How the establishment weaponizes anxiety and addiction

One thing you learn from beating a serious alcohol and drug problem is Responsibility — something that is largely absent from both personal and societal discourses in 2022. Indeed the term ‘personal responsibility’ is now seized upon by the far left ideologs who control our institutions as a ‘white supremacist dog whistle’ or some such nonsense. Yet, with Jordan Peterson, I am of the unshakable belief that personal responsibility, and its natural by-product purpose, are the bedrock of civilisation and the answer to our existential crisis.

For many years, we as individuals and societies in the West have been outsourcing our personal responsibility to governments and corporations. Instead of taking control of our weight, we look to body positivity messages spun up by marketing agencies on behalf of the sugar industry; instead of sorting out our mental health, we normalise depression and anxiety through the trendy sloganeering of the burgeoning Wellbeing industry; and rather than building strong communities based on family, loyalty, and decency, we signal our virtue through attaching the insignia of the current thing to our Twitter profiles.

We have become a feckless people. Much like the alcoholic or drug addict, our society has abdicated its responsibility to itself in favour of an insulated, dopamine-washed cocoon, where victimhood is not only an excuse, but a romantic ideal also.

I speak from experience when I say that the mind of the addict very much resembles the collective consciousness of our current culture.

Now, full disclosure: I still drink and use drugs on occasion, but I do have it under control these days. A few years ago I reached a point where I realised I either had to manage my usage or bite the bullet and quit everything for good. So I did what I had been telling myself I was going to do for about decade and got some help. I set some goals and held myself ruthlessly accountable.

I took responsibility for myself.

And while I do not consider myself ‘cured’ of my addictions; while I still allow myself an unbridled long weekend here and there; while I must fight to bring myself back to sobriety at the end of it; and indeed, while the day may yet come when I have a serious, unplanned relapse and must once again face the possibility of permanent abstinence — I have grown, and now have a certain perspective.

I have the perspective to be able to compare my previous self with the new and improved version. And through this analysis I have gleaned startling insights and drawn numerous parallels between the mind state of the addict and the zombified drone world of the 2020s.

As an addict I can say with certainty that the shirking of responsibility, whether by an individual, or a society is born of anxiety. And that avoidance then finds its fulfillment in consumption of one sort or another. This consumption triggers the pleasure centre in our brain, and the resulting dopamine gets us high and makes it easier to forget about our dodged responsibilities.

When the dopamine wears off, we are then faced with an uncomfortable choice: Address the now overdue responsibility… or get high again.

It’s like holding onto a rising balloon. The higher you get, the further the fall back to ground level, where your responsibility to yourself, your family and your community awaits. And the harder you are going to hit when you get there.

Our society in the West has been holding onto that balloon for so long now that letting go is not a viable option anymore. We have risen so high that the geography below is no longer recognisable. We have lost sight of who we were so much so that most people now could not go back to that state of being even if they wanted to — the addiction is too advanced.

Pleasure seeking is a natural instinct. But compulsive and obsessive pleasure seeking is the behaviour of an addict, and indicative of a mental and spiritual malaise — a serious imbalance. In primitive homeostasis, pleasure was the reward we received for having achieved something of value. We completed a task and our brain released a small amount of dopamine, and this positive reinforcement then compelled similar future action.

In our primitive brain, anxiety is what happens when we sit still for too long. We are wired for action — we know that any given series of decisions and movements will lead to a certain practical outcome that is either desirable or undesirable. Naturally we are driven to seek desirable outcomes and so we are geared toward those actions which will deliver these.

Taking no action therefore leads to existential angst. We know that our immobility is setting us up for undesirable outcomes, whether it be getting eaten by a sabretooth tiger, or getting fired from one’s job. More is lost through inaction than through wrong action, or as Hamlet famously pondered, “To be, or not to be?”

A person of action is of little use to someone seeking to exploit or control for their own gain. The man or woman of action understands their responsibility to themselves to take what steps are necessary to achieve their desired outcomes and little will stand in the way of such a person, not least some huckster with a bridge to sell them.

A person of inaction however is easily manipulated, for, like the craving of the alcohol or drug addict, the existential angst caused by sitting still for too long requires a distraction — something to allay the anxiety. The natural way to do this is to remove the object of the worry (take action) to earn the feel-good reward of a sense of achievement (the pleasurable release of dopamine).

But there is a short cut to this feeling also. Pick your poison… Whatever gets you high. Here are just a few common distractions:

• Alcohol
• Cocaine
• Opiates
• Meth
• Cigarettes
• Marijuana
• Sugar
• Fatty food
• Porn
• Sex
• Gambling
• Shopping
• Social media
• TV
• Pop music
• Gossip

A person of inaction, caught in the throes of her primitive fight or flight urge to move, can short-circuit this biological imperative, and go straight to the reward. Then the pleasurable distraction becomes habitual, and the cycle perpetuates itself, becoming an addiction.

