If I had to characterize tech in one word, it would be “degenerative”. When people complain about degenerates or about a degenerate society, whether they realize it or not, they are complaining about the mostly unavoidable long-term results of a rapid leap forward in technology. This leap started with the Industrial Revolution, but did not become a truly significant factor in most people’s lives until much later. It took a fair amount of time for the effects of the Industrial Revolution to permeate out from the British Isles / NW Europe and really up-end the fundamental givens of life for most of the world.
Often people imagine that the degraded state of things these days is the result of an ideological agenda, however, at it’s core, it is actually the result of misdirected and confused reactions to industrialization. Don’t get me wrong; I do believe that malevolent people are leveraging the average person’s struggle to come to terms with industrial life against them, but the thing being leveraged pre-exists the leverager and supersedes in importance. Feminism serves as a great example: If you attempt to maintain the industrialized system while hunting down those who leverage feminism as a political tool, you will constantly be overwhelmed with both work and failure. On the other hand, if the industrialized system is defeated, feminism automatically dies with it.
Another example — and one which is particularly noteworthy on account of its test subjects being totally free of political/ideological entanglement — is the case of John B Calhoun’s experiments on rodent populations under conditions of great safety, comfort, abundance, and security. Calhoun essentially created a number of large rodent utopias and the results were consistent: The creatures initially basked in the enjoyment of an adversity-less existence — the population booming at first but stopping far short of reaching environmental capacity and the subjects soon passed into a state of deep and unsalvageable societal breakdown —
“This period between day 315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and in normal social behavior. Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and females, aggressive behavior of females, passivity of non-dominant males with increased attacks on each other which were not defended against. . . After day 600, the social breakdown continued and the population declined toward extinction. During this period females ceased to reproduce. Their male counterparts withdrew completely, never engaging in courtship or fighting. They ate, drank, slept, and groomed themselves – all solitary pursuits. Sleek, healthy coats and an absence of scars characterized these males. They were dubbed “the beautiful ones.” Breeding never resumed and behavior patterns were permanently changed.”
I do plan on devoting a much more extensive post to Calhoun’s experiments, but this will do for right now. You get the idea.
Frequently enough, I am asked whether I believe in a distinction between good and bad tech. There is a sense in which I believe such distinctions exist, and I will explain those distinctions below. However, mostly what people are getting at by asking this question is that they imagine there might be some easy way to solve the tech problem, i.e., limiting what kinds of video games their kids play, or playing legal boundaries on human gene manipulation, etc. Sorry folks, no such easy fix is possible. If that is a hope you are cherishing, you have most likely been misunderstanding the problem.
This question of good and bad tech is one of those questions which requires subtlety and whose answer answer involves some balance between two opposing factors. This, in turn, might give the early impression of compromise and lack of conviction, but I assure the reader that this will not be the case. This is also be the longest article I am likely to write, so I’ll break it into sections.
Stripped down to its very core, technology is something whose fundamental purpose is to make our experience in the natural environment less strenuous. This, in turn, may lead to the continued survival of individuals who would otherwise be marginal survivors.
Let’s say we have a certain population of people and one day Thomas Edison brings them a brand new widget which has a significant impact on their lives, such that individuals who previously been unworthy of long-term survival and propagation — be it through bad health, physical weakness, stupidity, poor temperament, lack of courage, lack of self-discipline — are now able to remain in society and remain in the sexual marketplace and, possibly, produce a new generation; one which will inherit the inferior nature and nurture of its technologically rescued forebearers. The natural world is the very system which safeguards humanity’s fitness and provides the most credible opportunity for the best possible health long-term. Technology is something like a millennial’s Safe Space from the rigors of nature — and the result of this indulgence is a deepening degeneracy.
