I just got booted off of Facebook seven days ago - a concocted "security incident" and a request to retract/recant about 40 posts - comments - I'd made over the past three months deviating from the Official Narrative - that’s part of the “process” they wanted me to go through to “unlock” the account. No dice. And I’m not the only person they’ve done this to, they took a $175 billion hit to their equity capital because of this practice, they’ve dumped a lot more people than just me. I've been posting on here on Substack since September, putting links on my facebook page, so that's not the loss, but the real loss is contacts. I downloaded my account a few months back, so I can parse through that, but that leaves about 150 or so new ones. That's the way social media holds people in its iron grip - it makes real contact very difficult, and contact mediated by their platform very easy, so it becomes addictive. And their control and ability to nudge and coerce and shape becomes absolute, they can and do manipulate who sees your posts - and the posts you see.... it can be a very effective means of psychological warfare. And the only way to stop it is to get rid of facebook entirely, let it crash to the ground, and try to reconstruct contacts in real life, and that's the task I have ahead of me. I seem to have a fair number of contacts on my phone - and in other places, though. If you’re on facebook, please spread the word. I’m leaving the account “locked”, and I’m not coming back - facebook is an Outrage Machine and a Time Suck and an addiction, and I’m going to break it…
And more: As for being cut off by facebook, at first it was fury, then amputation, it was a physical pain... and I found that interesting and figured out that such a thing was in fact poisonous. And further reflection - it was a waste of time - a hole down which time went, and then, obviously a means for the people/algorithms which run it, to create psychological effects - that's nothing new, it's been reported before, but I had had moments of realization that it was being done to me, it was constantly sundering connections, especially to people nearby, and favoring one set of people for a while, then another set. And since I know people with rather widely disparate opinions, including some with whom I argue, sometimes I'd see only posts/comments from people I argue with - so that's the Outrage Machine part. It's a manipulated, artificial environment - and there's no need for it. I can only wonder what havoc will be wreaked in people's lives with the VR/Meta environment - and I'll leave *that one* well alone, like foxglove a beautiful flower but deadly poison. https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/facebook-and-i-are-no-more-booted
Feb 8, 2022·edited Feb 8, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford
I have not participated in society much in my adult life, precisely because I am repulsed by the casual violence of so many people, like drone bombs on wedding parties, microplastics filling up the oceans, the extermination of species, the destruction of the working class and the aggregation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands is just the cost of Progress. I have spent a significant part of my life trying to warn people about the rise and fall of empires, but that mostly alienated me, and so I mostly stopped, as I have watched our civilization roll inevitably down that hill toward that cliff, society growing more delusional every day, disintegrating, breaking apart little by little. My 19 year old niece told me once during her senior year, as we were talking about the madness of the world, "everything you said would happen has come true." Maybe I caught one?
Curiously, loneliness has not been a problem for me in this pandemic. It has made me start writing again, while I plan to break away from my civilization even more thoroughly. When it tips over that cliff I intend to watch it calmly, to be there for the survivors.
Well done, Matthew, to approach the Pandemic of "Communicative Disease" as James J. Lynch named it. I suggest you read the work by James, then by Jaak Panksepp, focusing on the 5th and 6th of 7 Emotional Brains, namely, CARE and PANIC/LOSS.
“If current trends persist, communicative disease, and its resultant loneliness, will equal communicable disease as a leading cause of premature death in all post-industrialized nations during the 21st century. At time it seems as if our nation [U.S.A.], having reached its high-water mark of prosperity, is simultaneously awash and drowning in a sea of narcotics and prescriptive medications to help deaden the pain. It is almost as if we have agreed to submit voluntarily to a national, chemically-induced frontal lobotomy to cope with the loneliness and disconnectedness of our age.” James J. Lynch
“He has profited well who learns from loss.” Michelangelo
I've read "Catcher in the Rye" about three or four times in high school. I kept reading it because I thought I was always missing the point in Holden's behavior, and that there are many deeper layers to the fact he was the way he was. At this point I don't remember the book details much (probably I should re-read it) but the feeling about the book I carry as bone memory resonates with your writing. As far as poorly chosen mandatory school literature is concerned, I share the same thoughts about "Anna Karenina". It was up for reading and analysis when I was 15. Who the heck thought that, at 15, I could put myself in the shoes of a 30-40-ish old woman trapped in a loveless marriage in Russia and tormented by a split of a love affair and motherly love?
