Yesterday, I gave an interview to an Italian fashion magazine, short magazine, S-H-O-T. I talked to the two editors of the magazine. And I went on one of these rampages, one of these rampages, about how bad things are and how optimistically they're going to get only worse and how there's literally nothing we can do about it and how the future is narcissistic and psychopathic in equal measures.
At the very least, this post-apocalyptic scenario, which I love to purvey in all my videos, enough to cause a sizable proportion of my viewership to head to the nearest basement and off themselves.
So after the interview, when I left the devastated editors to their own devices, I asked myself, is it really true? Is there nothing we can do about this? Can't we extricate ourselves from this mess that we had driven ourselves into? We are trapped. That much is clear.
The situation is bad and getting worse. That much is also clear.
Narcissism, psychopathy are on the rise, not least among women. That's also clear.
Nothing what I've said was wrong. It was all based on statistics and so on.
But are there any ways out? Are there any solutions?
And I think there are actually.
There's a series of steps. None of them is too complicated. All of them are very within the realm of possibility, but they do require a lot of will, individual will, political will and social capital. They require investment, commitment and a vision.
I'm going to enumerate the some of these steps. And if they're all implemented together, I think we can reverse this morass, this conundrum. I think we can have a better future.
To this very moment, I doubt that there is such will both among the population at large, each and every individual, every single collective, the broken institutions we have, politicians, I doubt.
But at the very least, I can release the equivalent of a manifesto. Measures and steps that based on psychology and the social sciences are known to have a beneficial impact on all levels of society.
Why not? Let's give it a try.
Now let's go and have a look at what I have in mind.
Sometimes civilizations reach a point where the only way out is a reset. No, not the big reset. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but a reset of some social dynamics.
In other words, sometimes the only way out is to start from scratch, go back to square one, reimagine and rethink civilization from the foundations up.
The equivalent of a grassroots movement on the intellectual level, a bottom-top approach. I fully believe that we are at such an inflection point, such a tipping point. And I am pessimistic about our ability to avoid it. And I do think that it's going to lead to the demise of our civilization as we know it. Not to the extinction of the species, but definitely to the extinction of everything we hold dear culturally and socially.
I'm going to enter a new age if we are not careful. And this age is going to have a strong resemblance to the darkest periods in human history, for example, the early Middle Ages.
What needs to happen? What do we need to do?
The first thing is we need to encourage a transition from cities back to nature, both mentally and physically.
Now, before I proceed, everything I say can be implemented, can be incentivized.
Governments and society at large can provide incentives, could be monetary incentives, could be moral incentives, could be peer pressure, could be social activism, but we can create an incentive structure which will bring about these transformations in how we behave, where we live, how we interact or don't interact with each other, etc.
So all the measures I'm going to describe, they can be brought about. It's not going to be easy to reverse urbanization, a process that started at the latest 7,000 years ago. It's not going to be easy.
But we need to do this because cities are hotbeds, hotbeds of very adverse social outcomes and processes and dynamics. Cities have been a serious mistake, serious wrong detour, which shows the wrong fork in the road.
And we need to un-city ourselves, we need to de-organize, we need to de-organize by dispersing the population. We have the technology needed to convert arid stretches of the planet into thriving places.
For example, look at Israel. Israel is 57% desert and yet it's one of the major powerhouses of agriculture, high technology, innovation and science. So it's possible to re-acquire and repurpose big parts of the planet and disperse the population so as to avoid overcrowding like in rat colonies.
I dedicated a video to this issue. It's titled From Narcissistic Cities to Psychopathic Metaverse and it's available on my YouTube channel.
The second thing we need to do, we need to suppress some kinds of pernicious speech, some kind of ideologies.
Yes, I'm against free speech. I'm against unmitigated, unbridled, unconstrained, unlimited free speech. The exact opposite of Elon Musk, who is not known for his great wisdom when it comes to social relations.
So I'm against free speech that is anarchic, dysregulated, not even regulated, but dysregulated. We regulate speech. You can't deny the Holocaust in many countries who go to jail, go to prison for this. Ask David Irving. You can't be an overt Nazi. Free symbols are forbidden. Nazism, fascism in many countries, communism, white supremacy, racism. These are all forms of suppressed speech, but we need to add to the list.
For example, I consider third wave feminism and sex positivity a cult, a dangerous cult. It's dangerous because it runs against everything we have learned and everything we know in psychology. It's counterfactual, it's poisonous, and it's destructive to its adherence and recipients regrettably a big proportion of young women. I would suppress third wave feminism as forbidden speech and an ideology. I would also limit advertising very considerably.
