “brainwashed idiot” and “disillusioned pussy.” The challenge for the average recovering SWPL/beta is to overcome his comfortable, media-fried suburban drone upbringing and develop the discipline and inner strength to carve out a space of freedom for himself. I may know intellectually that the system is rigged, but why bother? White-flour pasta’s only 99 cents a box and fifteen bucks will get me all my favorite TV shows on Netflix…
So you’re telling me that corporate espionage of their employees is different than state espionage of their citizens? – ed.
Yes, and when your boss puts up a sign that says “Arbeit Macht Frei” and tries to get you to step into a funny shower, you can compare him to the Big H – otherwise, it just weakens your point, insofar as you have one, other than you’re unhappy with the modern world. Yeah, corporate espionage is wrong – it ain’t Hitler or Stalin.
KB, fangs bared, snarls:
So really, all corporations have to do to be “good” is engineer a depression. Then all corporations(that created the depression) are good cause they “supply”(that is limit the supply) a job.
Always it gets down to one of you snarling and saying “Slave should be grateful slave not starve to death! Slave should be grateful Master let slave LIVE! Now work harder SLAVE! Or Master fire you and destroy your life!”
Then you talk about being better than Soviet Russia.
In America, all it takes to be Number One,
is to be born your father’s son!
-A tribute to George Bush the II
Yeah, being born is real tedious, and “difficult to execute”.
January 19, 2011 at 2:10 pm #23
No. Your “generation ZERO†will take no action. They’ve proven themselves incapable. If to “push your decrepit, corrupt empire into its grave†means to continue playing COD while the house burns around you, then – yes.
[Inaction in a system that requires action to survive works just as well. - ed.]
I counter that Russian prisoners of war in WW2 Nazi deathcamps as slaveworkers, engaging in work slowdowns as sabotage were not as effective as General Zhukov’s Russian armies grinding millions of German soldiers into ground beef.
One takes eons, the other – months.
John McCain “withholding intelligence” from his hosts at the Hanoi Hilton was not as effective weapon as his bombing runs as a Navy pilot.
Passive resistance is what the slave uses – not the free man.
Firepower wrote :
I counter that Russian prisoners of war in WW2 Nazi deathcamps as slaveworkers, engaging in work slowdowns as sabotage were not as effective as General Zhukov’s Russian armies grinding millions of German soldiers into ground beef.
Were the Russian POWs a vital component of the Nazi supply chain? I’m inclined to doubt it.
Passive resistance is what the slave uses – not the free man.
How about guerrilla warfare then?
Only if you think it worked out well for Viet Cong, or against Redcoats.
You’re getting off topic. The point is: active combat accomplishes MORE than passive acts.
Firepower wrote:
Only if you think it worked out well for Viet Cong, or against Redcoats.
Obviously it did. The only Americans in Vietnam now are expats and tourists. The same is true for the Brits in America.
You’re getting off topic.
No, I’m not; you’re evading my question. Here it is again: were the Russian POWs a vital component of the Nazi supply chain? If they weren’t, that was the reason why they didn’t accomplish much against the Nazis. So your example fails.
The point is: active combat accomplishes MORE than passive acts.
And my point is that what the action is directed against is much more important than whether it’s labeled “active” or “passive”. The front-line combat you’re so impressed by is rarely seen in modern wars. It’s been replaced by guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and other actions that leave the enemy without a target to hit.
I posted this comment over at Gaming my Wife so I’m probably breaking some sort of blog etiquette by reposting it but here goes.
With a historical long view, why do people work?
1. So I don’t starve.
2. So my family will not starve.
3. Because there is a guy with a whip standing behind me.
If none of those motivating factors is at work then it falls to consumerism. Consumerism does not motivate as well as the three above, thus the very modern idea that a job needs to be fulfilling.
If you only have X, then you will be successful.
That X factor has changed over time from acrage=>factory job=>union card=>college degree=>government job. Having anything guarantee success is a tenuous proposition and subject to change. White collar workers are feeling the pain factory workers felt 20 years ago. We are now in the government job phase and that will pass on as well.
Basically this is a fomentation – and not necessarily articulation – of a decades old rant, and agreed upon by most here who have never had to dig out bits of corn from cow feces just to survive.
Your nihilism, and your anger because of it, is nothing more than evidence that you are still very much incubated in the system you despise. You have presumed a degree of entitlement, of which there is none, for anything.
Only in such a time of boon and prosperity does such absurd illusions of what ought to be, propagated by individuals devoid of individual perception and ratiocination alienated from the chill of death and who have replaced the urgency to survive with boredom, i.e. modern society, lead to disenfranchisement and rage by those who realized they were following the herd.
Is this place dysfunctional? Yes. Does it have redeemable value? Also, yes.
You just wish that you were that important. You’re not! You’re a bunch of meaningless gutter snipes wallowing in your own inability to cope with life. Generation 0 is an appropriate term for you self-deluded idiots. A big, fat 0.
My birth year is ’44 – we’re the ones who brought your Reagan and everything else you wish you could be but can’t because you’re so busy thinking you’re going to be important someday.