I believe that you'd find it worth your while to compare "A Clockwork Orange" and Alexander DeLarge with "The Catcher in the Rye" and Holden Caulfield.
"A Clockwork Orange" I have used with many classes as a basis for discussions of ethics, morality, society and so on.
The fact that the protagonist does what he does simply because he likes it and he can, never fails to elicit anger and revulsion from colleagues and students mired in the fallacy that society shapes us as if we were clay, thus reprieveing us from blame or responsibility.
I must admit I am not familiar with how english teachers in the US choose their novels for reading assignments. Is there a hard literary canon one /must/ choose from, or is it more of a loose canon based in the homosociality of the culture permeating the profession? Personally, I've tended to combine free choice, with picking from lists made by the faculty to handing out 'one book to rule them all'-reading assignments (in the last case titles teenagers probably won't read, not even as adults, such as 'Silas Marner').
Anyway, always nice to read honest criticism of both a novel and the circumstances regarding the reading of same. Much better than the either sycophantic pandering to colleagues or smearing of the competition called literary criticism in major magazines and papers.
We try in my house to stay involved with friends and family and have throughout. But some people are still terrified. We invited a couple over for dinner, they're new to the US and of my husband's ethnicity so we had them over for tea and it was really great, they felt like family. But then they decided it was too risky to come for dinner and meet more of our family. I'm heartbroken. Fear of covid did that. The showed up masked for the tea BTW. And they work in the local hospital/as a part time EMT. Totally vaxxed and boosted, they're so frightened that life will never be free for them. This is what our worthless government did to us.
I never got to read that book in school, but was stuffed with Shakespeare, which I felt was like the soap opera trash of it's time. Why? Everything was about nuttiness!
I loved Flowers for Algernon, and the real fun came with sci Fi class when we went into 1984, We, Brave new world, and a few other dystopias.
I felt that we were in a dystopia already, even though most kids in school were just studying for the SATs as if this will help them fix the system from the inside (or avoid the pitfalls of the system).
Maybe it's because they blindly accepted what the teachers taught, especially in history and government class, which didn't make sense to me. A lot of American history sounds like bullshit and excuses! Same with the American government system, balance of power between the branches, my ass!
It wasn't until decades later, when I met my current girlfriend that we realized why we weren't like the other "hard working" students: we grew up as young immigrants with parents that relied on our USEFUL INTELLIGENCE in order to help them navigate this ridiculous society.
I think the most brainwashed people are the ones who felt and believed in the American dream, which George Carlin said "you gotta be asleep to believe it".
Brainwashing is not from the schooling, but your environment. Some of us saw the hardships at a young age, while many weren't afraid of how society and people do things illogically.
From Robert Anton Wilson - Prometheus Rising
"Another 20% are “responsible, intelligent adults” with fully developed third and fourth circuits. They spend most of their time worrying, because the predominantly primate parameters of human society seem absurd, immoral and increasingly dangerous to them."
Mathew, I so enjoy reading your newsletters. You are clearly a deep thinker on so many levels, and I feel like every newsletter is an education and an invitation to strive to learn something new every day. You are a master of the written word.
u are fascinating- i need to reread this. (i am coming from a starting point where i always thought that the asskissers giving the teachers exactly what the teachers wanted, are phony.
I remember being shocked when I learned contemporary high school students don’t “get” Holden Caulfield or “The Catcher in the Rye.” I mean, what?! Have they no souls?
Salinger was my favorite author at that age, to the point that I chased down and photocopied unpublished short stories from thickly bound volumes of vintage “New Yorkers” in the public library after I’d finished devouring all of his available books.
And then that passage you cited about “Holden Caulfield” Syndrome—*wow*. Thank you for giving that vile psychobabble a proper takedown.
Oh, the reason Salinger never agreed to sell the film rights to any of his books is because he was appalled by the production of “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” as “My Foolish Heart” and never wanted to experience that disappointment again:
I’d missed that delightful comment from Mike—thank you for sharing it! I wish there were a way to see all of a Substacker’s comments as he really has a lot of gems floating out there.
