Closing Paths

How could reprogramming organic status around a centralized beast pillar go wrong?

Dale Stephanos, John Harvard statue, 2024

Juggling a few themes on this Substack stretches them and lets them fill out organically. Internet writing is liberating because it’s relatively spontaneous. Ideas can be developed over multiple posts, sometimes in unexpected ways. And relationships between themes come out that weren’t obvious at first. Reality is interrelated. The cultural big picture shapes personal socialization via human nature and technological frames. Onset of Clown World → cavalcade of NPCs behaviors → reflections on socialization and status. All through the personal and social history lenses.

Short bursts with different themes fit this Substack’s goal of practical applicability. The Band is where more long speculative stuff appears. And it will. Some subjects are inherently long and complicated. But smaller fragments of bigger ideas are easy to personalize. Toss out whatever is disagreeable and keep any useful insights. It’s why some readers are comfortable here despite disliking my world view or personality.

Switching between angles also exposes links that hold the House of Lies together. The profound importance of screens being one obvious example. And things that weren’t so obvious at the time. Transformational vectors presented as just the way things are. Like the socio-cultural suicide I’ve been calling everyone goes to college. Well, not literally everyone, but nearing 50% and aiming for more changes the nature of an intellectual training ground.

Consider the difference between by the fruits and word magic. One is what happened. The other is a ball of incoherent statements that all feel good emotionally despite being intrinsically self-contradictory. Like pretending college is a) for high book smart aptitude and b) anyone can pretty much go. Both can’t be true. Yet there’s no discussion from anyone involved. Seriously. Find one stakeholder addressing this mutual exclusion. The only way it is viable is if we act like humans are perfectly interchangeable. But the very existence of [college] as a category is based on them not being. Word magic. While by the fruits, the pretence of human fungibility has destroyed what intellectual credibility was there.

Set aside the naked idiocy of using scholarly training in specialized fields as a form of general 21st-century workplace preparedness [it’s getting worse]. On the surface it’s too stupid to consider. Yet it morphed into a vast, bloated, directionless debt and ideology machine considered somehow essential. Another example of how socio-culture is centralized but not centrally planned. Things bubble up organically, but are then jacked, twisted, inverted, grotesquely bloated, then raised beyond ever questioning. On an individual level, walk away. Collectively, this has to collapse under its own waste and uselessness before something effective could be tried.

Downstream from Reality

This is obviously a huge topic and beyond a post. So stay with socialization consequences through an NUC frame. Think about what indicators connote social status in that context and how they change. Speaking generally, since even the most socially successful will be hated by someone. What makes it complicated is that status in any setting depends on contextuals - perhaps more than intrinsic characteristics like the SSH. What brings high status on a fight team is different from a group of elderly birders. Or little kids. Or intellectuals. Or an extended family. Or a clinic. And so forth.

Vintage Marvel Captain America poster, 1974

The basic idea isn’t complicated. Any social structure has defining norms and values. What makes it fuzzier is the different factors making these up. Some are large cultural assumptions that are fairly constant across contexts within the culture. Some are task or purpose specific. Some are personal qualities of individual participants that impact group microcultures. Status in a group = realization of its norms and values.

But since norms and values are composites of different things, the specific status-yeilding combinations also vary. The best player on a team and its charismatic vocal leader are both highly regarded. Exactly how in relation to each other depends on them and the team. Degrees of realization of norms and values.

John F. Clymer, Up River, oil on Masonite, before 1989

SSH profiles have different levels of average mass appeal, as any cluster of traits does. On the whole, Alphas are more attractive and more valued than Deltas. These impact relative status within any grouping. Gamma repulsiveness and Alpha appeal hold anywhere. Where their social status limits come in is when the hierarchical group is related to other aspects of the society at large.

Charles Edouard Edmond Delort, Les Noces, Fontainebleau, before 1895, oil on canvas

Gammas may be repulsive, but a Gamma on the Lakers will have more public social clout than the Alpha in the D&D club.

Robert Alexander Hillingford, The Morning of Waterloo, 1896, oil on canvas

It’s a gestalt.

Everyone goes to college was a change from organic culture social patterns to huge centralized beast operations. And changing social patterns introduce new status indices. This was obvious in 1990. There always was a discrepancy between what was cool among kids and what was enviable among adults. Basic responsibilities of adult life ensures that. But there was a developmental continuum when the culture is organic. The discrepancy between what is appealing, cool, prestigious, admirable, etc. in [everyone goes to college] and organic childhood or adulthood is far greater than those two with each other.

Consider the societal impact of linking “success” to a single inverted system of producing indoctrinated chit wielders for a de-industrialized Ponzi scheme. Suddenly, vast socio-cultural power was conferred on a new dysgenic network of beast institutional gate keepers. Letters of reference. Grades. “Leadership” as judged by sub-midwit “educators”.

Norman Rockwell, Study for Oil's First Century, pencil drawing on paper for the cover of the American Petroleum Institute Quarterly Centennial Issue, 195

Compare this with organic pathways into adulthood. [Good at school] wasn’t really even considered. Because the slackers actually were right. It’s arbitrary. And we’ve since learned most of the fables we were taught collapse under the slightest honest historical scrutiny. Which really didn’t matter when other merit-based paths led more directly to a respectable future.

Organic success is organic. Real in the appeal of its outcomes and produce. Eucivic traits like initiative, resoursefulness, and perspicacity, are directly rewarded. And socio-economic status correlates to qualities that people find intrinsically admirable.

The [everyone goes to college] sycophant train rewards very different traits. Suppression of individuality, recitation of nonsense for seal treats, attracting favorable reactions from low-wattage sociopaths, arbitrary hoop-jumping. Basically an aptitude for lickspittling up a meretricious pseudo-hierarchy. Anecdotal, but the average t-levels between the NUC guys and the SBC boys were significant.¹ Obviously there were exceptions. And lots of guys parlied collegiate nonsense into productive lives. It’s the general social landscape that we had to conform to. To say nothing of the continual enstupiding and ideological priorities that followed admissions bloat and Clown control.

I couldn’t stand that world outside of some social stuff and didn’t spin it into the beast entrees I was supposed to. The lasting lesson - not caring about idiot mass opinion is equal parts armor, empowerment, and autonomy. Don’t take my word for it. Tally up the number of times you compromised or were pressured to because [someone else thought…]. I don’t know if protective detachment can be consciously learned. Mine seems to be an organic defense mechanism that emerged in response to circumstances. But it can be cultivated. In an inverted world where conventional wisdom is personally and socially toxic, it’s invaluable.

Vincent van Gogh after Gustave Doré, Prisoners Exercising or Prisoners' Round, 1890, oil on canvas, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

Of course, by the fruits, the House of Lies is aimed at the destruction of human dignity. It’s a material control structure, but metaphysical in origin, ivy optional. And once it establishes a centralized gate like EGtC, alternative positive, pro-social paths are obscured. Getting off the SBC train didn’t suddenly light up viable, sustainable life alternatives that didn’t involve substituting House of Lies values for my own. Which turned out to be less of a problem than it seemed in the short term. The NUC collapse was underway, and the time-biding and deferral of adulthood in the last post was right there. Why not extend the fun side of college without the rest?

The sociological answer has been obvious for a while. But the early Clown era personal one was very different.

1. In the before times, before the ascendance of amorphous blob physiques, young men displayed a much wider range of masculinity from adolescence. Think scale of 1-10 instead of 1-2. Narrowing paths. The more society rewarded beast chit huffing, the less organic variety in men.