Freedom of Choice? We’re Being Invaded!

I had a couple of sobering experiences yesterdays that reminded me of the complications involved in keeping the human species from killing itself and every other major lifeform on the planet. As usual, if life wasn’t so funny it would be terrifying and depressing.

First, I had a doctor’s appointment to review the analysis of my failing right knee. I particularly like my physician because he has a very international view of medicine, life, and the world around him. As we went thorough my options regarding the beat-to-shit knee, we carried on our usual conversations about the world outside of my old, rotting body. Someone close to me once told me that all of the doctors in the world had conspired to treat Covid as if it were something much worse than the seasonal flu. He complained that he didn’t get “his check” for participating in that grand conspiracy to profit Big Pharma and whoever else supposedly benefitted from the pandemic. From there we had a laugh about the self-important goobers who imagined they were receiving Microsoft tracking chips with their vaccines. Again, no payment for that work to my doctor and I suggested he at least ask for a lifetime subscription for Microsoft Office and not that bullshit 365 crap, but the real thing on a DVD. And that was the funny part of the conversation.

The less funny part, from his perspective, is that when humans are confronted with evidence that their delusions are nothing more than bullshit they double-down on their bullshit. Cognitive dissonance seems to be exclusively a human mental defect, but it is a big one. When I asked if there was a way to get past that, in his experience, his response was, “No, we’re doomed.” I desperately wish I disagreed with him, but I don’t. Since I was a kid. in the 1950s, and first read C.M. Kornbluth’s novelette “The Marching Morons” I have had zero faith in the future of human beings as a species and my own best-case-scenario is that we find a clever way to kill ourselves off without taking every other form of life with us. Any reading of US history that isn’t pure conservative newspeak is full of the dullest, most violent, and the dumbest rolling over anything resembling logic and decency as easily as Trump cons his nitwits into sending him their spare change. “We’re doomed,” for sure. At best the 1% of humanity’s best and brightest will be doomed to babysitting the marching morons until the planet is uninhabitable.

Later that day, I limped to the local YMCA to try and reinstate my swimming routine after a couple of months of avoiding the pool until I knew if it was doing good or harm to my knee. When you are 75, a couple of months of low to moderate exercise does a lot of damage to your physical conditioning. My usual lame 1/4 mile routine too much for me and I was pretty discouraged when I gave up on the swim and headed to the sauna before braving this year’s mild December evening. There was one guy in the sauna and I picked the opposite end of the room to stew in my frustration. Within a few minutes, the sauna was almost full of middle-aged men showing off their flabby naked bodies and I should have passed on the experience. Their conversation was as depressing as my swimming failure and I sunk into a steaming funk as I listened to a pair of nitwits babbling about the “border crisis” and other equally obscure-to-Minnesota subjects they know nothing about.

The big takeaway I got from their conversation was that they are major breeders of stupid. I wasn’t interested enough to keep an accurate track of their family mobs, but I am fairly certain that everyone in the sauna had at least 5 offspring. All of whom were somewhat-to-seriously involved in mindless school sports. For sure, with all of the preening and bragging not one of those obvious-Trumpers had a kid who was competing in the USA Mathematical Olympiad, the Scripps National (or even the city or state) Spelling Bee, the National Speech and Debate Tournament, or any of the 30 national high school academic competitions. (I linked those competitions, just in case you don’t believe there is anything other than sports for your kid to excel in, you fuckin’ idiot shoulda-been-sterilized-at-birth goober.)

In this country, practically throughout the nation’s history, we have celebrated the luckiest 1%, not the smartest. The half-wits who stumbled into wealth through inheritance or good fortune or both end up being the idols of millions and those who work hard, take almost every step of accomplishment our species has managed, and make the rest of us look like the the extinct human species we came from are mostly ignored. As I have said more than once, “I’m not worried about AI, but LI is gonna kill us all.” The fourth of the “The 5 basic laws of human stupidity” is “Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid individuals” and the fifth is “A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.” They are everywhere and their population is growing exponentially, even as world population growth slows. In fact, for the most part the only humans who are currently breeding are fools,. So, “we are doomed.”

Freedom of Choice? How to Make A Cult

You can’t get very far into this subject without an argument about what a “cult” is. So I’m going to stuck with Webster’s for a definition, because I usually do.

