The Last Man Pays by Subscription

The greatest challenges of our age are, in part, self-inflicted. An entire generation sits helpless, viewing the challenges of life as impossible, conventional milestones as unobtainable, and as a result retreats into escapism, plastic toys, and masturbation. They do not seek challenge, and they do not desire to bring children into this simulacrum of adulthood. The waste of an entire generation is acceptable if the numbers continue to go up. The snake is eating its tail, but at least the snake’s stocks are at an all-time high as a result of doing so! We live in a post-industrial society that devalues the production of tangible value.

When tangible things are produced they are deliberately flawed, so that you may purchase another one, and the tangible thing now even tells you that you must purchase more, perhaps while attempting to drive. Because their tangibility, the concept of the thing, their very use, their intention, it is all secondary to the one true pursuit of anyone creating anything in this modern age: that an imaginary number that means they possess great wealth becomes ever larger. That number is meaningless and they are hollow men, but they do not care.

Nietzsche warned us of the last man. The last man has come and he is surrounded by cold comforts and a false adulthood, and he is charged a subscription for the privilege of being alive. God is dead, and the overman is on life support.

No, it is late-stage capitalism, say the Marxists. We have a solution. This is a lie. Marx diagnosed the problems with capitalism but did not provide any sort of workable solution. His followers invented several more elaborate solutions, and all of them progressively revealed themselves to be unworkable, to the point of being actively psychotic at their apex, emptying out cities and annihilating the intellectual. Yet there are still people who believe in these promises, that the state will disappear and we will all live under communism in a post-scarcity economy, pretending the darker nature of man shall cease to exist. They lie to themselves, and then they lie to you. This is in fact the problem with leftism, and why the insanities of the past, peddled anew by marble-headed internet men, are in any way attractive.

Across the West, this fact remains true. From Tony Blair to Jacinda Ardern to Kamala Harris to Barack Obama to Bill Clinton to François Hollande to Julia Gillard to Joe Biden, the liberal-left has degenerated into a pack of nothing-men, content to let the xenomorph burst from your chest, vote for Donald Trump, and eat you alive. But you will be watching Netflix while it eats you! You can be elected with an enormous mandate and all you can achieve is a trillion-dollar giveaway to the men who operate the toll booths of life. This is a sad reality, they tell themselves, as they hop on the speaker circuit to tell banks how to operate toll booths better.

Toll booth operators are our modern elite. They fly around in jets shaped like palaces at our expense, generating endless conspiracies about themselves and proclaiming themselves to be heralds of a great future, a future that none of us will ever star in, reduced to mindless background, our hopes and dreams irrelevant, grist for the mill, sacrifice for the altar, blood for the blood god. We demand they be removed, but we are told it is impossible. This is simply how the modern world works, you can’t change it. How else would capital flow to the market if these titans of industry could not direct its flow?

So an entire generation looks back on the past and proclaims that it has fallen in love with nostalgia. It longs for a moment ever drifting further away, when a hero was sixteen pixels tall and a house was twenty thousand dollars and a yearly wage was five thousand. Is this nostalgia, or is it being faced with a future that does not offer them anything but fleeting and cold comforts as they face the reality of only ever getting a simulacrum of adulthood? When childhood is extended and adulthood is unobtainable, even as the body ages, the mind wishes to retreat to a time when adulthood is possible. Cultural artifacts can no longer be evaluated on their merits, but on ‘nostalgia’, on their ability to command a feeling about a time when adulthood was possible. No other culture in the history of humanity has even descended this far into pastism.

Consider the grown men who arrange lounges to perfectly evoke the late 20th century and then announce this is the only way to experience a cultural artifact authentically. This, they say, is their reasoning for doing so. The generation prior understood that watching Citizen Kane in a drive-in theater at two in the morning may not have been the intended delivery mechanism, but nevertheless, it is still Citizen Kane! But that was because the generation prior knew the time depicted in Citizen Kane was worse than their own.

The modern man in his perfectly preserved lounge, with his perfectly preserved television set and perfectly preserved video game console and cartridge, longs not for the authentic experience, but for when he could imagine a future where he had a wife he loves, children to introduce his console to, just as his father at his age showed him Star Wars as a youth, rather than the real future, which is him attempting to recapture this feeling while he sits in a cramped apartment, isolated, undersexed, and paying a third of his income for the privilege to rent this experience. It is not his and will never be his. He can only purchase it a week, a fortnight, a month in advance. Forever.

His female counterpart is the same, paying a monthly premium to watch a group of young people live in New York apartments on repeat while she is trapped in her childhood home, unable to self-actualize like her fictional friends. They are young, they live sexless simulacrums — whether homo or hetero — forever looking at a past that seemed better simply because it was a past that had room for them to become adults, instead of charging them a subscription when they first ventured beyond the home of their parents.

