"In addition, some people seem strongly attached to the conviction that our overlords’ plans are perfect and that they are executing them flawlessly. Their every failure is interpreted as a planned, cunning deception along the straight path to final and complete victory. Supposedly, they own and control all the opposition, all escape routes are blocked and all hope is a delusion for the feeble-minded.
I’ve listened to such arguments many times and they invariably entail a great deal of dark imagination. However, we are not the first generation whose degenerate ruling classes fantasized about cementing their dominance and enslaving the rest of humanity. Our “overlords” are in no better place to realize those fantasies than were the prior ruling degenerates through history.
Probably the most successful and most ruthless attempts at achieving totalitarian dystopia were last century’s Communist regimes of the USSR, East Germany, Romania and Albania. But they all collapsed: in spite of having total control over their police, secret police, courts, military and educational institutions, and an unchallenged monopoly over the media, none of them were able to survive for a very long time.
So why should anyone assume that today’s ruling degenerates
can do what no previous ruling ones managed? To be sure, they
are very powerful and the struggle is very real, including its casualties. But to extrapolate the direction they took, and envision an inevitable defeat for the rest of us would amount to surrender and an acquiescence to the dystopian option.
It is extremely important for us to understand that this acquiescence has dramatic consequences for the conflict’s outcome. The
difference between surrendering and resisting is nothing short of massive, as the following story illustrates.
The "hope" experiment
In a cruel experiment at Johns Hopkins University during the 1950s, Dr. Curt Richter placed rats in a small tub with no possibility of escape to test how long they would tread water for. The average rat would give up and drown after about 15 minutes. However, just as they began to drown, the experimenter would pick them up, dry them off and allow them to rest for a few minutes. Then they'd put them back for another round. This time, the average rat would tread water for 40 hours!
In the first round, it seems that the rats gave up because they perceived no hope of overcoming their predicament. But their strength and ability to survive only became apparent in the second round of the experiment: they had it in them to endure 160 times longer than they did when they saw no hope of salvation. The advantage we have over the lab rats is that we still have an important degree of liberty, understanding of our situation and free will to demand and make changes."
At this point, cultivating optimism should be our sacred duty to the future generations.
alexkrainer.substack.com
