Politics Is Worse Than Video Games, Drugs, and Porn Combined
How to become a political nihilist in 30 minutes or less
Politics isn’t real. It is a surrogate activity. It is to world improvement what porn is to sex, video games is to achievement, McDonalds is to nutrition, fucking sluts is to intimate connection, and drugs abuse is to happiness. It’s artificial, vacuous, simulacra that makes you feel like you’re doing something useful but ultimately leaves you unhappy, empty, and diseased.
Further, due to opportunity costs—you only have so many hours or watts of mental energy per day—wasting all your time pursuing fake value isn’t just a waste of your time but actually a net negative on the world. Imagine all the positive, generative shit you could you do if you weren’t spending all day every day LARPing out some Marvel fan fiction. Even the most dull and inept of you could provide real utility to the world if you took those 10, 20, 40, or 100 hours a week and spent them on something actually worthwhile. By allocating your few precious decades of existence to excess surrogate activity, you are selfishly robbing the world of your unique value, and yourself of joy, purpose, and meaning.
And I don’t just mean this about voting or “mainstream” politics. I mean it about all political action down to something as insignificant as putting up a lawn sign, watching political news, or arguing political philosophy with your political opponents on Twitter. Doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat, a Republican, a communist, a libertarian, a white nationalist, or whatever else. It’s all a waste of your time and a net negative to the human race.
The game needs both NPCs and real players
To be clear, it’s not a net negative for everyone: a lot of people need surrogate activities. Most people in fact are fundamentally surrogate humans—“NPCs”—for whom surrogate activities are life itself; nothing more than a cog in a machine in the battle of evolutionary forces. And it’s important that so many are that way. They are the hive mind of unindividuated grugmass upon and through which the forces of GNON and the will of kings are enacted.
But what they create is not necessarily “positive”. It is just necessary. A shitty civilization is better than no civilization. If everyone was out there innovating, architecting, and discovering there would be no workforce to scale the rare new idea that is actually any good.
Most understand that we couldn’t survive if we didn’t exploit the natural world—if all the atoms on earth were humans instead of trees and fish and cows and steel, we’d all be dead—But few understand that there’s a similar division of value within humans. Marx was right. The working class is exploited. What he failed to see is that exploiting the working class is a prerequisite for civilization.
If everyone was starting their own company, no company could grow, because there would be no “worker bees” to do the grunt work. If everyone was out there reading a thousand books and doing philosophy, we’d all be dead because there wouldn’t be any labor class boomers powered by the infinite conscientiousness of Folgers and boot straps to build and maintain the sewage systems and the roadways and electrical grids, etc.
Maybe when we have advanced AI robots such divisions of labor will shrink. But not completely and not for a long time.
Either way:
If you are into some kind of obscure, heterodox political philosophy: you aren’t an NPC. And thus, as far as the goals of the game you’re supposed to be playing, you’re blowing it. You are wasting all your time off in some bush snorting bath salts instead of trying to progress the campaign. Whether it’s literally through vidya or “well akshually”ing people on Twitter or “fighting for causes” or “calling out the hypocrisy of the enemy” or whatever bullshit you think is a “noble fight for truth and good”, it’s all fake, sucralose, processed soy garbage masquerading as real food. In the 21st century: If it feels righteous, it’s LARPing. Period.
How do I know this? Well, the first sign is the fact that you are miserable.
Why you are miserable
Your unconscious mind and body are smart. A whole lot smarter than you think. And, in fact, a whole lot smarter than your conscious mind for most things. Your “unconscious” is hundreds of thousands of times older. And much bigger—your entire “conscious” brain basically just a gooey dinner napkin laid atop it.
Your body knows you aren’t doing anything meaningful; it knows you’re just getting high all day, and not doing anything real.
How does it know? Because when it gives you dopamine rewards it gives them for specific behaviors in which it expects to get a return on investment. And all that precious dopamine it keeps dumping into your behavior is having a worse ROI than alts in a bear market.
How would you feel if after years of investing in crypto every single coin you bought lost 90% of its value? Would you be happy? Would you be motivated to keep investing? Would you feel successful and like you’re a valuable human being and like the world is a great place with lots of opportunity? Of course not. And this is exactly why your limbic brain is miserable. Because it keeps investing dopamine in you and you keep rugging it.
