Stolen Glory

They have stolen our glory. I've heard many people comment about how recent generations, typically meaning my generation and the ones that have come after my generation, are less motivated, less mature, somehow failing to live up to their potential like other previous generations (generally the generations of those making the snarky comments). This didn't make sense to me. Our biology hasn't changed in a hundred years, not enough to make a difference.

And therefore if there is a change, then it comes from the environment that we were raised in, culturally and physically and socially etc. In which case, if there is a problem with my generation and the successive generations after me, then it has been foisted upon us by the generations that raised us.

Now this is obviously a facile and shallow argument, and would be akin to arguing original sin. Every generation could blame the previous one all the way back to some lobe finned fish in our distant past.

But there is something interesting here. In the case of my generation and the generations born after me, somebody is actively sabotaging us. In the last century people have figured out how humans tick far better than ever in their history. Following World War Two: The Milgram Experiment showed how to motivate people to do morally reprehensible things they wouldn't normally do. Skinner and his box deconstructed how to training and motivate and shape the behavior of everything from pigeons to people. Marketers figured out how to convince us to buy things we didn't need. And video games took all of this and transformed itself into a hermetically sealed virtual world that would satisfy all of our needs. In the eight years since the Matrix depicted a virtual prison for humanity, huge swathes of humans have willingly chosen precisely those sorts of prisons. And within those prisons, designed by marketers and B.F. Skinner and Stanley Migram's disciples, humanity has diverted huge amounts of resources to virtual efforts and achievements and trials and triumphs that would previously have manifested in the real world.

They have stolen our glory.

https://thisisnotadvertising.wordpress.com/tag/museum-of-humanity/

So we must steal their tricks.

We must steal the sense of mission and the sense of epic scale. We must steal the sense of being part of something bigger than ourselves. We must steal the sense of contribution and show people how they are contributing to the end of the Ten Thousand years of Darkness.