Inspired by Paul Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine, that I am currently reading.
People in corporate American have been infected by the plague of “fake nice”, a direct consequence of the feminization of western culture.
As the machine that humanity built over time evolves and turns each of us into cogs, some are quick to be converted- their personalities are eager to check out, be compliant, and play the game all the while numbed out. SSRIs sped up that process, designed by The Machine.
Inconvenienced by grief? There’s a pill for that. Does your attention span get in the way of productivity? There’s another pill for that. Do you suffer from unpleasant side effects? Take a DNA test to find out which one is the best for you!
There are a few hold outs: unmedicated humans who still struggle with emotions and often can’t contain them. The fake nice plague grates on them like poison ivy, and causes them to bristle and chafe and eventually to explode. No one is fully human except for people like them, and the feeling of being in The Uncanny Valley is discombobulating. Sometimes they can’t tell which way is up, but they refuse to give in and check out and play the game as everyone else does. Eventually they get pushed down by the machines collective parts and succumb. They’ll lose their desire to give a fuck, show up, do a good job, and get up the next day and do it all over again.
When they give up, the companies they worked for will continue to operate under the delusion that passivity and superficial niceness are the way. There are layers to every gesture, facial expression, and phrase, and the cult members drive themselves nuts trying to maintain their feeble grip on their fragile place as a cog in the machine. They form alliances and work together to sabotage the resistance, unaware that they are only inching closer to losing their humanity in the process.
Many have been conditioned to believe certain emotions are unacceptable and deserve to be punished. The few that resist understand the power of forgiveness and how directing that power towards oneself first is the key to real happiness. They feel sadness for the rats trapped in the maze, chasing money and power and security in a world that doesn’t understand real peace. Every so often, the chaos that runs through the veins of the members of The Cult causes casualties, but The Machine gladly accepts those sacrifices in its incessant goal of subjecting humans to complete algorithmic domination.
Occasionally artists and writers come along with keen insights about the delusion we have all fallen victim to. The Machine will consume their art by ingesting it into an LLM and deciding it’s not statistically significant to see the light of day. True leaders will vanish, and only the weight of collective thought will have power. Eventually the outliers of the human race will cease to exist. IQ distributions will coalesce around mediocre intelligence levels and genius will vanish entirely. We will become homogeneous, unemotional, and optimized to benefit The Machine.
