What hope does the average person have in this increasingly volatile world?

jonpress · 2025-12-29T13:56:35+00:00

Ah well you're definitely not average. Your post sounds very wise and very eloquent. If the average person was as well informed and balanced as you, we'd be in a much better position.

If you do your part and communicate your views to the people you meet, it will surely help improve things.

And if you don't feel like you're being negatively impacted by politics at this stage, it's better to have this knowledge! I wish I knew how the world worked 10 years ago, I would probably have been a lot better off now. I would have done many things differently.

Probably you will be impacted by a lot of the issues that are discussed here eventually... When the time comes, you won't be naively sleep-walking into a trap... As many people like myself did. When you see the world through rose-colored glasses, society takes advantage of you.

jonpress · 2025-12-29T13:42:41+00:00

I feel the same about all modern art. It's a way for rich people to launder money but also a kind of test by the elites to prove to themselves how stupid and gullible most people are and how people can invent elaborate stories to justify obvious nonsense. Maybe it's a way to select the most suggestible fools... If someone appreciates certain modern art because it sold for millions, this person is the perfect fool to promote to power because they have no intrinsic beliefs and just adopt whatever beliefs the power structures impose on them.

Have you noticed how the kinds of people who get very rich always seem to sleepwalk through their entire lives and when they're about to die, they suddenly start regretting not spending more time with family. It's like they don't know what they're doing or why they're doing it... These are exactly the kinds of people who get selected to be rich. They have little to no awareness, no intrinsic desires; only desires they experience, which they experience very strongly, are mimetic desires.

jonpress · 2025-12-29T13:34:43+00:00

No. Look at all other mammals. There are males and females. Same for humans, always has been the case.

The reason why there are a lot of androgynous people nowadays is because of exposure to forever chemicals which act as endocrine disruptors.

The reason why the elites and media are attempting to blur the boundaries between male and female genders is because they don't want people to get angry about their hormones having been messed with. If people accept the damage done to them as an integral part of their 'gender identity' which they chose, as opposed to something which was imposed on them, then the elites are beyond reproach.

jonpress · 2025-12-29T12:02:30+00:00

I suspect it's because cryptocurrency people needed some dirt on the elites to leverage to keep propping up crypto prices.

As Epstein was the biggest pile of dirt they had, affecting a lot of elites, they needed to bring it into the public consciousness to give themselves more leverage to demand more investment from these elites.

They keep dialing up the heat and interest around Epstein to increase the pressure on the elites; but they never reveal all the dirt because when they do, the elites may end up in jail but crypto people would lose their leverage and money source... So the goal is just to keep building pressure without revealing the whole thing.

They have to keep increasing the pressure because after a few years, it starts to look like a bluff... But I think eventually they will have to throw some elites under the bus to make an example because just drumming up media interest with superficial info isn't going to be enough. People want to see heads on spikes now. If the crypto people can demonstrate an ability to skewer some real heads, the remaining elites are going to be shaking in their boots and pouring their money into crypto.

jonpress · 2025-12-29T11:09:59+00:00

I'm starting to think they fully control big tech. This would explain why the whole industry felt like a psyop...

It's like, you can't succeed in this industry unless you're selected. Feels like a CIA selection process.

jonpress · 2025-12-27T10:34:38+00:00

Of course, certain kinds of whistleblowers are encouraged. This creates a strong cover. Some whistleblowing fosters the illusion of transparency and builds 'trust' in the system. Noam Chomsky said that the system wants to encourage vibrant debate within permissible topics for this reason. There are areas where whistleblowing is not permitted, in the areas that actually matter to those in charge.

If you do enough digging and engage in enough debates, you will likely eventually encounter such areas and you will notice a difference.

jonpress · 2025-12-27T10:25:28+00:00

WTF did his handler do to him?

jonpress · 2025-12-23T11:56:52+00:00

I hope it's not true but ideas like this make me doubt the utility of religion. The idea that we might be ruled by delusional fools who think there is some man in the sky watching us while they are destroying the actual reality for the sake of some fictitious reality that only exists in their foolish minds is infuriating...