To be fair, it’s not exactly your fault. Your limbic brain, despite millions of years of implicit wisdom, is a dumb ass boomer when it comes to explicit knowledge. And thus is doing the equivalent of giving you dopa-money to invest in sea shells (or, worse, bonds). Because “that’s what was always a good investment”. And he is too (explicitly) stupid to realize that the world has changed and that seashells aren’t valuable anymore. He is following what worked for hundreds of thousands of years so as far as he’s concerned: if you are losing all your money investing in seashells it must be because you just aren’t investing hard enough.
To get more concrete:
The dopamine he gives you when you get social approval he thinks will lead to social status and longterm intimate relationships; people who will be there for you in times of need, who you can touch and laugh and grow with. He doesn’t know you’re just getting mouse clicks on heart icons from bots on social media who you’ll never hear from again.
The dopamine he gives you for that tasty hamburger he thinks will lead to lots of nutrients and vitamins. He doesn’t know it’s all empty calories of soy, preservatives, and sugar, the meat pumped with hormones and literal trash, and the vegetables produced in over-farmed soil strip-mined of all their nutrients.
The dopamine he gives you when you fight hard and then defeat the evil Other he thinks will lead to you gaining power and saving the village (and getting all the resources, power, relationships, etc that would come with that). He doesn’t know that all you’re doing is yelling at some random on Zuckbook or shooting pixels in a video game.
The dopamine he gives you when you bust in a hot babe he thinks will lead to a deep bond and partner and family. He doesn’t know you’re just one-night-standing some damaged thot who couldn’t relationally navigate her way out of a paper bag and would sooner throw your children from a moving vehicle than raise them. Or worse: just cooming into your hand, the hot babe just more pixels on a computer screen.1
Dopamine evolved to be a short-term reward you are given when you do things that will lead to long term selective advantage. Namely: long term value and status in the social hierarchy (serotonin) and long term relationships, friendships, bonding, and family (oxytocin).2
Imagine you’re an alien observing the earthlings ten thousand years ago: what would you expect to happen when one (or all) of their brains were constantly being dumped with dopamine year after year but no results toward long term health, status, power, relationship, etc were ever acquired?
What would have to be true of them or the environment if they were constantly getting social approval dopamine hits, but somehow never developing any deep bonds?
Or “completed task” dopamine hits, but somehow never actually producing anything?
Or orgasm dopamine hits, but never gaining any intimate relationships or children?
Or nutritious food dopamine hits, but never getting any nutrients?
Or righteous triumph over evil dopamine hits, but never gaining any environmental stability, social status, or power?
The only way this could ever happen is if there was something seriously wrong with that individual or the environment around them (“the world”).
Perhaps there’s a famine or most of the tribe has been killed in war or all the women have been made infertile by disease or the entire tribal hierarchy is crumbling into an every-man-for-himself Machiavellian hellscape or their body has been damaged by some type of serious injury. What would be the optimal survival strategy to handle any of these completely-delibilating-for-several-years problems? That’s right: to become depressed.
Depression is a feature, not a bug
“Depression” is an evolutionarily adaptive protection mechanism. It is like hibernation or Windows recovery mode. When the external environment or you are fucked up to where dopamine does not lead to long term positive results over an extended period of time, it down regulates your energy levels, up regulates your fight-flight sensitivity (a chaotic and unpredictable environment requires extra vigilance and threat detection to survive), swaps optimism with pessimism (optimism is similarly only adaptive in a stable ecology) and upregulates your dopamine seeking behavior.
The problem—besides that oscillating between fight (anger), flight (anxiety), or freeze (depression), and being negative about everything does not feel very cozy—is that the more your dopamine rewards diverge from your actual results, the more dopamine you seek. Your inner boomer has hardcoded “if dopamine is not leading to long term positive results, you just need to work harder at acquiring dopamine”. This was a minor factor that was also adaptive ten thousand years ago, as it allowed us to keep motivation through acute environmental instabilities. Today however it is not only no longer effective but a maladaptive catastrophe of epic proportions. In a world where an infinite rabbit hole of every surrogate activity you can possibly imagine is only a click away, this formerly adaptive mechanism now leads many of us to be generally unhappy and unfulfilled, and a small but not insignificant few to spiral off into destructive and often irrecoverable addictions.
