How to Hack Your Way to a Guilt-Free, Political Ideology

by Eyenot

Politics in the modern world is a minefield of ready-made reasons to go completely anti-social on just about everyone around you.

With just about anyone you run into, espousing your political ideals beyond just a few tentative "talking points" is bound to land you in the deadly crosshairs of the everyday civilization member's aspirations to power.

But it doesn't have to be that way!

While the average person is busy collecting and trading prepackaged directives on the consumer-driven ideology market, you can instead save a lot of time and hassle by forming your ideology from the literal ground up.  (It's like having a cheap weenie deck ready in case some exorbitant cardgamer wants to challenge you to a "duel.")

First of all, discounting hunter-gatherer cave paintings, what civilization considers recorded history itself is more or less only as old as the apparent invention of agriculture.  Even if you place agriculture's advent much earlier than the "establishment," there are trends in archaeology that buck the establishment as well and place the building of the ancient megaliths much further back as well.  And with agriculture came all the rudimentary elements of politics: division of time, slave labor, and money.

However, just before civilization started its marathon of a millennia-long jaunt straight toward the thermonuclear destruction of the planet, modern Homo sapiens relied for several hundreds of thousands of years on hunting and gathering.  So to be truly political, you'll want to argue for keeping around only the truly best things about civilization and otherwise hedging your bets on the side of the primitive.

In order to capture the more conservative, profit-minded individual's imagination, you'll want to espouse a desire to see humanity's purpose fulfilled in soaring amongst the stars and (more importantly to the more wealthy and therefore more powerful members of civilization) mining the hell out of every planet, moon, and tiny asteroid we come across.

It's pretty hard for any member of modern civilization to argue against space-faring.  The noble pursuit of sailing the stars has either inspired or uplifted numerous of history's great inventions and has pushed human abilities nearly to their breaking point.  Any paddy farmer in China would gladly trade some night soil for some rockets and Velcro!

But in order to win the hearts of the stoned, handout-dependent cockamamie cuckoo liberal left, you simply have to also espouse the inherently beautiful and pure qualities of simplicity of life and abundance of leisure time afforded to early humanity by the equally noble lifestyle of hunting and gathering.

Increasingly, many anthropologists and archaeologists are in agreement that the old Hobbesian assessment of early mankind's life as "nasty, brutish, and short" was merely a projection on mankind from within our own addled psyches, and that prior to agriculture, mankind actually lived longer and with far less disease, pestilence, and bloodshed.  Considering the left's desire for people to live in harmony with one another (and among some of them, with nature as well) and for everyone to be treated as perfectly equal, you should adopt the merits of a life where all you need to do is fire a bow (friends in rural places!), do a little horticulture (friends in the libertarian community!), or just be a people person (friends in the public sector!).  As far as social safety nets go, nothing draws people together quite like surviving an ice age!

And the space-faring futuristic angle helps with the lefties as well, considering once we're all immigrants from Earth to the rest of the Universe, deportation itself becomes post-humanist.  See, even Silicon Valley can get behind massive deportation!

But now you're stuck with two seemingly irreconcilable extremes.  How do you reconcile needing a space program with needing to be a hunter-gatherer?

Well, my friends, that's why we have what's called ecofascism.

You can just profess to want to remove all borders and national governments and replace them with a one-world, single-government fascist state that literally forces everybody to both be extremely "deep green" as well as always ready to lend their part to a somehow sustainable space industry.

As luck would have it, if the one and only remnant of industrial civilization you want to keep around is the space industry, you can cut mankind's biological footprint considerable down to a tiny margin of its currently Doomsday-over-clocked spectacle.

Once humanity has been made (at fascist gunpoint) to give up living in crazy boxes and to stop destroying every last square meter of forestland for the sake of rapaciously forcing "yields" from the Earth, we'll simultaneously solve issues like unsustainable ecological abuse, greedy land ownership, opulent laziness, tax evasion, taxes, and domino-effect world wars, while also freeing up all available resources to be withdrawn as-needed for the occasional building of laboratories, control towers, launch platforms, satellites, probes, shuttles, and solid fuels.

