Memoir, from just outside the box

The Borg, Kendrick Lamar and Arthur Schopenhauer

The Borg are an alien group that appear as recurring antagonists in the Star Trek fictional universe. The Borg are cybernetic organisms (cyborgs) linked in a hive mind called "The Collective." The Borg co-opt the technology and knowledge of other alien species to “The Collective” through the process of "assimilation," transforming individual beings into "drones" by forcibly injecting nanoprobes into their bodies and surgically augmenting them with cybernetic components.

At Isaac Simpson's Substack site, The Carousel, he defines his idea of the Borg as "the globalist regime that was once behind woke." I get the impression that his earthly version of the Borg's Collective is amoral Big Money which senses that the woke Left is burned out and that the Right is now the ascendant market.

Isaac notes that this year's crop of Super Bowl ads were all designed to... "not piss anyone off." He says that the Borg has "shed the skin suit of the Left and is now learning to wear the skin suit of the Right."

At the Super Bowl, the outburst from the woke Left was Kendrick Lamar's halftime show, an overt dig on White Power.

In contrast, in the ads, Isaac noted "sentimental Americanism creeping in." He predicts that "this will be the tone for the next ten years of American culture, as the Borg learns to produce effective right-coded sentimentality via a new set of signals."

The problem is that "this American sentimentality is hollow. As the woke Borg rotted, so did its ability to create art. But, it's not enough just to clean up the woke detritus and replace it with lame sentimentality. There has to be fertile ground to make great art. Democratized Creativity destroys that fertile ground. The sensitivity-coach environment results in a hideous product."

"Woke is receding, which is revealing a destroyed cultural ecosystem underneath."

"Back in the day, the people who loved Hollywood loved it because it was completely fucking insane, and that insanity led to the creation of amazingly transcendent works. Today, the commitment to transcendence has been corroded by inclusivity, a loss of the transcendental flow, the result being shallow fluff and trigger-warning bullshit."

"When you don't allow creators with backbone into the system, they go rogue. The bureaucrats' inability to accommodate the rebels condemns the system’s product to artlessness."

Kendrick Lamar Duckworth (born June 17, 1987) is an American rapper. Regarded as one of the most influential hip-hop artists of his generation, and one of the greatest rappers of all time, he was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

During the Super Bowl halftime show, I was among the millions of white people who didn't understand a word of Kendrick Lamar's rap... but... I felt the vibe... Black Power. I had to wait until the next morning for someone savvy to explain to me what I had witnessed. That person was columnist Karen Attiah of The Washington Post.

“Kendrick Lamar's message at the Super Bowl was a warning and a threat."

"With an unmistakably white supremacist administration at the helm, this is the right time for that warning."

"Black dancers were clad in red, white and blue, wearing various versions of Black-coded dress... hoodies, durags, grills. Uncle Sam chided Lamar... too Black, too ghetto, tone it down."

"Samuel L. Jackson's Uncle Sam was trying to dictate the boundaries for Blackness in white spaces."

"The raised fists of the dancers were reminiscent of the 1968 Olympics, when Black athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists in a Black Power salute."

In The New York Times on Valentine’s Day, poet Tiana Clark offered her take.

“It was a layered spectacle of cultural and political allusions encoded in and percolating through propulsive rap, thirteen minutes of profound audacious art, multifaceted symbolism and brilliant complexities, a diss track to America. With his indictment of White Power delivered as a rallying anthem, Kendrick Lamar’s transgressive joy powered the antidote to political burnout and apathy.”

Trump exited his sky box before he got the message.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was among the first philosophers in the Western tradition to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy, such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism. Though his work failed to garner substantial attention during his lifetime, he had a posthumous impact across various disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and science. His writing on aesthetics, morality and psychology has influenced many thinkers and artists.

On YouTube, I viewed what I call the 11-minute Arthur Schopenhauer Breakdown. One hour later, having hit PAUSE twenty times, I had written three pages of notes, "unsettling truths about human nature."

"Life is not fair."

"Power is not moral."

"Human nature is not rational, it is biological."

"Those who rise to the top are rarely the best among us."

"The world is not governed by intelligence or justice, but by cunning, social influence and brute force."

"The people who rise to power are the ones who are less burdened by conscience."

"The will-to-power wears masks. It disguises power as virtue, coercion as cooperation, oppression as necessity."

"The will-to-power hides behind ideology."

"The powerful see themselves as inevitable."

"The strong win, not because they are better, but because they are willing to do what the weak will not."

"Schopenhauer did not advocate for surrender. He asked us to see the world for what it is, not for what it should be."

"The world operates not on fairness but on will, strength and deception."

"Power is taken by those who understand it… people who are strategic, fearless and visionary."

"It's not just that bad people rise to power. Society helps them do it, foregoing goodness for strength."

"Caesar convinced the masses that he was their savior. Napoleon used charisma, propaganda and fear."

"People do not crave fairness, they crave certainty. They crave a leader who is decisive, powerful, dominant... even corrupt."

"A manipulator who understands human nature, and who plays on fear, desire and ambition, will always control the masses."

"The masses mistake domination for greatness."

"The masses reward those who play by a different set of rules."

"Power has never been about morality. It has always been about deception."

"The moment you stop believing that justice will fix this world, that is the moment you will finally begin to see the truth."

"Should we abandon morality and become ruthless ourselves?"

"Wisdom lies in seeing through the game."

"The only escape from this brutal game is to detach from it. Stop chasing illusions. Stop expecting fairness from the world."

"Live with clarity rather than delusion."

"Schopenhauer did not teach power, he taught freedom, freedom from illusions, freedom from expectations, freedom from lies."

"Once you see through the game, you can never be manipulated again."

"Those who cannot be ruled are those who are genuinely free."