And it’s all so obvious when viewed with a basic understanding of evolutionary psychology that it would be funny if it weren’t so extraordinarily tragic. There is no famine nor plague nor mass death nor infertility nor any other deep, lingering multi-year disaster warranting the activation of this response (or at least not nearly to this degree). The world is fine. Or at least fine enough. By the overwhelming majority of metrics, much more fine than most of human history. It’s just that the signals are wrong. Unbelievably wrong. So unbelievably wrong that doing the opposite of what your instincts want is the more or less unanimously recommended strategy for all self-improvement (“discipline” and “will power”). Our entire motivational circuitry has been pwned by technology and civilization in the most impressive man in the middle attack in human history and our dumb-boomer lizard-brain just can’t tell the difference.
So, it’s not exactly your fault you’re depressed and useless and wasting all your time on frivolous junk. We live in what might as well be a completely alien world. And the few non-NPC’s who are navigating it effectively mostly discovered their successful strategy by accident, getting lucky via probability rather than by actually having the same problems as you and finding a way out of it.
But, ultimately, it doesn’t matter who or what is at fault. Your wellbeing—and the wellbeing of your tribe—are your responsibility. Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is just trying to pick your pocket.
Political utopia and self-deception
But let’s even ignore all this psychological mumbo jumbo. We don’t even need to go deep into evolutionary history to make it patently obvious that obsession with politics is drug-addicted surrogate dog water. All we have to do is look at your desired results for literally ten minutes.
Imagine for a moment that you have achieved all your political goals. Imagine your communist utopia or white ethnostate or ancap stateless society or whatever you seek not as a platonic abstraction of “out there” and “out then” but something that has already been achieved and which you currently live in.
Imagine your day to day. What would be different? What job would you work? What would you do in your free time? What would your problems be? What would your friends be like? How would your relationships be? What would you look like? How would you feel? Etc. Step away from the screen, close your eyes, take a few deep breathes, and then spend a good five or ten minutes thinking about and visualizing this.
First of all, 99% of “political” people have never done this. You’ve never even thought about the real, practical, personal impact of your political mission? That should be your first red flag that your motivation has nothing to do with the results you claim to care about.
And second, assuming you’re not a self-deluded idiot (edit: the original tweet was “What will you do once Communism is finally achieved?”), quickly into this exercise it becomes obvious that very little will actually change for you. It will certainly be an improvement, but for most it will be single digit percentages at best.
Most of the problems in your life are completely orthogonal to any and all political aims.
Your struggle for meaning and to be motivated to produce something of value. Your struggle to not waste your time pursuing cheap dopamine deadends. Your struggle to eat well and take care of your health. Your struggle to have enjoyable and functional relationships with family, intimate partners, friends, or coworkers. Your struggle to effectively identify, articulate, and communicate and your needs and wants and hurts and preferences and achieve them without screwing someone else to do so. Your struggles of feeling lonely and isolated. Your insatiable desire for more freedom, novelty, and control over your environment (“power”). The people around you being “dumb”. Just the general facts that life is hard and full of frustration and difficulty. Or that you’re going to die. None of these go away. A good 90% of everything hard about your life will still be there after you’ve achieved your political utopia.
Need more confirmation? Try turning off the TV (or Youtube or Twitter) for a month and it will become obvious that everything political you worry about is less than one part reality for every nine parts media-personalities-hooking-into-your-threat-detection-mechanism-to-sell-your-eyeballs-to-advertisers hyperreality. Our motivation to constantly tune back in to fear-porn political-media is rooted in the same limbic mechanism that makes us unable to look away from a hideous car wreck: we are biologically programmed to be vigilant about threat detection. The genes that sought to always be ahead of the curve and to seek the secret knowledge about future catastrophe were the only ones that made it all the way to the 21st century. Revelations is hardcoded into human biology. But this once necessary and valuable drive, like all the rest, has more or less long since been satiated and re-purposed to sell you bullshit (or sell you to bullshit).
