Thank you for this. I routinely joined the people horrified by the personalities presented on the Libs of TikTok account, until someone I knew cropped up. This individual claimed non-binary status when I knew her, and was the first I had encountered. Ironically, she (can’t say them - I really can’t make myself do it, although I did to her face) was in my home daily as a behavioral therapist for one of my sons with autism. I really liked her. We talked a lot. She let me in on her life story a little, and it was horrific. But I tried to make her feel safe and appreciated in my home, because I just knew that’s what she was missing. She inevitably realized that, as an incredibly broken person, helping others wasn’t what she should be doing and she left that job. But when I saw where she had spiraled to in the year since I saw her, I was utterly heartbroken. We can mock them all we want behind the safety of a screen, but these people are broken and shoved down and unanchored from anything that would actually help them. I’ve been thinking about how we reach these people a lot, too, and mocking their suffering, or entertaining their ridiculousness, is neither productive or helpful.
There are many millions of young people like this and they aren't going away. Disgust and rejection is understandable, but can't be the end of the topic.
Great article. One book you might find relevant is 'Libido Domandi : Sexual Liberation and Political Control", by E. Michael Jones. His thesis is that such atmomized individuals are not simply the byproduct of sexual liberation, but the goal of it. A society of strong families able to support one another is harder to dominate than a society of fishselfs.
I'd like to register my approval of your stated intention to move past the mockery and disgust. It ain't easy. Residing in California, reading Twitter, with occasional peeks at TikTok sure can't make it any easier. The easy way is just ignoring these people and the pit they've dug themselves in. Move to Texas or Florida or Montana or hell, anywhere inland with affordable real estate. Writing off the blighted culture and avoiding it like plague it so clearly is. Maybe get religion?
But what kind of religion forsakes any hope of salvation for one's fellow man and woman? Can leftish urbanites be redeemed? Even a few? Can the political vessel be, uh, righted? Bailed out? If the ship's going down, are there lifeboats? Will the wreckage yield rafts? These are, to me, the vital questions. It's your struggle with this tension that keeps me reading.
Apr 10, 2022·edited Apr 11, 2022Liked by Chris Bray
As someone who routinely observes people but doesn’t understand people, it strikes me that there’s a common pattern of our “advances” untethering us from the biological purpose of a thing, with an endpoint being destruction of individuals.
-Food has been untethered from its biological purpose, and now obesity, inflammation, cancer, and all sorts of diseases of the body are rampant.
-Electricity has been untethered from its biological purpose, and it’s quietly destroying us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Few even see this as a real thing. I’ve only recently been convinced.
-Sex (the act) has been untethered from its biological purpose, and you get the forms of destruction that you describe in the article.
-Sex (the category) is going through the process of being untethered from its biological purpose, and so we’re witnessing cognitive dissonance while it gets sorted out. But make no mistake, it’ll have destruction of some kind as an endpoint.
There are some who view destruction as part of a cycle that governs all things, so it’s all good. But here, it seems the destruction is being crafted, rather than flowing. Like a wolf that separates a sheep from the flock. From outside, it seems as though it’s flowing naturally, so it’s ok. But from any one stakeholder in that sphere, it’s the destruction being created.
Before an untethering, individuals see themselves as a stakeholder. After an untethering, they see themselves outside the sphere and detach from the stakes. And so they don’t view the destruction as negative, but positive or neutral. The mistake, in my view, is that we’re always a stakeholder because we exist WITHIN the systems we’re untethering from. It would be like the sheep suddenly saying they’re not a stakeholder, when they so obviously are one. They will be destroyed - they just don’t know it yet.
Although we have a bunch of demonic octogenarians running the government, and the public school unions have been indoctrinating since I was in public school, it’s not too late for us 40,50and 60 year olds to start affecting change at the local level. Momsforliberty.org
"But it seems increasingly clear that a whole lot of people have walked themselves into a painful corner as a learned response to an endless stream of fashionable nonsense, not as an actual breaking out of a societal prison. I’m increasingly inclined to get off the mockery and disgust train, and try to figure out how to talk to people about a path out of call me by my fish pronouns to a life of stable human connection."
First, mockery and disgust are normal and healthy reactions. They help save you from going down with the ship. And the visible power of these reactions in you *might* help shake loose a few of the salvageable souls who are caught up in this.
