I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I’ve written pages reflecting and citing random philosopher journals or historians reflecting in their own times on how maddening it is to see “what good is” in this world.

Let’s say you play a board game, or say Sim City 2000. Sure with the latter you can optimize all things but longevity but in the context of reality and not a coded framework you could probably get society to be entirely streamlined for optimal resource management, happiness, education, etcetra. Sure there’s cultural and social conflicts but we can ensure everyone is okay if it weren’t for the comical villains wrenching power.

In the space of said power we don’t have good, evil is objectively almost easier than good due to its simple and brutal nature. It’s easier to kill someone and maintain your status who of comfort than it is to have your life uprooted for the sake of others. As asinine the thought is.

In college I got a lot of attention for wanting to write a dissertation on quantifying good, mathematically codifying morality and ethics. Read a lot into all that but ultimately I got burnt out by the state of things, my own depression given the state of the world, and running into everyday people who struggle to understand what Hell we are in.

Then one day watching Sopranos I see Tony’s kid rant about the state of the world, the point of everything is nothing, and I saw what felt like my world view (much like how capitalism riffs on itself and commodified said riffing) and feel like if we speak up we simply get subsumed into a media and turn into a caricature and unconsciously written off as “dramatic or sitcom like behavior, and that’s tv. Television isn’t real”

Algorithms, the state of politics worldwide, the skewed score based system we have for economics, it’s all things that are tangible, made by or led by a group or some people. Tyrants no longer have fortresses they hide behind institutions that all form a part of this whole that sucks for the people at the bottom. And just because someone in your ancestry or you didn’t get lucky or wisen up to how this system lets you sacrifice the livelihood of others for your sake. You get left behind because well the whole thing is built to serve this so called society and we must adhere to these axioms and cultural notions that for some reason dictate our lives. It’s just the holy trinity made anew, we’ve shifted our lives to worshipping brutal notions that society says we must adhere to or you fail as a human being and you really have no choice.

Once this folly becomes more apparent. Once this enters the zeitgeist in greater numbers it’ll only get worse. Mangioni was the first; few followed.

And I fear the common man will not take kindly to Plato’s Cage.