The Sea of Worry

Modern Guilt & Modern Fear

Have you ever met The Children of the News Cycle? Theirs is a bleak world of late: they worry about immigration, but also about the reaction to immigration. They worry about Ukraine and Putin, who many see as Hitler in a literal sense. They worry about Climate Change, but also about climate protests. Some even still worry about The Sniffles. They worry about Yemeni rebels stopping ships full of Chinese plastic crap. They, once again, worry about terrorism. They always worry about The Middle East in general, but Israel specifically. This week, they have been told in breathless detail that we are on the verge of World War III, lest the heroic NATO powers step in once more to guarantee Global Peace and Freedom™. They can’t help asking themselves: “is this the one?” no matter how remote the chance, and no matter how many times previously an event has been hyped as being “it” without, in fact, being “it.”

White, middle class, British people who see themselves as civically engaged receive their reality from The Guardian, The BBC, or GB News—all of which tell them roughly the same stories with a very slight ideological bent. They see it as their way to understand The Liberal Conversation that the news cycle is meant to facilitate. But for all the talk of political polarisation, there is precious little variance in the actual talking points. In actuality, the minor differences that do exist must be focused on & endlessly obsessed over because they are so limited in number—only a very narrow conversation is permissable. All must obey The Current Thing. This effect is only amplified when it comes to the online realm, with social media turbo-charging The Endless Conversation via constant parasocial bickering to the point people begin to believe they are the protagonist in world events.

Conventional wisdom tells us that crying wolf for decades would lead to The Children of the News Cycle developing an immunity to its messaging. Conversely, all that happens is fear becomes self-reinforcing and you end up with a society that is wholly geared towards fending off imaginary wolves. Fear-based propaganda, especially the fever pitch that was 2020, grew to meet the rising tide of apathy. This helps to explain why 13% of ALL women over the age of 16 in the UK have taken an antidepressant in the last 7 days. That figure rises to roughly 20% for women over 50 and 25% for women over 65. This is the same or higher in the US, Canada, Germany, and much of the rest of the Western World; it has been rising steadily, and sometimes rapidly, every year for more than a decade.

Percentage of adults aged 18 and over who used antidepressant medication over past 30 days, by age and sex: United States, 2015–2018

In modern Western Democracies, the politically engaged masses exist in The Sea of Worry; their reality is one of constant anxiety about drastic events beyond their control and outside of the scope their everyday lives. In his documentary The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis lays out how the Bush Jr. administration, used terrorism and transformed it into an all powerful boogieman that greased the wheels of state action. Adam Curtis is also, unfortunately, an interminable shitlib who would never turn that cynical, analytical eye to debunking the current boogieman of ‘Fascism,’ or offer solutions that stray outside of the limits of boilerplate progressivism. His documentaries offer you darkness without true revelation or a means of escape; they are the perfect product for The Newsnight Intelligentsia, who believe watching a “serious news show” puts them a notch above Drywall Dave, who reads the exact same Reuters/AP penned stories in The Sun.

The Sea of Worry is something that was more one-dimensional during The Cold War: our Managerial masters sorely miss that simple dynamic, and have spent every day since the fall of the Berlin wall trying to invent enemies as compelling as The Evil Empire. I have come to realise, as many have, that even at the height of The Cold War, the chances of a hot nuclear conflict were beyond remote, and from the late 1960s onward The Soviets internally acted upon this reality: they ramped up abortion, no longer fearing a land war, because they saw sheer human mass as an administrative headache. By the early 1970s, The USSR and The USA saw their mutual nuclear arsenals as financial headaches more than anything else, resulting in the two SALT treaties for nuclear reduction. The nukes were never going to fly, but the fear they might was very useful. The Cold War was largely a domestic, not geopolitical, project.

People who lived through those years will tell you that fear of The Bomb was the mental background noise to many people's lives, especially young people. It always existed within their psyche—trotted out and enhanced whenever needed. Cold War fear of all-out nuclear conflict being almost laughable is still a controversial position, but it is the only historically literate one.

We find ourselves today with a version of The Bomb tailored for the increasingly fractured cultural and political niches that make up the dissolving societies we call The West. The Children of the News Cycle are unified in their fear, but not always in what they fear. There exists an overarching fear complex; in the information age it consists of a targeted one via The Internet and a generalised one via legacy media. This is why war had to return post 9/11: for it is the one unifying thing the managerial class know populations both fear and support. “If it’s stopped there, it won’t reach here!” the tired old boomer mindset states, invoking WWII. So all foreign wars become wars for protection of the homeland and its greater values. This is the through-line in Ukraine and the attempted through-line in Israel. The narrative of “fight Hamas in Gaza to stop them from conquering New York!” isn’t exactly resonating, hence the invocation of Iran. The Sea of Worry must be kept full at all times.