Second - none of this is fundamentally new. Here's what I mean: I not a very spiritual person, but I am a big fan of organized religion. Literally thousands of years of applied psychology and applied sociology distilled down into wisdom and life strategies anyone can grasp, at least a little bit. It's hugely helpful and powerful stuff, which is why the cultural nihilists always go out of their way to denigrate it as 'semi-literate goat herder superstition', even though it plainly isn't. (Just the very act of compiling and preserving a text the size and breadth of the Bible, using ancient manual technologies, requires significant civilization-level resources.)
The path out of our present cultural ground-loop has been charted by those people who survived the turmoil of thousands of prior years of civilizational change and upheaval. Any of the great religious traditions that have enough overt respect for tradition will offer a workable path towards leading a life of stable human connection: Orthodox Judaism, Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity, some of the more respectable Islamic traditions, etc. Sadly, most of the more liberal strains of Judaism, and a whole lot of Protestantism, will not serve for these purposes - their founding ideologies made them vulnerable to fashion and Wokeness and they are now too corrupted. And the jury's still out on Mormonism, Baha'i and Christian Science.
I am completely serious: for most people who are spiritually adrift and spouting harmful fashionable nonsense these days, probably the most effective and time-tested means for setting them on a path of stable human connection is to get them involved in an authentic and faithfully traditional religious denomination.
I live in Southern California. My friend's daughter is in the 7th grade at a public school. ALL of the girls in the 7th grade decided they were lesbians. They even have sleepovers to "become one". The VP of the school is lesbian and married and perhaps that is a factor.
My friend's daughter decided she would stay straight. The other girls told her that was fine she could be a "straight ally". That was fine for a while but then the girls became angry with her and started bullying her. That's when my friend pulled her out to homeschool her.
The school system is propagating this decline. There is no way that all the girls are lesbians. But they all decide things together.
There are a couple young women I know that have decided to transition into men now. They look like pubescent boys that never reach manhood. It's sad because they were strong confident females before but now they are weak males. Women need to have strong women ... we don't need them becoming men... especially when it will hurt their bodies... and they will never actually look like a man. But it's popular now. And both of these girls had absentee alcoholic fathers. They are just broken.
Great read! Glad I stumbled across your stack. "This is, I think, Great Reset sexuality. In a world that’s falling apart, sex is falling apart. You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy about it."
The clarity of sense of self, ones place in the universe and the interconnected-ness of absolutly everything, that comes with experiencing nature regularly, shows society for the maladapted, twisted and sicked organism that it has become.
We are literally beings of light (see the refracting microtubules in our cells). We need sunlight, nature to function correctly. Deny sunlight on your skin and you don't make the hormones you need in the right quantities.
And society policymakers, politicians, and bureaucracy have created every possible opposite of what we actually need.
Corny but true. We are essentially plants with complicated emotions.
There's a cause/effect question here. Do leftist politics cause a breakdown in sexual biology, or vice versa? I could see it working either way. They operate in a sort of hideous symbiosis - the more sexually deranged people become, the more fanatical their devotion to leftism ... meanwhile leftist policies actively create more of the deranged. When you contemplate the totality of it, the leftist egregore rises to the level of Lovecraftian body horror.
This reads to me like an important updating of Christoper Lasch's "The Culture of Narcissism" in which he traced the connection of the (then) newly predominant personality disorder of narcissism to the dissolution of the family and traditional social norms. Congratulations! A brilliant, original, and profoundly important piece.
Back in the dark ages, 1984, I had to write a research paper for my senior English class. My topic was a comparison of the decline of the USA to the fall of the Roman Empire. My main source was Edward Gibbons, an English historian from the mid 18th century. The reasons identified by Gibbons were primarily ones of moral decay, many of the details parallel our own nation's trajectory. The perplexing part is although we can identify it, we can't seem to stop it.
You are perfectly right and I also noticed that long time ago. It's the feminism ideology, the woke, the eco-climate, the politically correctness, the cancel culture, the gender and others. I have talked to this people, guys, girls, activists and what they really want is hug, friends, company, family and meaning in life. They never had it. Sadly their parents are divorced, they are alone, rich but have no meaning, no friends. So they copy what they see on social media, in TV, they travel extensively to escape this feeling and the more they run, the more they feel empty. The correct thing is to stop with the dept stuff, cut off money, let them work and let them have their own life. Find for them meaning and they will be happy. Being rich doesn't mean you understand how life work or know how to talk to people or make friends, love. Only real expirence can bring this kind of emotions, no TV, online app or product.
"...a free-floating bucket of subliterate shit."
