Why I’m "white-pilled" about the future...
By Jonathan Roseland |
Back in 2019, I did an interview with the geneticist and author J.F Gariépy on the topic of transhumanism and the book he wrote about the coming phenotypic revolution. Around the same time I read JF's book, I also read At Our Wits' End about the decline of intelligence and what that means for the future. The two books paint a dreary picture of the world to come; that all these dysgenic forces are driving down intelligence across civilization and that we'll end up totally enslaved to our own creation - technology.
Listening back to the interview I realized I am a lot more white-pilled (optimistic) about the future now than I was then. I'm, no doubt, in the minority - given what's gone on in the world in this decade - most people have become less optimistic about the future. I'll make the case for being an optimistic accelerationist and lend you something in real short supply these days - hope.
In the current year, the decline of civilization is in full swing
The COVID pandemic/plandemic has revealed nearly all of our institutions (government, science, medicine, media) to be either dangerously incompetent, totally corrupted, and/or deeply malicious. The run-away inflation and economic armageddon that the right-thinking have been warning about for decades seem to finally be upon us. And now our political leaders seem hell-bent on getting us into yet another war, possibly a nuclear one. A prima vista, the view from the current year is not encouraging.
What is the main thing that’s given you a more positive outlook?
Someone asked me on Twitter in response to my sentiments which are concise but do not come close to capturing my optimism about the future…
Since I did this interview I've grown a bit less #blackpilled on the future of mankind. The global acceleration of entropy, that we've all experienced in this young new decade, does not bode well for those that aim to enslave us all...
In short, I've become an optimistic accelerationist, and as things accelerate there's more and more to be optimistic about. Entropy is a fancy word for chaos and disorder, and when you come to accept that it's the medicine our civilization needs to redeem itself the view from here brightens.
Back in 2019, we were on a trajectory to a truly dark place...
The technocratic elites really had a decent shot at turning billions of us into their powerless slaves who could eventually be liquidated to get the human population down to that 500 million number that they seem to like.
- They could have kept up the farce of democracy with pseudo-populist politicians like Donald J. Trump while slowly taking away our fundamental human rights; free speech, free association, property rights, freedom of conscience, bodily autonomy, religious freedoms, etc.
- They could have kept up what the United Nations itself (not exactly a bastion of right-wing "conspiracy theorists") calls replacement migration; moving millions of poorer, browner people every year into historically white, European countries. Which is bad for everybody except a tiny minority of connected political elites. They could have come close to erasing all but a very small group of white people from the face of the Earth.
- They could have deprived us of anything approaching organic, naturally derived food. They could have forced almost all of us onto a GMO vegetarian peasants' diet.
- They could have continued to enjoy cocaine, caviar, and champagne on their superyachts; enriching themselves off the satanically-inverted money-as-debt legacy financial system.
- They could have kept the US dollar as the global reserve currency; until such time as they perverted Satoshi's ingenious invention and rolled out a USD central bank digital currency - one coin with which to rule the planet and snuff out the last vestiges of human defiance.
- They could have realized their "Children of Men in real-life" depopulation fantasy by feeding Western culture this poisonous cocktail of deranged feminism, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, internet porn, and the LGBTQ indoctrination - that I despise while being tolerant of individual gays who aren't don't devote themselves to undermining the civilization that has done so much to protect them.
- They could have convinced the young generations to abandon the faith that gave hope and meaning to their ancestors, surrendering to nihilism and hedonism.
- They could have kept us all distracted by and addicted to drugs, porn, alcohol, video games, opioids, junk food, and/or mindless entertainment.
- And if you complained about any of this they would silence you online, depriving you of the chance to defend yourself while they called you a racist, bigot, anti-vaxer, or conspiracy theorist.
They had a real decent chance of turning us into (what, perhaps we started out as) a slave species.
If the globalist elites had a little more patience and discipline they would have let Trump be elected a second time. They wouldn't have imprisoned billions of us in our homes with lockdowns so they could get even richer quickly selling us back our freedom at the tip of their rush-job vaccine. They wouldn't have pushed Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine. They wouldn't have printed trillions of US dollars in two years. But to quote and paraphrase my favorite movie, "We're wired to overreach" and there are no safeguards on aggressive overexpansion. The control freaks pushed too hard, and too fast; in their hubris, they pulled too many blocks out at once from the collective civilizational Jenga tower, and gravity is taking effect.
From the coming chaos, a phoenix will rise
I once wrote an article entitled By 2021 we will know if Western Civilization is Doomed, wherein I make the case that a chaotic civilizational "hard landing" is preferable because...
