Learned Helplessness for the Masses
Learned helplessness is the behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control.
The behavior includes lethargy, boredom, depression and non-responsiveness to negative environmental conditions which would, under normal circumstances, lead to the subject's acting so as to achieve a neutral or positive position. If mosquitos are biting you, then you put on bug spray or head in doors. You remove or escape the negative stimuli which afflicts. The victim of learned helplessness is so emotionally and mentally conditioned by past experience that he has lost initiative and the volition to direct his own present and future. He feels a loss of control over even the most basic events and circumstances.
Of late, it appears that much of the alternative media – a term covering a very broad spectrum of ideological positions all putatively at odds with Big Money – has played the role of negative stimuli for the part of the population that cares about law, order, tradition, happy communities, prosperity, stability, safety, peace or any other word connoting a positive value humans innately desire.
When the Internet sprang forth into the popular consciousness in the 1990s, it seemed that alternative view points to the usual establishment pablum put out by cable tv and national print would provide energy for positive social change. For the first time, anyone could craft a theme, build a platform and draw a readership. New ideas could be spread and somehow these would translate into populist movements more finely tuned to a specific menu of issues. You and your liberal Democrat friends and family might not agree on much, but you could find common ground on things like food quality and safety, educating kids, public debt reduction or other issues. You didn't have to take the pre-canned, approved issues delivered by the Big Three cable networks anymore.
In the early Aughts, journalist Cokie Roberts lamented the rise of uncredentialed mouth breathers and hillbillies trespassing on the sacred grounds of the Fourth Estate via the new fangled Internet. From the beginning, the establishment understood the threat posed by an informed electorate. Or at least, of an electorate thinking thoughts on some really weird planes of existence. "Informed" is a highly subjective term.
Decades later, another white chick, Mika Brzezinski would restate Cokie's thesis more strongly, along the lines of "it's our job to tell you what to think." What happened in between those years to the possibilities of vibrancy in ideas and diversity of views, of dialogue and accompaniment aimed at the common good?
The Dead Internet theory whether true or not certainly has gained traction because of the painfully obvious devitalization of the web. Its early wild wooliness and bursting energy have been replaced by a dead feeling, all the hairs shaved down and smoothed over with lotion by someone in corporate HR. The form which took shape between 1995 (when I first joined AOL and CompuServ) and the Current Year was carefully resculpted by oligarchs like Zuckerberg and others, who brought social media forward as a mold to contain public discourse. Google refined its results to present right-thinking reading material to the searchers; YouTube began removing the content creators around 2016 who posed a threat to the rich or disrupted ad revenue.
For years, the video platform was a buffet of absurd opinions and thought, but with the rise of Trump and his election in 2016, the oligarchy put a tighter leash around discourse. YouTube now is more sterile, more subdued. It's corporate capitalism at its best, smoothing out rough, jagged edges to create soft pastel motel art-style landscapes which hide a broken society. Capitalism hates variety but likes cartels since these provide a patina of choice. The mass man yields his pennies to the market more readily if he is only capable of choosing one of two, maybe three, opinions. GM, Ford, Chevy. Too many choices at the macro level makes wealth extraction harder. The mind seizes up when faced with too many choices, competing stimuli cancel each other out, leaving money in people's pockets.
AI is now generating so much content that at some point very soon, the content it scrapes from the innards of the Internet will just be its own output. Human curated content will become less and less of a thing and the Dead Internet will become even deader. Just machine generated content going on forever.
Trump is a goofball, a bull in the china shop, busting up fine dinner wear and goring sacred cows. Grifts like NATO and the MIC in general were put under dire threat from a president who wanted to end wars, make peace with Russia and force Europe to cover the costs of its own defense. In 2016, the European Union, a federation of several industrial Western nations, was still relying heavily on the American taxpayer for the maintenance of a military alliance whose reason for existence died with the Soviet Union. In 2024, American troops remain parked in Germany 80 years after the defeat of National Socialism.
The entire overfed intelligence, security, military and foreign policy apparatuses of the West were triggered by his bombast about the cost born by the American taxpayer and passed for decades into the pockets of the rich. No one really knows just how many trillions have disappeared into black budgets with zero oversight from anyone who is elected (or theoretically answers to an elected official).