I just got booted off of Facebook seven days ago - a concocted "security incident" and a request to retract/recant about 40 posts - comments - I'd made over the past three months deviating from the Official Narrative - that’s part of the “process” they wanted me to go through to “unlock” the account. No dice. And I’m not the only person they’ve done this to, they took a $175 billion hit to their equity capital because of this practice, they’ve dumped a lot more people than just me. I've been posting on here on Substack since September, putting links on my facebook page, so that's not the loss, but the real loss is contacts. I downloaded my account a few months back, so I can parse through that, but that leaves about 150 or so new ones. That's the way social media holds people in its iron grip - it makes real contact very difficult, and contact mediated by their platform very easy, so it becomes addictive. And their control and ability to nudge and coerce and shape becomes absolute, they can and do manipulate who sees your posts - and the posts you see.... it can be a very effective means of psychological warfare. And the only way to stop it is to get rid of facebook entirely, let it crash to the ground, and try to reconstruct contacts in real life, and that's the task I have ahead of me. I seem to have a fair number of contacts on my phone - and in other places, though. If you’re on facebook, please spread the word. I’m leaving the account “locked”, and I’m not coming back - facebook is an Outrage Machine and a Time Suck and an addiction, and I’m going to break it…
And more: As for being cut off by facebook, at first it was fury, then amputation, it was a physical pain... and I found that interesting and figured out that such a thing was in fact poisonous. And further reflection - it was a waste of time - a hole down which time went, and then, obviously a means for the people/algorithms which run it, to create psychological effects - that's nothing new, it's been reported before, but I had had moments of realization that it was being done to me, it was constantly sundering connections, especially to people nearby, and favoring one set of people for a while, then another set. And since I know people with rather widely disparate opinions, including some with whom I argue, sometimes I'd see only posts/comments from people I argue with - so that's the Outrage Machine part. It's a manipulated, artificial environment - and there's no need for it. I can only wonder what havoc will be wreaked in people's lives with the VR/Meta environment - and I'll leave *that one* well alone, like foxglove a beautiful flower but deadly poison. https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/facebook-and-i-are-no-more-booted
I have not participated in society much in my adult life, precisely because I am repulsed by the casual violence of so many people, like drone bombs on wedding parties, microplastics filling up the oceans, the extermination of species, the destruction of the working class and the aggregation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands is just the cost of Progress. I have spent a significant part of my life trying to warn people about the rise and fall of empires, but that mostly alienated me, and so I mostly stopped, as I have watched our civilization roll inevitably down that hill toward that cliff, society growing more delusional every day, disintegrating, breaking apart little by little. My 19 year old niece told me once during her senior year, as we were talking about the madness of the world, "everything you said would happen has come true." Maybe I caught one?
Curiously, loneliness has not been a problem for me in this pandemic. It has made me start writing again, while I plan to break away from my civilization even more thoroughly. When it tips over that cliff I intend to watch it calmly, to be there for the survivors.
Well done, Matthew, to approach the Pandemic of "Communicative Disease" as James J. Lynch named it. I suggest you read the work by James, then by Jaak Panksepp, focusing on the 5th and 6th of 7 Emotional Brains, namely, CARE and PANIC/LOSS.
“If current trends persist, communicative disease, and its resultant loneliness, will equal communicable disease as a leading cause of premature death in all post-industrialized nations during the 21st century. At time it seems as if our nation [U.S.A.], having reached its high-water mark of prosperity, is simultaneously awash and drowning in a sea of narcotics and prescriptive medications to help deaden the pain. It is almost as if we have agreed to submit voluntarily to a national, chemically-induced frontal lobotomy to cope with the loneliness and disconnectedness of our age.” James J. Lynch
“He has profited well who learns from loss.” Michelangelo
Matthew, you are never alone. Do not be deceived, have faith.
I've read "Catcher in the Rye" about three or four times in high school. I kept reading it because I thought I was always missing the point in Holden's behavior, and that there are many deeper layers to the fact he was the way he was. At this point I don't remember the book details much (probably I should re-read it) but the feeling about the book I carry as bone memory resonates with your writing. As far as poorly chosen mandatory school literature is concerned, I share the same thoughts about "Anna Karenina". It was up for reading and analysis when I was 15. Who the heck thought that, at 15, I could put myself in the shoes of a 30-40-ish old woman trapped in a loveless marriage in Russia and tormented by a split of a love affair and motherly love?
I believe that you'd find it worth your while to compare "A Clockwork Orange" and Alexander DeLarge with "The Catcher in the Rye" and Holden Caulfield.