The philosopher and social observer, Louis Althusser, suggested that advertising works through a process called interpolation. It reaches into our minds and forces us to behave in ways which we would not have behaved had it not been for advertising. Advertising, in other words, is brainwashing. It's manipulation. It's also, in many, many cases, a lie. Advertising contains fallacies and falsities and wrong data. It's a form of misinformation.
I would restrict advertising dramatically. We have done that before. We have restricted advertising for tobacco products. What about alcohol? What about other things? Opioids is a great example of how marketing and advertising have killed 100,000 people a year in conjunction, of course, with the medical establishment.
Some forms of speech need to be suppressed.
Again, I refer you to an example, a video I've made, feminism, from equity to psychopathy. The video is available on my channel. No, I'm not a conservative. I'm the exact opposite of conservative. I'm a liberal, progressive. But it's gone too far. We have gone too far. We have poisoned the well. We have poisoned the tree, and we are feeding on its fruits.
We need to reverse course because we are heading for a head-on collision with a cliff. Nothing will be left of us. And the lifeboat we all inhabit, called the planet.
Of course, consumerism is a big part of this. Consumerism, the divorce between men and nature. But consumerism is driven by ideologies in itself. It's an ideology, a form of religion.
Again, I have videos on my channel which deal with consumerism.
We need to force people back into families and into communities. We need to offer monetary incentives to form families and to maintain them long-term. And we need to structure society so that communities prefer added benefits.
In other words, if you're alone, you're penalized.
We need to penalize people who choose to remain alone. And we need to penalize them because singlehood had become a cancer, a malignancy, and it is feeding on itself.
And because studies show clearly that the overwhelming vast majority of lonely people are unhappy. They just don't know how to end their loneliness. They can't extricate themselves.
We need to help them. Incentives, monetary and otherwise, social incentives, they work wonders. They work wonders. You won't believe if the incentive structure is right how behavior changes.
We do need to make it worth your while to live with someone, to cohabit, to have a long-term intimate relationship, to form families, to work with people towards common goals, and to inhabit the community.
We need to redesign and reform the workplace. As it is now, it's the center of an addiction, addiction known as workaholism. I have a video on my channel titled, Workaholism, Addiction or Lifestyle.
Workplaces have become distribution centers for drugs. The drug is money, of course. And not only money. Work itself had become a kind of a dangerous substance.
So we need to reform the workplace. We need to seamlessly integrate the workplace, both with the community and with home. The workplace needs to be a natural extension of one's life and needs to be demarcated and boundaried very strictly. It should be obligatory to work with other people face-to-face.
Work from home should be penalized and limited, disincentivized via the tax regime, for example, taxation, in other ways. We should incentivize going to a location where you work with other people face-to-face. And workplace intrusions into private time should be criminalized, nothing less.
The work-life balance has to be restored. It's gone awry.
Corporations taking advantage of their access to their employees via modern technologies, and they're abusing this access.
Indeed, a proper technology, we need to ban certain types of immersive technologies. We ban technology all the time. We ban, for example, human cloning. We ban baby selection. We ban gender or sex selection in advance.
There are many, many technologies which are utterly banned. There's no reason to not ban immersive technologies such as the metaverse, such as certain types of virtual reality, augmented reality, extended reality. There's no reason not to ban some of these things or severely restrict their usage and make a clear demarcation between these technologies and reality so that no one can make a mistake, so that the lines are not blurred.
Technologies are out of control. We need to bring them in.
Social media was malevolently designed to create addiction and conditioning and rage and relative positioning and envy. Consequently, it has led to an explosion in the rates of depression and anxiety among young people and old people, seniors.
We need to take over these technologies. We need to regulate them.
Social media is not the internet. The internet started off as a free-for-all, almost anarchic platform. Then, corporations with deep pockets took over the internet. The internet has been hijacked. It needs to be emancipated and liberated.
We need to take back the internet from these tech giants. These tech giants do harm, do not do harm. Are you kidding me? They are very harmful. They're very harmful.
They need to be broken to pieces, competing pieces, the same way the government tried to do with Microsoft. Then, they need to be regulated as old-type media are and as utilities are regulated.
We need to regain control of these gateways to current reality and future reality. It's all a war about who controls our perception of reality.
We cannot allow beebots like Google and Facebook to control how we experience our being and our existence.
We need to certify people to use certain kinds of technology, the same way that we run background checks on people who buy guns today.
Today, you want to buy a gun, they check your background. You want to use certain types of technologies, including definitely social media. You need to undergo a background check, absolutely. You could be decertified, not licensed, to use certain technologies.
We need to limit the use of all social media technologies to two hours a day, absolutely not more, according to studies by Twenge and others.
We need to ban relative positioning practices, for example, likes on Facebook because they create envy, they create depression, they create anxiety. These are drugs and Facebook and Google are the equivalent of drug pushers. We are terrified of them because they're too big to fail and because they hold sway over politicians, they can render even the President of the United States invisible. It's gone too far.