Of course, tech’s degenerative influence in the world is not clear in every real-world instance. In some randomly selected case of new technology entering the world, we can’t be consistently sure which individual human lives would have been prevented by the hygienic rigors of nature, but nonetheless we can appreciate the obvious truth of the principle. For example: Let’s say we introduce stainless steel tools to a people who previously only had tools made of stone, wood, bone, etc. It’s possible that this alteration of circumstance is not quite enough to distort the marriage and reproductive prospects within the community — obviously there are many important factors at play in mate-selection. Perhaps the stainless steel tools simply made the standard of living slightly better and life continued much as before, i.e., life was still subjected to the myriad rigors of the natural environment and society was still firmly anchored by things like tradition, religion, etc.
On the other hand, it should be obvious that if we go to our stone-tool people from the preceding paragraph and, over the course of 150 years, gradually introduce to them all of the gadgets and “life”-style presently known to us, it would it plunge them into the great physical, mental, spiritual, and societal decay that is all too familiar to us. Why?
First, such an introduction of modern tech would necessarily entail the social, economic, and reproductive enfranchisement of weak and inferior individuals. They could not hack it in the stone age or in the steel age, but they can hack it now.
And they do more than just hack it! 200 years ago they would have been wolf food, but now look at them in the smart-phone age! Their technologically rescued lives become larger than life, so to speak. Their weak, inferior nature means they demand more goods and services than the those who are fit. The market and the state, in turn, eagerly indulge them. I think that for some people this may seem a dubious claim at first, but it if it does seem so, it is only because we are so accustomed to things as they now are.
Take a look around you. Almost every new product or new technological phenomenon has some some name or marketing angle that is clearly intended to massage the infantilism of the masses of neutered people who could not survive outside of the typical urban zoo. At least 100 times a day, the typical consumer is spoon-fed some kind of patronizing pablum called “smart-something-or-other”: smart-phones, smart-TV, smart-cars, smart-grids, smart-bombs, smart-parent, smart-water, smart-watch, smart-screen, smart-truck, smart-edge, smart-connect, smart-care, smart-clock, smart-wool, smart-keys, smart-toy, etc. I’m not even going to bother exhausting all the “smart”-shit out there. It would take way too long. Then there’s all the “intelli”-shit, and and of course, all of this garbage just allows people to be less intelligent, less perceptive, less communicative, and less skillful.
Then there’s facebook — no actual faces, no actual book! Hahaha, what a God-damned clown world modernity is!
And twitter: Okay, I realize that some guys are using twitter as a platform for various reactionary or liberal-rustling purposes but, besides that one exception, if you are a male and have a twitter account just for the “fun of it”, you’re a faggot. Really, man, imagine looking your great-grandfather in his eyes and explaining your twitter account to him!
Instagram: same thing, faggotry.
And I’ve only scratched the surface here. From now on, you will see this characteristic deeply woven into almost everything in the day-to-day societal life of the modern human. It is as if we are all assumed to be 20-year-old, IQ-90, mall-loving bimbos. And this is somewhat logical, for women (and de-masculinized men) are the engines of consumerism.
But why is that?
Because modern tech “emancipated” them from their ancient and biologically determined roles. Tech created the feminist and the metrosexual, and we’ve been experiencing a feedback loop ever since. More degraded men and women who demand more indulgences which in turn creates even more degraded men and women. Once you have washing machines and birth-control pills, it’s a guaranteed slippery slope thereafter. Only the mercy of the hard ground can stop the fall.
Tech has robbed humankind of its health, its dignity, and its glory and has rendered it an absurd lap-dog. But I do believe we can still claim this lost health, dignity, and glory. It is hard work, worthwhile work, and very importantly, it is possible work. Many, or most, will not bother to take up this work, but let that be no deterrent whatsoever to the person who understands human dignity to be not a luxury, but a vocation — a mandate actually — that beckons us from within our God-given nature.
As far as I can see, it is axiomatic that the accumulation of tech translates into increasing physical, mental, spiritual, and societal degradation. This, in turn, necessarily leads to a decreasing esteem among the population for traditional/conservative mores. It is a great absurdity to simultaneously promote technological progress and respect for traditional mores. It’s clearly an either-or proposition.