The looming election and the ratcheting up of geopolitical doomsaying has caused a phenomenon that fills me with worry: being asked about politics in social and family situations. People talk to me in hushed tones about looming, immediate disasters they have been told about. There is anxiety because media and social media have made these events real—despite me and hopefully you knowing that visible politics is akin to pro-wrestling. It is in those moments that I realise, despite being a political weirdo attempting to create revolutionary right-wing ideas, I am FAR less afraid than The Mass. I do not fear Climate change, I do not worry about who to vote for, I do not fear being drafted into a war, I do not fear nuclear fire. This is because I know what is on the news is a story—a story with a purpose—and that what is in the news cycle often tells us nothing. It is there to fill up mental space.

Narrative news is a function of the news being a narrative: if it reads like fiction then it is. That’s the long and short of it. People differentiate mentally between the news cycle and fictional media because they think it helps them keep a grip on reality, but nothing could be further from the truth. In our stream Everyday Lies, we talk in detail about how even the most banal news, when you drill down into it, is adjusted to fit a handful of narratives, and reinforce them. Often the truth is far more banal than the headlines would represent, functioning as an engine of regime flavoured unreality to keep The Endless Conversation going. The News Media represent themselves as a bulwark against online sensationalism, but this is an inversion; they must constantly create a narrative that has a sense of forward movement even when nothing is happening. The regime must portray events in such a way that they seem interconnected narratively to the audience in manner that makes sense to them, and reinforces common greater values. As Western populations get less homogenous, and increasingly less Western, narratives must be simplified. This is why there are a limited number of plotlines all news in The Current Moment must adhere to—and since 9/11, it is endless war that is the narrative backstop of choice.

In a previous piece regarding the conflict in Yemen, I pointed out that the war there had been going on continuously since 2014—a fact that is universally recognised if you look beyond the news headlines. To most people, the conflict in Yemen did not exist until the news cycle made it exist to them. The reality on the ground did not change as much as the western perception of the conflict did, which is a gulf explained by the saturation level propaganda all modern managerial states subject their populations to. Yemen became, for a brief moment, The Current Thing purely as a function of a news cycle supporting American militaristic posturing.

The same is true for Israel and the geopolitical extended universe of the Iran Conflict, American policy hawks have wet dreams about. America is so horny for war with Iran it makes one uncomfortable; it's ugly and perverse. The Neocons are at FULL MAST with the idea of missiles in the air pointed at their Greatest Ally™.

We know via the work of The Nudge Unit, who were the official social engineering team for David Cameron's government, that all language is deliberately and openly crafted to elicit certain responses to nudge you towards certain beliefs and actions. This is justified by these actions being “good” beliefs and actions, so the state argues they'd be remiss not to socially engineer those outcomes as far as possible. This is an accepted tactic in The Liberal Conversation that is supposed to be public life. These nudges, of course, all coincidentally also align with the aims and goals of the British security state. If the news cycle is making you paralysed with fear of a global war, and all messaging is explicitly and openly crafted, that's simply how those who craft the narrative have decided you're supposed to feel. The message is less important than the messaging, the packaging, or the framing of events. The entire news environment is chanting “WAR IS COMING! WAR IS COMING!” in rhythmic unison.

The idea of the importance of The Liberal Conversation has led directly to acceptance of The Internet, which is held up as the ultimate expression of The Liberal Exchange of Ideas. But The Internet is an informational weapon controlled by the American security state, social media doubly so. What does that say about The Liberal Conversation? Looked at tactically, it functions as a psychological weapon for those in power, as the Internet undeniably is. Those of you with eyes to see and ears to hear will have noticed that The Liberal Conversation has been injected with a new level of existential dread ever since the fear porn bonanza of The Lockdowns.