And all this is assuming your political solution will even get implemented before you die (fat chance), or worse, that your political solution is actually even a solution at all rather than just some satanic cognitive virus simply using human hosts as a reproduction medium to spreads its entropy and destruction far and wide (likely).
You will fight your whole life oscillating like a bipolar maniac between anxiety, anger, and depression against the enemy’s evil, selfishness, and igornance to prevent them from destroying all that is beautiful and good and all you’ll get is ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶l̶o̶u̶s̶y̶ ̶t̶e̶e̶ ̶s̶h̶i̶r̶t̶ three hundred million dead bodies.
Your political solution isn’t trying to solve what you think it is
But let’s say your political utopia is nothing like every political utopia that actually got any power in the last century. Yours will really make things better! For realzies this time! You accept that it won’t happen in your lifetime but counter that “the fight” is not about a better life for you but a better life for them. Not the outgroup them, of course, but the ingroup them—the next generation, the oppressed peoples, the kids in cages, your race, whatever.
Unfortunately, such justifications are just as ill-conceived as all the rest, simply another lie we tell ourselves so we can get a fat hit of that sweet, sweet dopamine.
You only care about people you don’t know and will never meet and who may not even exist outside of some media-induced-hyperreality just enough to be able to convince yourself that your motivations are noble, and not an iota more.
If you cared to actually see whether what you’re doing is effective you’d have already realized your strategy sucks and changed it a long time ago. There’s a reason effective altruism is a thing (because most charity, especially state funded, is just a useless money pit that not only doesn’t help anyone but often actually makes the problem worse). And there’s also a reason you’ve never heard of EA and won’t pursue it now that you have (because you and everyone else not only don’t care that most charity is a useless money pit that doesn’t help anyone and often makes the problem worse but actually actively avoid knowing it).
(Edit Feb 2023: I wrote this a few years ago before anyone did know what EA was. Predictably, EA has since been popularized and quickly fallen prey the same trap as all it’s predecessors: self masturbation of one’s own moral righteousness at the expense of the people it’s claiming to help and society at large.)
Everyone gives the homeless guy $10. No one follows him around to see that he spends it on meth. Everyone recycles. No one cares to know that it not only doesn't work but actually makes the problem worse (more on this). Because no one really cares about the homeless guy or the environment. We care only about our internal state; assuaging our guilt, about believing we are charitable or sustainable. “It’s the thought that counts”, institutionalized. For all we care, the actual truth of what is happening “out there” can kick rocks and die in a fire.
The result we seek is not for the homeless guy to get sober and confront his demons and find his unique and fulfilling purpose or for the rivers in Africa to be free of plastic bottles and carboard boxes. Sure, that’d be nice, we wouldn’t object to it. And we may even tell ourselves (based on nothing but hopes, dreams, and a well-mastered skill of self-deception) that is what will happen. But the truth is that the only result we are actually seeking is to hear our inner monologue triumphantly announce: I am a good person.
The only thing we are motivated toward is to stop the nagging critic in our head or the judging stares of our peers that scream “You scum, why aren’t you helping?! Are you some kind of evil selfish bastard?!” whenever we see a homeless guy with a sad puppy dog face on the side of the freeway or a video of a little baby turtle choking on a plastic straw. As long as we can make that go away, we are satiated and more than content with out of sight out of mind from that point onward.
And the people with all the money and power know this. In fact, learning this is a pre-requisite to acquiring money and power. So they sell you junk—whether they be laws or products or narratives or movements—that are engineered just enough to convince you they create real impact, just enough to get you those dopamine hits of self-righteousness, social approval, and moral virtue, and then they use all that money and commitment and conviction not to “improve the world” but to fuel their own hedonic dopamine treadmill: increasing their own wealth and power.
They don’t do this because they are evil. I can assure you, you would do the exact same thing if you were in their position (you already are—you treadmill just in an apartment instead of a mansion). They, just like you, simply want more with less (“power”) meanwhile understanding that resources in the world (“wealth”) are limited.
