This video features a solo analysis by an unnamed cultural commentator examining modernity's underlying mythologies through the lens of 19th century French thinker Gustav Le Bon and other historical philosophers.

The speaker argues that modern society operates under two dominant fantasies: science fiction (representing technological advancement) and socialism (representing state provision from cradle to grave), both disconnected from human nature and history.

Drawing on sources including Joseph Campbell's The Masks of the Gods, Mircea Eliade's work on mythology, John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, and Oswald Spengler's definition of socialism, the analysis traces how these mythologies emerged and control contemporary life.

The discussion covers the evolution of Western society from the Industrial Revolution through World War II's near-utopia to today's dystopian reality, arguing that our descendants will culturally resemble our ancestors more than us due to modernity's anthropological abnormality.

Mythology as the Driver of Human History

"History is made by dreams and fantasies, not by fact or logic" - Gustav Le Bon, with examples including Christian kingdom of heaven, Marxist utopia, Platonic forms, and Viking Valhalla as ideals that animated entire societies

John Haidt's research shows 90% of the population rationalizes their emotional state; reason is a tool for achieving emotional ends, not determining morality. "Whether you want peace, glory, love, equality, or progress stems from your own human animal desires and your era of history or culture"

Modernity has made people more irrational, not less, as enormous wealth allowed engagement in insane delusions. "As a rule, if you don't see a mythology or illusion in a certain society, that means you're ensnared by its web"

Modernity is such an anthropological outlier that descendants centuries from now will likely share more culturally with ancestors centuries past than with us today

The Masks of the Gods and Religious Evolution

Joseph Campbell's The Masks of the Gods four-part series shows how mythology evolved, with each era creating masks of underlying archetypal principles fitting their social structure

Roman Empire's religious structure treated local gods as representations of broader archetypal gods shared globally: Mercury equated to Greek Hermes, Norse Odin, Celtic Lug, and Egyptian Thoth

Humans have a natural need for religion; societies without it collapse into tyranny or degeneracy. "Humans are looking for ideas, and ideas are looking for human bodies" in an almost sexual division between ideal and material

Ideas exist in Darwinistic competition and will kill human bodies to grow, explaining why ideological and religious wars are common. Tolerance is rare because centralized ideas can't tolerate conflicting ones without disrupting society's functioning

Science's Shadow: Aesthetic vs. Method

Science brought technological wizardry that changed the world positively, with population increasing by factor of 10, global unification, and mid-to-late 20th century states becoming "practically utopias with no real poverty disease war freedom and universal suffrage"

Science's shadow allowed modernity to believe insane things by confusing the aesthetic of reason with actual scientific testing method. "If you're not using the testing method or the iron law, it's just not science"

Communists structure ideology so there's no way to disprove it (opposite of science) while claiming to be totally scientific as an aesthetic

Current ruling ideologies believe humans can remake reality by changing definitions, citing post-modern Marxist, French liberal, and fascist philosophy. Thomas Sowell's blank slate view holds humans are totally malleable

Academia never questions foundational assumptions including: equality, blank slate, humans don't need culture or religion, everyone is the same, only economic factors drive the world, there is no ideal or divine, people are motivated predominantly by sex, and history has no lessons

Dream Time and the Halls of Time

Anonymous Gen Z Japanese singer Ado makes music about hating the managerial regime, Gen Z getting screwed over, depersonalization of modernity, and mysticism, introducing concept of "dream time" as dimension where people imagine things

The "halls of time" are imaginary symbolic places where ideas exist before manifesting in material reality. Marxism, Christianity, and science existed in halls of time before humans manifested them

Modernity's structure means we struggle to think creatively; technological and cultural innovation has collapsed precipitously in recent centuries. "We've cut off all access to dream time or the halls of time"

Functional religions create frameworks allowing imagination beyond those religions. Dante, founders of modern science, and liberalism all pulled from Christian framework. "If our civilization is to survive, we will need to reconnect to the imaginative realm"

