Is You Is or Is You Arendt?

 


I'm a Curtista who is frankly surprised by the failure of the carrot. A pivot from soma to surveillance, from pleasure-drenched passivity to fear-forged conformity. It’s as if the velvet veil of indulgent distraction (Huxley) is being torn away to reveal the iron scaffolding of coercive oversight (Orwell). The crowd no longer lulled by abundance and amusement, but corralled by algorithmic scrutiny, ideological purges, and the ritualized performance of loyalty.

๐Ÿงช Huxleyan Mob Control — The Age of Soft Captivity

Distraction as Dominion: Entertainment, consumerism, and dopamine loops pacify dissent.

Pleasure as Pacifier: The body is indulged, the mind numbed—no need for force when desire is engineered.

Information Glut: Truth drowned in trivia; the archive becomes a carnival.

Consent via Comfort: The masses willingly submit, not out of fear, but out of saturation.

๐Ÿ•ต️ Orwellian Mob Control — The Age of Hard Surveillance

Fear as Framework: Control through punishment, visibility, and ideological purity.

Language as Leash: Newspeak, cancelation, and the narrowing of expressive possibility.

Memory as Malice: History rewritten, lineage erased, rupture ritualized.

Obedience via Oath: Public displays of allegiance replace private thought.

It marks the end of the Festival of Forgetting and the rise of the Watchtower Rite. Where once the eye was closed in dream, now it opens in judgment. The calendar could inscribe this as a polarity: The Season of Soma giving way to The Season of Surveillance.

Not seamlessly. I can see it where the maddened Arendtian mob got riled up by talk radio and Fox.

๐Ÿ”ฅ Catalysts of Petty Bourgeois Madness (per Arendt)

Economic Dislocation: Their traditional livelihoods and social status eroded, leaving them embittered and insecure.

Loss of Class Identity: As social classes disintegrated, the petty bourgeoisie found themselves increasingly alienated from middle-class values they saw as hollow.

Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories: In their search for scapegoats, they latched onto anti-Semitic narratives. Ironically, this occurred even as Jews were losing influence in state affairs, revealing the irrationality and symbolic displacement at play. That was then. This is now. With the Red Scare gone, Aristocratic Liberals are the main targets along with their woke culture and identity soma.

Disdain for Bourgeois Hypocrisy: They rejected the liberal values of the middle class, which they viewed as hypocritical and spiritually bankrupt. This moral disgust fed into a broader rejection of democratic norms.

Mob Mentality and Intellectual Alienation: Arendt describes a “mob” of disaffected intellectuals and middle-class members who shared a contempt for prevailing values and were seduced by simplistic, totalizing ideologies.

Collapse of Civic Anchors: The erosion of the nation-state and legal protections left individuals unmoored, making them susceptible to movements that promised belonging, purpose, and revenge.

Oversimplification: They were left out of the Festival.

Ultima Ratio Imperii: The final argument of empire—force, surveillance, and the ritual of exclusion. The Festival becomes a coronation of coercion.

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