Amusing Ourselves to Death

"I'm not in the business. I am the business." Rachel, Blade Runner

Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman

Dissemble: to conceal one's true motives, feelings, or beliefs

Dismantle: to take (a machine or structure) to pieces. "the engines were dismantled and the bits piled into a heap"

Demolish: to pull or knock down (a building).

These three words describe perfectly what is happening to the minds of our children, not to mention our own.

Look on Tik Tok. How many followers does someone have?

We started it with Facebook. It is now the language, the very fiber of our children’s being. Following.

What child is not on Tik Tok? The app has been downloaded 165 million times in the U.S., meaning that if each download is unique, more than half of our population has turned over its most sensitive data to the Chinese Communist Party.

But that’s not even the most important part—that we have turned over our information to China. It’s that now we know about it, we keep on doing it willing. The trade-off of endless amusement has made our deal with the Devil (and I don’t mean China, I mean the real Devil—because I am beginning to believe there might actually be one) worth it.

“We already know that sites and services such as Facebook and Google are “free” because you, the user, are the product — your data gets sold for profit to advertisers. But allowing your profile to be mined for targeted ads about domestic politicians and fast fashion is a world away from servicing a dictatorship that unleashed a deadly pandemic across the world and is currently committing de facto genocide against its Muslim citizens.”

It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. There’s nothing any of us can do anyway.

There’s a great scene in my all-time favorite movie, Blade Runner where the replicant Rachel says, “I’m not in the business. I am the business.” 

She is a AI, created by a man, her “god” if you will, who has implanted the memories of his own daughter in her mind. When she starts to play the piano, she doesn’t know if it’s really her or implanted memories of someone else.

This describes our children perfectly. Their minds have been highjacked. Thoughts are constantly being implanted that they do not evaluate, or think about critically. They just accept them.

We have become so distracted by entertainment that, in the words of Neil Postman, we are “amusing ourselves to death.”

“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?”

The past few days, I have been catching up on the latest online games that children have been playing during the pandemic. This is where I first heard a variation on the three terms I’ve listed above, repeated over and over by a YouTube influencer who goes by the name of LaurenzSide. There are a million variations of this influencer you can choose from, I just happened to pick her because she is insanely popular with elementary school age kids.

All that LaurenzSide does is critique free games while she is playing them.

So, basically, where once kids used to play in real life in the 1980s, they transitioned to playing games online in the 1990s, and they now watch someone else playing the games while they sit in complete passivity.

Imagination is dead. Reading is dead. Every kid dreams of being a YouTube influencer. But what is a YouTube influencer? Is it someone who achieved an incredible goal against all odds? No, it’s someone who regurgitates banal, nonsensical non-information that starts and ends nowhere, and is played in a continues loop.

Watching this stuff, I could not find one bit of content that elevated the mind of a child to create, work hard, or achieve any goals except moving on to the next episode.

LaurenzSide is an engaging personality. She is 31, I believe, has a boyfriend or a husband, not sure which, and just had a baby. I have no doubt she thinks she is doing something good and wholesome with her show. Yet, with all her wholesomeness, she is telling kids—in the most annoyingly jarring high-pitched voice peppered with cackling laughter that would make even Kamala Harris cringe—that they should “never, under any circumstances download any of the games” she critiques.

Your first thought might be, uh oh, kids will probably rush to download them all. But no, they will not. Why? Because even that would take too much effort. All kids have to do is sit and watch her play the game for them. Which she does in such an over-the-top animated way it’s exhausting. A few hours a day of watching LaurenzSides could well result in a completely comatose child. I know that’s how I felt.

What are these games?

Let’s see, there is one where you can get your tongue broken off and watch it grow back. You can watch all kinds of weird and disgusting things happen to a person’s body, like growing black hair in strange places. You can be a chiropractor and accidently break people’s necks instead of cracking them. Or you can play a game where you try to make it to the end of an obstacle course, trying to save as many of your children as possible, yet what actually happens is you have to sacrifice them along the way so that you can win.