Living in a Science Fiction Dystopia

We already live in science fiction reality where young people's lives are determined by internet, a technology that existed in sci-fi novels for decades before becoming real. "Science fiction made AI"

Current dystopia combines elements of both Brave New World and 1984: left-wing government throttle on population, double think, thought crimes, perma wars, telescreens, bread and circuses, watered down culture, mood enhancing drugs, suppression of spirituality, and normalized free love and drugs

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner (written in 1960s, set in 2011) predicted: iPods, video calls, gay marriage, genetic engineering, European Union, Soviet Union fall, China as America's competitor, American poverty slide, electric vehicles, legal weed, internet with rapid delivery, real estate price increases, racial tensions, black president, school shootings, and overpopulated world of 8 billion

Star Trek influenced technological development more than most political philosophies of its era, inspiring communicators, tablet computers, voice activated computers, video conferencing, advanced diagnostics, and universal translators

"We say we live in sci-fi since that means we subconsciously think the timeline stopped in the mid-20th century" because boomers dominate society and our frame of reference is stuck between World War II and 1980s

The Death of Utopian Science Fiction

Utopian science fiction has been practically dead as a genre for decades. Since Soylent Green in early 1970s, there are few happy sci-fi stories, contrasting with 1950s-60s optimism of Star Trek and The Jetsons

Starting in early 1970s, quality of life for average American declined precipitously across economic, social, sexual, health, and meaning metrics. "People looked into the future and saw bad things"

As dystopian sci-fi became more popular, society turned into dystopian science fiction story through both causation and correlation. Death of religion, relationships, ethnic identities, and deep values meant no dream time strong enough to offset end of post-WWII prosperity

"The only way that this science fiction reality will become utopian is if we can rise to the occasion." Mid-to-late 20th century was already close to utopia, proving it's achievable

Confusing Science Aesthetic with Scientific Method

Baby boomers thought they were making Star Trek society with modernist architecture's ugly dirty block buildings because they looked "modern and science fiction." They confused aesthetic of the machine with actual science

Managerial class believes ridiculous things that would never pass honest scientific test, but uses certain language and wording to come across as rational "almost like a magical ritual"

Modern bureaucracy functions like ancient Babylonian or Egyptian priests performing rituals to bless business projects - it doesn't help but gives leftist priest class's blessing

Era when actual science had biggest effect on Western civilization was around World War I. Today's beliefs directly oppose scientific evidence: men and women are the same, biological race doesn't exist, reality is purely material, central planning is best economic system - all already disproven

People confuse science (testing method) with biases of neurological left hemisphere from Ian McGilchrist's The master and his emissary. Left hemisphere deals with machines and mechanical processes, preferring control, simplicity, and dead aesthetics

Science Fiction Phases of Western Development

Society took on science fiction hallmarks in 19th century with Industrial Revolution. Last 200 years can be written as science fiction novel with distinct phases

Early 19th century: high-tech dystopia with elites ruling overpopulated countries, miserable poverty, enormous mega cities, people chained to demonic machines

Late 19th century: more utopian, wealthiest society in history with enormous technological growth, cultural progress, freedom expansion, end of slavery, Western colonial dominance, enormous social trust

World Wars era: horrors combining continental-scale war with evil futuristic ideologies and horrifying death machines

Post-WWII: near utopian conditions across Western world

Current era: dystopia of managerial screen-addicted mouse utopia

Someone from every pre-industrial society would think current era is "satanically possessed, utterly evil, and in a process of total collapse"

Someone from mid-20th century brought to West today would be horrified by how ill and weak people are, their misery, poor dress, loneliness, obesity, and complete distrust of others. They'd be shocked society hasn't already snapped at the insanity

Mid-20th century people would be impressed by digital technology but disappointed by lack of progress in other fields. 1950s assumed space travel, moon colonies, transmutation of matter, teleporting by 2011

Technological Progress Collapse and Regulation

Almost all metrics of technological advance decreased since 19th century with peak around 1870, including patents, breakthroughs to new scientific fields, economic growth, and positive change for average person's life