You both have the same goals. They just have a better strategy. Namely, they understand if they tell you “world peace” (or whatever your big gay aim is) is impossible, or that it will cost ten hundred quadrillion dollars and take centuries, they will always lose out to the guy who tells you it’s not only possible but will only cost you $19.99 per month and can happen in if you just vote for this guy in 2024! The unpleasant truth loses to the comforting lie. So the guy trying to sell you the unpleasant truth either goes out of business or wises up and starts selling you the comforting lie.
Meaning: even if your leaders really are well intentioned and mean it and are trying their absolute best to make it happen, the innate and inherent complexity of the world—merged with the fact that we are all really stupid and gullible—makes it so that the game theoretic incentive model for any “cause” to gain power is that it must optimize toward getting everyone to join—and keep coming back—at the expense of devising something that actually solves the problem.3
Every political group loves to point out how the other team is doing this—pulling back the curtain of the enemy’s hypocrisy, corruption, and broken promises is politics 101. Of course they conveniently fail to ever look inward to confront their laundry list of skeletons equally as numerous. It’s much more effective (selectively advantageous) to simply project their failure onto the enemy to motivate us to fight even harder against The Other and it’s evil! Such is basic human psychology. And no, it’s not this politician or that party or this state or that country. This problem is not only systemic but intrinsic to coordination of human groups. Learn basic Power Dynamics and this becomes rather obvious.
But just for completeness sake let’s even assume none of these last few paragraphs are true. You truly are “altruistic”—perhaps because it’s toward people who are your direct and measurable in group, such as your children—and your leaders truly are good guys fighting to make the world a better place rather enriching themselves with your ignorance. Like we learned above: the best you can do for them is a 10% life improvement.
At first glance, you might say this is more than worth it. But of course, you’d say that! It means you get to keep getting high! You again are conveniently ignoring the opportunity cost. What would your children’s lives be like if you took those 10, 20, 40, or 100 hours a week for 52 weeks over 5 decades (somewhere between 26,000 and 260,000 hours of time) and spent them on pretty much anything else? Just a hundred hours dedicated to reading a dozen books on parenting or finance or business or any number of other actually useful skills and you could probably give your children that 10% life improvement in one one-thousandth the amount of time and energy. If you 10X’d that you’d double their quality of life and still have ten thousand hours left to spare!
The Germ Theory of Politics
So to recap: You’re not improving the world. You’re not fighting evil. You’re not being a hero. You’re, at best, masturbating at yelling into the void and, at worst, masturbating to everyone getting murdered (kinky).
For The Right, given that all they ever do is lose, this shouldn’t be that hard to accept. The Left however always win. At least when the competition is against the right. The only time they ever lose is when they think they are fighting the right, but they are actually fighting reality (innate gender differences, innate racial differences, pareto distributions, behavioral economics, etc).
It may seem like the left is “succeeding” through politics, but in reality they are “succeeding” at “defeating bigotry and inequality and greed” or whatever in the same way that the US “succeeded” at “defeating” communism (or Nazism).
One: It didn’t. Communism (or Nazism) “defeated” themselves by imploding from their own inherent structural defects. Maybe the US sped it up, but it would have happened anyway. The US is imploding via its own inherent structural defects too, just with a longer half-life.
Two: we didn’t “defeat” shit. they’re still here! We may have suppressed them, but they’re growing again, “facts” be damned! Like all viruses, we can “flatten the curve” or even push them into remission, but the cognitive virus that are Communism or Nazism or racism or Christianity or any other ideology that just keeps perpetuating themselves despite being “wrong” has very little to do with external practical results and very much to do with internal feelings of self-worth, meaning, acceptance, virtue, righteousness, etc.
So not only does political activism play about as much a role in the direction of social change as your 3 year old’s backseat kiddy wheel plays in the direction of your car but also the car is a self-driving unkillable Terminator against which conventional means of ideological warfare are totally futile.4
So what is the real cause of social change? What is the real ecological control knob by which the selective advantage of cognitive viruses is modulated? Technological innovation, mostly.
Politics is downstream from culture but culture is downstream from technology. All “progressivism” (or any other novel ideological “ism”) is just the slow onset of the inevitable philosophical ramifications brought on by some new, massively disruptive technological innovation.