Trump was the place where all the short-lived populist movements went to die. Occupy Wall Street, while solidly left in the best sense, had admirers on the right, and lasted but a flash. The rowdy Tea Party circa 2009 was locked up in lawfare such that it was cheaper to disband. Ron Paul's libertarian movement was ended through the careful suppression of his followers and organizers at the grass root level by the GOPe. Paul, like Trump, was a lesser viable threat to the MIC since he appealed to people who wanted America to draw back its far flung military bases and troops. He appealed to people across partisan lines. He was an obstacle to the proliferation of war and foreign adventures but, unlike Trump, was a steadfast defender of property and civil rights. A President Paul would not have been so jab happy as either Trump or Biden.
Looking back at the 90s, there was a populist sentiment behind the Contract with America. It also fizzled out despite lending its energy to the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
Ross Perot is sometimes mentioned by people who remember him differently, more positively with the benefit of hindsight. He too was a populist, common sense kind of businessman who spoke truthfully and ended up going nowhere. Politics should not be carried out by businessmen, women or the propertyless but they can appear as a breath of fresh air when the public square is congested with bad fumes. The United States has been run by businessmen from its inception, with the government serving as a front, but they have remained behind the scenes.
In 2024, we have Robert Kennedy, Jr. and his running mate, an oligarch in her own right and the ex-wife of one of the biggest members of the Inner Party ever, Sergey Brin, who is rumored to spend a lot of time on his private island in a well appointed bunker. You cannot make this shit up.
I'm not going to bother looking up her name. I forgot it 10 minutes after seeing it.
Kennedy lost Dennis Kucinich as a campaign manager when the independent candidate refused to speak out forthrightly against Israel's ethnocide of Palestinians. Kennedy self-destructed quickly after announcing, when he said something stupid about Jews having immunity to Covid. He was brave enough to take on Big Pharma, but he folded like a cheap suit when it came to speaking out against the Israeli atrocities. He's the kind of guy who talks too much, is too intelligent and too expressive. This opens him up to gaffs and triggerings of scared white women. Revelations that a parasitic worm ate part of his brain does not help his image or that of people who oppose vaccinations.
This week, watching the U.S. Congress pass yet another massive budget for foreign wars, it's become clear that the Empire has a life of its own, a story to tell and it will not be interrupted by any populist outcries. Few people want to see more wars being financed while the country crumbles, but what the peons think makes little difference. Systems take on a life of their own, especially when technology has advanced to a level where it's easy to shut someone off from the financial system or end their careers for saying something unpopular. Only 19 representatives voted against a bill that would grant the U.S. spy agencies warrantless access to people's data. The level of power available to the cartel of private interests who make up the Deep State are breathtaking and only becomes more sweeping with each passing year. The Soviet Union could only dream about having the level of surveillance held by the public/private web of partnerships that make up the intelligence "community."
In the last couple of weeks, American college campuses have erupted in largely peaceful protests against the mass murder of women and children in Gaza. Reading the far right, I've seen criticisms of the people who are being roughed up and jailed by cops for expressing anger at Israel. These are the people who despite their ideological separation, are the first to publicly call attention in a very visible way to the awesome power of organized Jewry in the West. The far right is empty gas on the Internet, useful for scaring women and Boomers. Its own members will actively work against any meatspace movement that visibly calls out Jewish power as they have with the pro-Palestinian protests because it highlights their own uselessness and griftiness.
In the spirit of what about-ism, recall that the cops stood down as American cities burned in the aftermath of George Floyd's death. American citizens were murdered by the more violent hooligans and the cops did nothing to dam the flood of destruction. Or at least this is what we saw night after night during the summer of 2020. Yet when student protestors and other sympathizers peacefully protest the genocide being carried out with American tax dollars, the Israeli prime minister rattles the cages of his American pols and out come the National Guard to throw around liberal arts majors on university quads. That's power, naked and out in the open.
But the right can only go on and on about the Arabs and their allies protesting here against the genocide. You'll never see a white male organize and stand up for anything. This is the learned helplessness caused by isolation, social disintegration and a total dependence on electronic devices which create a virtual reality. People in their own private, customized worlds become spectators, neither active in their own development or of anything else. They pick their teeth and complain about the few souls out playing on the field.
The foregoing is all to say that nothing has taken the wind out of the sails of the USS Cleptocracy. It pushes forward at a nice clip on a calm sea with nothing in its path. The Internet is a safety valve for rage, frustration and a place where people go to drop out.
