What Got Modern Society Here

Our Westernized and American way of life is a relatively unique story in the lens of history. However, we have become very unusual beyond this.

A fair warning: this is a long essay. It is difficult to summarize everything that has made our current situation so exceptional.

For thousands of years, over 90% of humanity had the exact same lifestyle:

• A civilian peasant life with a career specialization in subsistence farming and a side job in basic homesteading.
• Parents educated their children in the family trade, with plenty of hands-on apprenticeship and quality time.
• Little to no literacy, and entire communities would have extremely limited information available.
• Domesticated animals drove most transportation technology.
• Communication technology was mostly couriers and carrier pigeons.
• Social networks were local taverns and churches, or courts and universities for the well-established.
• Except for the fabulously wealthy, they grew or made over 90% of their consumed products.

In particular, information technology has embedded a cultural layer into modern American society we have never seen before.

Employee/consumer culture

Normal life in the USA changed dramatically starting with the Second Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century. The trend was slowly developing already, but mechanical engineering improvements improved factories’ yield. Eventually, mass production was cheaper than self-sufficiency.

This new economic change yielded multiple movements:

1. Factories could rapidly create affordable products, which escalated many entrepreneurs to nobility-grade wealth.
2. It made more sense to buy cheap, uniformly manufactured products than a crude, handmade project.
3. People could leave their home to work in a factory, which would generate more money for their household.

This created a trend of people leaving the farm to work in factories. In turn, more factories made more products, giving more reason for more people to work in them.

We are now at the zenith of this trend. If society couldn’t maintain its colossal range of specializations, most people would be fully unable to survive.

Education culture

The emphasis on education grew as a trend alongside this industrialization. At one time, teaching people was broadly for specialization into a role requiring thought. However, starting in the 19th century, Europe’s governments gave public education to indoctrinate children toward a nationalist bias. This was a winning solution, since it also trained children at large in literacy and math.

Among the Progressive Movement’s other developments, they drew directly from that European philosophy on education. However, while Europe focused on making good national citizens, pioneers like John Dewey believed education empowered living the good life.

The ensuing system operated like a factory. Uneducated children were the raw inputs, and career-minded citizens were the finished product:

1. Borrow from both 19th-century factory automation principles and Europe’s holistic educational approaches.
2. Require students to perform rote tasks that are allegedly necessary for understanding but don’t contribute to any outward results.
3. Give the students formalized criteria for success based on their ability to leverage their memory toward tests.

Education is at least somewhat necessary to understand how to live well but isn’t the constraint for most people. Instead, society’s problems come directly from a lack of sufficient desire to do good. That low desire comes from, at least partly, our universally corrupt moral state.

Neglecting our moral issues is at least as old as Greek philosophy. However, the Progressive Movement is presently its most influential society-spanning trend that continues to this day.

To this day, many epidemic addictions, such social media and excessive video gaming, come directly from this value system.

Consuming + education

A new, formerly unknown institution had replaced the millennia-old home education system.

While nothing is new under the sun, consumerism combined with an education emphasis began a legitimately never-before-seen trend. We saw a middle class that was larger, wealthier, and more educated than at any time before it.

Education leads people to improve their conditions but also makes them more active in politics. But let’s hold that one and talk about another issue.

Consuming + propaganda

In the early 20th century, marketing went through a dramatic approach. Starting in 1919, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, converted his uncle’s psychoanalytic work into a business model. He designed his “public relations” firm to subliminally influence Americans through advertisements.

In business, the competition for someone to buy your product has always existed in someone’s mind. However, provoking subconscious desires is far easier than trying to influence people who make conscious, rational decisions. The battle quickly transitioned to fighting over feelings and sentiments, which foster impulsive behavior. One advantageous side effect of this approach is an addicted (and therefore steady) customer.

In war, information availability has always determined success. The side that knows everything about their enemy will always win if the other side knows nothing. However, newspapers and radio allowed anyone with resources to also strategically send massive amounts of misinformation.