It is advantageous to someone who is seeking power, or the expansion and consolidation of power, to keep those he is seeking to control addicted to one or more of these various shortcuts. Thus, it follows that it is useful to this person or group if there exists in society a widespread existential angst, for those in such a state are more prone to pleasure seeking behaviour and, as such, more susceptible to addiction, and ultimately much easier to control.

This is the relationship between anxiety and addiction at a macro societal level. Power structures need and desire populations filled with fear and anxiety in order to control them through the consumption of goods, services, and media that fire their brains’ pleasure centres, thus creating a dependence cycle: Lack of personal responsibility leads to inaction, leads to anxiety, leads to consumption, leads to pleasure, leads to a further lack of personal responsibility, and so on.

This cycle, when replicated in enough individuals, becomes systemic and is then reflected in the society at large and thus an entire people can lose touch with their identity as a community or nation, and become nothing more than cogs in an ever-expanding machine.

But there is one more piece to this puzzle. How is the void created? Constant fear porn in the media is an effective means of keeping people hypnotised, but as we’ve discussed, it is of little consequence to the person of action, someone with a honed sense of personal responsibility and a clear purpose in life. So how is a person stripped of their sense of responsibility? Because for this to happen the previously existing cycle, the virtuous one, which got us to where we are in the 21st Century, must have been disrupted. A link must have snapped.

Such a fracture requires an invasive force from without. This is where propaganda comes in.

Propaganda can best be understood as storytelling, for this is fundamentally what it is. Just as the virtue of personal responsibly, as espoused by any successful culture, is propagated through storytelling, so too is this link in the chain of personal and society growth broken. It is the stories that we hear every day, from a young age, that instil responsibility. These stories we are told by parents, teachers, friends, family, advertising, news media, influencers, and leaders — they determine whether we become people of action or inaction.

The shattering of the link in the chain that binds personal responsibility to action and thus staves off the desire for vacuous pleasure seeking is not difficult and can be achieved over the course of a generation or two simply by telling the requisite stories. It is, in fact the same process that KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov referred to as ‘active measures’, or ideological subversion.

How have we been subverted? Fundamentally, our attitude as a society has shifted from one of responsibility to victimhood. The phrase “It’s not your fault” might be a fitting slogan for the zeitgeist in 2022. Indeed, through the Marxist dialectic of oppressor vs oppressed, we are now taught that nothing that happens to us is our fault but rather the result of malicious action by a more privileged actor.

The subsequent message is that it’s okay to feel horrible and hopeless, and indeed, that it’s okay to medicate our way back to happiness, by whatever means best suits our proclivities. In short, the way we are feeling is not our responsibility, and thus, inaction is okay because to suggest otherwise would amount to ‘victim blaming’.

This message is everywhere now, both subtle and overt. It is seen throughout the institutions of education — from grade school participation certificates to college safe spaces. It is reflected in popular culture, as an entire nation turned a blind eye to the wanton destruction and murder of the BLM riots in 2020. It can be heard in the language of our so-called leaders when the spout phrases like ‘stay safe’, ostensibly a call to personal responsibility, but in reality a sugar coated authoritarian blue pill whose information pamphlet will inform you that in fact no critical thought is necessary, and simple adherence to government directives will protect you from all ills — that is, You’re better off outsourcing your personal responsibility to us (the experts). Let us think for you, it’s much easier.

With Elon Musk’s recent acquisition of Twitter, perhaps the most topical example of this messaging is the rise of censorship in the last six years. At bottom, what Big Tech censorship tells us is that weak and frightened people are not responsible for their own feelings, but rather, society as whole must change in order to keep them happy.

We are a decade into the Great Culture War now and the damage is beginning to show. Whether the message is:

‘It’s okay Timmy, you get a prize for eighth place too’, or

‘Burning down a business in your neighbourhood is okay because you’re angry’, or

‘There is a nasty virus going around which is primarily killing the elderly and the overweight, so we’re going to shut down the entire world for two years to keep everyone safe’

– the core message is the same: Personal responsibility is a meaningless concept.

And thus, this crucial link in the chain of our moral framework is broken, and a people of action become stalled, disorientated, lethargic, and anxious.

And then, the system which instilled the messaging and brought about the anxiety in the first-place steps in to fix the problem. And it offers us fast food, pharmaceuticals, sex, drugs and rock n roll, entertainment on demand, social media and, perhaps most significantly — simple answers. It tells us what to think, for this too — the avoidance of mental exertion thorough the consumption of pre-scripted narratives — is a highly addictive pursuit.

And it is a highly profitable model, as indeed are all business models built upon addiction. I am speaking from experience — just ask my old drug dealer.