Pragmatism versus Death Cults

One of the movie and fiction tropes I absorbed as a kid is "the system" is a corrupt pile of garbage and it only persists because of the hypnotized masses. Conan the Barbarian (1982) is basically all about that. The masses are either literally enslaved through violence, or enslaved to a cult run by the magician/warlord Thulsa Doom who's ultimately defeated by Conan's ascent in consciousness. The Matrix is another movie with similar themes. There were numerous TV shows with that same set of themes all through the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, like "24", or even MacGuyver, or a ridiculous show like "The A-Team".

I think that trope failed to hold up over time for me and some of my high school friends. It is true the system is a corrupt pile of garbage. It's worse now than ever and in fact has been on consistent downhill trajectory my entire adult life. However, the "model" implied in those TV shows and movies is "the individual" can triumph over the system in a physical way, that is the heroes can actually physically defeat the thing, like in the movie They Live the hero character (who has no name) actually defeats the alien invaders by blowing up their mind control device. The general public snaps out of their slumber and presumably ousts the aliens from their midst. In "The Matrix" Neo attains super human powers through a rise in consciousness and training. Conan destroys Thulsa Doom and disbands his lotus eater death cult.

The trope fails because "the system" is really synonymous with the vast ocean of people out there in the world. One of the Roman emperors Caligula famously "declared war on the sea". The "hero" trope is a little like that. I think the Neo character is a great example of that sort of madness; Neo's line "there is no spoon" is a good summary of that insanity. Nope, it's all spoons. Or in the Conan world, you chop the head off one Thulsa Doom there's dozens popping up in his stead on a daily basis, and endless fodder for cults.

Let's take a modern day example and try to figure out who's the Thulsa Doom. In recent years some oligarch NGO and probably some college professors somehow convinced the public that 20 somethings can have different "pronouns" and to use their "wrong pronouns" is an act of violence that in some states is "illegal" in certain settings. In 1990s TV shows trannies were a punchline and comedic trope because they are ridiculous and suffer from a classic, age old problem: nature doesn't care about you, but you think you're "important" and whine and cry like a baby about your plight as if that bitching will "change" factual reality--like having testicles and a penis. Somehow, their insanity became everyone else's problem. Who's the Thulsa Doom to decapitate and "defeat" that cult of 1,000,000 Karens?

A historical "solution" to societal depravity is for groups of skilled people to bail on the delusional masses as they spiral down and down to destruction. When the masses go crazy, people start to shuffle around. For example, California net migration has been over 100,000+ people per year since 2018 due to high costs and an insane ideology heavy, corrupt government and a generalized departure from reality. There's a similar story in Illinois and New York for the same reasons. The Reformation period in Europe also drove waves of migration as the masses descended into violence and madness about crackers and wine and religious cults took over entire cities and led to starvation and mass violence.

I think one of the sorting mechanisms that will come into play in the US will be pragmatism and skill versus ideological retards and fools. What's the point, for example, of skilled people propping up corrupt, incompetent corporate/financial America? The "skilled middle" will pop out of the incompetent upper and lower class and power structure.