1,236 words
Riot-wise, it’s been a peaceful summer, at least compared to last year. But since nothing has gotten better since last year, I’ve started to wonder why that is.
The economy hasn’t improved. The country just lost a twenty-year war. The people who believe that anti-black racism is a problem still cling to that delusion with passionate intensity.
Most significantly of all, the lockdowns that we were promised would be over long ago only seem to be getting started. How long can a nation of 330 million people endure cabin fever before exploding?
Same goes for the vaccines. What seemed paranoid only a year ago now seems sensible, and I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime over the winter, troops start kicking down our doors and forcing everyone at gunpoint to submit to being hooked up to a permanent IV line that feeds us remote-controlled government-sponsored “permanent boosters.”
So why did people stop rioting?
How much of last year’s riots had to do with George Floyd, and how much had to do with people coming out of their damp caves after the first few months of lockdowns to run under the warm sun and scream with savage joy?
Why do people seem much more submissive this year than last? Is it simply exhaustion?
The buzzword in the mid-1970s after Nixon resigned, US forces escaped from Vietnam with their tails between their legs, and OPEC started jacking up oil prices was “apathy.” For perhaps the first time in American history, a populace that had been raised on the idea of American military invincibility and moral unimpeachability was forced to accept that we could be beaten and that our leaders could lie to us. It was an entirely new feeling, and not a good one. Even though we tried to whip ourselves into a patriotic frenzy for the Bicentennial, it seemed that everywhere you turned in 1976, you heard the word “apathy.”
Back then, many people escaped into hedonism: Quaaludes, angel dust, religious cults, and empty disco promiscuity. But as dismal as all that sounds, at least it had a desperate vitality that seems nonexistent nowadays. People seemed to chase pleasure instead of the vast nothingness that fills their lives today.
The general public mood these days seems to be one of listless surrender.
It’s not that people are in denial of how bad things have gotten. I’ve noticed you can hear more penetrating political opinions from ordinary service workers than from nearly any talking head on the boob tube.
While waiting at Home Depot’s customer-service kiosk the other night to get a refund on an overcharge, the fat, black-masked female desk clerk and I had a respectful discussion centered on the idea that people have been suspiciously well-behaved considering the endless gaslighting and involuntary confinement of the past eighteen months.
While getting my teeth cleaned today, the fat white female dental hygienist and I agreed that it’s impossible to trust the media and government about anything anymore. Not that it’s ever been possible, but it’s never been more obvious that it’s impossible.
We all know they’re lying, but we’re all so engulfed in a blizzard of information and misinformation that it feels futile trying to discern who’s the worst liar and how much truth they’re peppering into the stew just to keep you confused and off-guard.
But why do people seem resigned to it? Could it be related to the fact that during the last two presidential elections, the side that was declared the loser was convinced the election was stolen? Are people starting to realize that voting is merely a ruse concocted to appease the rubes by tricking them into believing that their opinion matters?
Is it a malignant form of learned helplessness? Even worse, is it by design — taught helplessness? Is it some form of mass-engineered indifference?
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died by clicking here.
In conjunction with his research on depression — which may actually have a biological benefit among humans and other animals in the sense that it may preserve energy you’d otherwise waste struggling to swim upstream –psychologist Martin Seligman developed the theory of learned helplessness in 1967 at the University of Pennsylvania after a study where he administered electric shocks to dogs. Some of the dogs were placed in a box with a lever that, when pressed, stopped the electric shock. Another group was placed in a box where the lever had no effect, teaching them that the shock was “inescapable.” When those dogs were then placed in the box where the lever could stop the shock, Seligman observed that they didn’t even bother; they simply accepted the shock and passively whimpered.
It is said that Seligman’s work had a huge impact on the thought of Theodore Kaczynski. Although the Washington Post version of Industrial Society and Its Future never cites Seligman and only uses the word “helpless” twice, Kaczynski directly cited Seligman in letters written after his arrest.
In a 1969 diary entry, Kaczynski wrote that “the important things in an individual’s life are mainly under the control of large organizations; the individual is helpless to influence them.” When feds raided Kazcynski’s Montana cabin, they allegedly found several written notes citing Seligman’s work. In a 2004 letter, he wrote that if “one has had insufficient experience of the power process, then one has not been ‘immunized’ to learned helplessness.”
In his essay “The Unabomber and the origins of anti-tech radicalism,” Sean Fleming writes:
Although [Kaczynski] was fascinated by the experiments on helplessness, he was unimpressed with psychologists’ interpretations of the results. As he wrote in a 2010 letter, Seligman’s Helplessness “is of central importance for an understanding of the psychology of modern man”; “Seligman, however, is too much of a conformist to draw the conclusions about modern society that can and should be drawn from his work.” In Kaczynski’s hands, the concept of learned helplessness became a mass-psychological diagnosis.