This subliminal influencing was a full-scale attempt after World War II. This propaganda came through every angle, including the newly developed television. A glaring example comes through the newly invented word “cult“, which presupposes someone could reprogram a mind like a computer. As technology scaled, the information grew and traveled faster. To this day, we see endless psyops (“psychological operations”) for political reasons almost daily.

Anti-consuming + propaganda

By the 1960s, a new type of youth arose in the United States, known as the “hippy”. Their workaholic fathers failed to train their children for life, and they turned on their parents in adulthood. They rebelled against their absentee father figure by projecting “the man” onto society at large.

The political impact of this rebellion was not small. Feminism’s goals advanced to complete cultural similitude to males. In the process, they cast off their biological role as life-giver and homemaker. Most of the nation suffered under a sea of inexperienced adult children making the irrational demand for world peace.

In the mix of this antagonism, they also pushed against the corporate training toward consumerism. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a sufficient framework to redefine themselves. In response, the public relations apparatus simply appealed to their sense of individualism and independence.

While they corporately called themselves autonomous and free, life slowly conformed them to reality. Eventually, the hippies become the yuppies of the 1980s. Without realizing it, they had become more hard-working, consumerist members of American society.

Even today, unprepared adult children raise unprepared children, and everyone blames society for it.

New politics

While America was experiencing the consequences of unbridled freedom, the Soviet Union was still present. However, they continued to slowly decay under bad management and continued breaking worldwide records in government-sponsored genocide.

During this time, various policies throughout the United States politically changed the landscape of conservative and liberal:

• “Conservative” transitioned from a libertarian-esque desire for autonomy to a pro-institution advocation of the Military Industrial Complex.
• “Liberal” maintained its general pro-institution stance but gradually shifted further and further leftward. Eventually, they focused on nothing but special interest groups. Over time, their niche focus became identity politics like gay rights and giving entitlements to the poor.
• Most people, therefore, wanted more government, and the debate raged on how to associate the government with the free market.

The 1970s and 1980s Carter years versus Reaganomics showed this dispute. Everyone seemed to want government programs, but Republicans wanted government programs that subsidized the private sector. Most Americans still obsess more over what the government can do instead of seeing themselves as responsible to fix things.

Bigger industries

Unbelievable quantities of US dollars flooded the world, much of it through various government-funded arrangements. This was a continuation of the Progressive Era’s endless government system shuffle.

One of the arrangements was the ever-growing Military Industrial Complex, which Eisenhower had explicitly warned about in his farewell address.

Another came through the Social Security system’s increasing funding and scope. Extra money meant more medical technology, which created a slowly growing power structure. Better medical tech means longer lives, meaning more healthcare needs funded by the government, which created a cycle of growth. We now have the Big Medical/Pharma Complex (or, colloquially, “Big Pharma”). Big Pharma now participates in almost all Americans’ healthcare decisions.

Further, both military and general government interests directed plenty of government funding toward the sciences. This directly contributed to an even further push toward scientism and its subsequent reproducibility crisis.

The Military Industrial Complex was also a blueprint. It reproduced in other domains:

• Big Agriculture (“Big Ag”)
• Big Banks (through the FDIC, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae)
• Big Tech, but we’ll get to that

New industries

This government/private partnership also created new, unheard-of-before industries.

While the hippies were complaining about it, USA/USSR conflicts intensified through proxy battles. Media technology developments in the USA, specifically, were making wars increasingly less popular. Starting with Korea, into Vietnam, and beyond the Cold War into Iraq, Americans now have very little stomach for war.

The propaganda wars, however, shifted many other not-war-related matters into petty jockeying for national pride, from education to spacefaring.

In this noise, Americans observed many conspiracies and scandals against the voice of the propaganda:

• To improve test scores, the United States seemed to consistently lower the criteria to boost their numbers. This approach has now given high schoolers an effective fifth-grade education.
• The “war on drugs” has often enhanced police force presence but has also often increased drug use.
• The assassination of John F. Kennedy, Jr. was odd. This was shortly after he said he was going to defund the CIA.
• The original blueprints for the moon landing spacecraft have gone missing. Given the limited technology, it seems unusually difficult to get to the moon in the 2020s.