These are almost criminalized organizations. Anyone who has been subjected to their practices at the receiving end knows what I'm talking about.
We need to fight back. We need to organize and fight back.
Friends online could be only people you have actually met in real life.
We need to verify the identity of all users. We need to criminalize the use of pseudonyms, non-anonymity.
Blockchain technology could be of great help here because it allows us to verify identity. This is technology, but there are other much neglected issues.
Sex education, for example. We need to educate children regarding sex, the physiological aspects of sex, the medical aspects of sex and the mental implications of a variety of sexual practices, orientations and preferences.
We don't need to introduce our opinions into the curricula, but we need to expose children to a range of opinions on all topics. And yes, this includes conservative opinions.
The agenda right now is monopolized by a sliver, a sliver, mind you, of the intellectual establishment.
Everyone is terrified. No one dares to talk. Academics lose their jobs and tenure and pension and livelihood because they dare to say something which is politically incorrect.
Numerous people are cancelled. Celebrities, intellectuals, they're cancelled.
It's a regime of terror, like in the French Revolution. People don't dare. Everything had become taboo.
Everyone is someone's victim. So you can't move a centimeter to the right or a centimeter to the left without stepping on someone's extremely sensitive and delicate thoughts.
As a way to survive, children need to be exposed to the whole gamut, the whole panoply of opinions and judgments and information with regards to sex in all its implications.
For example, we know that compulsive casual sex and compulsive sexting and coming online have deleterious outcomes later in life.
Promiscuity is intimately connected to dark personalities, subclinical psychopaths and subclinical narcissism, and also is intimately connected and directly correlated with substance abuse, depression and anxiety.
We need to share this information widely and at an early age. Sex positivity is a seriously bad idea as far as mental health goes.
Seriously bad idea.
And yet, it's the orthodoxy. It's taught in universities, it's taught in high schools. Everyone is exposed to sex positivity as if it were the Holy Grail.
And all studies, all like ALL studies, show that it's a self-defeating, self-destructive strategy which has long-term implications for mental wellness and mental well-being.
And also, if one is not careful, is destructive to the body. And one is not careful because the vast majority of casual sex and other practices are coupled with drinking, actually.
Why do people drink?
Because what they're doing is not natural. There's nothing to do with social and cultural edicts. It's simply the human mind and human body are not built for this.
So we need to suppress this ideology of sex positivity because it's wrong. Not because nothing is wrong with it morally. It's simply wrong scientifically.
And we are misleading whole generations of children.
Similarly, we need to inculcate in children the importance and benefits of intimacy, of long-term relationships.
Children, adolescents, and young adults are terrified of relationships and of falling in love. It's the new unwanted pregnancy.
Why?
Because they want to make money. They want to have a career. They want to consume.
Why?
Because capitalism and the corporate world have brainwashed them into believing this.
The corporate world, corporations, and in cahoots with governments are brainwashing the younger generations to remain single, to engage in promiscuous sex, so that they can consume more and participate in the workforce and earn enough money to consume more.
It's all about consumption and bottom line growth. It's despicable. It's criminal. There's no other way to describe this.
We are lying to the young generations. We're misleading them. We're negating everything we've learned in psychology and sociology so as to keep them in a state of suspended animation glued to the screen.
Because if you have intimacy, if you have a family, if you have children, if you have long-term committed, loving relationships, you don't have time for Facebook. And if you don't have time for Facebook, someone is making a lot less money. And it's all about money.
They want to monetize your eyeballs so you can't use your eyeballs with anyone around you.
Being single is very good for business and profits. Promiscuous sex is the lubricant of modern commerce and a lack of intimacy and the inability to form relationships.
31% of adults in the United States are lifelong singles. Another 20% have pseudo relationships, which are not real. Half the population is single.
Is this an accident? Of course it's not an accident. We have constructed our commercial life and the technologies attendant upon our commercial activities to encourage and reward and incentivize a lonely life.
Because when you're lonely, you're bored, you're depressed, you're anxious and you reach for the nearest online retailer or for alcohol, which also makes someone very rich.
We need to license parenting. To drive a motorcycle, you need a license. To use a gun, you need a license. Most activities require a license.
The two most important activities in life don't require a license. To vote and to make a new life, to become a parent, and we need to license parenting.
Prospective parents should be required to complete a curriculum in child psychology, relationship management, age-appropriate technology use, and so on. They should study for three months before they conceive.
I have a video titled Parenting Should Be License, where I explain the intricacies of this proposal.
We need also to enforce age-related restrictions on entertainment venues, such as nightclubs, the use of alcohol, especially on campuses. We need to introduce a gradation of measures intended to bar and restrict access to detrimental objects, such as drink, such as sex, and activities that are problematic at a certain age.