My goodness, this writer has just described a bucket that floats and...has shit in it? This is what happens when we don't have editors, folks.
Thank you for this. I routinely joined the people horrified by the personalities presented on the Libs of TikTok account, until someone I knew cropped up. This individual claimed non-binary status when I knew her, and was the first I had encountered. Ironically, she (can’t say them - I really can’t make myself do it, although I did to her face) was in my home daily as a behavioral therapist for one of my sons with autism. I really liked her. We talked a lot. She let me in on her life story a little, and it was horrific. But I tried to make her feel safe and appreciated in my home, because I just knew that’s what she was missing. She inevitably realized that, as an incredibly broken person, helping others wasn’t what she should be doing and she left that job. But when I saw where she had spiraled to in the year since I saw her, I was utterly heartbroken. We can mock them all we want behind the safety of a screen, but these people are broken and shoved down and unanchored from anything that would actually help them. I’ve been thinking about how we reach these people a lot, too, and mocking their suffering, or entertaining their ridiculousness, is neither productive or helpful.
Sweet, blessed nuance to this topic at last.
There are many millions of young people like this and they aren't going away. Disgust and rejection is understandable, but can't be the end of the topic.
Great article. One book you might find relevant is 'Libido Domandi : Sexual Liberation and Political Control", by E. Michael Jones. His thesis is that such atmomized individuals are not simply the byproduct of sexual liberation, but the goal of it. A society of strong families able to support one another is harder to dominate than a society of fishselfs.
I'd like to register my approval of your stated intention to move past the mockery and disgust. It ain't easy. Residing in California, reading Twitter, with occasional peeks at TikTok sure can't make it any easier. The easy way is just ignoring these people and the pit they've dug themselves in. Move to Texas or Florida or Montana or hell, anywhere inland with affordable real estate. Writing off the blighted culture and avoiding it like plague it so clearly is. Maybe get religion?
But what kind of religion forsakes any hope of salvation for one's fellow man and woman? Can leftish urbanites be redeemed? Even a few? Can the political vessel be, uh, righted? Bailed out? If the ship's going down, are there lifeboats? Will the wreckage yield rafts? These are, to me, the vital questions. It's your struggle with this tension that keeps me reading.
As someone who routinely observes people but doesn’t understand people, it strikes me that there’s a common pattern of our “advances” untethering us from the biological purpose of a thing, with an endpoint being destruction of individuals.
-Food has been untethered from its biological purpose, and now obesity, inflammation, cancer, and all sorts of diseases of the body are rampant.
-Electricity has been untethered from its biological purpose, and it’s quietly destroying us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Few even see this as a real thing. I’ve only recently been convinced.
-Sex (the act) has been untethered from its biological purpose, and you get the forms of destruction that you describe in the article.
-Sex (the category) is going through the process of being untethered from its biological purpose, and so we’re witnessing cognitive dissonance while it gets sorted out. But make no mistake, it’ll have destruction of some kind as an endpoint.
There are some who view destruction as part of a cycle that governs all things, so it’s all good. But here, it seems the destruction is being crafted, rather than flowing. Like a wolf that separates a sheep from the flock. From outside, it seems as though it’s flowing naturally, so it’s ok. But from any one stakeholder in that sphere, it’s the destruction being created.
Before an untethering, individuals see themselves as a stakeholder. After an untethering, they see themselves outside the sphere and detach from the stakes. And so they don’t view the destruction as negative, but positive or neutral. The mistake, in my view, is that we’re always a stakeholder because we exist WITHIN the systems we’re untethering from. It would be like the sheep suddenly saying they’re not a stakeholder, when they so obviously are one. They will be destroyed - they just don’t know it yet.
Although we have a bunch of demonic octogenarians running the government, and the public school unions have been indoctrinating since I was in public school, it’s not too late for us 40,50and 60 year olds to start affecting change at the local level. Momsforliberty.org
"But it seems increasingly clear that a whole lot of people have walked themselves into a painful corner as a learned response to an endless stream of fashionable nonsense, not as an actual breaking out of a societal prison. I’m increasingly inclined to get off the mockery and disgust train, and try to figure out how to talk to people about a path out of call me by my fish pronouns to a life of stable human connection."
First, mockery and disgust are normal and healthy reactions. They help save you from going down with the ship. And the visible power of these reactions in you *might* help shake loose a few of the salvageable souls who are caught up in this.
