Surviving Idiocracy

My twenties were dominated by traveling. Not to your next Spring Break you mind. I was a little more independent-minded and adventurous. The Middle East and Africa were in my crosshairs. Once there, I moved on by whatever means of transportation I found. Local transport, on foot, bicycle, Bush taxi – whatever was available at the time. Comfort was not a factor I cared much about. Adventure was. 

I saw slums in East Africa and went to see the witch doctors in Benin City. I slept on the floor of police stations in Central Egypt and ate things I could not identify with desert-dwelling Bedouins in Sudan. 

More than once I was exposed to either some form of combat or at least a very iffy security situation. Back In Austria, I was often asked how I managed to get through it all without being harmed significantly. My response was always the same. Don’t be an idiot and don’t follow idiots. You have to keep your wits sharp because even if in poorer countries the idiots are more muted, they are still there and try to lay their idiot malarkey onto you.

Going to a poor country and flashing your wealth makes you an idiot. You create feelings of envy and this makes people creative about how to transfer what you have into their possession. Violence is not off the table. You don’t need to worry about problems you don’t create in the first place.

Going anywhere you don’t know very well and drinking beyond moderation also makes you an idiot. Drunkards are easy targets for whatever might intend to bring harm to you. 

See how that goes?

Your behavior and foresight determine your fate in large part, not only when you are traveling. This is valid for any situation of life. 

Trying to guess what may happen – and I mean realistically happen not some wild version of a fantasy story – takes courage and effort and recalibrating the picture every so often makes this a rather strenuous exercise. Because life has its ways to run rings around our plans. You can’t plan once and then stick religiously with it as this makes you rigid and brittle. 

Things change, assumptions turn out to be wrong, surprises happen and this goes on every second of every day. Never underestimate the Idiots capacity for causing mayhem to you and anyone you love. The only way to deal with that is a survivalist attitude. Not a prepper’s attitude. 

Preppers are often paranoid and have unrealistic expectations. Plus being a prepper is a life-consuming effort. If this is your cup of tea and gets your juices flowing, by all means, be my guest. But most of us won’t respond to this itch. And going completely overboard is hardly a flexible strategy to deal with things you cannot possibly stake out at the moment.

A survivalist makes a lot of preparations without digging a hole in the ground and stuffing it with provisions. A survivalist will first of all do anything possible to live in reality. Not in the version of the world that we try to imagine to make the world into an ego-pleasing, comically theatrical version of what it truly is. 

The survivalist will take everything that happens and remove the emotions, remove the superfluous, and break it down to its true core. And then he examines if it impacts him, how this may happen, and how he intends to protect himself from harm or to recover from whatever hurt him in any conceivable way.

Lightening the load also helps a lot. Humans are born pack rats. We hoard stuff, ideas, friends – whatever. Most of it we never need but it all weighs us down in our quest to be nimble. While you are about to clean out your stuff, also clean out your mind and throw some old ideas, some hopes, and some comforting assumptions onto the dustbin. The future will be messy and you will need your mind to be unburdened by the old. 

And don’t forget to hone your skillset with stuff you don’t ordinarily do. Try to fix stuff, get smart on cooking, renovation, fixing mechanics, and even electronics. Brush up on that language that you wanted to learn forever or get some coding basics. Be ready to be useful and to function outside your usual frame of reference. Idiots create chaos and chaos breaks whatever frameset that you are used to – be sure you can thrive in it. 

The best way to rein in Idiots is by allowing whatever they do to run its course and get them exposed to it. Idiots cannot deal with hardship. Their egos and their worldview are so stiff and inflexible that they can’t ever look beyond the rim of their plate. Most of them are not aware that the plate has a rim at all. Their worldview is all they ever know. 

Exposing them to the consequences does not mean to engage in debate and win. You can’t do that. An idiot is invulnerable to facts, logic, and common sense as we have seen. If you find a good angle to debate them and score a win you will only stiffen their resolve as they take your win as an evil ploy concocted by the devil himself. In their world, they are angelic creatures and they are always righteous. So whatever the outcome, you cannot win.

Truly exposing them to the consequences of their actions rather means making them enjoy the endless pleasures that their actions produce. As they wreck the economy and make everything much more expensive, they will need to be made to not only sample that but they must walk the talk. 