With every passing year, Kaczynski seems like more and more of a prophet.
Learned helplessness — or apathy, ennui, malaise, anomie, defeatism, whatever you choose to call it — seems to have spread like peanut butter on toast from coast to coast. Ever since the Floyd riots kicked off last year, I’ve found it intensely difficult to care about things outside my own life and the lives of those close to me. It seems blindly unrealistic to presume that anything I do would have the slightest effect on a world so hopelessly wrecked.
Or is it possible that this temporary indifference is simply a form of emotional hibernation, a way to stock up on psychological resources and then strike with full, blinding fury the moment that a glimmer of hope appears?
And is it foolish to wish that this is what most other people seem to be doing right now as well? Are they biding their time until it’s time to explode?
I’ve come very close to pure apathy many times in my life, but I always come roaring back. I’d like to have a similar confidence in society at large.
If things get worse — and I don’t know anyone who doubts they will — can we look forward to food riots? Pill riots? Or no riots at all?
Maybe I’m a hopeless romantic, but I’d rather the world go out with a bang than a whimper.
But if a whimper it must be, I doubt that it will be a short, effete sigh of defeat. I suspect it will be a thousand-year whimper that gets fainter with each passing year.
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26 comments
Some of us suspect it could worse and that more riots are coming, the next time there is some incident, like George Floyd. It might not be completley apathy, Things have changed so rapidly since 2020. Something you said before the summer of 2020 was assumed to be normal, now that same sentiment could get you fired from your job. The republican establishment has not gone after the rioters or the oligarchs that control so much of our lives. Politicians and the military leaders are blantly lying, and are being aided by the news media and social media. I don’t believe the military brass has ever lied at this level, not even during Vietnam. Some of the policies that are being enacted are being done to spite Trump, and they will have negative effects for the country. Even part of the medical establishment has blantly lied and said that BLM rallies didn’t spread covid. Then you have all the anti-white indoctrination in education, the military, and corporations. Some people will try to escape through sports and pop culture, you can’t even do that anymore. Things were getting bad before 2020, it has gotten worse rapidly.
A whimper from whitey yes, but this year black people continue to blow each other away in our cities at astonishing rates. From Philadelphia to Portland and in a broad swath of the midwest (like Indianapolis and Columbus) homicide rates are at a historic high. Of course, it will never be enough for liberals to take notice and also say (this is key) ‘perhaps they are different from us’.
I wish they would hurry up exterminating each other. They go to slow on a necessary task. We must stand well clear of that self cleaning oven. When the dollar gets hit they’ll have to be starved in an engineered famine anyway.
If police forces keep shrinking in man power, like they have been doing. It will be more difficult to deal with this. These teams of social workers, meant to replace police, and negotiate with criminals, simply won’t work. Reducing the police budget and putting moeny into social programs will not work either. I’m amazed that people actualy think it will. I also believe the military could have a significant reduction in man power in the future. This is due to the teaching of critical race theory put in place by generals and admirals whose incompetence led to the failure in Afghanastain. This is the same military brass on the lookout for phantom white supremists. These institutions could become skeleton crews in the future. Trying to run these organizations without a majority white manpower base will erode there cababilities.
The only thing standing between Whites and their enemies are the cops. Let’em rot.
I agree, and like he stated, let them exterminate each other.
Those cops do more to protect the orcs than they do to protect whites.
I revisited a documentary made by Adam Curtis called Bitterlake. There’s several scenes where Brits are doing DNA and eye scans on Afghans. The look on the faces of these goat herders is priceless. The object of the testing war for these people to feel helpless and violated. You can see how this theater of war was the testing ground for the shit happening with biosecurity in the west now. We’ve gone mad with our electronic technology.
I hear you on the lying thing. I think even most Biden voters are freaked out by the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. Of course, this is another manufactured refugee crisis to make white suburbia more diverse. Then again, I think we’ve seen a sort of inversion of the political spectrum. Leftists are rallying around the vaccine and essentially simping for Pfizer and corporate power while rightists are suspicious of corporate power and talk about trust busting. Craziest of all is one of the Pfizer board of directors used to be head of the FDA. People talk about stop with the conspiracy theories. Well, if you don’t want there to be conspiracy theories then don’t have the former head of the FDA join the board of directors of a major pharmaceutical company that gets an EUA and full FDA approval within a year.
So why did people stop rioting?