All the while, LaurenzSide is saying things like, “I hate that this game exists.” “This game shouldn’t exist,” “don’t worry, this isn’t real.”

And my favorite one “nothing is real.”

What these games all have in common is that they simulate real life, all the while reminding viewers that it isn’t real at all. Added to that, they desensitize children to their natural reaction at drastic changes to their bodies. Everything is possible in a virtual existence.

Where once children were told, “Dream big, anything is possible,” and they knew it meant they could achieve goals with hard work and determination, now it means that dreams are just that: dreams. Nothing is real. And just like this Brazilian man who “became Korean after 10 plastic surgeries,” you can be anything you want by faking it.

Nothing is real, therefore, there are no consequences when something bad happens. None of us has an individual identity so none of us are culpable. None of us are solid and stable, we are all changeable and therefore, expendable.

How do we stop our children from being sucked into this nightmare?

I’m not sure that we can. I’m not sure we haven’t gone too far down this path to ever return. The only answer would be to shift our thinking from destroying ourselves to destroying technology. Sounds drastic, I know. But don't worry, it won't happen. We depend on technology so much so that we have already become inseparable from it. We love our technology more than we love ourselves.

Perhaps even in our children’s lifetimes, they will see the final melding between human and machine.

In Tad Williams brilliant epic series Otherland, children all over the world watch a clown show on TV. The clown is hypnotizing the children and leading them into an alternate reality where they are, essentially, being fed to those who control this alternate reality and need the children’s life force to maintain their immortality.

Enter the demonic world of organ harvesting and you will see what I mean. It happens under our noses and we don’t see it. Just today an article in The Epoch Times recounts a former police officer called Bob describe being an unwitting participant in an “industrialized” supply chain that converted living humans into products for sale in the organ trade. The players in this macabre industry include the judicial system, police, prisons, doctors, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials who issue the directive.

The fantasy world the clown presents to children becomes more enticing than the real world. And why wouldn’t it? In Otherland, you can play the same game endlessly, you can die and be reborn, without feeling pain. In real life, one must work hard, strive for goals, feel pain, and feel pleasure. Even pleasure becomes an uncomfortable emotion. Pleasure can lead to disappointment, which can lead to pain. Touching a real person, feeling fragile emotions in situations beyond one’s control, these are fearful prospects for those who have entered the world of endless fake amusement.

“He had once thought it was strange to have a friend you'd never met. Now it was even stranger, losing a friend you'd never really had.”
— Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

Think on that for a moment.

Kids are more attached to their YouTube influencers than they are to their friends and family. These characters seem realer, and if a child could crawl inside their technological device and live there forever, they would.

The more removed we become from reality, the easier it becomes to shrug off our responsibilities to uphold any type of faith in God, moral teachings or accountability. We have our new gods and they care for us. The world is so filled with heartbreak, this constant stream of global warming, starvation, wars, predators on the streets, it is an insurmountable weight that we cannot bear. Much as we would like to solve all the problems of the world, it is beyond our ability to do so.

How frightening and overwhelming reality has become. How much better to live in a happy place where we never have to think about anything, it’s all done for us.

Western civilization is being dissembled, dismantled and demolished. And if we are honest, if we had a chance to get rid of all our toys of distraction, would we have the courage to do it?

Remember those long-gone days when we were advised not to visit our elderly parents and grandparents so we could protect them from COVID? One death was too many. Remember that?

This was a convenient solution to a hidden truth that had already been around for a long time but no one wanted to acknowledge. Because, let’s face it, before the pandemic struck, the elderly were already one of the largest forgotten groups in America. Another casualty of the demolition of Western civilization—the destruction of the family.

Once the pandemic came along, it was quite fascinating to listen to the media spin, how suddenly, the concern for the well-being of the elderly was of paramount importance. We must protect them at all costs. How do we do that? By conveniently, justifying the fact that we don’t visit them. What a relief, no more guilty conscience.

