. . . and lived amongst us.
Being a fully paid up member of the nerd class, I want to describe my lived experience. All of my life I have faced oppression and systemic discrimination (particularly from attractive females). The non-nerdative society in which we live has meant each day is a struggle for survival.
Nerd rights are human rights
I have a precious nerd soul living in a not-so-precious nerd body. But others have really struggled. I know some fellow nerds who look like Adonis; man-mountains of drool-worthy flesh. Spare a thought for their inner turmoil - they’ve been born into the wrong body.
In another time and place I would have been a warrior. Or maybe not. I probably would have been relegated to re-stocking the arrows, but I’d have been reasonably close to the action (or just used as cannon fodder - Oy! Nerdy McNerdFace, just pop your head over the trench and see what’s going on will you?).
In the past our serfdom was of the kind where your major concern was where the next turnip was coming from. We live much more comfortable lives now and, apart from the current difficulty of getting eggs and tomatoes, our serfdom is of a different kind.
We are still beholden, and always will be, to our basic material needs. Try going without water for a few days (definitely NOT recommended, even as an experiment). We’ll always have to live with that kind of serfdom.
There will, I think, always be “Lords and Masters”. The fabulously wealthy, powerful and privileged. It’s the same old, same old, but the ‘Empires’ and ‘Kingdoms’ of today are more focused on financial and corporate domains. We’re still just as much ‘serfs’ as we ever were - disposable commodities to those in this ‘elite’ class.
It will, I think, ever be thus.
The only thing that has really changed are the techniques and methodologies of control and domination.
If you’re a member of this elite class you need some level of population and some level of struggle within that population. Where else are you going to get the people to ‘service’ you at places like Epstein Island without a certain level of underclass?
It’s a tricky business managing the world if you’re a modern day elite - a corporate Duke, or Baron. You can’t have riots all over the place - that might disrupt the supply of things you want - but you also don’t want those uppity fuckers getting ideas above their station. Let them eat just enough cake to keep them happy, would seem to be the current modus operandi.
You certainly don’t want these uppity buggers focusing on where real power resides. You need to distract them with things like politics and governments - and when that stops working, and people realise every political ‘party’ is as rancid and shitty as any other, you have to employ different methods of distraction.
Well, that’s quite enough of the tin foil for today.
But bear in mind that if anyone focuses on a more ‘global’ view of power they can easily be dismissed as cranks and conspiracy loons. Just get the message out to all of those politicians and media entities that you own, and job done. You can even smear anyone talking about power at a global level as “anti-Semitic” - another useful little trick up your sleeve.
One of the major distractions of today is that of identity.
It’s like some kind of perverse obsession, these days.
One way to achieve this is to take some nerd, suffused with intelligence of the academic kind, and nudge them in their naïve idealism to publish shit on how important identity is. The nerd, being an idiot with a big vocabulary, plays along without realising how they’re being manipulated.
Pretty soon you have a kind of ‘intellectual’ chaos where a zillion different identity groups along very diverse lines claim all sorts of ‘oppressions’ that, invisibly, impact their lives in all sorts of intersecting ways.
The Fairy of Oppression hath imbibed the Beans of Flatulence and wafted an oppressive miasma throughout society.
It’s all, mostly, illusory of course.
The people with their heads screwed on (the normies - men and women of the traditional kind, for example) have no choice but to fight this fucking garbage and end up appearing to be every bit as obsessed with identity as the nerdy muppets who promote it.
Meanwhile, the elites are ROTFL (on rugs made from the finest Tibetan Yak hair rolled between the thighs of doe-eyed virgins).
Message to my fellow nerds. We have to stop this shit. Yes, we’re weird and have the weirdest thoughts and dress it all up in the most pompous and erudite language - but once in a while we need to at least try to pretend we’re normal - we need to try and be transnormal.
"The Prince" by Machiavelli is the handbook for understanding how the world actually works.
We still have Great Princes who rule their domains, except these days we call them CEOs, and their domains are virtual and cross physical borders. Money is power.
Meanwhile, our supposed "leaders", aka politicians are mere stooges for the Great Princes who have real money and real power. Sunak in the UK, Macron in France, Albanese in Australia et al are just puppets. They are the hollow men, men without chests, who pop up on TV and mouth meaningless words because there are hands up their arses moving their mouths.
The Hancock files reveal that our most senior politicians are dimwitted sociopathic buffoons, making random decisions without knowledge or thought in order to get better opinion poll numbers. They have some limited influence and can cause us great harm as a result of their stupidity, but the real power in our societies lies elsewhere. Here, for example, is the current King of England who thinks he's a Great Prince having reality explained to him by an actual Great Prince.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/k0o04n/prince_charles_heir_to_the_british_throne_getting/
Same as it ever was.
I am an optimist: in the nerd civil war, those with common sense will triumph over the idiots. It’s why I read your Substack with such pleasure. For the nerds who understand mathematics and science shall triumph over those whose mental energy has been devoted to jargon and ideology. Jargon and ideology, ultimately, are quite simple to mimic and parrot. (As you demonstrate, along with triumphant fellow nerds like James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian, and, earlier, the prescient Alan Sokal.)
(I am also a cheerful person who enjoys hilarity and must admit that without such gems in my alumni magazine as, “She and her mother identify as white” life would certainly be duller. Unlike the radical left, I don’t believe in utopia— so one must enjoy and give thanks for this blighted world, and the nerds before us who strove for material improvements. After all, even the working classes today enjoy luxuries Kublai Khan could not have imagined— giving us the luxury to retreat into a mental world in which one’s pronouns take up tremendous importance.)