Hey, it’s a beautiful day and it rained last night. This is the part of the column where I soothe you into thinking this is going to be a frivolous and easy-reading jaunt. A stroll through a perfect word-meadow. A frolic in a cool creek, pants rolled up, fingers dipped in the clear, chilly waters. Pleasant.
Later (you may or may not realize and expect) I will set a brushfire in your mind with some idea or opinion that your subconscious will chew on, mixaphorically speaking, for some time.
Your pre-brushfire homework (you can do this whenever you have a chance, you don’t need to do it now) is to go to this column I wrote in 2022. It’s still where I left it: https://www.brownwoodnews.com/2022/09/07/michael-bunker-the-granfalloon-technique/
As a quick review of that article, in it I demonstrate exactly how individuals are purposefully separated into meaningless groups so their behavior can be controlled. It sounds silly when I say it quickly like that, but if you read the linked article, you will find that I absolutely prove it. That is the preface.
One of the things my readers ask me the most (or comment on most frequently) is my assertion that things like downtown revitalization are one of the last mechanisms available to save any vestige of civil society. People say, “That is intriguing. Please explain more about this.”
I say that “local community” is the last bulwark against the onslaught of mental illness, demoralization, degradation, and degeneracy that is burning down the world. I know this because I have studied civilization. I’m probably the only person you know who has read all eleven very thick volumes of The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. That’s not a boast, it’s a fact. I have studied and written extensively about how civilization is destroyed. I teamed up with a Cambodian friend, whose family escaped the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, to write the true story of their escape. In it, I explain how Cambodian civilization was destroyed and what happened when the Khmer Rouge took over. What happened in Cambodia is happening today. On the news. You can see it.
One of the tactics of demoralization is to multiply and activate “granfalloons” (groups of individuals brainwashed into thinking they have affinity and community responsibility to strangers who share some meaningless trait or identity in common) to inflame social discord through cultural agitation. That is to say that the people who aggravate or with whom you argue online, are not people who are “connected” (in a social sense) in their real lives. They are disconnected from real, flesh-and-blood neighbors. People who are connected with real people and who have real responsibilities and who have things to do, do not sit around arguing online. They don’t inhabit comment sections merely to point out that they disagree with something.
When a real person with a meaningful life disagrees with something they read, they just shrug and keep moving. They aren’t looking for a fight because they have things to do, people to see, happiness to experience. People who don’t have any meaningful connections (in the real world) get their dopamine hit (or whatever neurotransmitter drug makes them feel real for a few seconds) by trolling or finding things with which they disagree so they can argue. Arguing with strangers is a powerful drug for disconnected people. And it is a mechanism of separation and dissolution. Keeping people at each other’s throats is the recipe for social control.
Real people are not outraged by hearing or reading a dissenting opinion. And they don’t feel the need to burn the seconds, minutes, hours, and days of their lives barraging strangers with their dissenting opinions.
What does all of this have to do with the death of civilization? I’m glad you asked.
Real people are connected with the real world. That is to say – they have real and meaningful relationships with their neighbors and with the society around them. The stronger those connections, the healthier the social fabric. The plastic society of social-media-highway/suburb-cardboard-box-Xerox-copy-big-box-franchise-corporate-next-exit-community is not capable of withstanding the onslaught of mental illness that is now destroying Western Civilization. Everyone operating in that theater of operations has already been micro-separated into granfalloons that are easily controlled by fear and anger. I present modern politics to you as an example.
The rampart or bulwark against this disintegration is real, local, identifiable, community.
A quick history lesson. Early American civilization consisted of multi-generational farm families connected by dirt roads to small towns where the people traded and engaged in their fledgling political system. Their affinities started with family first, extended from there to their neighbors (love thy neighbor had shoe-leather,) from there to their trading partners in the small towns, and from there to the trading centers called cities (from the word “citadels”) which were the centers of political and economic “protection” of their shared values. From there, allegiance went to perhaps the county level, the region, and then the state. There was no national allegiance at that time except as a means of uniting in defense against invasion. That is to say, Civilization was built on the smallest scale by allegiance to family and the local community. There is, therefore, little real argument against the maxim that the last rampart of bulwark against the destruction of that society is – as I said – a real, local, identifiable economic and social community. This is best represented by things like a strong, revitalized downtown community of local business owners that you can know and support, even if you don’t live there. Remember, the agents of demoralization and destruction desire you to hate your neighbor because of their politics. This drives you into easily manipulated lanes of control. You all go to the chains and the big box stores, and you do what you are told. You give your money to your enemy. You buy the same stuff, the same “art,” the same ideas. Little do you know that those ideas, songs, merchandise, and concepts, are purposefully designed to take an axe to the root of your life and family. They are the agents of destruction, and you give them power when you give them money. They spend that money destroying you.
The world offers two options: 1. You go along with the mass. Buy your clothes at Target, your food at Taco Bell, your everything else at Amazon. Give Walmart your money, cut the throats of local entrepreneurs, and hope the people in charge can still sell you an American flag made in China so you can wave it on the way to your cultural gulag. 2. You can do what I did, say “screw it all” and move into the country and let the world burn. Unhappily, if you do this, it will burn, and you won’t escape the fire of it.
The other option they don’t tell you about is that you have to engage in economic warfare starting today. That is to say, live in the real world. Meet real people, and neighbors, and love them. Buy your stuff, as much as you can, from real people who you can meet and know. Don’t just nod your head at me and say amen and go on with the way you’ve been doing things. Buy local isn’t an advertising slogan. It is a call to war.
The agents of disintegration are always negative. That is, they preach the gospel of disintegration, trolling, anger, arguments, and negativity. That is why when you read the comments section, the trolls reign. Real people rarely take the time to go into the comments section and say, “I agree with this so keep it up.” Positivity is an antidote to the granfalloon technique. Sharing this article, if you have read this far, would be a good start! Send it to five people and badger them until they’ve read it.
But what do I know? I’m just a writer on a soap box.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.