I was living in the villages of Luxor, Egypt right when the COVID craze started. As a child, I lived in villages in Switzerland and France. As a young married woman, I lived in a village in what was then Yugoslavia. I love living in villages. It is my preference. In all these places, the elderly continue to live in the family home, baking old family recipes, sewing clothes, helping around the house, working in the garden, babysitting grandchildren. When the pandemic arrived, no one could suddenly get rid of the elderly to “protect them.” Life went on as it did before.

Meanwhile, I heard horrible stories of the elderly in American living their last days even more alone than ever before. For those who had been lucky enough to have visitors, they were now denied it. They had no rights to make these decisions. For “their own good” those rights were taken away. I saw one tragic story of a daughter, I think it was in Australia, trying to “steal” her mother out of the care facility, only to have the police show up and force her back, all the while the grandmother crying that she didn’t want to go, pleading to please be allowed to be with her daughter.

This perverse mentality was fed to us and we accepted it. Otherwise, we were murderers. And no one wants to be that. This acceptance paved the way for us to further accept sacrificing of our own children to the vaccine.

Look at this twisted headline: Some Vaccinated People Are Dying of Covid-19. Here's Why Scientists Aren't Surprised.

“LONDON—As the Delta variant of the coronavirus surges through the U.K., almost half of the country’s recent Covid-19 deaths are of people who have been vaccinated. But doctors and scientists aren’t sounding the alarm about the apparently high proportion of deaths among the vaccinated population.

“On the contrary, they say the figures so far offer reassurance that vaccines offer substantial protection against the variant, particularly after two doses.” 

See how that works? Whereas just a few months ago, every death was alarming, now that people are vaccinated there is no cause for alarm when they die.

Does that give you a headache? It should.

But it’s okay. If you get a headache, just take a pill and settle down to watch your favorite TV series. But not with your children sitting next to you. No. They will each be in their separate areas, watching their favorite TikTok or YouTube influencer. Or, as Mark Zuckerberg has declared, meeting their friends in a cold, isolated virtual world instead of outdoors riding bikes or something. It’s all good because everyone is safe. No one is out in the big, bad world getting hurt by some unknown danger.

Very few children know what it’s like to have a grandparent living with them, offering wisdom from an all but forgotten time. Children are fast losing the attention span or the imagination required to listen to an elderly person tell them a story, or read a book, where they create characters and locations in their own minds instead of it all being implanted for them.

Instead of hearing the stories of a World War II veteran, our youth are being told that D-Day was the “biggest antifa rally in history.”

Here is the truth about antifa, as Andy Ngo’s book Unmasked accurately states: “Violence is a feature, not a bug, of antifa’s ideology. In fact, they venerate violence. Since 2015, untold numbers of victims, including other journalists, have been doxed, beaten, robbed, or killed by antifa militants. Few of them receive media attention—or justice.”

But our children will never hear that. They will hear the exact opposite, even from our own government. All that once was thought to be good and right is being dissembled, dismantled and demolished. My own son was sure that Andy Ngo was a fraud and had been debunked by “real” journalists, until I showed him interviews with Ngo and he listened to Ngo’s own words.

But again, our children will never find this out through their own Google searches, nor will they find it out in school. And they won’t be interested in the information anyway.

Our children do not know they are being groomed as sacrificial lambs and that their own parents are helping the process along. Conspiracy theory, I can hear the parents yelling.

I am appalled when I read virtuous parents making comments on social forums about their concern of the new variants, how mad they are at the unvaccinated, lamenting that their children aren’t vaccinated yet and what's taking the government so long, how they think everyone should start wearing masks again, and how irresponsible it is of the government not to instate mask mandates again and keep them in place.

As Neil Postman says when he observed that Huxley portrayed the future more accurately than Orwell:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.’”

What about those children dying from the COVID vaccine? Oh, not to worry. What’s a dead child here and there? It’s worth it to sacrifice a few children for the sake of society as a whole.

If you are willing to look, you will find horror story after horror story of children being maimed for life or dying from the vaccine. Oh, but it’s not the vaccine, it’s just a coincidence. How different from when we were told every death was a COVID death.

