FBXL Social

Rome is decadent, all we can do is find a hermitage and start rebuilding quietly so we can emerge once the city is empty.

It's a good video that suggests that in the context of what we're talking about, we need to go small again, and have the people owning their own plot of land. Metaphorically, that suggests to me something I've been talking a lot about lately, having your own little slice of the world. Once game development is mechanized and made into a billion dollar industry of virtual serfs tilling someone else's land it was always ripe for perversion.

So it's like other things in life right now -- we need to make our own things, own them, not give them up in the face of rewards from empire. In so doing we'll be free, and likely happier. But a small farm will only ever produce a small amount and we need to refocus our visions to account for that. Instead of coveting the corrupt cities, we should be looking instead at what our own lands can produce. It won't be bright and shiny, it won't field giant armies to conquer the entire continent, but it'll be honest and it can be good...

This might have been made by a wannabe socialist revolutionary (I literally don't know, it could honestly have been), but it's still filled with deep truth.

Notwithstanding the fact that certain ideologies are deeply hostile to most normal people right now, I tend to agree with you. Good ideas are good ideas, and bad ideas are bad ideas, we need to retain the good and filter the bad regardless of their source. One of the rhetorical tricks used by net evil factions is to package good ideas with horrible ideas so you can push through your horrible ideas, because the good of the good ideas can be dwarfed by the bad of horrible ideas.

As for your main point, I think a lot of people have been damaged into thinking that the only way things can work is top down, and that's one of the reasons everyone's feeling so shitty -- Someone convinces you that you can only be granted change rather than making it for yourself, and suddenly you've had a slice of your humanity taken away from you.

I remember, I had a similar event when I was a younger man. I had just broken up with a crazy lady. She was the sort who would try to control you through constant accusations, and the only way to sort of keep the peace was to comply. So once I left her, I had my crappy bronco ii, and filled in some of the holes with riveted tin, and I spraypainted the whole thing from top to bottom in mat black. Looked like shit, but it was like "I'm doing this, I don't need to ask permission, and if it turns out like shit it's my thing that looks like shit". It was a big moment for me, a realization that you can and sometimes should just do things.

It did end up looking like shit, but I wasn't done. I ended up tearing out the dash and the headliner and doing it all up custom (padding and fabric), and it looked terrible and probably would have killed everyone in a 5 mile radius if I ever got in a crash, but I didn't care because it was my customized piece of crap. I even redid the dashboard plastic, taking plexiglass and painting the back in black with a stencil so it looked like one piece of glass with openings for the various things. Again, didn't look great, and if there was any resale value I had destroyed it completely by making it look terrible, but it was my little piece of crap.

Having now learned that I have the agency to do what I want even if it ends in something objectively terrible and even if it does the world doesn't end, I later started to realize the power in just doing your best. Most people don't try to excel, they just want to do what is standard or even just what is required. That can mean at work, but it especially means at home. There's overwhelming evidence in many ways that lots of people aren't putting in any effort, so just doing your best, doing what you think is right is actually a revolutionary act because history is written by those who show up.

There's another piece of that too, because a lot of other people are still stuck in the box, still thinking they need permission to act, permission to make decisions in their own lives. There's a lot of people who wouldn't ever think they are even allowed to paint their own piece of crap car, and people who think they aren't allowed to raise their kids right, and people who think they aren't allowed to make a video game, and people who think they aren't allowed to write a book, and people who think they aren't allowed to pick up trash. Whatever it is, people think they aren't allowed without getting some big corporate or government sponsorship, so they don't even try.