This generation also longs for the past because our culture has begun to fall into complete meaninglessness. Films are empty streams of images, advertising in all but name. Behold the genre of the ‘cozy game’: a game, which is defined by the rules and challenges it poses to its players, stripped of any challenge, a world of no failure state. Behold streaming shows that repeatedly explain the plot to you, not trusting the watcher to want to be challenged in any intellectual way. Even Star Wars is drained of its heroism and now even Luke Skywalker has forgotten his own truth about the possibility of redemption and overcoming of the self. Luke Skywalker, the hero of their parents, now sits on an island proclaiming that heroism is a lie and there is only damnation, like a mad prophet. Heroes are not real, evil is inevitable, and the devil always returns with a bigger laser, somehow.

Evil cannot be defeated. It can only be tamed or delayed, but it will always win, and its progress is inexorable, and even if fiction cannot fight it, what hope do you have, renting an apartment full of cockroaches at a premium and working a job that consumes your time but never stimulates? A job that they keep telling you the computer will take, and then you will be destitute.

Even love is subject to the toll booth. You are lured with the promise of a future shared with another, and you are left poorer, bereft of attachment, given only an endless scroll of faces that communicate only rejection, faces that may not even be real. You remain alone, watching films of actors pretending to be happy people via subscription charge, knowing this happiness seems unachievable for you — a partner, a home, a child, a job that does not abuse you.

The modern leftist politician looks upon these challenges, and he demands, righteously, without irony, his greatest change, the thing that shall fix all this evil in the world. And his demand is this: that the toll booth operators must extract their rent from the public in a non-racist manner! That there be female toll booth operators! That the real issue is that there are not enough rules to mildly restrain their rapacious greed! Vote for him, and he will do nothing. He will make promises he has no intention of keeping, and then he will leave office and join the thing he said he would fight.

The modern rightist politician offers you the fraudulent chance that you, too, might one day run your own toll booth. If only you trust him, he can make things great again. He slips into your ear, he whispers sweet nothings, he knows, just like you, that the past was better than this, and that if only you could recreate that past — but it is the sweetest chill, it is lies, and he is really a friend of the toll booth operators, and he takes your hopes and dreams for a future and he subverts them. Now everything is worse, and when you say you have hopes and dreams for the future, you must pay for that. $15.99 a month, and you can never cancel. Now the young have yet another thing to pay rent on. When he comes to you again, he tells you that you are not a toll booth operator yourself because the wrong people are operating the toll booths. They are the cause! They obstruct your ascension.

But your ascension never happens, and the rightist becomes rich at your expense while you become poor. The leftist politician offers you hope, then does nothing. So you turn to the radical.

The radical says he has a solution! But the solutions have already been tried, you realize. One solution tried becoming final by gassing children at industrial scale, chasing a better future through death; the other watched them starve for the glories of the worker, chasing a better future through death. You find no hope in either, only a longing for a past when things were set, and final, and the real problem was kulaks, the Jews, or both. There is no answer in the death cults of the prior century, no matter whether they wear a swastika or a hammer and sickle on their arms.

No wonder the attitude of the public is to attempt to travel back in time to when these men could be fought! When hopes and dreams were an asset, a goal, and not something to be trod upon. When adulthood was real, not a simulacrum. The response of those that created this is to blame their children.

You rightly conclude they are all lying. You wrongly conclude that you can do nothing.

That these problems continue unabated, however, is something that is self-inflicted, and you revel in your victimhood, because it is comforting, and it is easier than making change. But what are we to do when it seems the gestalt of young people cannot dream of a solution, and would rather retreat into fantasies of the past, where adulthood was achievable, and now find it fashionable to define themselves by what they are not, their very identities meaningless tautologies, defined only by oppositionalism?

To dream of a better world is folly, and media has taught them that. Their parents watched Luke Skywalker see the good in Darth Vader; they watched him attempt to murder his nephew because of his potential for darkness. They are told there is no hope, that this is the future, that AI has come and it will steal their jobs and they will be even more destitute than they are currently. Technology scares them, and they retreat into Luddism instead of tackling the challenges of the future with vigor!

We are young, we are the future — we should not long for the past. No, we should long for the future and all that it entails. That means discarding the solutions of the past, solutions that have been found to be ill-fitting, to have an expiry date, or to be psychotic, and devising new ones. To leave behind a politics based on oppositionalism and pretending to be what you are not, and reinventing a fundamentally liberal material politic. To have a world where the greatest heights are intellectual and cultural, not operating larger and larger toll booths. Where rapacious greed is seen for what it is — a cancerous boil.

The future is only something to fear if there is no hope. We outnumber all those who would tell us to remain caged failures, living a simulacrum of adulthood so they may maintain their toll booth on life’s joys. If there is to be a future, this challenge must be overcome, not hidden from! There is a future that is positive, that is life-affirming, that has the milestones of adulthood achievable. We must only collectively will it into existence. This is the challenge of our generation, and it is a challenge we seem all too keen to shirk from, to hide from, to sit upon our couches and proclaim that it is all too hard! You are the problem, my friend! To give up is to die. Apathy is death.

Are you willing to overcome this and claim adulthood, no matter the cost? To reclaim joy? Are you willing to create, to overcome yourself, to establish new values? Or do you desire only cold comforts, and to die alone, all your victories hollow, meaningless, ephemeral, and paid for by subscription?