The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

"Listen to Reason" Indeed (2026-06-01)

Honoré Daumier illustration from an 1839 edition of Les cent et un Robert Macaire by Maurice Alhoy and Louis Huart. Image courtesy of oldbookillustrations.com.

At this point, and no doubt long before now, I suspect the vast majority of people are utterly fed up with the way in which language and their intelligence alike are abused and insulted by self-declared "elites" and their phalanx of technocratic hangers-on. These people are now widely recognized to be gaslighting anyone they deem beneath them with all their might, while completely undermining the effort because after all, those people are "beneath them" and must therefore be stupid. When these people demand the rest of us "listen to reason" what they are really saying is, "obey without question." They aren't fooling anyone at this point. "Because I said so," with or without violent accompaniment never did persuade anyone. You can force someone to do something by some form of coercion, whether blunt violence or comparatively subtle economic pressure, but you can't force someone to think something. Here in a nutshell is the problem of those self-declared elites and their hangers-on. Since the big desire they all apparently share is a desire for power over others and the ability to break laws others must follow, they are always pushing the boundaries. For a long time, using coercion to force particular actions was quite satisfying to them. But as anyone who has learned about addictions also knows, the addict develops a tolerance to their original dose, so they must increase it or switch to some other drug for the same effect, if they are unwilling or unable to forgo the addictive substance or behaviour. Joseph Weisenbaum's readers will remember his explanation of how a pathological programmer is similar in psychology to a pathological gambler who feels they have a power to always win: they must constantly test their perceived power again and again. If they truly believe this power of theirs is real, then the test and the feeling of mastery with its accompanying dopamine hit is potent indeed.

The "elites" and those who identify with them have worked out quite a few means of coercion to enforce behaviour they want. But no longer feeling any constraint on their actions, nor much by way of lingering belief in the fundamental humanity of the people outside of their narrow groups (let alone respect for the fundamental right to life and well-being of all the other beings on Earth), they can no longer be bothered with putting a nice face on the coercion. After all, they insist socialism and communism have been utterly destroyed, so there are no other options. Perhaps unexpectedly, this turned out to be a disappointing result. The dopamine hits from the coercion are not so good, or maybe they aren't happening. And so it seems to me the next big turn was to "culture," more usually referred to as "entertainment." It was time to turn to forcing people to think and believe in certain ways, and to deny them anything that could contradict what they wanted the "hoi polloi" to think. Hence the extraordinary prominence of media magnates, grotesque techbros, politicians, and celebrities, including celebrity religious figures and spiritual hucksters. These elites also banked on the assumption people outside of their circles and indeed, outside of the united states, were in fact desperate to have whatever they approved of and had for themselves, indeed, were desperate to be them. Based on the stuff these elites approve for publication and repetition, they are stunned and furious to discover how profoundly wrong this assumption is.

I get the impression they were quite certain that all they had to do was withdraw their approval, as represented by their consumer goods and military hardware, at which point the targeted people would promptly fall in line and change their thinking and beliefs. On the country or nation-state level, this was supposed to lead to prompt "regime change," on the individual level ready acquiescence to betray their own communities, turning spy, informant, or agent. Otherwise, countries or nation-states could look forward to being denied access to all the goodies by sanctions, and then given a dose of proxy or direct bombing and attacks to destroy their infrastructure and kill as many civilians as possible. Individuals could look forward to such person-sized sanctions as criminal charges, whether genuine under law or not, and drawn out processes to clear their names which typically resulted in personal if not familial bankruptcy. There is more than one foul case of this type of psychological warfare driving its victim to suicide in hopes of at least sparing their families from poverty. Overall, this must have seemed to them, and indeed can seem to the rest of us, like the equivalent of a locked room and no means to resist the tormentors who poke at us from outside. Except, it isn't.

Yes, a lot of stuff, far too much of it the necessities of life, and a remarkable amount of "entertainment" related things besides, are now denied to huge swathes of the world via the decisions of those elites, enforced by their technocrats. People are suffering because of the deliberate effort to block access to necessities of life by cutting off trade or destroying their potential capacity to produce those necessities themselves. However, humans would not have survived to become bipedal creatures with bifocal vision and opposable thumbs if we had no ability to face down adversity. People do, all over the world. While I think it is true people in these conditions get a deep satisfaction in overcoming adversity, if only by analogy to much less difficult examples of overcoming difficulties I have seen and experienced myself, I call bullshit on the dipshits who go on about how they are "better people" because they have lived through an awful experience. Such people are really saying they are better than who they are speaking to. This is quite different from people who acknowledge they did not know they would be able to cope with the difficult experience until they did. Then again, those are not typically who goes on speaking tours about what happened, focusing instead on continuing to do what they can to be a constructive force in the world. They focus on deeds, not words. Maybe all these sanctions and hideous attacks and bombings would work if humans in general were not in fact intelligent, self-motivated, and creative. If indeed the majority of people were the sorts of fundamentally mindless drones these elite types insist we are, while paradoxically spending intense, obsessive efforts to try to make us into what they insist we are. Logic is not a strong suit with these high flyers.

And now those elites and their technocrats have an ever-growing problem. They can't get their desired dopamine hit or achieve their dreams of godlike powers on Earth. They are seeing and hearing every day about people outside their bubbles who have decided they can after all, do without the things these embubbled people think they should want or be ready to accept rather than deal with people other than them or die. It is easy to find out how confused the embubbled caste are about this, just check out the mainstream news, where their only explanation is to insist such people are obviously fanatics who don't value human life and mindlessly hate the embubbled caste and its approved way of life for the masses. These supposed news reports, which are of course mislabelled opinion pieces, sound more and more unhinged, even as they repeat with variations again and again "why don't you obey?" Oddly enough, this puts me in mind of Franz Kafka's grim short story, In the Penal Colony.

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