But truly exposing Idiots to those consequences also exposes all of us to those same consequences. The trick is to be better at surviving them and also to prepare long before the brunt of them comes to bear. Idiots never prepare for anything realistic. They already know everything so if it is not part of their pre-conceived worldview, there is no need to prepare. Even when things start to go wrong, they can’t seem to ever see that. They will hold out longer than anyone exposing them even more to the pain they have created in the first place.

So besides having a survivalist attitude, you must also keep an open eye on developments around you so you can react early and prevent greater harm to you. Going all in on the green madness and eliminating all conventional solutions such as heating and an ICE vehicle will expose Idiots. If you make more sensible choices while the going is not all that horrible, you will suffer much less. Keep your old trusted ICE vehicle around, and shun the subsidy for the heat pump. Learn how to fix your ride if it breaks.

Now we can’t and we should not even try to create the consequences that are needed to cut the Idiots back to size artificially. That would require common sense and cooperation which are exactly the things that have gone out the window because of the Idiots ruling the roost. In an idiotic world, you can only rely upon yourself and maybe an extremely small circle of like-minded people around you. Not being an Idiot is a pretty lonely place.

We absolutely must internalize one fact. Idiots cannot be mended. They cannot be changed through reform. Only the Idiot can change from the inside through a process of reality infusion. That’s a very painful process so it’s exceedingly rare that any fully bloomed idiot ever goes that way the full length.

Most idiots will harden and go extreme as they get exposed to the factual world and its consequences evermore. They will cling to their narratives come what may making them desperate and sometimes outright violent. They would rather die than admit that they have been wrong. Better keep your distance.

As they are constantly on the edge, they will be triggered very easily. You will trigger them with things that seem completely innocent to you and indeed anyone with a rational mindset. Interacting with them is like walking in a minefield. Things will blow up.

They do not understand jokes or double entendres. They will always seek to twist anything you say against you. And if ever you get one of them to start looking beyond the confines of their extremely narrow world, you can be sure as hell that there will be an even more extreme version that will pull anyone showing signs of rational thought back down into the abyss. 

Idiots need safe spaces, they need to cancel those they don’t agree with, they need special environments and arcane rules for anyone so they can feel safe – enough. They know everything already which is why they don’t care about going to school. If your world is complete, you don’t need education. 

But remember, they are at odds with reality and reality is a merciless goddess. 

The 3 big, typical European Revolutions wanted to create a new form of human. The English, the French, and the Russian Revolution each had an ideal society in their minds. There was no place for a true diversity of thought. The revolutionaries knew exactly where the dividing line between good and bad was. The individual was irrelevant. Only the common good counted. Thats why each of them failed in the longer term. They denied reality.

The American Revolution on the other hand wanted to preserve property rights and individual rights. They did not want to remake man but rather remake the country and the system of government to suit the people. The US Constitution is not the oldest written constitution ever. But it’s the oldest still in force. For a reason.

The founding fathers knew about the idiots and that they would eventually rise. That’s why they divided power so there will always be some organized resistance to idiotism. Big stratified systems such as the European Union or the Soviet Union are heaven for the idiots as there is little that counters them and whatever pops up can be efficiently steamrollered. The US has DC but it also has the states countering DC when the idiots mushroom.

Decentralized systems where power is close to the people and small offers idiots much less opportunity to camouflage and hence they are harder to permanently infest. Idiots are always pushing for big solutions and big systems. 

Make no mistake. We will suffer the consequences of Idiocracy. All of us. No one can escape this except if you want to live as a hermit in the mountains. Most of us don’t want that. We are sophisticated, societal creatures and we like our comforts. I am no different here.

There won’t be a savior. There won’t be a saving grace. Countries will fail, and systems will fail. Markets will fail. Savings will be wiped out and many will lose their last shirt. People will go hungry again where hunger was already extinguished and things will become too expensive to afford. Global supply chains will come under strain and so will we. Are you ready for that? Do you have the skill set that allows you to survive, or even thrive in such a world?

Because that’s the world that’s upon us, and remember, you might as well have some fun while going through it. Thats much easier with a good, well-oiled, and established set of survival skills. 

In a famous scene in the movie Basterds by Quentin Tarantino, the German SS officer Hans Landa is in a room with the captured Aldo Raine and his sidekick Smithson. Landa wants to surrender to the Allies and cut out a juicy deal for himself but the Basterds have their doubts. Raine responds that before he was a soldier he was engaged in illicit trade and in doing so he had to keep his wits. So when he sees a story that’s too good to be true – it’s because it is. 

Churchill said, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat“. The idiots offer destruction and death. What’s it going to be for you?