Call the sheep dumb but maybe they just don’t take the reports of the wolf seriously. I mean, this little box tells me all kinds of stories. Aliens. Spaceships. Monsters. One gets jaded.

Find a way to make money where you sell your services directly to the customer. No boss or job. Flexible schedule. Good money.

Yes, drug dealer is one such, but there are others.

You don’t think we could hit 99% popularity?

Some people need a master. Children tempted to drink gasoline, for example.

Assuming that the control could be resisted, call that a test. A test of self-awareness. If you can resist then you get free will, if you don’t then you don’t. It could be appropriate either way.

Assume that it’s one you like.

Ok, instead of a chip use strong propaganda.

Assume there’s a legitimately strong argument for their goodness and smartness.

You can’t make better people and better cattle at the same time.

Imagine you were a billionaire. Which do you want?

Disney World.

Yes, big value is synonymous with worth lots of money

Meditation is good.

Sure, I’m cashing them in later today.

The moderators have the power therefor when they do something rude it actually isn’t rude. In fact you are rude for suggesting that they are being rude, and deserve punishment.

It’s funny how power works.

Lemme see if I can put that in a succinct meme.

We have created a parallel reality. A consensual dream. And, when you live in a society, skill at navigating the consensual dream is more useful than skill at navigating reality.

That probably covers it sufficiently. Translations for non-sexual contexts is easy.

Excellent. An opportunity to elaborate my thingy.

By impress I mean that the thing looks big. People are impressed by big strong stuff.

Stuff that has big value is worth a lot of money. Thus money is based on people being impressed.

For good and ill, one’s self-worth is generally based on how much attention you get and how much nice things people say about you. Thus self-worth is based on people being impressed.

Law is based on impressive arguments, impressive authorities, impressive force, impressive majorities.

Models of reality are likewise. Arguments, axioms, authorities, experiments, observations.Somebody is impressed and the hypothesis gets promoted to theory or whatever.

That’s where I’m going with that. People are being impressed. Majorities are getting impressed. Impressive people are being impressed.

So we enter post-scarcity but everybody is still playing the same games.

It could be the effects of ancestral trauma. We see people expressing extreme poverty behavior even tho it happened a couple generations back.

It could be genetic. Climbing the social ladder is arguably what we’re born to do.

This would suggest some kind of therapy is called for.

I think there was a Greg Bear where humanity encountered an alien race with a nice therapy that became popular among humans. Probably an allegory for meditation.

Talsit?

Yeah, we should create a c/PedanticNonanswers too

Ok, the obvious : our society-programming is just that powerful. So we are all eyebrows-deep embedded in a useful insanity.

But you’d think we’d struggle against our restraints a bit more. That it might even be common. If nothing else, for the sake of art, science, economics.

An old storm damaged fence.