So nightclubs today, theoretically, are not supposed to admit anyone under the age of 18, but of course, nightclubs are full of people aged 15 and 16 and 17, if they look good enough, and if they do certain things which they are not going to. Everyone knows it's true. Bars are the same. Alcohol is sold to minors easily. And campuses openly, overtly allow alcohol in fraternities, and so on and so forth.
This is not age-appropriate. The brain continues to form until age 25. At age 16 or 18 or even 21 or even 23, very important parts of the brain are not fully developed. Some of them almost don't exist. These are the parts that are concerned with executive functions. These are the parts of a brain that are involved with judgment, with decision-making.
And so selling alcohol to minors, or selling alcohol even to someone who is 21 or 23, providing access to sexual activity to someone who is 15, that's criminal, because they don't have the equipment, the mental equipment to deal with this. They simply don't have the brain to do this. The brain matures at age 25. They don't know what they're doing to cut a long story short.
Perhaps all these links to an important reform. Education is a public good, exactly like healthcare. Privatizing education is a seriously bad idea. Privatizing healthcare is also a seriously bad idea.
As anyone who had compared healthcare systems around the world knows, I was the head of the Healthcare Reform Committee in Macedonia. And we worked together with the WHO and so on. And I can tell you, public healthcare systems suck. Private healthcare systems, I'm sorry, private healthcare systems suck.
Public systems function.
So education and healthcare, in a series of other things, they're public goods. They should never be privatized.
We need to deprivatize education. Yes, you heard me correctly. We need to ban private universities, especially in higher education. We need to nationalize universities. We need to let communities, states, regional authorities, I don't know, lots of parents take over.
Education needs to become a public good again.
When you privatize education, it's not about education. It's about money and fun. Universities, for example, in the United States, they're not about education. They're about giving you a good time and taking your money, of course, which creates a mountain of student debt that you can never pay. You can become a slave for the rest of your life.
We need to reorient education around the twin concepts of phronetics and eudaimonia.
Phronetics is doing the right thing. Eudaimonia is pursuing the proper, the good life.
We need to skill students to survive in life, in real life, skilling. We need to teach them how to manage relationships, for example, how to avoid predators and abusers.
Why are we teaching them? Why are we teaching them about the Visigoths in Europe in the fourth century?
I mean, it's good to know, but is this really what they need?
We need to redefine education as providing future generations with the skills to survive and thrive in competitive environments and in conjunction and interaction with their peers.
And yes, history has a place, as does mathematics and, I don't know, other things, other topics, biology.
But the priority should be given to life skilling because when a young man or woman graduate college, higher education institution or university, the first thing they confront in life is a workplace, how to cope and manage and survive in a workplace and then relationships, heartbreak, breakups, and children.
No one prepares the young generation for these things. They don't know what to do. They're utterly discombobulated and confused and disoriented, and they can't look to the older generations because the older generations botched it up seriously.
All of us, my generation, the boomers, onwards, well into Generation X, we really, really screwed it up. We really made a mess and a hash out of it. We destroyed the planet.
Young people can't look up to us when it comes to relationships because of the divorce rate, because of what these young people had to go through.
When we, the older, their elders divorced or broke up or acrimoniously fought over them, they don't have role models. We do not have role models in today's world and society.
We need to teach them these things because they can't just absorb these things from the environment by osmosis. There's no one to look up to and to consult because the vast majority of the older generations are children. They never grew up. They're infantile.
And finally, psychology should become an obligatory subject starting in middle school.
Lifelong auditing, lifelong journaling should be taught. Introspection, introspective skills, regulation of mood and affect, movements should be taught. We should encourage these things as ways to obtain insight and secure one's eco-syntony.
To teach them how to feel comfortable in their own skin and to have a center to be grounded.
To negate the emptiness that modern life tends to foster at the center, at the core of each and every one of us.
We need to fight for our children.
We're not doing this. We're not doing this. It is a sad side. No wonder young people feel abandoned, resentful. They don't even have the energy to be rebellious anymore. They just withdraw, live with their parents and watch video games, play video games all day. That's how depleted they are. That's how hopeless they are. They reject life. They don't want to confront life anymore. They don't try anymore. They gave up.
People aged 25 have the mentality of someone aged 80. As if they were on death's door. As if there was no reason to fight anymore. As if the future were behind them. Living, inhabiting an eternal present and a gloomy, dark, dreary present at death.
We need to give them a hand. And by extricating them, maybe, maybe we will have helped ourselves.
I hope so. I, as a boomer, feel extremely guilty for what we have done to future generations and to the habitat, the planet.
I think we are leaving behind a legacy that would take many, many generations to undo.
We have poisoned everything from individual psychology to global ecology. Way to go. Thank you for listening.