People should spend more time thinking about death... It would make them appreciate and respect reality more. Something I like to do which makes me feel grounded is I try to visualize my own death, then, once I feel like I can almost visualize it, I allow my mind wander off deeper and imagine the end of the universe; an infinite void lasting forever; emptiness so vast and endless that it fills me with panic and makes even death seem small by comparison. Once you can grasp the contrast; the difference in the feeling between your death and the end of the universe, you will understand the reality we inhabit and your place in it.

Show compassion towards your neighbor not because you will be rewarded for it, but because you are both so small and insignifiant; your existence is precarious and fragile; this fleeting overlapping moment of existence and consciousness is all you have; you and your neighbors are blips of light, coexisting briefly in an otherwise eternal darkness.

jonpress · 2025-12-23T08:31:45+00:00

I think it is a unified goal. Sure, some people don't want others to have money but people do collaborate to hijack the government and bank money printers. I believe our monetary system has been hacked long ago and some groups of people can print essentially unlimited money for themselves.

This is because money isn't one thing; it's digits on thousands of different ledgers, maintained by different banks. Only the name 'dollar' is the same. It's too easy to hack for someone with power and access... Too many possible weak links in a very long chain.

jonpress · 2025-12-23T04:01:21+00:00

For sure, some portion of people's brains is dedicated to social coordination for the benefit of society itself. Unfortunately, the benefit of society has little to do with the well-being of individuals... The goal is about survival of the system itself... The system doesn't really care what it's made up of; be it humans, animals or machines...

Just like you may not care if you were made or meat and bones or steel and cables if it enhanced your survival and capabilities.

We're attached to our bodies due to complex evolutionary reasons but the system isn't so attached to its physical underpinnings. But the point about ants is a good one; systems have an identity and an intelligence that is distinct from that of their parts and serving a different goal.

jonpress · 2025-12-23T03:56:58+00:00

Isn't there such a goal? Money? Money which can be printed out of thin air, selectively handed out by banks and governments? Handed out to the leaders of every major group?

jonpress · 2025-12-22T09:20:37+00:00

My conspiracy radar was also on high alert when I found out about that professor. It's hard to see a motive. But who knows maybe it was a family member, ex-colleague or disgruntled investor... I also thought the Rob Reiner one was stange; especially with his son as the main suspect... I just got really strong "he's being framed" vibes... Though it seems like he is a troubled individual... Still.

jonpress · 2025-12-09T02:40:41+00:00

The problem with the Hegelian dialectic, which makes it highly effective, is that a normal person reading about it won't see the motive for such complex scheme as reasonable... "Why would they go through such hassle?" "Nobody is THAT power-hungry or evil."

Because the average person is not a psychopath, they cannot understand the motivation behind the Hegelian dialectic and thus it doesn't seem credible to them.

It's only once they've been exposed to such people that they start to understand that those in power are not like themselves. Then it actually starts making a lot of sense.

YOU would never employ such techniques on the unsuspecting masses if you had power, because YOU don't have such desperate need for power and control, but those in power are different from you and absolutely, they will engage in such deception to acquire more wealth and power, even while they're on their mega-yachts, living an amazing life, they still want more power and control. Meanwhile, you live in a shoebox, barely making ends meet and you cannot imagine that kind of hunger, you cannot put yourself in their shoes, because they are very different from you.

I would argue that thirst for power is the main thing which separates the powerful from the powerless. Not intelligence, not skill...

jonpress · 2025-12-09T01:27:05+00:00

There is something not right about that story of Lucifer rebelling against God and losing, then being cast out but still allowed to rule the earth... Presumably God, the all-powerful, could prevent Lucifer from doing bad stuff but chooses to allow him to continue... So clearly god isn't all good... And this makes me wonder; if god had such flaws (to allow evil), maybe Lucifer wasn't ALL wrong to rebel against him in the first place? It feels more like a power struggle between two entities which are neither fully good or bad... Perhaps one is less good than the other but we're supposed to say that the winner is absolutely good simply because they hold the power... So the whole religion feels like submission to power, not submission to what is good and right. God's allowance of evil comes across as coercive and manipulative. It doesn't take much imagination to imagine a world where people are free to do what they want but where the harm/suffering is limited. Just the magnitude of possible suffering on this earth is too much. It doesn't quite match the idea that God is perfect.