Because rioting does not currently serve the interests of TPTB.
There’s a case to be made that the 2020 riots were an incipient Color Revolution in the USA. Same actors behind the scenes: shadowy networks of NGOs, prominent Dem politicians, street activists with backpacks full of cash, the media cheerleading squad.
Short term goal: disorient American society to get Trump out of office.
Long term goal: continue the transformation of America into another globalist postal code.
I think “listless” might not be too far off describing me from a year ago. You won’t find me engaging in “political discourse” or pimping for a candidate. I have about two people I might broach a current event with. Friends and family are paramount like never before. Maybe because we’re privy to people who suck ass like never before? I dropped out of society last November. I watched a little bit of a Tucker Carlson show this past week for the first time since then. I whimpered some and sniveled more. You can make the case that it doesn’t matter who’s in office but a preposterous shithead doesn’t help overall morale. It’s amazing how split down the middle we are. Elections are squeakers. We’re all intractable my-side-right-or-wrong zealots who seek to dismiss rather than discuss. You can make someone a racist and then not have to confront any divergent thinking impinging on your tenuous worldview. I read Jim’s Worst Weeks Yet and take the opportunity to make gallows humor wisecracks but the truth is I read them with something like morbid incredulity. Like a guy looking at serious prison time and total destruction of his life for throwing eggs at Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington state. That’s like something Eddie Haskell might do to Lumpy on Leave It To Beaver. But Lumpy wasn’t associated with a straight-up racist anti-American anti-police hate group given to violence and looting and destruction of public property. So where do we go from there? Yeah, I’m just this side of a “It’s all Babylon anyway” outlook.
Shift – You have an incredibly original way of writing; of turning a phrase. Quite an eloquent post.
Why thank you.
I don’t think it’s apathy, I think it is people adjusting to the realization that all the usual methods for redress of grievances are a joke. Free speech doesn’t exist on the internet, protesting the wrong ideology gets you put in a gulag, and voting is the adult version of writing letters to Santa. Once people internalize this they are going to be looking for what the next step is…
Its very simple, Open Society stopped paying for bussing and lunches and free lawyers and paying all the people 25/hr to riot and stopped providing them with cover from the police and the prosecutor, all things they had last year.
They’ve become overconfident, and think they can keep kicking a sleeping giant with impunity.
I suspect “the riots” are political theater coordinated by the DNC for their own benefit. As quickly as they can be ordered into action they can be shut down. The American government is truly under demonic possession at the highest levels and they are bold in their willingness to do all this in plain site. They prey on our apathy and our fear of their totalitarian instincts. We understand what they will do (and have done) to crush us. For us it’s not apathy but something else that hold us back.
Yes, I was surprised the author attributing the general societal decline to “apathy” where I think the proper term would be fear.
The lesson of Ashli Babbit is clear.
They will kill you and promote your killer.
They will use the media to demonize your corpse.
I think we’re all waiting for someone to lead, inspire and direct us. Having been disappointed by Trump, we’re wandering around, waiting for the next Big Man. Not a pretty picture.
Or is it possible that this temporary indifference is simply a form of emotional hibernation, a way to stock up on psychological resources and then strike with full, blinding fury the moment that a glimmer of hope appears?
This perfectly articulates my would-be response to the question Greg Johnson has received from listeners and read on a couple of podcasts, about the perceived ambivalence among WNs.
This article was inspired, sir.
James Kirkpatrick, my thoughts exactly.
Strap on the seat belts. I think things are going to get real bumpy at some point. Because there is hope.
Excellent and much needed discussion in this article, Jim Goad. Thank you.
James Kirkpatrick, spot on. There will be a response, and yes it will get ugly out there. There is hope.
Jim Goad, a very good discussion on this matter. Thank you.
Genuinely not trying to be funny, but isn’t a lot of the rioting and chaos on behalf of BLM being done by…white middle class arseholes?
Will say one thing. In 1998, JG Ballard talked about this Western societal overload in a radio interview, using a stRiki-Eiking sentence: “The media landscape is saturated with images of violence and sexuality, desperately trying to extract a sort of flicker, a galvanic response from the sort of dead frog’s leg of, you know, the human spirit,…” The man saw where it was going, and here we are, 23 years later. He was always ahead of his time, though of course he could not have seen the current madness we are undergoing, at least not entirely.
The rest of the interview the quote above comes from is definitely worth reading:
https://jgballard.ca/media/1998_nov11_BBC3_radio.html
Forgive me if someone else has posted this, but the first thing that came to mind when reading Mr. Goad’s article above is the quote attributed to Aristotle (and probably to others as well), “Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society.”
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