For example: Abolitionism didn’t happen because we all the sudden had a moral awakening and decided slavery was wrong. It happened because we invented the cotton gin (and industrial machines in general) allowing, for the first time in human history, civilization to still function at all without slavery. As soon as the labor power of slaves could be outsourced (without all of agriculture collapsing), it was outsourced. And then the contradiction that had always existed between the Enlightenment mythos of “all men are created equal” and slavery simply could finally be acknowledged without it leading to everyone starving to death.
(All men aren’t created equal, and The Enlightenment is wrong, but that too is for another poast.)
Similarly, Feminism didn’t happen because we all the sudden had a moral awakening and decided that we should stop oppressing wahmen and start respekin’ them. Women weren’t stuck in the home raising children because men were big selfish meanies, they were stuck in the home raising children because taking care of a household and children was a one-hundred-hour week job for all of human history up until a century ago. The invention of labor-saving devices like vacuums, dishwashers, gas ovens, washing machines, etc cut this down to fifty hours, which gave women, for the first time in human history, free time to go “and why exactly am I submitting to this beta loser?”, and then the invention of reliable contraception created the option of absconding this role entirely.5
Just as with slavery, i can assure you alternative strategies were tried all throughout human history. Splitting labor, men raising the children, female warriors, Matriarchy, and dozens more. They just all sucked and the tribes who practiced them were slowly (or quickly) out competed by those who used the evidently (by it’s clear ubiquity throughout human history) more effective “patriarchy” strategy. And this remained true for most if not all of human history up until the early 20th century.
The story with LBGT rights or animals rights or healthcare or even democracy itself all have similar roots. The ideas were not novel, most existing for hundreds if not thousands of years, and formerly having been tried hundreds if not thousands of times before. It just wasn’t until the environment changed to a very specific and unique set of conditions that they became anything other than maladaptive self destructive cancers.
And thus: Politics is a lagging indicator of social change, not a leading one; as much the cause of it as a cough is the cause of a cold.
I could go on. But at this point if you are not convinced—or at least curious enough to hear what to an alternative would be—by now, nothing else I could say with get you there.
So I’ve made the case as best I can make that you’re an addict and your drug is dumb and gay. The question now becomes: How do you get clean?
That will have to wait for another poast. Click button if you want to be emailed when it’s published.
Imagine being able to just walk into any room and have the hottest women in the world willing to do whatever you want to them. You must be a gigachad. No point in making you motivated, you are already at the apex of man. And yet somehow you manage to be completely alone with no power, no wealth, no friends, no family, no children, and no purpose. How is your brain supposed to reconcile this? It should not be any wonder cooming breaks your brain.
This is the main reason SSRI’s “work”. By inhibiting serotonin reuptake, they functionally artificially increase your serotonin levels. By increasing the saturation of the chemical which tracks your perceived status and worth in the social hierarchy it reduces the symptoms of depression. This technically “works” to improve your mood and self-worth, but it is about as good a long term replacement for solving the root behavioral mismatch as one of those electric fat burner belts is a replacement for actual exercise.
Rarely, there are exceptions. Where the comforting lie and the unpleasant truth both row in the same direction. Religion is one of the best examples. The current most interesting being Bitcoin. As Naval so aptly stated “Bitcoin is a tool for freeing humanity from oligarchs and tyrants, dressed up as a get-rich-quick scheme.” But that’s for another poast.
This isn’t exactly accurate. Ideas, just like any other thing which has a reproduction rate, fall into the Logistics Map in which most of them peter out quickly, but others oscillate in population size back and forth, collapsing under their own weight, and then, in the to the power vacuum, recreating their bloated state, back and forth ad infinitum.
now, a century later, women have replaced husbands with bosses and governments, and children with cats and immigrants and they’re all miserable and want to die. But, solving that problem too is for another poast.
as a 16-year-old high school student, this was the most enlightening thing i have ever read
I've read the entire article and I agree. Politics is garbage. 99% of it is manipulation of our primitive brains. After reading this, I am now a fan. I would be very interested to read "How To Get Clean" if it was published. Please consider publishing it soon, and get well.