The path of most resistance
A drunk person came into our house last week and threatened to steal all of our belongings. Unless we paid him off.
(You can read about it here. Please vote it “Helpful”.)
I’m sure this bully’s tactic has worked in the past.
We are wired to avoid pain. Bullies use this “one weird trick” to get otherwise rational, moral people to make irrational and immoral choices.
“Do what I want and the pain will stop.”1
What can be done?
Develop an appetite for pain.
Americans are famously organized around avoiding pain; “frictionless” is practically the national religion.2
But suffering is the precondition for wisdom. Full stop.
How we endure suffering, how we treat one another as we suffer, how we acknowledge suffering – those are the hallmarks of our civilization.
I have written here before that Americans were so lazy, so spoiled, so bored that they have decided to destroy themselves for the LOLs. (“Just to feel something.”)
Obviously, I do not mean the millions of Americans who toil day and night, who suffer incredible fear and anxiety as they worry about their survival in a society organized entirely for the pleasure (literally, exclusively) of the rich and thus powerful.
But I do mean many and perhaps most Americans.
Hasan Piker, commenting on the power of protest:
When you go and attend these sorts of protests… you get to see solidarity in action. And it's a beautiful feeling. It is the anti-black pill. It is the maximum “touching grass” that you can do.
Our for-profit, ad-driven media and the vultures in the GOP who run our government have moved on from the Charlie Kirk assassination, from the “ANTI-ICE” shooting in Texas but they were acts of violence perpetrated by black-pilled young white men.
To be black-pilled is to refuse to understand suffering – your own and that of others. It is by no means a coincidence that the GOP, the billionaires who are their clients and sponsors, are explicitly rejecting empathy.
To feel pain is to be human, and these monsters – these moral degenerates – have rejected our common humanity. Perhaps, because they lack the ability to understand their own pain.
When a President and his Vice President threaten to use the world’s largest military to cover their political opponents with feces, take them literally and figuratively.
The slippery slope we are halfway down is one where good people avoid pain and bad people create it.
[This regime runs on the spectacle of inflicting suffering. You know this to be true. It is very well documented. They are documenting it for you. They wish for us to avert our eyes. That is both immoral and political surrender.]
When bad things happen to good people, they become better.
If you are a good person, you will learn to take the path of greatest resistance. You will learn to work through pain.
It is the only way to fight evil.
It is, in every culture, the enlightened way.
Obviously, in the year of our lord 2025, I am also referring to the government shutdown, to the shakedown of law firms and universities, to violent raids by masked “agents of the state”, etc and so forth. ↩
What is to be said of “no pain, no gain” and the relatively recent cult of the ripped bod? A masochistic kink that mistakes aesthetics for “health”. The fantasy that we can choose the pain that we experience and thus manage it; surgically, remotely. ↩