Prestige Machines

[atreestump]

In the 1930s people believed history could be controlled.

In Germany Adolf Hitler imagined a world where nations were living organisms each struggling toward a hidden destiny. Germany he thought had a soul wounded but not dead. If only someone could awaken its mythic will the people would march together into greatness.

At the same time across the Atlantic wealthy American industrialists were inventing a new kind of power. The Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations quietly funded universities professors and research institutes. They believed that ideas could be planted like seeds in the minds of young elites and that decades later these ideas would govern the world.

Two projects very different. One used spectacle myth and force. The other used networks prestige and patience. Both were built on the same dream that history has a center and someone can find the lever.

Hitler built his machines in stone and light. At Nuremberg Albert Speer designed colossal cathedrals of searchlights that carved the sky into vertical walls. The crowds stood beneath them tiny but unified as if absorbed into a higher purpose. These were not just rallies. They were acts of theatre designed to dissolve the individual into the collective and to make people feel not think.

Today the machines are different. Now the spectacle is subtle. A TED stage. A magazine cover. A blue checkmark. Curtis Yarvin a programmer in Silicon Valley believes that modern power hides in these signals. If you capture the institutions that define what is high status the universities the media the cultural gatekeepers you control the reality everyone lives inside. Yarvin calls this prestige. It decides who matters. It tells us what is true.

The cathedrals of light have been replaced by cultural factories. They work in silence producing meaning.

But something strange has happened. The Rockefeller strategy worked. Their ideas spread through universities and media until they reshaped the Western world. But they did not stop there. They mutated.

The same networks that envisioned a rational orderly liberalism also birthed the counterculture of the 1960s radical individualism neoliberal globalization and eventually the algorithmic chaos of today. Soft power works but it does not obey commands. Ideas slip the leash.

Meanwhile Yarvin believes the liberal machine has grown fat decadent and weak yet somehow still untouchable. Silicon Valley billionaires he says are rich but politically powerless. They dream of disrupting the world but when faced with the status hierarchies of elite culture they retreat. Their institutions their magazines their think tanks their universities barely exist. He imagines a new network of patronage seeding outside prestige. A parallel hierarchy that bypasses the old one. A quiet revolution.

But there is a problem. Prestige only works if everyone agrees on who has it and that consensus is breaking apart. Universities are losing authority. Legacy media brands are collapsing. Social platforms fragment reality into billions of personalized feeds.

The cathedrals of light worked because everyone saw the same light. The Rockefeller networks worked because everyone wanted the same credentials. Now no one agrees on what matters. TikTok teens live in worlds unrecognizable to their parents. Memes become political movements. Alternative realities bloom and clash online each with its own heroes its own myths its own truth.

The prestige machines are breaking and nobody knows what replaces them.

This is where another vision appears. Alain de Benoist a French philosopher writing in the 1980s rejected the dream of one universal destiny. He saw a future not of empire but of multiplicity a world where different cultures traditions and myths coexist without collapsing into one grand narrative.

It was a provocation because for centuries power has depended on singularity. One flag. One story. One destiny. But now fragments multiply. In this world no single elite can decide the meaning of history. No leader can awaken one universal will. No institution can monopolize prestige.

Instead power circulates. Myths compete. Futures diverge.

This vision is unsettling. Hitler promised clarity through unity. Yarvin promises clarity through networks. Both whisper the same thing history has direction inevitability meaning.

But the deeper truth may be stranger. There is no center anymore. Meaning is dissolving into a thousand experiments small worlds built by small groups each inventing its own myths and aesthetics each creating its own stage where its signals matter.

The future may not belong to those who seize the machine but to those who step outside it.

And yet the temptation remains. To find the lever. To believe that someone somewhere still drives the story.

But what if history has no driver.
What if it never did.

[kFoyauextlH]

Amazing! I'll edit more into this post. Oh, maybe this will be a more hidden part and then the new post afterwards will be the more exposed part! I might just make a new post then. I also checked and it appears that edits don't show up there yet.

I like going back and filling up posts and threads sometimes to make more of each post without bumping certain things too much or to place it earlier in a sequence fir when I or anyone else might ever go back and read or see it. I think for older threads I haven't touched or altered the records except for the first posts to edit titles and sometimes to preserve the older titles that are being changed by putting them in the beginning of the first post.

There have been times where I like to catch a certain time stamp, since I look at the numbers and they remind me if certain themes and ideas, and also wanting to keep certain post counts for a while so then I go and edit into posts like these for a future reading experience.