If you think WWIII or some kind of hot American Civil War is imminently about to kick off, you are drowning in The Sea of Worry, and have become useless. Fear of a phantom global or civil war that never materialises is just the same as being afraid of a nebulous, ultra-deadly virus—it is living in unreality. If you don’t live in reality, you can’t effectively plan ahead. The idea of another American Civil War especially has become borderline kitsch, with news media pushing the idea to such a degree it is a cultural touchstone big enough to be cashed in on via a low quality civil-war-sploitation film—a beanie-man fever dream. The mantra of Nothing Ever Happens is becoming an online politics cliché, but really what we are seeing is the fact that American hegemony is still in place. There can be no true conflicts in the Middle East because there are no true rival castles, no real rival power centres. The idea Iran could threaten American hegemony in an immediate sense is ludicrous, it is also not in their interest to do so. The Ukraine war was a story of a US-dominated NATO, forcefully engineering a conflict with Russia and then repeatedly punching itself in the face. The regime suffers a loss, yes—but they are own-goals: self-made defeats.

The immediate fear of catastrophe the masses feel as they immerse themselves in The Sea of Worry prevents them from seeing the real problem in all Western nations: inexorable and systematic decline—entropy. Their flights of fancy into geopolitics provide them with an escape from their everyday lives, at least if your worries are a big ocean of vague distant fear then you can justify inaction regarding them. They have allowed their minds to be globalised and as such live in their own, internal world of Unreality: a world in which people in London and New York worry that Israel might be attacked more than they worry about the BMI category they jumped during lockdown, or that the average American woman is now 5’4” but 170 lbs.

Civilisations have civilisational time horizons. Think about it this way: there is a grand old house a brilliant man built and maintained. When he dies, his son inherits the house, but does not know how to maintain it and won't hire anyone who does. The house does not fall down immediately. It slowly degrades until minor and then major things go wrong. Living in the house day to day, he might not even notice it getting shabby. He could patch over a few things, even if he did it badly. It could look perfectly fine for many years, until something he took for granted goes wrong and he can't fix it. The problem is, the roof leaking or a window smashing and not being fixed makes the decline quicker. It can become a negative cycle, but even then it's a process over months at the very least. A house becoming unlivable is not a single event. In fact, it is very rarely a single event.

The banality and simplicity of the real problems facing The West struggle to cut through the insane fiction that keeps people immersed—agitated, but ultimately paralysed by The Sea of Worry.

Maintaining the level of fear at a fever pitch has created a narrative soap opera in world events: our supposed elites cry in support of foreign flags and proclaim the end of the world in an environmental apocalypse. What is pumped out by media and portrayed as “accepted reality” is cartoonish. They are crying that Hitler has returned and the earth is dying simply to cut through the informational noise and refill The Sea of Worry in people’s hearts. This paralysing unease keeps you amenable to a tightly managed mass society. But it is lazy writing, and they are not all on the same page, so it becomes predictable and necessary to telegraph in advance—partially to prepare the mass and partly to signal to other elites to get with the program. So if you read public information meant as inter-elite communication, you can predict the political future. Then why doesn't everyone see what we see? Because almost no one reads things like government White Papers, long form NGO reports or legal rulings in detail—especially from a dissident perspective.

The material of substance behind the headlines requires research to find in the first place, it is often couched in complex legal language and it is, above all, boring. Being boring compared to the insane cycle of headlines is a powerful defence mechanism for the regime’s long term planning, why would you focus on a boring policy report some YouTube person is talking about when the news is showing you footage of people blowing up? The things I feel a deep unease about are UK agricultural land usage, a complete lack of UK engineering training, and massive white elephant construction projects to facilitate mass immigration. These are the nuts & bolts of what keep The Grand Old House of British civilisation somewhat liveable. These are signs of decline, but not causes of immediate, fiction-worthy collapse and as such they go mostly ignored. These are the things our content is geared towards, as well as calling out the obvious political containment in our midst.

We are often accused of being “Blackpilled” due to our insistence the entire process is not genuine, but the fear of a sudden, sharp single-event collapse being instilled by all aspects of the current regime is demonstrably not genuine. What we are seeing are the invented emergencies that turn the political ratchet spoken of in Robert Higg’ Crisis & Levithan. Fear has its own utility, it creates demand for action and the introduction of an Exception in response to perceived threat—but in reality an immense amount of energy is being expended to simply tread water. Things SEEM to be happening, but nothing really changes and the predetermined trajectory of the postwar project marches on, defibrillated to limp another few inches by the latest contrived emergency. History is written by great men, if it appears that history has ended—as Francis Fukuyama infamously posited—it is because we have run out of great men to drive it forward.

What no one is prepared for is that nothing will happen, that their personal Sea of Worry will amount to nought and they will be left in a world ever poorer in spirit— that nonetheless lingers on. What people really don’t want to think about is slow death, they’d rather The West die in some glorious fireball than simply creak to a halt and rust in place.

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A special thanks to LamentedGuide & PlasmaRob for helping edit this piece.