It’s hard out there for a kulak.
...

most of this lust for meaning goes not into power, but into the mere appearance of power: power porn. If there is any fighting style that prevails in mixed martial arts, it is Brazilian jujitsu. If there is any trope that prevails in the modern marketplace of ideas, it is the pornography of importance.

Dissidents under all regimes often come to grief by expecting power, their enemy, to be fair to them—or believing that some demonstration of unfairness will harm the regime's legitimacy. Actually, successful illegitimate action confirms a regime's legitimacy. Only the powers that be can break their own rules.

The primary impact of dissidents in the modern regime is as scapegoats and/or naive provocateurs. Power, which would otherwise have to explain its troubled relationship with reality, instead gets enemies it can blame for its failures—shoring it up nicely. While these enemies are perfectly sincere in their animosity, and can be irritating and even damaging, they are orders of magnitude too weak to be an existential threat.

And even if dissident energy is simply wasted, all energy is finite. Even dissipating the enemy’s energy is a victory. And this is how most dissidents, too, reinforce the regime.

For example, ritually desecrating the temples, monuments, idols, or other sad fetishes of a weak, beaten people is a time-honored way to flex on them and keep them weak. Nine hundred years before Jesus, the Assyrians had already made themselves masters of this art. If you think you are something different from an Assyrian, you are wrong.

Modern civilization, thanks to innovations in communication from Gutenberg to Pornhub, has returned to its beginning. In 2020, everyone is totally connected. So everyone can and must be engaged with power—just like when we were chimps.

The total state is no longer content with physical compliance. It demands emotional security. Power is not just obeyed. Power must be loved. And this reversion to the total state, our most ancient form of government, makes the modern regime, despite all its toys and transistors, seem somehow surprisingly barbaric.

But when power has our emoluments and our compliance, why does it need our homage? Why must it pester us so, for the mere trinket of love?

Because it feels insecure. Power always feels insecure. Everyone wants power—so it should feel insecure. And the worse its performance, the more insecure power feels, because the more insecure it is; so the more homage it must demand.

Culture isn’t static, though. As the competitive pressure on a state changes, the cultural rules that helped support the empire’s growth are likely to evolve. An ethos of self-sacrifice or restraint in the name of the common good isn’t necessarily the most appealing, and as a population comes to feel ever more secure younger generations might dismiss traditional ways of doing things as staid and silly. Cultural entrepreneurs might mount sophisticated criticisms of established ways of doing things, and concoct alternative stories of national greatness which prioritize the pursuit of self-interest or the superiority of a mode of thinking which is deeply sceptical of the old cultural norms. It doesn’t matter if everyone in the empire is persuaded or not. If some people feel they have been given permission to do a bit more looking out for themselves and a bit less worrying about what’s expected of them as upstanding members of society, that may well be enough to start to work on the cultural equilibrium.

...valuing the market at 51X LTM earnings during the present parlous moment in time – or even nearly 27X if you want to give the financial engineering jockeys in the C-suites a hall pass for $77 billion of mistakes and losses this quarter alone–is nothing short of nuts.