I guess I could put the main new writing as a new post and other stuff I don't mind not showing up on the other site in this post, if ever, but I'll also be more aware now about stuff in edits not showing up there yet, as I've been editing and adding a lot to posts. I'm alright with things being a bit further for searches and hidden potentially due ti the kinds of things I may be saying in these modern times. I'm interested in what I might say about this too, this whole piece was full of inspiring and fascinating ideas that really activated my imagination.

I may put more provocative things in edits, and things to attract people to the forum side into the things they are more likely to see on the main site.

Do you check the forum version too? I check both, but the main site probably less than this one since I've been gradually bumping old topics until most or all will have new writing in them. Once that is done and I've found all threads that I have the first post in and have re-purposed them to refer to some titular theme and theme set under the name of an entity, I'll possibly start making new threads also. Plus I'll likely go back, re-read, and maybe eliminate anything that sounds too provocative, problematic, or toxic, as one never knows what might ever become a problem at any point but some things may be more likely to, so I may go through and remove references to certain places and videos about things going on, putting them on the more private site instead if anywhere, and maybe that might make me feel less tense about anyone seeing that stuff and bothering me about it, however unlikely such an encounter may be, but it still makes me tense. It is a balance between wanting to vent due to being so disgusted and frustrated and demoralized and angry, and causing potential stress or paranoia about being connected in any way to things becoming increasingly scanned for and censored, like an upgrade to America's Patriot Act and other things they were supposedly up to so long ago.

This site seems to show that even though I was always similar, I never thought much about the current situation or the specific *ssh*l*s that are causing lots of problems everywhere, until they started making a bigger and bigger stink, that has now reached all sorts of people who never thought about them or the issues, even though they were being criminals before too.

I was going to bring them up and that issue here in this post in relation to what is written above since I noticed a difference in the appeals being made, like what each faction points to as having the prestige and being authoritative, even though that also seems annoying since this should be a core issue that needs no authorization from anyone to verify or validate that it is clearly and blatantly what everyone should know without doubt or question is absolutely evil and wrong, but people still say "such and such organization or experts have proclaimed that this is some negative word with meanings that mean it is very bad", and then the factions of evil people doing evil things says "Who cares, no, you're nothing, and what we are doing us not evil, and look how you can't stop us, because you aren't anything, you have no authority, power, or prestige".

So there seems to be this element running through right now in several ways, especially how people have rallied together worldwide, possibly like never before at such a scale, and that the wrongdoers compare it all to the N*z* rallies even though most people don't truly dislike them like that even, giving them passes more than they would anyone else on Earth due to successfully making them out to be extra special and different because of years of propaganda and brainwashing and cultural stuff being used from even before the victimization narratives and proof, which they are risking ruining so many years of work creating good will from people and overcoming all kinds of negative press from thousands of years of people finding them super annoying and problematic. They managed to convince modern people that everyone was always just randomly bothered for no particular reason, just xenophobic liars, and now are making a number of people look back at the Nasz people and think twice, which is not a great thing at all either of course.

The closest thing to the people coming together based on emotion have indeed been these rallies and growing sentiments in the face of atrocious evil against human beings, and at the same time the academics are being brought up as validation and verification against whatever a tiny minority of people prolonging what just about everyone else is against is doing.

The situation is mad and actually pretty much unprecedented. Though it has similarities to the much more hidden H*l*c**st, this is also not like it in a number of ways and is even far more crazy, since so many people see this, are against it, and it us being fueled purely on a tiny group, meaning the world's politicians included, just doing it anyway to a very big population that is connected to an even bigger population that also has most of the world's sympathy, and has the academics and their prestige and prestigious organizations saying that it is wrong and should stop, and it keeps getting worse and no one can intervene or make a move out of pure t*rr*r at what will then happen if they do and all the trouble a bunch of b*st*rd t*rr*r*sts will bring upon them.

This is apparently going to go on until so many people have been permanently and irreparably ruined, and this should end, unless people are complete morons, which they are being brainwashed into thinking that they and everyone else truly is, any thought that the people constantly positioned to be selected to be placed in positions of authority and power can ever be trusted or relied upon.

Conditions seem ripe for something like a major upheaval, but the people now are so downtrodden and afraid, clinging to life, that the experiment in pure evil being broadcast could easily be imposed upon just about any population in the world now, and people would just starve to death, fearing being sh*t down and being sh*t down regardless all throughout, and then even being too weak to lift a rock or swing their arm or make a fist.

The extreme things are necessary now more than ever, but it appears that such really not appearing means mankind has died, not so long after God.

[IndieAgora]

Amazing! I'll edit more into this post

Thanks. You may as well post again as I'm not sure if edits also appear on the other site.