A hard landing is relatively rapid, taking weeks or months as opposed to years or decades.
A hard landing is acutely painful for the people who go through it.
Governments will be caught unawares by a hard landing.
A hard landing is disruptive to the dominant establishments of business, media, academia, etc
A hard landing creates chaos, out of chaos there’s the opportunity for civilizational reset.
Whereas...
In the past, a soft landing to civilizational collapse would be preferable because of the lack of violence and loss of life. It would be a relatively pain-free civilizational reset. However, it’s very different in our era;
A slow decline will allow the government and ruling establishment to entrench and further protect their power.
Local police forces will be replaced with national militarized police forces.
The current world financial system allows for countries to be saved from their idiotic decisions by fiat money printing and loans from foreign central banks (Looking at you Greece!)
Over time people become complacent with tyranny, they cynically accept that the government is corrupt and criminal and that there is nothing they can do.
Ubiquitous smartphones and social media make it possible for the government to spy on you everywhere. It was said that in the Soviet Union that the only time you could safely express your anger with the government was in bed, with the lights out, under the covers to your wife. In a Soft Landing civilizational collapse, we won’t even have that freedom because we all use our smartphones in bed and wives have been replaced by porn!
There’s a high likelihood that the kinds of totalitarian governments resulting from a soft landing would eventually start a nuclear war with each other. This, of course, is actually good for the elites because it reduces the number of useless eaters that need to be provided for.
With a soft landing...
The best-case scenario is a dystopian technologically mediated tyranny and the worst-case scenario is a nuclear war occurring that would kill millions or billions of humans.
To which, I might add, that a hard landing is preferable because of the justice it dishes out. With a hard landing, there's some hope of seeing some of our traitorous professional political-betrayer class dangling at the end of ropes (or better yet, getting the Muammar Gaddafi treatment!) The baby boomers, sometimes called a generation of sociopaths, in the West inherited this extraordinarily prosperous, functional, and just society (relatively speaking) which they traded in for our current Idiocracy in real-life reality.
A hard landing in this decade ensures that those boomers experience some of the karma they've sown by caring more about buying big-screen TVs than they did about handing off a decent society to their children. But one of the mistakes that the conspiratorially-minded (like myself) often make, is blaming a shadowy cabal of ruling elites for all that ails us, while the man or woman in the mirror should step up and shoulder some responsibility for the sordid state of things. And in the coming chaos, we're all going to be smacked at least once or twice for our foolish, selfish, shortsighted decisions.I'm personally wishing I had spent less of my 20s and 30s carousing in swanky bars, discos, and restaurants and more time learning tactile skills - like hydroponics farming - I deserve a good smack for that!
Beyond this velocipedic age, a golden aquarian epoch beckons
As things accelerate, be heartened - the more things fall apart, the more opportunity there is for redemption. Decadence and an excess of comfort are at the root of so much that has ailed us, and the chaos to come will take these destructive seductresses from us. As our civilization becomes materially poorer, we'll become spiritually richer. Your neighborhood will become a nicer place when we have to trade eggs for tomatoes with each other. If you've studied history much, you know that civilizations in the past have gone through similar collapse cycles BUT, make no mistake, this one is different. And because of three factors, it may actually be the last...
- The Internet - In the past, the only media for mass communication was state-controlled propaganda. Revolutionaries could spread their message only by plotting treason in hushed tones in the backrooms of bars. Now we have the internet, and despite big tech doing their damndest to censor us more people than ever have now been red-pilled; by which I mean, actually using your own free will and critical reasoning to make decisions as opposed to just acquiescing to the mainstream.
- Global freedom of movement - One thing that's great about modernity is the capacity to move someplace freer. In the past, you would be very lucky if you could pack up and flee tyranny. But as this hard landing crashes down, there will be different Gault's Gulches around the world; there will be states and countries that decide democratically (or not so democratically) to be bastions of freedom; I'm thinking about Uraguay, Florida, Texas, and Bulgaria (where I live).
- Crypto - With every new item of bad news on the economic front, I say to myself "Thank God! We're that much closer to actually having a sound global reserve currency." A book I read and reviewed, Bitcoin: Hard Money You Can't F*ck With, makes a very convincing case for Bitcoin eventually dethroning the US dollar. I look forward to one day holding a worthless $100 bill in my hand and then wiping my ass with it (as I did with Serbian money once in a bathroom without a scrap of toilet paper while on one of the first dates with my now-wife). From my review of the book...
Much of the insanity that civilization is currently plagued by is a trickle-down effect of the money-as-debt, fractional-reserve legacy financial system, like many I call it "the beast system" - it's the endgame boss that humanity must beat for a fighting chance at becoming a Kardashevian type-1 civilization. And while Bitcoin as the global reserve currency won't fix all that ails us, it will be a lot less beastly.