However, the development of the computer was a truly revolutionary achievement. People could do more information work with less effort in less time. While emergent order is superior to central planning, computers supercharged this distinction. The Cold War ended when the USSR collapsed and Russia gave up East Germany.

To this day, we have effectively mitigated or buried all of humanity’s issues with computer-based solutions. In particular, Big Tech still believes computers are our salvation.

Continued war

In the 1990s, the United States was the singular world power, without any equivalent antagonist. Small proxy battles and civil wars arose in Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia, and others with tiny dictators. The United States has, to this day, stayed “hands-off” while meddling on the back end.

The Military Industrial Complex has continued marching forward. The limits on accountability within the government have made the equipment absurdly overpriced:

• In an egregious display, Congressman Michael Waltz presented a $90,000 bag of bushings in a congressional hearing.
• Many times, a soldier will launch a missile worth more money than he makes in a year.
• That missile will hit a target that makes less money than the missile’s value in their lifetime.

Decaying values

All of this prosperity made the nuclear family no longer necessary for subsistence. At one time, men had to work and women had to maintain a home, but not anymore:

• The homemaker is no longer necessary with various technologies like washing machines and microwave ovens. Further, the feminist push toward career aspirations has culturally shifted the role to being inferior to having a career.
• More computer-based office work means females have many specialization options historically unavailable to them otherwise.

When the no-fault divorce emerged in the 1970s, the legal precedent demonstrated that marriages were more about convenience than commitment. This began a more acceptable trend of traumatizing children with a broken home.

The average American household has now moved away from single-family households. However, nuclear families often don’t involve a married male and female anymore. Further, extended family have developed an increasingly critical role to fill that void.

The college con

The Progressive Era’s push for education carried its legacy into the 1940s. This empowered any American veteran to get a college education almost for free. The opportunities from education left a lasting impression on subsequent generations.

By the 1970s, people praised college as the best available opportunity for any aspiring young mind. They weren’t entirely wrong, but the government freely gave student loans without much discretion. Colleges effectively had free rein to do whatever they wished, provided the students attended their school.

Over time, the glut of wealth moving into colleges developed into multiple, unrelated agendas:

1. Finance scientific studies for the purpose of gaining prestige in the scientific community through professors’ academic papers.
2. Host and promote second-tier professional sports.
3. Train young people regarding the above-stated broken homes for life itself.
4. Finance government activism for the interests of college students and alumni.
5. Its original objective: educate the youth on relevant job specializations.

Naturally, a college’s quality of education for job specializations has plummeted amidst competing interests. At the same time, the cost for a college degree has almost doubled since the 1970s. Federal loans subsidize this tuition, which follows students more closely than a mortgage.

Further, the trades had been vilified and neglected. Even now, we have a severe trade skills gap because many Americans believe college is the only sufficient career choice.

Political marketing

After the Cold War, the public relations push migrated beyond advertising and intelligence. Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign avoided dry lists of policy decisions. Instead, he won over the American public by implying his superior sexuality and paternal characteristics.

Even now, every political campaign juxtaposes hard-to-understand promises, vague hope for self-interest, and magnified fear of the opposition. This has always been present since democracy surpassed martial victory to win politically, but is now a hard science.

Go left, young man

Without critical thinking, liberal idealism asserts society is climbing towards a utopia. These utopian visions, however, don’t adequately explain the world’s evil. They tend to treat evil as more of a passing trend than a chronic presence. This philosophy is not petty, since it profoundly affects all policy decisions.

While powers-that-be may talk of utopia, they are also human and would like to run that utopia. The leadership’s political mindset from the 1990s onward into the 2010s became a type of “eventual communism”. While they conceded that capitalism works, it’s merely an intermediate stage for a communist utopia. Eventually, humanity would become communist. Almost all well-funded liberal efforts have tried to advance that Great Reset.

