The chief evildoer in Squid Game 2 looks very much like Elon Musk. It’s not a spoiler because the identity of the evildoer is known to the audience from the start.

The season ended on a scene of terrible carnage orchestrated by this evildoer, and now I feel great hostility even to Musk’s good and important comments on X.

Yes, I’m very impressionable.

The ascent of the squinting cohort of grim moral fanatics to previously unscaled heights of global power coincides with the descent of mass-democracy to previously unimagined depths of gluttonous corruption. . . Democracy’s relentless trend to degeneration presents an implicit case for reaction.

– Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment

Between the hectoring ideological apparatus and the entitled masses, there’s no off-ramp. We are doomed to be trapped in the dysfunction they create. The journey we have collectively traveled in the past 500 years inevitably leads to the current moment with its radical unfreedom. We have painted ourselves into a dismal corner, and there’s no way to paint it over.

All that’s left is a leap to a new stage of the evolution. It’s unnecessary that everybody should evolve at once. Only a few people need to do it. They’ll effectuate a jump into a new species, and that new species will create a completely different road instead of the messed-up one we are on. That evolution will be achieved through technology, possibly Elon Musk’s Neuralink being implanted into some people’s brains.

Yes, this is dumb. But nobody has suggested an alternative beyond trying to legislate away centuries of racial guilt, as if there were a huge difference between legislating away the unease caused by the guilt and the guilt itself.

If you claim that you are not a racist person (or, at least, that you’re committed to working your ass off not to be one—which is really the best that any of us can promise), then you must believe that people are fundamentally born equal. So if that’s true, then in a vacuum, factors like skin color should have no effect on anyone’s success. Right? And therefore, if you really believe that all people are created equal, then when you see that drastic racial inequalities exist in the real world, the only thing that you could possibly conclude is that some external force is holding certain people back. Like…racism. Right? So congratulations! You believe in racism! Unless you don’t actually think that people are born equal. And if you don’t believe that people are born equal, then you’re a fucking racist.

– Lindy West, “A Complete Guide to Hister Racism”

This is beyond magical thinking. This is a system of belief that requires you to disregard the evidence of human multiplicity that you observe every minute of every day. Believing in the Tooth Fairy is less nuts than this because not every interaction with another human being offers decisive evidence that there is no Tooth Fairy. Yet absolutely any form of engagement with humans or any part of human culture does definitively and exhaustively demonstrate that we are not born equal in a way that conditions our “success.” Nick Land calls the state in which Lindy West placed herself to write the quoted article “sheer Gnostic delirium: a commitment beyond all evidence to the existence of a true and good world veiled by appearances.”

That there is some poor, deluded Lindy West somewhere wouldn’t be important or interesting to discuss. But the quoted belief is now the foundation of a massive quantity of legislation defining much of our lives. People lose their jobs, are hounded out of productive existence, demonetized and demonized for doubting that Lindy’s Gnostic delirium is absolutely, undeniably true.

But that’s not enough. We are dismantling the biggest achievements of our civilization to keep alive the fantasy that anybody can be anything they want. Land wrote before gender theory became enshrined next to disparate impact but we are now seeing how the next stage of the delirium – men can be women can be men can be both – has become not only normalized but shrilly, aggressively dominant.

Falsifying the present, looting the future, sacralizing grievances – be they of the dominant Left or the dissident Right – this is what democracy does. Says Land, because I’m still retelling his book The Dark Enlightenment and will continue to do so in the next post.

Nothing conforms more exactly to the “general will” than the legislative abolition of reality.

Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment

It’s true, isn’t it? We’ve seen very dramatic examples of this with transgenderism, BLM, “hate crimes.” An even bigger example is the enshrinement of democracy as the most virtuous pinnacle of societal organization. Democracy functions on the basis of bribing the howling, desiring masses by promising to feed their ever-growing appetites. “I’ll abolish taxes on tips!” – “Me, too! I’ll abolish them even harder!” Vote for me today, and I’ll let you devour tomorrow.

