Ballad of a Common Man

The sporadic writing I do on Substack is speaking into a void. There was no real topic or goal in mind. Initially a response to living a relatively normal life during Covid, it has become a place to read and interact with a true elite. The fallacy of the Covid experts was ubiquitousn while their end goal was the growth of their own influence and power. Mine was freedom from their control and to live unmolested as the control group in their population-wide experiments.

Fear, laziness, and cultural ennui made it the bizarre spectacle possible as the populace complied enthusiastically — the first enthusiastic thing they had done in years. While I was living out there in a ghost town, the people Zoomed to work in their pajamas. Bereft of sunlight and Vitamin D, they grew paler and fatter, and began to squawk at everyone around them. You know their screeching tropes: “wear a mask!” “just shut up and get the shot”.

The delusions of the masses and the ignorant condescension of policy makers and their pet experts all made me angry. So, perhaps I came here to expel the poisonous contempt I felt for it all. Instead I have found voices of people writing here on Substack that have amused me, informed me, and made me feel a little less solitary in my thinking. They showed me that the edges of the corrupt Leviathan I detected, did in fact exist.

I am not solitary in my daily life: I have family and friends. I work a good job, I travel, I am in relative good health, and I don’t really want for anything. None of these things seemed really difficult to achieve. This is not due to me, but we live in easy times despite what the gloomsayers and doom prophets all around us say. I have no doubt that easy road is ending. Of course, my life has not been without the usual death, pain, and suffering that human lives involve. Life is ephemeral, and the shit comes for us all. But, relative to 99.99% of all humans past and present, those of us in the modern West, live lives so easy as to be unrecognizable to most of our species throughout time.

As the madness of Covid receded just enough for the masses to pivot to the next thing — I believe it was gender dysphoria (or the battle for the voluntary mutilation of children who felt uncomfortable with themselves), then Ukraine, then Gaza; but, like a demonic rhythm section: always China, constantly Trump/hitler, always guns, always novel disease, and then the ever-porous Border. And as a new issue entered the fray none of the others left. So that now we all live with this cacophony of fear and stress in the background like a truck backing around you all day with its shrill metronome. There is no peace.

Recently I have realized that this societal ennui, the rot of human endeavor, is not just something that annoys and encroaches from the horrid creature that sits fat, stupid, violent, and all-powerful in Washington, DC. It is already here and its rot has infested people all around. They go to work with you, they are old college friends, they are your family and your acquaintances, and they believe it all. It doesn’t really matter whether they believe from the right or left, it’s all the same performative nonsense. They no doubt believe, but their belief is nonsense based on no real-world data or knowledge.

I have never been a partisan, but always an independent. It was no great trick and I did not see through all of the bullshit. I’ve just never been a huge joiner and both sides always seemed a little creepy and cult-ish to me. But like so many people have said before: when I was younger, my views came more from the left/liberal sphere. I don’t think it was so much the politics per se, but more of an aesthetic choice. As I have grown older, I have become more subdued, muted even. Movement along this spectrum is, or should be, one of knowledge and experience. Those who do not move at all, have just found their comfort zone and consume only information that enforces their stagnation. As people grow older their mind either expands or contracts. I learned this lesson in my early 20’s and decided then and there that expansion was the only way.

I read a speech by NS Lyons given at a conservative conference about how to fight the Western elites and their march toward doom. More than anyone else I have read recently, they finally said the thing that I find true. The cancer is the bureaucracy, the managerial class, who rule over us from massive office buildings (and I suppose since Covid from their living rooms) in far off places. It is not the evil corporations or even the dirty politicians. This is just the greed and sin of humanity laid bare. Though the latter are where most place the blame, the bureacracues with no skin in the game have ever been my bogeyman.

I look at the Federal machine as a giant welfare state. These folks have jobs that require little skill or knowledge, they are unionized thus difficult fire, and they ultimately work for the good of their given bureaucracy. This is illustrated by the fact that the Federal bureaucracies fight one another and State bureaucracies for power. More starkly illustrated by the fact of incremental budgeting, such that their budget ever only goes up. The ratchet turns in only one direction. They accomplish their hegemony through ‘lobbying’ legislators (read threatening) as well as in courts practicing lawfare for their own benefit. This is all accomplished by spending your tax dollars in all the endeavors that grow themselves. They metastasize. They are not pulling us in some magical progressive direction of absolution.

So welfare recipients who work in a bureaucracy where they are protected from liability and firing and receive generous benefits and pensions all at your expense rule over you. Not out of some deep belief that what they do is right or for the common good but for themselves and their organization’s own benefit. But the rot is not restricted to them as they develop colluders in the populace who take their handouts. These can be individuals, NGO’s, or other government organizations.

Recently, upon meeting an old friend, he let slip that a mutual friend and his wife don’t work too much. I asked if they had saved a ton of money. It turned out that they lived a middle-class comfortable lifestyle, yet if they worked under a certain threshold, they were able to get medical care and even some form of food stamps (This all takes place in a very liberal state where this is apparently a common practice, and though the practice may be statewide, the funds are Federal). They do this so they can do things that liberal, middle class people do. Live in a nice house, travel, see music, go hiking, listen to NPR, rant about Nazi conservatives, and live a life of leisure. I find the practice disgusting. The idea that physically capable people who are not in need and who deem themselves liberal would tap into what they all call the social safety net out of choice illustrates for me that the rot has spread far and wide. The rules exist so why not use them?

They are now creatures of a bureaucracy from DC. These folks are all around us and they justify their absorption into the creature from DC with platitudes and beliefs that are diametrically opposed to my own. These are not evil, lazy people. They are the masses and they all consume one form of welfare or another — electric cars are largely subsidized welfare from the middle class to the rich.

There is no voting out of this. Bureaucracy is a cancer and it incorporates those within it to its own ends. They live inside an organic machine made of humans and the arbitrary systems men built for themselves. It colonizes their minds. They are legion, but we are too. Community, mutual aid, and parallel societies are the only way to win. Don’t give them oxygen and fuel, instead take it away. This is the only path that dims the noise and takes back what you have created and earned.

Grow, grow, and reap what you sow. And when you sow, you do NOT have to let the government know (Or the greedy corporations, or the corrupt politicians).