Right after World War II in the 1940s, the USA made trade arrangements that favored poorer nations. The idea was to give a buffer against the US to avoid it becoming as powerful as Germany. Even after the USSR collapsed, these rules have persisted until the late 2010s.

The uneven trade arrangement did help other nations who would otherwise have lagged behind technologically. China, more than any other nation, used every possible advantage to make the world rely on their products and services. Their unscrupulous efforts included blatant intellectual property theft, monopolistic practices, and severe human rights violations.

Media for everyone

In the late 1990s, the internet expanded into most homes and broke more long-standing conventions:

• The library became a household object.
• Calculating and referencing became available to poor people.
• Easy access to financing blurred the line between the social classes even further.

Prolonged peace leads to increasing leftward thinking. Specifically, people forget history, misinterpret peace as a standard behavior, and treat conflict as the exception. The internet’s ubiquity rapidly sped up this process through more open discussion, many of them being the above-mentioned college graduates.

However, this rapid information culture has persisted in giving more opportunity to education and knowledge than ever before. It also forces us into having to learn an entirely new skill set to deal with it!

Information is power

The roots of the Information Age started as early as the 1920s, but the Media Information Complex arose much later. However, the development was far more gradual than most people may imagine.

The above-stated Social Security system needed a means to track everyone, so they created a legal fiction for every American. It was, in effect, the equivalent of what we’d call a computer database, but in the 1920s.

The value of a consumer report about creditworthiness comes through decisions someone can make with it. For convenience’s sake, connecting that consumer report to that person’s Social Security number was the easiest association to make.

By the 1960s, every American could give their name, Social Security number, and birthdate to run a report. That report could determine their viability for borrowing money. These reports were a new type of reputation, built solely on processed form information.

Naturally, the internet dramatically expanded this system. By the 1990s, consumer information bureaus had standardized information-gathering techniques. They built a vast reporting system to monitor key components of Americans’ lifestyles.

Since then, it has become the dominant form of institutional identification and is the basis for most background-based discrimination. It has expanded in recent decades through the continued development of smartphones and other commonplace technologies like GPS devices. Most of these decisions are to create consumer addiction. This system harshly discriminates and alienates people through blind faith in a database entry.

Power is information

The public relations apparatus has transformed the other end of the Media Information Complex. It has now splintered into endless subdomains of niche demographics. Marketing data is now granular enough to accommodate everything imaginable.

Social media now allows institutions to endlessly categorize and appeal to whatever they want:

• Age
• Family size
• Hobbies
• Religion
• Job role
• Job satisfaction
• Favorite color
• Known associates
• Favorite snack
• Criminal background
• Favorite music
• Ethnicity

Further, the Cold War’s echoes still resonate in advancing abject fear of an unseen terror. Beyond the existential effect, their purpose has been to keep people consuming more media. More consumption increases the price they can sell to advertisers but also gives more data. It is a positive feedback loop with no clear end in sight.

This new Media Information Complex does give everyone at least some of what they want. It also tries to turn everyone into addicts and passively monitors everything we do. The United States Government permits all of it, but it’s probably not constitutional.

New antagonists

In 2016, Donald Trump became the US President. Since he was a legitimate outsider to the present world order, massive chunks of the world’s methods rapidly shifted. Donald Trump devastated China’s economic advantage in 2017 with tariffs and pushed the US government against neoliberalism. For many reasons, most of the old establishment wanted him gone.

Around the same time, 2018 saw machine learning technology emerge. It allows computers to make rules through thousands of trained repetitions of the same inputs. This so-called AI supremacy gave the technologists new hope.

In 2020, a disease called COVID-19 emerged as a pandemic across the world, starting from Wuhan, China. It might have been a biochemical weapon, but it certainly wasn’t combat-ready when released. Across the world, almost every government imitated propaganda directly from China’s proven approach. The message was simple: everyone must stay in their homes, halt all civilization, and conform to the Great Reset.

