Tik Tok Minds: Perfect For Dictatorship

To dominate people, oligarchies have to dominate their ways, means, aspirations, entertainment, expectations: people have to be programmed, they have to becomes apps… and apps will do that. Long and brainless article in the New York Times about the latest “App” (= programs financed by plutocrats to moderate the minds of the masses into abject, sunny submission), Tik Tok.

High Schools to TikTok: We’re Catching Feelings. Teens love the app, and now it’s getting the stamp of approval with teacher-approved clubs. Did school just get … fun?

On the wall of a classroom that is home to the West Orange High School TikTok club, large loopy words are scrawled across a whiteboard: “Wanna be TikTok famous? Join TikTok club.”

It’s working. “There’s a lot of TikTok-famous kids at our school,” said Amanda DiCastro, who is 14 and a freshman. “Probably 20 people have gotten famous off random things.”

Tik Tok famous: if and only if your sort of fame has been approved in Beijing by the authorities.

On the drive to celebrity on social networks: if we all become famous, are we still famous? 

Tik Tok? Information going to a company located in, controlled by, and collaborating with a dictatorship. Kids trained to be eager to become circus animals, and anxious not to be so. Serious schooling displaced by greed for celebrity. Displacement of serious study and deep knowledge gathering by me-too self obsession enabled by fake effects. What could go wrong?

The sound: tic toc, accompanied by tapping the index finger lightly on one’s skull is indicative of dementia, mental retardation: anybody would understand that particular gesture and sound effect around the world. Thus the app recognizes that it makes it easy to go beast on humanity with it. That can be a good thing, but it shouldn’t be the only thing.

Tik Tok Fun. But fun ain’t necessarily brains.

Indeed, granted that self-derision can be excellent, we are all mental retards, sometimes, somehow, and it’s indispensable to recognize it so as to get to know ourselves. But one recognizes one’s own stupidity is self-derision not just for fun, but also to re-establish more serious and deeper study of oneself and the world. And studying in depth has to be the task of schools (what else?) 

The danger presented by Tik Tok are multiple, then. One, as a worldwide spy service of cataloguing the personalities of everybody partaking in it ready to be hooked up on excellent Chinese government facial recognition, Second, and more importantly, Tic Tok establishes the wrong hierarchy of meta values: its practice teaches to forget the essential mission (hard schooling, deep studying, learning to concentrate and think) with the relief valve to the former (making fun of oneself).

New technologies are often misused. The danger with present electronics is that as it replaces the real world with fake, simplified worlds, it sucks up all the time and oxygen, living no time to envision the existence of the real thing, the real world. Hence the apparition of the snowflake mentality: all and any contradiction makes shallow minds melt away. Such minds are the most compatible with Xi dictatorship… And the Nazis, who were running a similar circus, all superficial fun, not depth, would have approved. 

Now, lest the preceding be construed as only an attack on Chinese controlled Tik Tok, let me remind readers that a deep alliance was built between the worldwide, West originated plutocracy and the Chinese “Communist” Party based (or CCP synchronized) [1]. Having youth engaged in trivial pursuit to the point of having trivial minds is exactly what is needed for plutocracy to flourish: this was observed by Juvenal, a Roman author, around 100 CE.

Indeed minds became ever more stupid afterwards: by the Third Century, Roman secular authors have nearly disappeared (except for Cassius Dio)… although Evangels (“Gospels”) are running rampant, the latter effect being related to the former…

In my vision, the Decline of Rome, was caused by the inability to think, creatively, which Roman plutocracy carefully fostered, because it’s easy to rule over sheep, and not over creators. Juvenal spoke of putting people to sleep with “Panem et circenses“: bread and circuses. Both cost a lot to Roman plutocracy, many an aspiring plutocrat found himself in heavy debt, setting up circus games to increase his popularity hence client base… so, considering the expense, the sheepification of the people took many generations, and the Roman republic and its isonomia (treating citizens equally under the law) declined so slowly, it took more than four centuries for Rome to fall apart after the edification by Augustus of his “Principate” (Premiereship in truth a gory dictatorship masquerading as republic).

Tik Tok and other “social network” technologies are cheap, no need for bread, and the circuses are free, as they are managed by the spectators themselves. Moreover, they give an illusion of celebrity to their participants (hence the fascination with followers, likes and the like…)

As I pointed out in my essay on the latest Nobel in economics, mental performance of the highest spheres has decayed so much, it is viewed as an awesome discovery to apply the experimental method in… science. Another example of mass imbecility is the impeachment of Trump, a few months from elections, while issues such as potential calamities such as nuclear non-proliferation treaties expiring, and launch-on-warning are religiously ignored.

But the plutocracy will do whatever to stay in power: that was amply demonstrated in the Late Roman empire, as Roman plutocracy made allies with whomever, and whatever, from the Huns (Roman general Litorius led a largely Hunnic army at the siege of Tolosa/Toulouse in 439 CE!) to imposing the abominable notion that heretics could be killed, if the emperor so decided, just because they were heretics (decree of emperor Theodosius I, circa 380 CE).

All this tic toking of youth will only make matters worse, by fostering monkey like activities to the detriment of serious, deeper studies. Ah, but the educators themselves may have become incapable of increasing depth, indeed. If we don’t re-establish soon a sense of mental depth, spaceship Earth is doomed.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Watch Hunter Biden, son of Biden, admitting receiving a $40,000 diamond (3 carat), from a Chinese energy tycoon, and then not knowing what happened to it (he gave it to “associates”). He had to admit: it was in divorce proceedings as a “personal indulgence“…. Diamonds are impossible to track, and this is why Al Qaeda got involved with them in West Africa…

Tags: Decline Rome, Tik Tok