Of course, the simple salt of the Earth will need to be kept ever-ready to be called from their restive primitive lifestyle to join the ranks of engineering, so simplistic gadgets like pocket GPS, lasers, smartphones, and Tomagotchi will have to be kept commonplace.

See, the engineering population won't be allowed to subsist on surface agriculture, and it's very likely to be seen as ecologically intrusive to build enough solar, wind, or other renewable energy to grow everything they need underground.  And most importantly, a transition from hunting and gathering (which requires a very deeply spiritual connection to the balance of nature to be done sustainably) straight into agriculture is not only bound to upset the psyche of the "new blood" initiates, it will also serve as malnourishment to them.

So to kill two birds with one stone, we'll have to set up a trade between the aerospace engineers and the primitive citizens of Earth, where the interesting gadgets are regularly traded for fresh foodstocks culled from the more sensitive art of hunting and gathering.  This will also ensure that one group does not grow to resent the other through some illusion of complete independence from their human kindred.

But how should this regular trade be facilitated in a way that imposes some small amount of regimen on the otherwise timeless and carefree lives of the denizens of the forest-reclaimed surface of Earth, without imposing more sense of time discipline and domestication than hunter gatherers have historically been observed to require?

The answer is simple: the efforts of adherents to the outcome of this political ideology also forswear to do everything they can to foment and proselytize a new world religion of technoshamanism.

The worship of the wonders of technology as a magical and spiritual system of beliefs not only lends an avenue to the acceptance of sparsely intermittent yet regular holidays, it also provides a way for otherwise primitive people to adopt the use of technological gadgets without asking too many scientific questions.

It's human nature to want to aspire to any greater station in life that's within the range of human understanding to undertake simply out of a desire to survive, and by omitting the explanation of semiconductors and electromagnetism to the world's woodland wanderers while substituting in a wonderful mural of mythology and mirth instead, you can quell that upward-mobile desire while also leaving the possibility of "enlightenment" to the more restless and observant primitives who spend a little more time than the rest looking into the sky and hanging around the "temples" (read: launch sites).

After all, a precise balance will have to be struck between the level of population that subsists for food on the other, while that other will also have to be precisely balanced to subsist on its own dependent on the newly unadulterated planetary ecosystem.

Which leads to another observation.

Of course, this political ideology already requires quite a great deal of faith in the desire of human beings to survive sustainably and see many generations succeed into the distant future, despite the gloweringly closer imminence of global thermonuclear war coming seemingly close on the heels of the increasing comforts of our myriad governing servants.

But what is also quite obvious is that so many billions of people as we count ourselves now will not easily find game to hunt, fruits and berries to pick, and roots to wash.

Quite tellingly, most of those experiences now exist merely as graphical interfaces to identical games with only pseudorandom number generation saving entire demographics from morbidly vacuous boredom.  If this futuristic synthesis of a space-faring, technoshamanistic theocracy brought about by a period of imperialist, technocratic ecofascism is going to work, it is going to require quite the unprecedented culling of human numbers.

Of course, militant fascism itself can serve some reductive cause, but only until the point is made and the human race capitulates.

Fertility and passion are like wild horses and not easily broken and domesticated as silently psychotic beasts of burden.  But if there's anything we can count on today, it's that a life not worth living is easily given up.  Faced with having to choose - between the insane, self-destructive life we live now (with no realistic sign of hope in any kind of long-term future) and a life that is completely alien and nonsensical - many people who do not rebel outwardly will gladly file quietly into government suicide clinics (a la Soylent Green but without the hideous recipe book).

So there you have it.

If you've ever wanted a political ideology that serves everyone, demands nothing but the everlasting future of the human race, and doesn't challenge anyone's beliefs all that much (after all, you can ask anybody you run into how their beloved smartphone, car, or refrigerator works and get blank stares - no need to wax ironic about "magnets" - "magic?"), here you have it.

You can just kick back, crack a beer or wheatgrass or whatever, espouse this tiny handful of views, answer all questions honestly, and cut off all logical fallacies (arguably the hottest content of popular political ideologies today) at the pass while resting assured that you're just being a decent person and hoping for the best.

You'll never have to budge from your premise or try hard to come up with a response closer to what somebody prefers to hear.

Hack away!