Second - none of this is fundamentally new. Here's what I mean: I not a very spiritual person, but I am a big fan of organized religion. Literally thousands of years of applied psychology and applied sociology distilled down into wisdom and life strategies anyone can grasp, at least a little bit. It's hugely helpful and powerful stuff, which is why the cultural nihilists always go out of their way to denigrate it as 'semi-literate goat herder superstition', even though it plainly isn't. (Just the very act of compiling and preserving a text the size and breadth of the Bible, using ancient manual technologies, requires significant civilization-level resources.)
The path out of our present cultural ground-loop has been charted by those people who survived the turmoil of thousands of prior years of civilizational change and upheaval. Any of the great religious traditions that have enough overt respect for tradition will offer a workable path towards leading a life of stable human connection: Orthodox Judaism, Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity, some of the more respectable Islamic traditions, etc. Sadly, most of the more liberal strains of Judaism, and a whole lot of Protestantism, will not serve for these purposes - their founding ideologies made them vulnerable to fashion and Wokeness and they are now too corrupted. And the jury's still out on Mormonism, Baha'i and Christian Science.
I am completely serious: for most people who are spiritually adrift and spouting harmful fashionable nonsense these days, probably the most effective and time-tested means for setting them on a path of stable human connection is to get them involved in an authentic and faithfully traditional religious denomination.
I live in Southern California. My friend's daughter is in the 7th grade at a public school. ALL of the girls in the 7th grade decided they were lesbians. They even have sleepovers to "become one". The VP of the school is lesbian and married and perhaps that is a factor.
My friend's daughter decided she would stay straight. The other girls told her that was fine she could be a "straight ally". That was fine for a while but then the girls became angry with her and started bullying her. That's when my friend pulled her out to homeschool her.
The school system is propagating this decline. There is no way that all the girls are lesbians. But they all decide things together.
There are a couple young women I know that have decided to transition into men now. They look like pubescent boys that never reach manhood. It's sad because they were strong confident females before but now they are weak males. Women need to have strong women ... we don't need them becoming men... especially when it will hurt their bodies... and they will never actually look like a man. But it's popular now. And both of these girls had absentee alcoholic fathers. They are just broken.
Great read! Glad I stumbled across your stack. "This is, I think, Great Reset sexuality. In a world that’s falling apart, sex is falling apart. You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy about it."
The clarity of sense of self, ones place in the universe and the interconnected-ness of absolutly everything, that comes with experiencing nature regularly, shows society for the maladapted, twisted and sicked organism that it has become.
We are literally beings of light (see the refracting microtubules in our cells). We need sunlight, nature to function correctly. Deny sunlight on your skin and you don't make the hormones you need in the right quantities.
And society policymakers, politicians, and bureaucracy have created every possible opposite of what we actually need.
Corny but true. We are essentially plants with complicated emotions.
There's a cause/effect question here. Do leftist politics cause a breakdown in sexual biology, or vice versa? I could see it working either way. They operate in a sort of hideous symbiosis - the more sexually deranged people become, the more fanatical their devotion to leftism ... meanwhile leftist policies actively create more of the deranged. When you contemplate the totality of it, the leftist egregore rises to the level of Lovecraftian body horror.
This reads to me like an important updating of Christoper Lasch's "The Culture of Narcissism" in which he traced the connection of the (then) newly predominant personality disorder of narcissism to the dissolution of the family and traditional social norms. Congratulations! A brilliant, original, and profoundly important piece.
Back in the dark ages, 1984, I had to write a research paper for my senior English class. My topic was a comparison of the decline of the USA to the fall of the Roman Empire. My main source was Edward Gibbons, an English historian from the mid 18th century. The reasons identified by Gibbons were primarily ones of moral decay, many of the details parallel our own nation's trajectory. The perplexing part is although we can identify it, we can't seem to stop it.
You are perfectly right and I also noticed that long time ago. It's the feminism ideology, the woke, the eco-climate, the politically correctness, the cancel culture, the gender and others. I have talked to this people, guys, girls, activists and what they really want is hug, friends, company, family and meaning in life. They never had it. Sadly their parents are divorced, they are alone, rich but have no meaning, no friends. So they copy what they see on social media, in TV, they travel extensively to escape this feeling and the more they run, the more they feel empty. The correct thing is to stop with the dept stuff, cut off money, let them work and let them have their own life. Find for them meaning and they will be happy. Being rich doesn't mean you understand how life work or know how to talk to people or make friends, love. Only real expirence can bring this kind of emotions, no TV, online app or product.
went back and read this amazing piece. subscribing now! thanks for this!