Consume Product

USSR: "The ore outputs in this report don't match up with the numbers we've released to the public."

"Gulag the authors."

USA: "The stats on Multiculturalism in this report don't match up with the message we've released to the public."

"Cancel the authors."

https://xcancel.com/ChiefEgregore/status/1930311005185180090

The West was a mere 30 years behind the USSR in terms of civilizational collapse, fascinating how in the 90s the West was so triumphant when at its core it had all the same flaws, chief of which was having an elite that hated, resented, and was totally insulated from the common people.

It'll be like what happened once the covid spell was broken

So, this feeling people get when they realize they can't speak the truth and keep their heads... this is a feeling that I've lived under most of my adult life.

When I studied physics, the professors emphasized the point that we're not here to save the world from itself or to tell people how wrong they are about the true nature of the world. We're just here to figure out how stuff works and if someone wants our opinion on something, we'll try to share the PC version because reality will bust their heads.

Back in the late 90s, the "big secret" was that nuclear power was the inevitable future. If it was true petroleum was going to run out (it never was) then the only hope to have a civilization is if we built nuclear power plants now, while energy was cheap. If we waited until petroleum ran out, it would be too late and building a nuclear power plant would be pointless.

But you can't just go around telling people who believed millions died due to Three Mile Island that they had only a few decades to start building nuclear power plants in everyone's back yards.

My job as a software developer / engineer (I was trained in physics, and I used that to fix people's broken systems) was similar. I could tell engineers certain things that I couldn't tell managers, because managers didn't want to know or understand. Even then, most engineers weren't adult enough or knowledgeable enough to know what was really going on. For instance, all software is really a compiler, translating concepts from one language (or data set, or input, or whatever) to another, and so once you understand how compilers work, everything is easy. But even more "concrete" stuff like how transactions actually work in a database and why distributed transactions is not possible, not in the way they understand it, flew over 95% of their heads.

In the end, I had to "translate" these concepts into concepts they could understand, and give them enough information so that they had nominal control over the software they "owned", at least enough that they could run a business using it. Sometimes they would come to me with absurd asks or even demands, and I would help them understand why they did not want what they thought they did, or what the repercussions of their ideas would be if we actually implemented them.

For the most part though, it's a lonely life where you know that you can never speak the full truth, and where you know that if you ever do you will get fired for it.