Does the cold war ever let up?

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What I mean is the idea that adulthood is a 24/7 cold war where you have to put on a face when you go out the door like you could just as easily screw someone over as look at em, that you know all the most cynical ins and outs of how the game is played and any crack in that veneer is a sign akin to mental retardation showing itself. It's like nearly anyone who figures out that they can throw their weight around, distort reality, shade fraud into incompetence seamlessly, and the only adult male whose a valid adult male holds himself every bit as guarded as if he were a law enforcement officer. There's very little space to just be, and catching a flow state - forget about it, you have to either be home alone, out hiking alone, or doing something with very close intimate friends to let the potential-killer mask down and not feel the weight of it aging you.

I sensed this tension and these requirements ramping up in my 20's, now in my 40's at work most days I feel like you could cut the tension with a knife. it's the game no one lets down because they know what will happen if they do, ie. it's a shark tank and that's the same thing as bleeding in the water. That last part makes being on the autistic spectrum all the more terrifying just because any subtle sign of your disability triggers the same.

I debate with myself often what exactly is this? How much of it is the social norms of our era? How much of it is just the age I'm at? How much of this is just Darwinian evolution red in tooth and nail unfolding the way it always has?

I get that if plenty of people are utterly amoral and will pull any levers with others to get what they want at other people's expense that force has to be redundantly held by more and more people, a bit like everyone needs to be good with guns if the local police are scarce. Because there's such a redundancy of cops and robbers it seems like everyone agrees that someone whose neither a particularly good cop or robber doesn't really belong anywhere. Is this a place we really have to be? Would it take having a Putin or Assad for a president or a guy like Saddam Hussein with acid showers and rape rooms for people who annoy him?

It's really boring, really tiring, really draconian, really backward, and it's the sort of thing that strongly suggests to me that the world will be just like this long after I'm in the grave. I think I understand, much better than I used to as well, how people get as damaged and cynical as I see them all the time. The environment does a lot to you, as do the constant demands of your environment.

I've been observing more or less exactly the same thing lately. The only result of making an effort to be a good guy is everyone treating me with suspicion & callous disdain these days. It's so seemingly apropos that I have a hard time even faulting these loved ones seeing me as economic livestock. I seriously work my a$$ off so I can give something back & nobody cares about that because I had to complicate professional matters beyond what we even have time to discuss.

Nobody wants my type around as far as I can see. Learning how to build each & every piece of the civilized world as best I can has nothing to do with respect for me as a guy. Not a one of the last thousand people I asked really wanted to learn about my craft. Showing people love is no more significant than anything else they see as out of character for me.

I don't want to be done in by this vicious sexist state of affairs but the sad truth is that we're lumped into an economic class seen as expendable & people we know see our kind as moreso. I think I need another drink for this one man.

I don't even really want to see people anymore. Total ostracism seems better than talking everyone down from this mass delusion.

I know a few guys, one in particular whose maybe 10 years younger who spent even more time than I did - in his teens - working on meditation, mysticism, the Golden Dawn stuff, Franz Bardon, etc.. He works as a therapist these days and left the area recently but it seemed like we were able to have a lot of conversation about precisely the same issue - ie. noticing that other men were behaving as if they'd kill each other if it were legal, would do so on a professional and within-the-lines way if someone let their guard down, that competence actually put a bullseye on your back with people, that we were in the crosshairs of that as much as anyone else, that there was no avoiding it, and the overall sense of the environment was a constant boiling bloodthirst in the regard people gave each other although it rarely ever rises to being expressed verbally, saying hi to someone when you pass them seems less like courtesy these days and more like the Caucasian version of whistling 'row, row, row your boat', and it's kind of kept as one of those 'understood without being said' sorts of things.


That really does seem to match historical roles, sort of along the lines Warren Farrell brought up about the bag each gender has been left holding - and I think his personal concern, something I'd confirm, is that men largely got left right were they were at and to the degree that things changed for women they were to a degree forced to try being better at being men than the men they were competing with for jobs which is a really value and creativity destroying proposition. The thing I'm wondering about is that actually has any power to diffuse that. It's a bit like if the bulk of people see each other as threats then it's something that's just in the air and everyone's stuck gearing up and weaponizing themselves accordingly.

It would be an incredible tragedy if this was the best we could manage as far as doing society.


The part that still has me gobsmacked, the piece that I just can't make sense of, is that as far as I know my five senses work the same way as most people's, my sense of touch and kinaesthetics largely work the same, the way I feel pleasure or pain is largely the same, and yet it's a bit like running into people who seem to think the same way is incredibly rare and I don't just mean common interest - I mean that it seems rare for people to even hold much of a center in themselves and not just get blown around. It's really tough to fathom how that works.

Mind you all this is no kind of reason not to love the women in my life, on the contrary it just worries me about how they're living.

I've previously written similar to the intial post. Some people didn't get it when I wrote it. I know exactly what you are trying to explain. It is vicious out there: every 'man' for himself. Some people won't see it the way for a variety of reasons. Things like lack of life experience, having a good job, money in the bank, a support network, insulate one somewhat from the forementioned painful realities. When the comforts are stripped away, when you lose everything, have no money, lose your job, your family etc, you really find out who your true friends are (if any) and are forced to engage the viciousness of modern society. 20 years ago it was about survival. Today's survival is now self-preservation mode at all costs. (Mostly NT) People take pride in the level of inter-personal callousness they can turn on at the flip of a switch. It is possible that the barrage of bad news, overstimulation, loneliness, family corrosion, wars, job scarcity, etc, is showing the noticeable toll. One has to have a good amount of life experience to see it for what it is.