Grow up, Charles.
“My birth year is ’44 – we’re the ones who brought your Reagan…”
The insipid battle cry of a decadent, dying, and disgraceful generation.
There’s less jobs and the few who exist requiere to sell your soul.
Yeah, those prospects are fucking great! Hah!
We are the ones raised when there’s no shame in basking on the naked greed that fuels the fight for spoils that are modern politics. And trust me, most of us will have no issue in letting the beast starve and with it, the rotten fucks that brought us to this mess.
Congrats, you got my true meaning. How ironic.
rly? Ya think?
Um. What is this thing that “the action is directed against” – and what makes this “thing” most important.
And in America, action of any kind is replaced by Skins, COD – and forum squabblers jousting at well-crafted points with obtuse arguments merely for the sake of arguing.
fb, you can always be replaced by a subcon. well you probably have. what are tfh and ad about.
So, Brandon, YOU’RE generation’s accomplishments – and plans – are what…exactly?
Going Galt, so to speak, is a them made absurd by Randians but it has a certain weight to it.
Ferdinand, on the topic of societal level popular scams that keep everyone on their own respective levels running around in hamster wheels for other people:
Have you ever watched “Century of the Self”
If not I highly recommend it – can’t hold a gun to your forehead and make you, but I will strongly recommend it.
A 4 part BBC mini-series by Adam Curtis, it’s several years old, very well researched, the middle two episodes cover the years closest to the 1950s, but all 4 are valuable watching.
The interviews alone are worth watching – anyone out there who thinks they have a clue as to many of the elements that contributed to the sort of psychological swamp that American culture sits in now, and hasn’t yet seen this series, may not have a clear idea of what he’s talking about. Many little interesting tidbits are dropped in it.
I could have the links wrong, but try
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6718420906413643126
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-678466363224520614
I won’t list the rest of the episodes, but leave it as an exercise to the interested reader.
@Kamal:
I saw that video before. I concede that it had a provocative hypothesis, but its aggressive reductionism (that all of modern society has been shaped by the results of a mid-century psychological experiment) made its case absurd. I stopped watching after he claimed Reaganism was caused by Mutually Assured Destruction.
As we said in Oki, “quit beatin’ it” and gimmie part 2!
Ferd, Sure, get angry, complain. Avoid jobs that insult your dignity. Denounce the massive mistakes of earlier generations. I’d say we need more of this, not less.
But bottom line: Be adaptive in your life choices. You can still win in spite of the stagnation and decay.
Good read, but nothing new here. The West will groan on long after Generation Y, or Zero, etc.
T. S. Eliot and his ilk thought the same about their generation, as have many others before and after (i.e., most of the 1960s generation have become conservatives); from “The Hollow Men” by Eliot:
“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
If you are familiar with 4chan and Anonymous, you will quickly recognize the familiar cries of rejected and neglected young beta males. The kind of filth they push on their boards has no redeeming qualities: child pornography, gore, mutilation, threats, trolling, bestiality, and other attempts to piss someone off.
Anonymous (associated with being “forever alone”) is mostly comprised of young men in high school or college that has retreated from the real world into their domain of video games and pornography. Most have never had a girlfriend. They want nothing to do with civilized society. Their recent antics of DDOSing Mastercard, Visa, and Paypal, along with trolling various websites like youtube and facebook, only show their contempt at a society that does not value young men.
You want to see young men pissed off and with nothing to lose? Go to 4chan and see what the beginnings of the Beta Revolution look like. It isn’t pretty.
I’m reading this very late after it was posted, but this is one hell of a post Ferdinand, great work. I think now, perhaps more than ever in my life, I can understand how someone could start a book,
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
FB: Why can’t you just search for one on Ebay at work?
D: Ferd, our supervisors monitor our Internet usage. The company fired a whole bunch of people after examining the cookies on their browser and seeing that they were visiting sites they weren’t supposed to be visiting.
FB: They check your COOKIES?
«D: Oh yeah. They’ve got a whole IT department who gets paid to read our emails and do things like that.
FB: They read your emails? And you let them do that?
D: Their equipment, their time. It’s even spelled out in our contracts. They’re allowed to fire us for misusing our Internet access and we can’t do anything about it.»
I am amused by the outrage of younger people who think that being unable to post things on eBay at work is cruel. In the past strikes were done over the number of 5 minute toilet breaks allowed in a day. Because every 5 minute toilet break is some stupid lazy parasite trying to steal time paid for by their employer. Some workers in some jobs have taken to wearing diapers to reduce toilet breaks below the permitted quota. Or much worse, as in “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair.
But for a while the really nasty jobs where workers are treated like truly disposable cattle tended to be done by docile silent illegal immigrants, so even if now thanks to the recession citizens are competing vigorously for them:
http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-allentown-amazon-complaints-20110917,0,7937001,full.story
One little details in the above article that is not mentioned is that the ISS managers may be so keen to “write up” employees because if an employee is fired for cause they have no right to unemployment insurance payouts, and these are (indirectly) charged to employers, so the more employees are fired for cause the more ISS saves.
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.
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