This post comes across as an attempt to avoid black-pilling, but instead just kind of re-enforces black-pilling. It's kind of like when someone in the Red Pill community says, "If you're a 4/10, just accept that no woman will ever want to be with you, and live vicariously through other experiences, no longer accepting that family or children will ever be part of your life." That... that isn't helpful at all. It is also fundamentally subversive and degenerational.

Democracy is not a meme (and certainly isn't inherently imperial). However, without Republicanism and Federalism, it effectively just devolves into Fascism, which is why the US is founded by people who saw it as useful, but not the pinnacle of all values. Voting does not equal Democracy. Voting is a useful tool in dealing with power infighting without leading to open violence and Melian Dialogues.

Yes, people actually do have say in how things work, even in broken systems. This is why we kept saying "Covid ends when you say it does", and that was true every time the people showed enough resistance to the entrenched order, such that Civil Disobedience became an acceptable reaction. This is always fundamentally going to happen because power is illusory. You can't materially ever be forced to do anything, it's just people fucking with your incentives and time preferences in order to convince you to make different decisions.

This is just a small time period that we're living through, which is part of a much longer period of perpetual decline and progressive degeneration of everything around us and within us.

Yeah, this is just more pathological nihilism I would expect from a Rick & Morty cartoon.

I don't even disagree that we live in a fallen civilization; but it just means you have a responsibility to your friends and family to re-moralize them, and build the bedrock of which civilization can rebound. As we've seen from Leftists of earlier generations, the "tune in, drop out" mentality only leads to further demoralization and nihilism.

90% of them will continue to align with the system.

The thing that kills me about the left-right distinction is that there is something very fundamentally different about the minds of the left and the minds of the right.

The actual far Leftists are prepared to live under such utter delusion that they accept no defeat, and re-assert inevitable victory, in the face of all evidence and consequences whatsoever. One of the truly most difficult struggles I face is not only explaining to default Leftists that they are doing terrible things, but getting them to accept it in the first place.

Meanwhile, the far Rightists will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at the first sign of trouble. Trump's greatest value was teaching the right how to win, and what winning looked like (and what it required) because I swear to god that none of you know what it is. "When-Ning? Is that the sound a horse makes?". Johnathan Haidt mentioned something about risk-aversion and disease reaction causing right-wing brains to basically self-isolate and shut down when confronted by real threat as a defensive mechanism. No one on the right believes they are "on the right side of history" or that "history bends towards [insert principle]" even when they are zealously convinced of the absolute moral certainty of their own positions.

There's a reason it seems like the vast and sweeping majority of the activist right that are making progress are current, former, or family of military personnel: they are people who are right-wing who are trained how to actually fight. The rest of the right is so fucking pathologically black-pilled that they can't even see their own victories; and give ground when none is called for. I think it might even be why the Leftist activists fundamentally despise us. To a predator, that's a prey response. They see you as deserving to be hunted.

Very slowly, year by year, each group of normies gets more and more red-pilled on what the Left is doing to them. Yes, there are people (including Gen Z) who are ideologically pre-conditioned to be Leftists by corrupted institutions, but individuation, responsibility, consequences, and loyalty do have their effects on everyone if they can be made to feel them; which is what I do to try and red-pill my family, friends, and co-workers. I don't even bring up politics most of the time, because I'm walking into psychological conditioning. Instead I work with philosophy, principle, and perspective to try and let them walk themselves out of Leftist hyper-reality (what Rommel called "Ice cream and cookie land" when talking about some of Hitler's orders)

Just giving up on all of that is degenerate fatalistic nihilism, and I won't have any of that.