(2021-04-28) Rao The Meaning Crisis Conspiracy

Venkatesh Rao: The Meaning Crisis Conspiracy. The meaning crisis was a psyop invented in a secret Murdoch-funded lab in 2015 to distract younger Millennials and Zoomers from the fact that the rent was too damn high, and it worked.

In 2015, the basic trends the Project Vegemite researchers had available to work with were: concern over the rise of tech, and the rise of inequality.

To pivot the momentum in a new direction, a basic feature of the psyche was required as a fulcrum. In this case, the basic feature Project Vegemite converged on was the fact that there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who dislike thinking, and those who think too much

I like to call them Type N for “non-thinkers” or “normies,” vs. Type M, for “morbidly thinky” or "meta". (meta-level)

Type N’s can take any amount of punishment you care to dish out, and keep going, so long as you keep the clearly false hope flowing.

Their life is largely meaningless by choice anyway, and they studiously avoid all morbid meta-thinking that might reveal that, so they cannot experience a meaning crisis.

The Type M crowd though (about 48% of the population by recent estimates), was the problem. They represented a vast, restless cognitive surplus that sought unpredictably stimulating outlets. Unfortunately, they like to think, and the also like to believe they’re thinking for themselves, which means they must occasionally be allowed to arrive at mostly harmless unique and novel conclusions about Life, the Universe, and Everything.

below a certain minimum level of real hope for expected happiness in this life, Type M’s will check out and sink into a sort of nihilistic hedonism

That won’t do because their willingness to think, properly channeled, sustains a lot of critical activities.

And above a certain maximum level of realized life happiness, they’ll check out as well.

The trick to keeping Type M’s productively involved in the workings of civilization is to keep them hopeful, but frustrated.

until 2015, it was working really well. Until the damn millennials discovered the secret of a little happiness in avocado toast.

2014, if you ate one slice of avocado toast a day, you wouldn’t just stop believing in the false hope of owning a home on a minimum-wage salary, you’d stop caring about anything past having a little fun today. And that was way more dangerous than mere disbelief.

Here’s the secret plan Project Vegemite came up with to make sure that the fallout of the collapse of premium mediocrity was contained: Manufacture a meaning crisis to make the M’s more like the N’s.

It was a bold and radical plan. Make the group that enjoys thinking effectively indistinguishable from the group that doesn’t. Make non-normies and normies interchangeable.

The hard part was step 1: constructing safe places for the discontent to flow once it had been triggered and fueled.

the fodder had to be such that it posed no risk of the Type M’s actually figuring out how to immanentize the eschaton.

Where the Type N’s demand only false hopes, the Type M’s call for vaguely plausible hopes. The kind that require years of hard thinking to get disillusioned with.

The solution, it turned out, was greebles.

notice that a lot of underemployed Type M’s online were going around sneering at each other for having no taste (presumably between bites of avocado toast), and fragmenting into increasingly smaller subcultures as a result.

What if the variety is the solution rather than the problem?

“Greebles?” “Meaningless surface detailing to make simple things look complex

A vaguely plausible hope is just a false hope with lots of greebling.”

You don’t produce the greebles. They produce the greebles. That’s what they do with their morbid thinky energy. Meaning lies in producing greebles more than in consuming them

Young people pouring endless cognitive energy into creating and exploring greebles around things. That’s the energy we must tap into. We just have to redirect that energy towards more humorless, less fun things so they think it is serious and adult.”

Anything dull, largely useless, time-consuming to learn about, and demanding average fandom levels of brains, will do. Best if it is old, so there’s a lot of ready raw material. Religion, sacred architecture, stoicism, enlightenment philosophy, classic movies, obscure 19th century political theories, mysticism, woo theories of trauma, getting off the internet to do woodworking (making).

Irony is too temperamental an ingredient for such a delicate operation. In fact, now that you bring it up, I think we need a whole separate psyop to actively counter-program irony. We must make young people suspicious of it.”

Link all irony and doubt to Marxism or something

“So what we want is miserably humorless nerds who are suspicious of irony, think postmodernism is the same thing as Marxism, and are willing to direct all their political energy to adding greebles to safely dead ideas?”

We’ll call it New Earnestness or trad or something.

And let’s make a clean separation from nerdy fandom. Any ideas there? Something that sounds more adult and serious. Less like hobbies.”
“We could call it aesthetics.

The old truth-is-beauty, beauty-is-truth misdirection trick. (transcendentals)

Half the battle with this sort of psyop is getting people to look away from anything they find ugly. The Type N’s do that without prompting. The Type M’s just need a little help with intellectual justification.”