In a terrible outpouring on Tucker Carlson, yes that bad man who should be banned (maybe even executed) because he tells the stories no one on the honest CNN and MSM will stoop to tell, a mother talks of how her daughter is now in a wheelchair after participating in a trial for the vaccine. This mother thought she was doing the right thing by offering her children up for the trials.

Why, why, why? Why would anyone knowingly do this to their child, for an illness their child will no doubt never get sick from—all to save the lives of adults-which is also a lie since they aren’t likely to die or get sick from it either?

The day we started masking our children, not to mention ourselves, was the day our overlords knew they could do anything and we would comply.

It is almost unbearable to watch this mother talk and witness her pain.

It wasn’t long after her daughter received the vaccine that she started complaining of pain. “It feels like my heart is being ripped out through my neck,” was how she described it. There followed two and half months of abdominal and nerve pain that was all but unbearable

She was told she was “imagining it.” Physicians claim it is a functional neurological disorder, blamed on anxiety. Any time she saw any new specialist, they already had diagnosis from the last doctor. It’s her fault, she is too emotional.

Her symptoms now include not being able to digest food, she cannot go to the bathroom, she is having convulsions, she cannot walk and cannot even hold her head up.

No one from the Biden administration or health authorities, no one from Pfizer has reached out in any way. There is no interest in helping her. The lead person in the vaccine trial refuses to respond.

Imagine offering your child up on the altar of Big Pharma as this mother did, thinking she was doing the right thing as a good citizen, only to have her child processed and when she didn’t respond favorably, spit out by the State and discarded.

How is this any different than the game LaurenzSide tells children they should “never, under any circumstances play,” where any number of children can be sacrificed as long as the goal is attained?

It isn’t any different. And that should strike fear into all of our hearts. Not the fake fear of the virus. A real, justifiable fear that if we don't feel it, we have lost our ability to think reasonably.

There are billions of us to experiment on. This should give us nightmares. So much so that we rise up and fight against it. Yet we are so distracted by the latest tantalizing device that we are amusing ourselves to death.

When I was not more than five years old, I vividly remember going to Disneyland for the first time and going on the Peter Pan ride. Those were the old days, not long after the first Disneyland was built in Anaheim, California. That night, I had a dream that Peter Pan flew in my window, got me out of bed and taught me how to fly. We flew all over my room, all over the house, all over the world. It was the most wonderful dream I’d ever had.

I woke up the next morning, convinced it had really happened. I ran downstairs yelling to everyone, “I can fly, I can fly. Peter Pan taught me how to fly!”

To the great amusement of my parents and my two older siblings, I made everyone sit down in the living room while I climbed up on the sofa. I closed my eyes, wished with all my might that I could fly, and jumped off.

Kerspalt! I landed with a thump. I couldn’t fly!

Everyone laughed but it wasn’t funny to me. I knew I could fly. I knew it! Perhaps I hadn’t believed enough. I climbed back up again and mustered all the faith I had. I jumped off.

Kersplat! The same thing happened.

Long after everyone had left the living room I was still there, jumping off the sofa, determined that if I just believed enough, I would prove it to everyone that I really could fly.

I learned a lesson that day. No matter if I spent the rest of my life believing with all my heart, I would never be able to fly. I would be wasting my life on a dream that wasn’t real.

No longer. Hooked up to technology, a child can fly, can change into a unicorn, can be anything they want. This sounds wonderful. But it’s only wonderful if you are willing to make a deal with the devil in return: that you are no longer an individual, that you are no longer your own person, that you give up yourself to the control of outside forces.

If you are okay with that, then this new world is for you. Maybe I am just holding onto an old-fashioned ideal that we are better off without. I concede it’s possible. All my instincts tell me I am not wrong. But maybe all your instincts tell you something different.

If so, I encourage you to watch LaurenzSide. She’s sure to make you forget all those negative thoughts. She’s sure to make you feel great.

Thanks for reading. Would love to hear your thoughts. Please share.