1. as in audience: a group of people showing intense devotion to a cause, person, or work (as a film)
2. as in religion: a body of beliefs and practices regarding the supernatural and the worship of one or more deities

Mrs. Day and I were talking about the odd devotion people we know have toward a variety of pop stars: from the Beatles to Taylor Swift or John Wayne to Keano Reeves. We know old-ass men who worship the Beatles with at least as much fervor as teenage girls texting about Taylor Swift. To be honest, we weren’t just academically interested. Mrs. Day and I really wanted to know “What is that about and how do I get my own cult?” Because if you can attract enough members to your cult, you never have to worry about money. Donald Trump sold 2,024 scraps from a cheesy tarp-sized blue suit he wore for his mugshot for $4,654 a scrap. That is more than $4.7M dollars for a suit J.C. Penney’s would have discounted or put in a seconds bin! So, “how do I get my own cult?” is a serious question. Now the two of us have a goal, a definition of what that goal looks like, and a purpose for reaching that goal.

First, we need that devoted “audience.” If you are really serious about this objective, math is on your side. There are about 320M people in the USA alone and 8.1B in the world, but let’s concentrate on the US and let the ROW cash flow come as it will. If I can get myself or my product (for example: a popular song) in front of a lot of people, say 10% of the bodies in the USA, I will have am uncommitted audience of 3.2M people. If I mostly suck, I might end up with 1% of that group who hear my song and pay attention to the name of the song, they might want to know who the artist is, look up when I might be performing nearby, buy some of that artist’s (my) music, and, if I really get lucky, they “follow” me throughout their lives like Beatles, Rolling Stones, Clapton, Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Springfield, and those really obscure British Invasion band fans. Those followers become members of the “cult of me.”

If I’m even a little bit special, 1% of that first group of 10% leaves me with a a fan/cult-base, a “cult group,” of 360,000. And that’s if I suck and/or didn’t get enough exposure to really be a hit. Casinos all over the world are well-stocked with performers who suck, but still collected enough attention to have a modestly lucrative cult following. (I’m talking about you, Teddy “Captain Poopypants” Nugent.) Taylor Swift has at least a 93% saturation rate (256M), supposedly 44% of US adults consider themselves Taylor Swift “fans” (258M over 18) and about 40M more between 10 and 18 (~275M total). Supposedly, 16% of that huge first group consider themselves to be “avid” fans and are almost certain to be the minimum size group for the Swiftie cult. That is a cult with 44M members. She’s the either the first or the second largest church/cult in the USA and she has fans worldwide.

If she was an asshole, I’d be worried. Pop history tells us mostly “what you see is what you get.” Ted Nugent was an asshole as a young man and is still one. Bruce Springsteen was a pretty cool guy as a young man and is a bit cooler today. Willy Nelson was cool out of the womb. Donny Trump was born a turd and just got smellier with age. So, I’m not worried about Swift and the Swifties. She (and her fans) got a pretty serious boost to her cred when Teddy Nugent publicly whined about her. Anything Teddy is afraid of (more likely, jealous of) is good enough for me.

While Swift certainly sets the high and enviable bar for creating a successful cult, she doesn’t make getting up there seem any easier. She is an incredibly hard working artist and performer. I don’t want to be a hard working anything and it it worked for Trump that means there is a pretty easy-to-achieve low bar for creating a cult, too. That’s the one I want to aim at, even without the advantage of being handed somewhere around $800M just for being born into the right, cutthroat family. Of course, if I started out with $800M I wouldn’t be wasting my time messing with goobers like the nitwits who belong to Trump’s cult. I don’t want those imbeciles in my country, let alone anywhere near me. I am even nervous about getting anywhere near their money.

That is a problem with creating a cult, too. It’s not like cult members are anyone’s idea of the “best and brightest.” From Joseph Smith’s original Mormons to the Beatles and their nitwit Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Transcendental Meditation entourage, true believers are kind of gross in a simple-minded, hyper-gullible, sticky-clingy, lay-down-with-dogs-and-get-up-with-fleas way that makes me want to take a shower after looking at them. That is a show-stopping problem for a wannabe cult leader. You have be someone like Trump who can loudly and proudly stand in front of people he despises and tell them what they want to hear. Man, if I’d have thought this out earlier I might have passed on the whole idea. Talk about being surrounded by people you don’t want to be near, this is getting totally out of hand. Still, the idea of collecting a few hundred thousand followers who will happily and stupidly empty their pockets and bank accounts for my benefit is tempting. I’m going to have to think about this more.

I’ll get back to you.