Zhuangzi (book)

There's a maxim that civilization climbs the hill in hobnail boots and falls off the cliff in silk slippers. Hobnail boots were the footwear of workmen and the military, i.e. masculine professions.

I think we're in the "fall off the cliff" time for western civilization, which gets increasingly effeminate, and dysfunctional with every passing decade. One example of that is happening today. There's a "named winter storm" happening right now across the US from about Iowa to Boston. I am not sure what the name is, maybe it's Fran? Anyway, the governor of Ohio declared a "state of emergency" over something that happens all the time in Ohio.

Most areas in the state have to deal with snow during the winter, so counties and towns and cities have snow removal equipment, as do households. When you know it might snow and accumulate a foot or so, it's not something to panic over here.

When I was in high school, we routinely attended class and went to extra-curricular events when conditions were much worse than today. I recall driving home one night after some activity at the high school and I was cutting tracks through 6" deep snow on the road. I realized, "Oh I better not stop and lose momentum." and just kept driving. It was no big deal. I eventually got to a plowed section and continued on to my parents.

Anyway, an interesting side effect of the chaos associated with gays and women running society is a subset of the population bails out and recreates some version of Daoist thinking. There's a book from ancient china called Zhuangzi written by a philosopher of the same name which encapsulates many of the concepts that I bumbled into, and that many others have elaborated at different places and times. In ancient Athens there were Socrates and Diogenes (who were both alive at roughly the same time). A more recent elaboration of similar concepts is in the TV series "The Prisoner".

The "building phase" of a society seems very serious, mainly because of physical difficulty. For example, when this township was being settled by white men back in the early 1800s, a family built a mill on Big Creek a few miles from my house. I ride my bike through that area all the time. During the course of building the mill, one of the young men was crushed to death. Another group of men dragged a millstone from a quarry more than 10 miles away over a rough path in the woods. All the ideas and philosophy of that time are serious and look to a future, ironically, free of such struggle.

The "collapsing phase" comes about because life is too easy, and basically the equivalent of an HR department or sociology class tries to run things for a while. At the same time, the former value and reliability based economy devolves into a bunch of scams. Only a sucker will do hard work because the whole system is loaded up with parasites. All the former carriers of meaning and value are replaced with trash and scams, like the US dollar. The scam of the gameified reality becomes all too apparent and some group of men realize they're in "the matrix" or "Plato's cave".

They realize the ultimate trickster is in their own inner world. The model of external reality presented by the brain to the "I" is false. Various conclusions about the self are faulty. Absurdism and jokes are the only valid philosophies.