For me it almost feels like it's a peel-back of secular humanism and whatever Judao-Christian value system we had in place which is now exposing what's really the game of Darwinian genetic stomp-out, which was there all along and a large part of how Christianity became so wonderously convoluted as to turn Jesus into a crusader, inquisitor, or purging agent for Templars and Cathar.

I often keep up with Bret and Eric Weinstein, as well as the guys at Rebel Wisdom (particularly Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jamie Wheal, Jordan Greenhall, etc.) because they're chewing on the following question - ie. that the game of Darwinian stomp out, ie. where if you don't know you're in a war you've already lost, is what they'd call Game A. Game B, OTOH, is the attempt at tweaking game theory to where it's bridged or laced together in such a manner that zero-sum games are discouraged and collaborative games are incentivised, a bit like trying to take David Sloan Wilson's research and turn us away from 'The Selfish Gene' and back toward something more pro-social that we have potentially in us.

Where I think Daniel Schmachtenberger nailed it in one of his War on Sensemaking, our society seems to be mostly curated these days by cluster B personality disorder and it's getting to be like a rabbid King Kong stomping everything to dust beneath it. It's a lot like William Butler Yeats' saying about the worst having miraculous conviction and the best having none. Really creepy spot to be trying to 'go it your own' to try and secure a job, start a family, etc. when your own family and friends have no hand-up to offer and yes, as you said - I think this is what it looks like not to be on a nepotistic escalator or elevator of some kind to where the good stuff sort of just rains down like mana from heaven.

Your and cbergs' posts are excellent observances. Cluster-b's are on the increase statistically. I can't remember if it was traits of NPD or narcissism within a certain age bracket but the increase was in the multiple 1000's of % higher than the previous generation for the same age bracket.

I think social media is encouraging people to adopt destructive, antisocial behavior towards anyone who seems different as a profiteering scheme. It's classic engineering divide & conquer tactics being practiced by fake engineers on people as if we were machines.

It almost feels like a colletivized system of subjugation that only exempts the rich & the very fortunate. People want to accentuate the exclusivity of their circumstances so they push away everyone who fails to conform. It's connected to the unchecked growth of wage slavery & corporate rule.

"... Mark Zuckerberg said lies, histrionics & exploitation are making us more connected and changing the world so it must be ok..."

IMO the only good way to survive in today's world, if you aren't already a part of some large upper-middle-class (or higher) clique, is to be part of some large well-organized subculture. This means one must either (1) find one's natural subculture or (2) do what one can to help build it, if it doesn't already exist or isn't yet big enough or sufficiently well-organized to be useful.

In particular, we need an autistic-friendly subculture, with, at its heart, a much bigger and better-organized autistic community than now exists. (See Longterm visions for the autistic community and Autistic Workers Project.)

That could potentially work out however, people not on the spectrum would have to learn the proper definitions of ASD levels 1-3. As someone else already mentioned in another post, that 'regular' people use autistic to mean synonymous with ret*d or their idea of autism is that of a level 3. In the modern world of snap judgments, sloganeerisms, and singular labels to describe someone, it is of no benefit nor invest in the time for NTs to understand us. This is one of the reasons why I am so glad to have finally started interacting here. You guys/gals are great.

Subcultures unfortunately have their own weakness in that they tend to have their own dogmas, politically if they're political or religious, and so you're stuck sacrificing integrity for survival in most cases rather heavily. The only one I can think of that I could see myself belonging to is whatever subculture is sort of forming around Jungian understandings of physicalism and/or entertaining deeper roots to what it is to be human along with enhanced sensemaking (thinking 'Intellectual Dark Web' and diaspora). When I was more mystically inclined I was in AMORC, BOTA, joined OTO for a brief period and found the last particularly 'woke' and the former two to have their own dogmatic issues - in many cases lovely people but not people I could see myself spending the rest of my life with because there was only so much bandwidth for critical thinking (the second I mentioned has probably been the closest to a fit).

I think the place we have to get to is seeing the game of Darwinian stompout as favoring genes over literally everything else. That's a level of nature that doesn't give a flying anything about human happiness. It props the sexes up against each other. Running on that engine if most thinking people decided to only have two children when looking at the state of our substrate and climate and a particular group persistently had 14 kids per family, crashed the climate, and left us in a postapocalyptic world they'd be the victors because they'd be most of what was left in that diminished state of existence. This impulse is quite the enemy of everything we want and yet it's got a knife to our throats right now. Not something we should have allowed to happen.

I think it mostly just takes patience to get someone to stop acting this way in situ.

It's slightly worse, in this context good behavior seems to be a sign of weakness. It's like if you want to be a decent person and not have the tables run on you for it you really have to be something like a living razor where everyone knows you could cut em if you wanted to and that they couldn't do a thing about it.

I'm all too aware of that, I've been demonized as hacker wunderkind for some time now. It's a double edged sword of a similar variation; service with a smile unless someone ought to be thankful to still have their identity.

Yep, as the good doctor from Toronto would put it - keeping your shadow in your front pocket and the hilt visible.