Pandemonium

In 2020, most of Western society was unfamiliar with mass manipulation. If they were, they would have recognized the propaganda and would have been more skeptical of their leaders’ intentions. Instead, over half the people consented to at least a few untested mRNA gene therapy “vaccines”.

By 2022, everything had resumed as it was in 2019, mostly unscathed but with many lessons learned. The authority that advanced the Great Reset’s talking points had lost all credibility. The public loudly ignored the aristocracy’s narrative, and they still haven’t figured out how to handle it.

AI slop

The machine learning revolution has trend repetitions of the 1990s internet:

1. Absurdly excessive spending on even more absurd promises.
2. A trend collapse from the new product not finding a sufficient market.
3. The technology becomes boring, and everyone but the nerds forgets about it.
4. A long-term revival once something else pairs nicely with it (similar to cell phones for the internet).

The damage, though, has been the low-quality regurgitation of endless, near-useless AI slop all across the internet.

Paying the bill

These economic decisions cost money. Starting in the 1990s, the US government debt started becoming unmanageable and has grown to absurd levels.

• Even with this situation, the US dollar has been the most favorable reserve currency across the world.
• Richard Nixon removed the dollar from any commodity like gold or silver. Since then, we all trust the dollar from the promise of more dollars. Backing debt with more debt simply can’t persist forever.

They may adopt a different backing, such as blockchain, but only time will tell.

Where we are now

The West in general, but especially America, has had universally better living than most royalty from 200 years ago. Even when hardship comes, living in an inner-city homeless shelter is often nicer than a mud hut.

The United States has 3 gigantic economic powerhouses that span the public and private sector:

1. The Military Industrial Complex, which has given us lots of tech and keeps America very safe. This costs a lot of money.
2. Big Medical/Pharma Complex, which keeps people alive for longer but wants people to always be partially sick. As it stands in 2026, Big Pharma is a larger economic power than manufacturing.
3. The Media Information Complex has two major branches:
   • A report of a person’s information associated with a specific niche. This can be worth $10-150.
   • The anonymized data without the name attached. This is worth $20 on an open market.

Most products in the USA are foreign-made.

The college system has failed us spectacularly. However, the internet has replaced it for nearly everything lower than a Master’s degree. The only service it provides is to virtue signal a targeted community of a candidate’s alleged ability. Cynically, it only proves the ability to take a loan out and exist inside a classroom. By contrast, the trades now pay lavishly and are in high demand.

Almost all our modern ideas are fulfilling what postmodern thinking can do.

• We have now reached the end of where postmodernism can take us: complete relativism in nihilistic hopelessness.
• In the ashes of a dead God, we can only derive meaning from selfish determination. We can’t prove anything, so it can only serve ourselves.
• We have developed a new cult in AI. This sends us back to our pagan roots by assigning arbitrary meaning to inanimate objects.

Where we’re going

This entire consumption/production system will stay stable, presuming the following.

First, the overeducated American public must keep on consuming and avoid self-producing. If they’re self-sufficient, they’re more willing to resist a violation of their rights. Dependent citizens keep the politics on whether we get stuff through American factories or imports.

Second, the US government must be able to keep funding or subsidizing Americans’ consumption. This means they must be able to pay their debts. Eventually, though, we will see a collapse: what goes up must come down.

However, consider this thought experiment for a minute:

1. Imagine Person A has a gigantic estate with many possessions in it.
2. Person A hires Person B to maintain it, and Person B grows to oversee every aspect of the estate.
3. After many years, Person A loses power simply through disconnection from their own estate.
4. If Person A fired Person B, they’d be utterly helpless.

In that sense, we can’t revisit the American greatness of the 19th century or early 20th century. We can only make something new as we respond to our present situation.

However, the answer isn’t always measurable. If we produce what we consume, we grow our meaning and self-respect while the economy shrinks.

One beauty about Americans, however, is that we really like their freedom. If the US government internally collapsed, an army of law nerds would rebuild almost the same Constitution we’re familiar with.