#450:

In life, it is vital to take things as they are, otherwise you do not interact with the world, but with an illusion created by your own thoughts and desires and fears. An illusion world is finished, your mind made every part of it, so it holds nothing you didn't put in there, with nothing new ever being able to enter. But the real world is unfinished, and it shows its true form via the parts that exist outside your knowledge structures, therefore, the test of true contact is simple: can reality surprise you? When nothing surprises you anymore, you have stopped looking at the world, and started living in your engineered model of it.

This is made most clear with people. By nature, you see others for their actions, so to you they are only ever what they have been, and this finishes them, as they harden into a piece of your illusion world. But people as they have been are only what they have shown you so far, because people are and always will be unfinished, therefore, to take someone as they are is to love them for what they might one day become.

Now that the dust has settled, the NL/Dan situation touches on many interesting points. I will try to avoid psychoanalyzing either of them, or assuming much about their friendship, since I don't have information on it. It is unfortunate and a mistake that NL chose to make the private friendship status public, since something private becoming public without much context just damages society, but I guess he thought it necessary. I will also not go into the details of the event itself, I have no particular sympathy for the US government, as previously stated, and Brazilian elections are in exactly seven days and there are huge issues regarding unwelcome US interference in it and the American advance in Latin America more broadly. I also do not have positive experience dealing with American companies in Brazil.

Because I like driving a lot, I had a subscription for a company called "Sem Parar," which allows you to go through toll booths without having to stop. You have a chip in the front window of your car and the chip automatically identifies it and opens up the toll booth gate so you can go through without having to wait. After I finished It Follows I stopped driving around as much since I didn't need any more material for it, but then I started getting bogus charges for toll booths I couldn't have possibly driven through. I'm not using this service anymore, I should cancel, and at that point I had 400BRL in incorrect charges. So I tried to cancel and get those charges zeroed out at the same time, but it proved impossible, they created some kind of labyrinth of fucking their customers in the ass where, if you have incorrect charges, you can only challenge them through their automated system, but it doesn't actually accept your challenges, so I had no real recourse after calling like three different numbers and getting sent around from department to department without any real solution. After days of this I had enough and gave in, paid the 400BRL and tried to cancel normally. This, again, sent me into another fuck you labyrinth where I had to spend an hour on the phone only for them to hang up on me, FIVE times! And to complain about this, you have to call some regulatory agency that is just as bureaucratic and annoying to deal with, and I'm like, oh my God, I'm never going to be able to cancel this shit, and I'm going to keep being charged like this forever. Luckily, eventually I found a way out of it and was able to cancel. Anyway, it was a really bad experience, and that's generally the kind of experience I have with American companies here in Brazil, they tend to be very scammy and hard to deal with. But according to Duke of Qin's point linked above, that's America, that's the decaying empire, and a decaying empire, as it is decaying, starts to scam its vassals. So if you have to be under some empire, which you have to as the weaker country, you should not choose the decaying empire, you should choose the rising empire, which is China. Ideally, you shouldn't choose between them, you should just deal with each of them smartly and cleverly so you gain as much as possible from both. I don't believe in democracy anymore but I am voting for Renan Santos in the coming election because, on top of having retweeted me once (we were talking about Yarvin), he clearly has the right vision on this issue as well as many others. He and his party aren't going to win at all, but I feel compelled to actually wake up early and go vote to show some support at least. In any case, all of this to say, I have no particular positive opinions on the US government nor its army, I hope the point is clear.