This is why democracy is intimately hostile to civilization. Civilization means depriving yourself today to invest in tomorrow. Democracy means robbing tomorrow to win today. Any civilizational project involves privileging the future. It’s not “gimme” but “I give this to the future.”

People like to be flattered. They love their appetites. Nothing flatters them more than having their appetites consecrated as political ideals. “Take away from him and give it to me” sounds kind of shabby. But if you call it “social justice” or “progress”, this immediately elevates you from a primitive coveter to a political being. Democracy, thus, is by its nature progressive. Appetite is the opposite of stasis. Feeding and glorifying the appetite is the opposite of conserving.

Unless it’s unclear from the above quote, I’m retelling Nick Land’s book The Dark Enlightenment. For my own part, I want to add that there were two famous Soviet sci-fi and fantasy authors, the Brothers Strugatsky. In one of their novels, Socialist scientists are trying to create a new type of human being. This individual, called “A Completely Satisfied Human” would have all his needs satisfied. The Socialist scientists in the book reasoned that, since this new human wouldn’t have to waste time or energy on satisfying his needs, he’d start creating. His creative capacity would be unleashed and he’d regale the world with extraordinary intellectual and artistic bounties.

When the Completely Satisfied Human was finally activated, though, he evinced zero interest in creating or giving. Instead, he manifested himself as a huge, desiring maw of need, devoured every material object in the vicinity, cocooned himself in his possessions, and tried to take ownership of time itself.

Yes, Soviet authors had a clear political reason to condemn complete satisfaction of needs. This doesn’t mean we don’t have political reasons to turn it into our deity.

More to follow.

We watched the animated movie Scrooge (2022) as our New Year’s activity, and while the songs are nice and actors have beautiful singing voices, the visual effects are so overwhelming that they are almost epilepsy-inducing. Whoever belongs to the intended audience of over-stimulated screen victims, I feel bad for them. As it is, I had to look away for at least 70% of the movie.

Half of the population of Dickensian London in this movie is black and at least a third is severely obese.

A timeless, beautiful story was drowned in opulent, overstuffed, insistent self-obsession.

The Patient’s Secret by the bestselling Canadian author is the best mystery I have read in years, and that’s saying a lot because I read a crapton of them. The novel has twists even I didn’t anticipate, and at this point I usually anticipate all of them.

Reading a huge number of suburban murder dramas like this one helps one notice that they are imbued with the anxiety over who deserves to belong to the shrinking middle class and who doesn’t. It’s very easy to fall out of it but increasingly hard to claw your way back in. And it isn’t about justice or fairness. If you can wear a daily corset of self-control and self-monitoring, you have a chance. If you want to indulge yourself and avoid boundaries, you will be forever excluded. These popular bestsellers are rulebooks for living in fluidity.

Even in Squid Game 2, there’s a trans character who is, of course, absolutely saintly. One can’t hide from this crap anywhere.

In 1979, Rhodesia elected its first black Prime Minister, Bishop Muzorewa. The Carter administration branded him a “neo fascist” because he was politically centrist. Instead, Carter wanted the bloodthirsty Mugabe to be installed. Unlike most other things, Carter was successful at this goal, and Mugabe took control of the country.

What I find instructive in this story is that leftists don’t learn new tricks. Decades go by, and their only argument is that everybody who disagrees with them is a racist and a fascist. That they managed to get such cultural ascendance on nothing but name-calling and claims of deep sensitivity is shocking.

See? I told you. They want to play the squid game, poor bastards. And the saddest thing is that this dude is like the flabby 60-year-old in season 2. With these intellectual limitations, poor verbal skills, and looking 20 years older than his actual age, he’s not all that competitive. But he’s very sure he is precisely because the country he scoffs at provided him with opportunities. And in return, he wants to throw it onto a garbage heap.