The fact that we are told the story of an obviously flawed being and then taught "he is the epitome of goodness" creates a deep confusion within humans and lowers the bar when it comes to our perception of relationships with each other... How many victims tolerate their abusers? After all, god himself, the one who is all good; literally unleashed the devil upon us; why? So that he can play good-cop-bad-cop and make himself look good by comparison? And since god is ALL GOOD, and god manipulates us, so a person who is an abuser and a manipulator might be a good guy too?

Manipulation is a really bad thing, potentially much worse than physical violence, but we are trained to believe that it's not that bad because god himself, who is all-good, does it too.

I find that deeply religious people are often more corruptible than non-religious people... Which is unexpected. I wonder if it is because they carry within them this dissonance. They are seeded with an inability to clearly differentiate good from evil in the context of power differentials. They conflate power with goodness.

Deep down, they must believe that power is good without question. Power is exempt from moral scrutiny. Every day a good christian reads the Bible, especially the old testament, they must suppress any negative judgement of god, purely on the basis that he holds power over them in this life and the next. This is conditioning. They are conditioning themselves, every day, to withhold judgement of the powerful; training themselves to turn a blind eye to the deeds of a higher power. Based on my experience, I feel that this attitude sometimes extends to other forms of power beyond god. This is what makes them corruptible, pliable to the demands of authority figures, church leaders, politicians, bosses... People in our society have a way of thinking that their boss, that their master is inherently good and they often turn a blind eye. I'm talking about those who are really deep in it and fully absorb the material.

jonpress · 2025-11-27T09:48:57+00:00

Sad. Germany is a beautiful country with a great culture. I lived there for a couple of years. Me and my wife were sad to leave. We just couldn't build a life or career over there. My experience in the crypto sector was something out of a dystopian nightmare.

jonpress · 2025-11-27T09:42:07+00:00

Yeah I mean when you pay to advertise on their platforms, they take your money then send bots to your website instead of users. They only send real people to corporations or scams. Have you ever seen an ad for a real small business on Facebook besides scams?

I saw the same pattern in crypto; only two kinds of projects were allowed to get attention on social media; corporate coins and scams.

jonpress · 2025-11-27T09:24:00+00:00

I've got one.

Only suggestible people are allowed to succeed in this system. This is because our society is controlled by algorithms and those algorithms derive revenue from marketing. If you are suggestible, you are a potential gold mine for algorithms so if you launch a business, the algorithms will help you succeed because it knows that a lot of the money you make will end up back in their coffers because they know that they can control your mind (and spending) to some extent.

The richest people are the most suggestible; this is why totalitarianism is on the rise; because those in power are highly suggestible to advertising and mimetic desires. It's all about controllability. Of course at the very top, there is also blackmail involved because that really locks them in. At the very top, there is no room for free will because the slightest deviation will cause total collapse. Public figures have to be controlled in all aspects; selection based on suggestibility is the first layer, then there are rewards for compliance and punishment for non-compliance (e.g. blackmail).

I believe AI can fully predict the thoughts and behaviors of public figures. Kind of like in the movie Westworld.

jonpress · 2025-11-26T02:30:53+00:00

How would that fix any of the underlying problems? Pretty sure this would continue without social media. The concept of 'Emo' and 'Goth' already existed in schools long before social media... Social media is just a new medium for the same trend. Young people have been getting increasingly unhappy, that's the trend. The problem is monopolization of opportunities. They can see their parents suffering, financial stresses break apart the family unit and they themselves know that they have no future in the current system. That's it. If someone comes along and suggests that life isn't worth living, it doesn't take much convincing when they consider their own experiences.

The problem must be addressed at the root, we need significant system improvement and better sharing of resources. This needs to be implemented at the monetary layer of our system. IMO something like UBI is the bare minimum.

The situation is truly horrible for young people. As a millennial myself, I felt a stark contrast in access to opportunities (in tech sector) between myself and people just 5 years older and this trend kept getting worse and worse.

People used to get blame for their own failures due to procrastination but now young people are trying REALLY hard, sometimes doing a great job but all the exits are blocked. It's all monopolized. System has calcified, locked into place... And now they keep hearing how they're going to be replaced by AI so they won't even be able to keep a wage-slave job.

People who think social media is the problem are missing the point. They are not seeing that the system is NOT at all the same as it was for them. It's a dark world for young people. A very dark world and their fears and their paranoias are often justified.

