Psychological Black Death

What if the world is already in chains, and this is the inevitable scenario to prolong the status quo as long as possible? The world is teetering on the precipice of becoming much stranger but nothing fundamentally changes, even if a nuclear war breaks out, or currencies and economies crash, or governments collapse.

The total stagnation of the world across many domains is evident: working harder for less rewards in a hyper-competitive economy, academia producing little worthwhile research, decreasing quality of life and low fertility rates. Humanity is not just regressing, it is in a doom spiral with human extinction as a possibility. The worst is yet to come, a psychological black death, in which nothing can escape the global surveillance apparatus and nobody has meaningful agency over their own lives. Slaves of a society that hates them, yet impossible to fight back against. The World in Chains scenario signifies the end of great men, the total control of the noosphere, the framing of reality through false narratives, and the relinquishment of truth to power.

Censorship, domination and Mental Omega

A few mass censorship actions have sparked outrage lately: payment processors pressuring Steam and Itch.io to remove adult content, and the entire country of the United Kingdom blocking adult content and even restricting VPNs with the Online Safety Act. State and corporate censorship of content that a few people dislike is the new status quo, every fringe group will have the opportunity to oppress the greater society because the state will co-opt any cause to seize power, and power seeks to exert its will through violence and coercion.

The psychic Yuri from Red Alert 2, wanted to unify the world and end human conflict, further expanded upon in the fanmade mod, Mental Omega. His power to control minds is unmatched, why fight an enemy when one can mind control them? Most of his military relies on unconventional means like cloning, genetic mutation, optical camouflage, mind control, performance-enhancing drugs, chemical warfare, completely unrestricted by conventional morality. In Mental Omega, Yuri succeeds in controlling the vast majority of the world via mental domination.

Such a faction exists in the real world, and their slogan is "software that dominates." Palantir and other big tech companies are the private arms of the US federal government, which has been at war with the American people long before I was born. Their CEO, Alex Karp has said, "the most effective way for social change to happen is to humiliate your enemy and make them poorer." The American people have certainly been humiliated and impoverished. If you want to become rich, there's a stock that will rise because one party always wins (not financial advice).

Zombie religions and moral dualism

To change the world requires creating a new religion, as the old ones have led us to this miserable state of affairs. This new religion need not present itself as religion, but may function all the same. Slave morality has produced mostly obedient slaves as expected, Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil presents an alternative for the pervasive, dualistic worldviews that are still dominant today.

None of the major religions that exist today, would have ever become popular without the state co-opting faith as a means of power. They would have all died as obscure cults if they could not be used to manipulate people, when was the last time that the majority was right about anything? When has the majority even cared about truth? Something religion and philosophy have in common is the search for hidden knowledge, hypothetical information that could lead to enlightenment or salvation. The Gnostics sought the hidden truths, to be reunited with the Pleroma, but such a belief could never become mainstream because the majority do not have the level of sentience necessary to derive anything from first principles.

What I will agree with the Gnostics on, is that the King of this World, Rex Mundi, is actually evil. However, their religion is just a myth invented for their time, same as any religion. As any structure ossifies it becomes brittle and can not adapt to change, which is how we have new secular religions today, displacing the desert trilogy of old. The most prominent being the cult of money, which is far more powerful today in the era of global financial systems, arguably the beast system alluded to in Revelations.

Cities of the unliving

A model city of the future may be Magnasanti, which I have alluded to before. An overcrowded place where the quality of life is mediocre by any metric, yet completely stable. Wherever they go, each block is the same, and any resistance is overcome by a totalitarian police force. A place where no one strives to achieve anything great, because they know that any improvement to their condition is not possible.

There are of course countless permutations of the same archetypal necropolis in fiction: Dark City (1998), The Matrix (1999), Hive cities from Warhammer 40K, Cyberpunk 2077, the list could go on. The corporate police state, where entire cities are prisons, is the present and the future.

Living under such a system, where one has no individual will to power to change anything, even in one's own life, can only lead to nihilism. It's the same reason why spirituality around the world is in decline, why few people want to have children even if they have the means to do so, or start companies or work hard for an employer just to survive. We're fucked because our ability to exert our will upon the world has been subverted and the value of human life is approaching an infinitesimal.