Community Notes

Blowing up the world's own idea of itself.

Fallout S1E1 (Amazon Prime, 2024)

Here at Vault-Tec, your health and safety are our number one priority.

We are taught ad nauseam that the organizing principles of society have evolved to a higher plane, with the apex of liberal democracy bestowing the Western masses with all the liberties and conveniences so that this mask that hides a different reality is perceived favorably and that each individual should have a stake in defending its continuance even against his interests.

The teachings stress the liberation of individuals and their quest toward “self-actualization” in “participatory” institutions embracing the “majority” that posses the foresight and wisdom to dispense with centuries of collectivist dogmas, tribal quandaries, ethnic strife, hereditary claims, royal tyranny, religious supremacy, and more recently national and cultural disputes.

And that would all be nice if it were true.

We like to believe that whatever our species was and has become, through whatever means it was manufactured (intervention, creation, evolution), over whatever period, thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, that our generation gets it, because our generation knows something that eluded previous generations. After all, we are continuously learning from the failures of history and are no longer condemned to repeating them, ergo whatever has been tried and failed has only been replaced by something better than what was before, and we continually improve everything through our collective learned wisdom. Real <my ideology> has never been tried.

And that too would all be nice if it were true.

But it’s human nature to want to belong and be accepted by others, and accepting others forms the bonds of kinship that give our lives meaning and purpose. Sometimes that requires believing stories and narratives in the popular domain so that we belong to something. The older the narratives and fables, and the further back in time previous generations embraced them, the greater the likelihood they must be accurate, just, and righteous. For the revered majority, the sincerity or accuracy of these stories matters less than the feeling of belonging. This trap applies to those who reject the need to belong to anything, and therefore believe in nothing, which only creates a hidden void that will, sooner than later, be filled by something.