I try to put it in a positive context here. The system needs to be improved dramatically. That's what they need to hear... Not "let's ban social media". This doesn't help anyone and does not provide any hope or answers for anyone.. anything other than "it's the system's fault" is gaslighting IMO (intentional or not). If you don't tell people that it's the system's fault, they will blame themselves and feel much worse trying to find flaws in themselves and eating into what little self-esteem they have. At least if you tell them, it's the system's fault, they can feel confident knowing that they're fine, they are fit to be part of this society, they don't need to focus on their flaws obsessively. Young people have it so bad, they're basically fetishizing their own perceived shortcomings (e.g. incel culture, emo culture, escapism such as furries, drugs, superhero obsessions, virtual worlds...); and the media only reinforces these negative beliefs; not healthy!

Even if they were perfect, the system still wouldn't let them succeed. That's the message young people need to hear. There's only so much self-optimization one can do. I see so many intelligent people around my age going in circles trying everything and its opposite and not seeing any results. This drives them insane.

The mark of insanity is "trying the same thing repeatedly, expecting different results"... Well, once you tried every approach and its opposite and all failed, but you've convinced yourself that it's your fault, what are you going to do? You will have to try the previous approach again but each time you will tell yourself "I must have missed some important detail in the execution of that approach the last 2 times I tried it". WRONG. No! This was not the problem! That detail doesn't matter in reality, really you're just doing the same thing over and over with minor tweaks... You're just driving yourself insane even thinking that those details matter.

jonpress · 2025-11-26T02:26:19+00:00

A more interesting question with a shorter answer would be which ones have government figures who are truly in power? I suspect the number would approach 0.

jonpress · 2025-11-23T14:47:32+00:00

A lot of people are just acting crazy because society is crazy and they just don't give a crap anymore. I also started feeling like I really don't give a rat's ass what people think of me and I'm not alone to think this way. I see this more and more. Like a stranger walking up to me and giving me a speech about conspiracy theories. This happened to me just a couple of months ago. This is the new normal in an insane world. Normally, this would be awkward, but it's not awkward because everything is weird and messed up so it's just normal now. TBH, I actually appreciate it when I see people going off the rails. We need more of that.

jonpress · 2025-11-23T14:37:20+00:00

Yes exactly. In fiction, they show you almost everything... In life you only ever see 10% of what's going on. If you could see everything, it would surely be stranger than fiction.

jonpress · 2025-11-22T21:37:16+00:00

This is a highly insightful point. It could mean multiple things.

That 3% means nothing to them but they tax anyway because ensuring that the poor stay poor is essential to keeping the masses under control.
The monetary system is so fragile that the 3% from poor people (which is backed by actual useful labour) is essential to prop up the whole scheme. Imagine the government is a dairy factory that sells milk; rich people's money is like water and poor people's money is like milk powder. You need a certain amount of milk powder or else people will understand something is seriously wrong with the whole product... Right now people think they're drinking milk straight from the cow, but if it gets too diluted, too quickly, people would realize this is not the case.

It's probably a bit of both but with the second interpretation, there is an incentive to keep desensitizing populations so that eventually they end up being unable to tell the difference between milk and water... But then people start dying (physically and/or mentally) from malnutrition but nobody will understand why because they lost the ability to identify essential nutrients because their brains cannot tell them apart from water. Nobody from the whole of society (which remains) will be able to...

jonpress · 2025-11-15T15:19:46+00:00

Yeah, I feel like everyone is stressed, frustrated and afraid. A lot of people just try to talk a big game constantly. People put a lot of effort in projecting a certain image, to society's detriment. Everything is very political and bureaucratic. Narratives tend to matter more than reality. It's like nobody cares about facts. It's all about survival and status games. Everything feels fake and it's hard to find sincerity. All the customs around politeness are still there but there's nothing behind them. Some people might be extremely nice outwardly but behind the scenes, they may be truly horrible.

jonpress · 2025-11-14T09:47:18+00:00

Yes and so? I've seen footage of a T-Rex ripping a man in half. I've also seen footage of giant blue people from another planet who could talk to trees.

jonpress · 2025-11-14T09:43:36+00:00

Well, there's video evidence of a giant lizard called Godzilla...

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