And we can look forward to an even brighter golden age with Bitcoin as the world reserve currency. Stay healthy, avoid falling pianos, and you can expect to live long enough to see it. I, for one, intend to salsa dance with my wife on the peak of Olympus Mons on Mars, and dollars are not going to get me there!
There's a lot of reason for pessimism about the near-term future, the next few decades, but after reading this book, I'm ultimately optimistic about this century. I think that cryptocurrency will be the vehicle that gets us to a freer, saner future.
There is good reason to believe that the free market fusion of cryptocurrency, biohacking, and digital free speech will serve as the rocket fuel that humanity needs to reach metaphorical escape velocity and break into a civilizational super-cycle. But that can only come after Western Civilization hits rock bottom; after all our corrupt and useless institutions are shuttered, which I do hope happens in the coming decade.
We are halfway through the winter of civilization
That I describe in my Winter Solstice speech in front of the church...
A dark, dystopian technocratic world of neoliberal fascism beckons, certainly, but I believe that arch of history bends toward something approximating Utopia. The collective human spirit has breathed free too much to put back on the face mask of tyranny. Civilization is in decline but I'll suggest to you that this year is the winter solstice - that we could be halfway through the new dark age.
You were born at a time when you get to choose tyranny or freedom! Perhaps it’s all just random, perhaps there’s nothing magical about the universe, but I like to think that there’s some master plan at work. If you find life to be pregnant with drama, suspense, adventure, coincidence, irony, and climatic conclusions, perhaps your life is something like a novel penned by an unseen author. You were born at this remarkable time of accelerating freedom and accelerating tyranny because you were meant to make a difference.
You've heard the expression...
Strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make bad times
We are well into those bad times. It's sort of an inaccurate expression because strong women also make good times and weak women also make bad times, they contribute just as much as we do, if not more. Isn't it better to live at a time when we get to be the strong men (or women) who redeem society as opposed to being the weak who let it go?
As I wrote about in A funny story about tyranny…
Personal and interpersonal freedom matters more than political freedom in living a good life.
When you take extreme ownership of the things that you can control; your health, your relationships, and your work, you can live a good and meaningful life, even in a time of tyranny.
Now, of course, we're much more likely to lead a better life the more politically free we are, but the personal and interpersonal freedom that results from having high standards and discipline in regards to our health, relationships, and work has a much greater impact on our lives than the government and laws that rule us.
So do what you can to maintain your political freedoms, but understand that you'll get much more bang for your buck out of personal growth efforts.
As the Idiocracy intensifies and we advance into the final chapters of Atlas Shrugged, view life as a comedy and not a tragedy, surround yourself with great people, and step up your investment in your health, and you'll be all the more empowered to contribute to a real golden age of humanity, which even now, I think, beckons at the end of a dark tunnel, that we're sliding into.
Pragmatically speaking
I'm now more optimistic personally because of the three Fs...
- Fitness - My +12-year obsession with biohacking and Nootropics hasn't made me wealthy but it sure has made me healthy - I'm in brilliantly good health. I recently celebrated my 39th birthday and I did an article entitled, 9 hacks for STAYING 29-years-old, check out my then and now photos in it - frankly, I'm better looking now and I certainly feel better!
- Family - My marriage is aging like wine instead of milk. We are happier and have a lot better sex life now with a half-decade behind us than we were during our "honeymoon period."
- Faith - I've shrugged off the nihilistic burden of atheism and re-embraced the faith of my parents and ancestors. And it's true what they say; faith is a source of hope and strength that's hard to replace! In this recent podcast, I make a rationalist/pragmatic case for Christianity...
The final major thing that makes me optimistic about the future was what happened to me on January 6th, 2024 - THE most MIND-BLOWING day of my life as a Biohacker.
Finally...
Join the Limitless Mindset Substack to...
Get frequent free edifying content about Biohacking, Lifehacking, and my holistic pragmatic antifragility philosophy. This informative (and often entertaining!) Substack is about how to take advantage of the latest anti-aging and Biohacking science and where I dispense timely mindset nuggets, lifehacking tips, and my own musings.-
{{#owner}}
-
{{#url}}
{{#avatarSrc}}
{{/avatarSrc}} {{^avatarSrc}} {{& avatar}} {{/avatarSrc}}{{name}} {{/url}} {{^url}} {{#avatar}} {{& avatar}} {{/avatar}} {{name}} {{/url}} - {{/owner}} {{#created}}
- {{created}} {{/created}}