One can also consider the possibility that NL/Dan did this intentionally, as some kind of storyline. There's this trend, which has only been increasing in power over the past decade, where because most people are now atomized and kind of lonely, what confers the most status in the eyes of the young is just having friends, so the kind of content that grows and gets popular online, a lot of it is actually just groups of friends hanging out and doing things together. I had this realization the other day watching @bunchoffriends and then I saw another influencer later mention this same idea, and it tracks too with the rise of friendslop, how many streamers do group content, and so on. You can show people being friendly together and that gets a lot of attention, but you can also show friendships being broken apart, that's drama and it's also popular. Dan is certainly no stranger to such trickery, and NL... well, NL presents as this wholesome uwu kind of character and maybe it's what part of him truly is, but you don't get to be this good at what you do without being some kind of twisted cyclepath in one way or another, so the argument here would be, if you look at the influencer landscape today, what's getting the most attention? That's probably Clavicular (who by the way mostly does streams hanging out with other people). And how exactly does he get his attention? As far as I remember, he ran over someone and was going to be arrested, he got someone pregnant, actually at this point he got like five girls pregnant supposedly, and then the latest is he drugged and raped someone and is going to be arrested. So Clavicular gets popular by almost being arrested, that's what generates drama and makes people say his name. All of these events are obviously fake, in the sense that they're orchestrated by him or his handlers, but they feel real enough that most people, who hate him due to his presentation as a pretty spoiled brat, get engaged because he's about to get what's coming to him. So if I'm an influencer and I'm looking at this landscape, I'm thinking about how to get most people to say my name, and then in NL's case he starts with the cruise, where Dan is also involved coincidentally, which is doing something so out there and so out of character that it catches people by surprise, it feels real, you can call it and actually book it and pay for it, and then it gets conveniently cancelled. That goes a little viral, lots of people are saying NL's name, and so they concoct another powerful storyline, this one, which also feels pretty real. Then the rest of the storyline is maybe NL and Dan slowly getting back together and making up? I don't know if that would get any attention however, it would be wholesome though, and I prefer such an evil plan being the actual case I guess because it'd make me lose respect for both of them less. But yes, the likelihood that this is the case is extremely low, I just can't not consider it as a possibility.

But now, assuming it's real, to get to the point I finally want to make, using the event only as an illustration of it, I need to speak about the more important problem of democracy, and I will do so through Yarvin, who makes a great point in the podcasts below about the function and purpose of political systems, including our own:

The introductory textbook on political science I always recommend is a book called The Machiavellians by James Burnham. It's a great survey of something called the Italian school of political science, writing mainly around the turn of the last century and chiefly featuring writers like Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, who was also very influential in the development of statistics. Real giants. Mosca in particular is, I would say, in some ways the unsung Darwin of political science. His concept of the political formula is basically this: the political formula is that element of the mythos which makes people believe that the government is good, that power is good and right. If you're an Egyptian peasant: "Why do I love the Pharaoh? I love the Pharaoh because the Pharaoh is the son of the sun, and if the Pharaoh is displeased, the sun will go out." That's a political formula. We have much more modern ones now, and most of the political formulas of today make the individual feel powerful and important. They make you feel like you matter, you're changing the world, you have an impact, you care. All of these words are basically euphemisms for: you're a powerful person, you mean something, you matter. So essentially the political formula of today boils down to this: you matter because you support the government.

The other goal [of democracy], which is also very important to a lot of people, is simply to make people feel that they're in charge, giving them the feeling of importance they get from democracy. That feeling of importance is very emotionally dear to a lot of people. If you told someone they would lose the right to vote, for instance, they would not calculate it in terms of: "I'm losing the right to vote. Therefore, my contribution to the wisdom of crowds will no longer be heard. Therefore, the crowd will be slightly less wise. Therefore, I will be governed slightly worse." Nobody thinks that. Instead, they think: "Oh, I'm losing my right to vote. I'm losing my power. I'm losing the sense of power that this gave me. Even though my power is negligible in an overall game-theoretic sense, it gives me a sense of importance that I really value as a human being. My sense of importance has been taken from me. I feel castrated." One of the things you have to acknowledge is that democracy feeds this human drive for power, which is a very important and very neglected part of human psychology. People want to feel important. They want to feel like they matter. [...] So they really crave power, or at least the feeling of power, because no one craves a thing; they crave the feeling of the thing.

The primary problem of democracy is that it doesn't quite work as advertised, and if you live in Brazil as I do this is obscenely more clear as time passes, but a secondary problem is that it needs the entirety of society to be politically activated. The current system's political formula justifies itself by making every individual feel powerful, but to actually go about that the theatre has to feel real enough, which means that people have to have opinions about issues and they have to be psyopped into believing one thing or another, this means everyone has to be politicized for the system to keep functioning, and the democratic system optimizes for stability over everything else, which works in times of plenty but doesn't in other times, and as we are now living in said other times (maybe AI will fix this), the more dysfunctional the system gets the more this total politicization accelerates as it requires more democratic energy to stabilize itself. In such times, it is important then to look at reality, it is obvious that you are not powerful, that you have no say in anything, that none of it actually matters in the same way that nothing that you have no control over truly matters since you can't affect it. And if this is the case, should one end friendships over politics? No, that's clearly profoundly retarded, because you're ending something real over something fake, trading the scarcest and most precious bond for the feeling of power that isn't real.