Alternative media has turned into the delivery protocol for learned helplessness for the masses. For many years, it's put out a steady stream of what-aboutisms on any given political topic. What-aboutism is learned as a child, when a sibling is seen as getting away with something you are punshed for quickly by an observant parent. "Why does Jimmy get to eat cookies before dinner... waaah." The political right has pointed to these as patent violations of fairness. The Universe has looked upon these plaints and yawned so many times that the shrinking cadre of vaguely center-right viewers just don't care anymore.
The adult version of what-aboutism goes something like, "Well, why does Hunter Biden get to skip a House subpoena penalty-free while Trump's guy is going to jail for months for doing the same thing even though he cited executive privilege..."
Repeated violations of fairplay are one of the conditionings leading to a bored indifference to social issues. If the Internet's free flow of information was supposed to enkindle positive change, it's instead become a cold water jet that extinguishes the fire of enthusiasm. The umpteenth gross violation of justice just makes people retreat further into their own private worlds. Nothing ever happens. The repetitiveness of what-aboutism stems from a disconnect between expectations of fair play and The Way Things Are.
Alternative media personalities themselves do well financially. One loudmouth in his early 20s had over half a million dollars in his accounts frozen by the FBI following January 6th. That's a lot of money to have for a couple three years of talking. I can only imagine what his bank account looks like now.
Alex Jones, arguably the founding father of populist conservative media, was revealed to spend $92,000 per month just on food in court filings.
Trump earned billions with the creation of Donald J. Trump Media. One estimate put him up $6 billion following the IPO. His daughter and her husband walked away after his presidency the beneficiaries of over a billion in consulting deals from the Abraham Accords, trademarks, emoluments and patents.
If Tucker Carlson did not exist, the state would've had to invent him. And probably did. An incredibly wealthy man who shilled for the war in Iraq at the turn of the century, he has spent the last year or so building out his empire. (To his credit, he made a sincere apology for his warmongering.)
Millions of traditional Americans redistribute his material and it's impossible to read any non-establishment outlet without seeing a Tucker clip from X. Tucker is a pressure valve who provides a psychological release for pent up electoral frustration with a system that is overtly hostile toward its nominative citizens. For all the years of his commentary, what has changed? Am I blaming Carlson? No, just observing that far from influencing anything, he's just become a cathartic release for an aging white population that still has too much to lose materially even as they live in a social and cultural ghetto devoid of any human value.
The forces of democracy and progress marched through institutions while more tradition minded white people with too much to lose camped out in virtual free speech zones and alternative media outlets on the Internet. The petrol dollar for decades meant Americans could enjoy a standard of living far beyond what their vanishing industrial base could support. Along the way, it allowed them to carve out private virtual worlds. We even have private gardens within private gardens.
Basements converted into home theaters with stadium seats, bigger (but shoddily built) McMansions, boat-like SUVs, etc. The smartphone replaced what was left of a crumbling public square and any energy for reform under whatever guise dissipated into frivolity. Older Americans huff about the cost of a smartphone, exclaiming at the $1400 price tag, unaware that most of the newest phones have cheaper models in the $600-800 range. These are very economical devices that offer an escape from reality. Did they bitch about their own spending habits when they were procuring VCRs, hi-fi sets and DVD players? As humans living in these forms, this kind of self-awareness is seldom found.
A reality wrapped in a compelling, ego-defined illusion shaped by personal tech is a heavy challenge for a spiritual seeker. The ego is now able to create a customized world based around video gaming habits, musical tastes, streaming selections and odd eccentric interests, from being a furry to overeating in front of people as a public spectacle. If there is some niche, esoteric microworld that interests, then one can easily slip into it and drop out forever. The public square is empty. The people with the latest gadget are the least informed about most public matters.
Only people living on petrol dollars with Internet devices in abundance could create an alternate reality where there are dozens of genders and pronouns. These types of people would've died quickly in any other period of human history as non-productive, disruptive outcasts from societies where survival is based on being engaged directly day-to-day with the environment.
In the virtual reality of gender, cross-dressing, esoteric music, furry, video gaming, porn watching of the modern man, we see (if we can) how simple it is for the mind to create and surround itself with ever more intricate illusions thanks to technology and, in the case of Americans especially, the petrol dollar.