"A Clockwork Orange" I have used with many classes as a basis for discussions of ethics, morality, society and so on.
The fact that the protagonist does what he does simply because he likes it and he can, never fails to elicit anger and revulsion from colleagues and students mired in the fallacy that society shapes us as if we were clay, thus reprieveing us from blame or responsibility.
I must admit I am not familiar with how english teachers in the US choose their novels for reading assignments. Is there a hard literary canon one /must/ choose from, or is it more of a loose canon based in the homosociality of the culture permeating the profession? Personally, I've tended to combine free choice, with picking from lists made by the faculty to handing out 'one book to rule them all'-reading assignments (in the last case titles teenagers probably won't read, not even as adults, such as 'Silas Marner').
Anyway, always nice to read honest criticism of both a novel and the circumstances regarding the reading of same. Much better than the either sycophantic pandering to colleagues or smearing of the competition called literary criticism in major magazines and papers.
We try in my house to stay involved with friends and family and have throughout. But some people are still terrified. We invited a couple over for dinner, they're new to the US and of my husband's ethnicity so we had them over for tea and it was really great, they felt like family. But then they decided it was too risky to come for dinner and meet more of our family. I'm heartbroken. Fear of covid did that. The showed up masked for the tea BTW. And they work in the local hospital/as a part time EMT. Totally vaxxed and boosted, they're so frightened that life will never be free for them. This is what our worthless government did to us.
I never really understood Pink Floyd until now...
This is excellent.
I never got to read that book in school, but was stuffed with Shakespeare, which I felt was like the soap opera trash of it's time. Why? Everything was about nuttiness!
I loved Flowers for Algernon, and the real fun came with sci Fi class when we went into 1984, We, Brave new world, and a few other dystopias.
I felt that we were in a dystopia already, even though most kids in school were just studying for the SATs as if this will help them fix the system from the inside (or avoid the pitfalls of the system).
Maybe it's because they blindly accepted what the teachers taught, especially in history and government class, which didn't make sense to me. A lot of American history sounds like bullshit and excuses! Same with the American government system, balance of power between the branches, my ass!
It wasn't until decades later, when I met my current girlfriend that we realized why we weren't like the other "hard working" students: we grew up as young immigrants with parents that relied on our USEFUL INTELLIGENCE in order to help them navigate this ridiculous society.
I think the most brainwashed people are the ones who felt and believed in the American dream, which George Carlin said "you gotta be asleep to believe it".
Brainwashing is not from the schooling, but your environment. Some of us saw the hardships at a young age, while many weren't afraid of how society and people do things illogically.
From Robert Anton Wilson - Prometheus Rising
"Another 20% are “responsible, intelligent adults” with fully developed third and fourth circuits. They spend most of their time worrying, because the predominantly primate parameters of human society seem absurd, immoral and increasingly dangerous to them."
Mathew, I so enjoy reading your newsletters. You are clearly a deep thinker on so many levels, and I feel like every newsletter is an education and an invitation to strive to learn something new every day. You are a master of the written word.
u are fascinating- i need to reread this. (i am coming from a starting point where i always thought that the asskissers giving the teachers exactly what the teachers wanted, are phony.
Thank you, Mathew. I’ll give Catcher in the Rye a try. Not sure if I read it in high school.
I remember being shocked when I learned contemporary high school students don’t “get” Holden Caulfield or “The Catcher in the Rye.” I mean, what?! Have they no souls?
Salinger was my favorite author at that age, to the point that I chased down and photocopied unpublished short stories from thickly bound volumes of vintage “New Yorkers” in the public library after I’d finished devouring all of his available books.
And then that passage you cited about “Holden Caulfield” Syndrome—*wow*. Thank you for giving that vile psychobabble a proper takedown.
Oh, the reason Salinger never agreed to sell the film rights to any of his books is because he was appalled by the production of “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” as “My Foolish Heart” and never wanted to experience that disappointment again:
https://thesubtimes.com/2022/02/01/my-foolish-heart-j-d-salingers-authorized-film-of-his-written-work/
I’d missed that delightful comment from Mike—thank you for sharing it! I wish there were a way to see all of a Substacker’s comments as he really has a lot of gems floating out there.
This post exemplifies why I am delighted to have found you, Matthew!
This is the most relatable article I’ve read so far this year.
Thank you.