Digital revolution occurred because it was so new the government never thought to regulate it. Government regulations and rise of mass society are blamed most for delays in technological progress

Downstream effect of Industrial Revolution: all institutions (school, academia, media, culture) promote conformity or envy which destroys innovation

Mid-20th century could be utopia because it combined wealth and institutions of science fiction society with remnants of social institutions from historic society using religion, nation, family, and honor to make humans as good as possible

Socialism as Modernity's Second Mythology

Gustav Le Bon wrote in 19th century that two core trends of modern world were rise of incredible technology powered by science and rise of socialism stemming from universal suffrage - "incredibly prescient" as same is true over century later

Spenglerian definition of socialism: the idea that state should provide for lives of subjects from cradle to grave. Emerged as rejection of West's core values of heroism and individual responsibility alongside Christianity

Oswald Spengler, Le Bon, and practically every writer in science of history saw socialism's rise as harbinger of West's civilizational decline

Modern democratic socialists, fascists, and Marxists all stem from same left-wing social clubs in 19th century Europe. Fire in the Minds of Men by Billington is best book on the topic

Socialism fulfills all three of Durkheim's definitions for religion: rituals, community, and metaphysics. Main three tenets are blank slate, equality, and progress will always happen

Socialism's Rise Through War and Urbanization

Marx correctly predicted next age would belong to the worker (or those falsely claiming to be their representatives) but failed to predict it would be bloodiest event in history, killing 150 million people - "easily more so than every other ideology and religion combined in history"

Socialism emerged 200 years ago partly due to Industrial Revolution and urbanization collecting dissatisfied working classes in large groups, as Marx correctly assessed

Second variable: development of enormous total war militaries democratized violence. Gun technology meant people were genuinely equal in ability to kill, "which is the true foundation of power"

"The left developed since it's good at war" - Bology. French Revolution and World Wars dragged Western world radically left since governments needing all men to fight needed ideologies pandering to common man

Socialism exists to pander to what largest amount of people want to believe, not reality. This was natural tyrannical endpoint of democracy that Aristotle, Polybius, and founding fathers feared: "A majority of wolves voting to eat a superior minority"

The Socialist False Reality and Its Collapse

Socialism created entirely false worldview which, through dominating academia (new priest class) and media, painted mirror version of reality warped in their favor. Since French Revolution was so long ago, everyone forgot normal baseline for human societies

Reality of the world is closest to what Bible, Plato, and Aristotle believed - the Western canon that created most successful civilization in history. Founding fathers had objective understanding of human condition

Almost entire world has been conquered by one variety of socialism: Marxism, social democracy, wokeness, or third world socialism. 20th century was age of socialism, but 21st will see its death

Socialism provides none of the spiritual tools necessary to deal with collapsing birth rate, loneliness, civilizational decline, meaning crisis, and other human problems

All macrosocial incentives that caused socialism's rise (enormous conscripted militaries, factory work, need for bureaucrats to coordinate) are dead now due to technological advancement

Ancient Greco-Roman thinkers and founding fathers feared socialism because it existed in ancient world (Greece, Rome, China, Babylon). In each case, socialism arose during wealth and stability, then degenerated and destroyed society before religion gained power again

Modernity's Mythologies: Disconnected and Dehumanized

Both mythologies have no attachment to reality: science fiction is literally fiction, socialism doesn't fact check anything but has enough internal consistency to pretend to be rational

Neither has connection to history or human nature, resulting in profound dehumanization. Both push highly sterile dead worldviews with no theory of mind about human condition

Attempt to connect these ideologies: socialist elites using new technologies to enslave public in sci-fi dystopian way, combining worst elements of both - relentless slavery to state with sci-fi dystopia

Science fiction is valid worldview for society today as representation of world we live in, allowing abstract and creative thinking. However, socialism must be replaced with ideology more rooted in past and reality

"If we're going to avoid a future of the boot of tyranny crushing the human face forever, we're really going to have to man up now." This requires living like ancestors thousand years ago who thought heroism was ultimate aim of man - Spartans, knights, and founding fathers