Living in Bizarro World

The point of Bizarro World is to make the real world appear so chaotic, so dangerous, so uninhabitable, that we will happily give ourselves over to the Technocrats who promise to make it all better.

One-time or recurring donations can now be made at Ko-Fi.

You can listen to me read this essay here:

Do you ever get the feeling you’re living in Bizarro World? I do. Every day this world gets more and more bizarre.

Bizarro World (also known as Htrae, which is "Earth" spelled backwards) is a fictional planet that first appeared in American comic books published by DC Comics in the early 1960s. Htrae is a cube-shaped planet, “where nothing is true, and all is spectacle”. In Bizarro World, everything is the opposite of what it’s supposed to be. Bizarro, the antithesis of Superman, lives on Htrae, as do perverted versions of Lois Lane and other antiheroes, such as Batzarro, the World's Worst Detective.

Society is ruled by the Bizarro Code which states:

"Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!"

Some examples of episodes would be a con-artist selling Bizarro bonds: "Guaranteed to lose money for you" and Htrae inhabitants eagerly snapping them up. When it comes time to investigate the crime, the mayor appoints Bizarro #1, "Because you are stupider than the entire Bizarro police force put together". Being stupider than anyone else is perceived as the greatest compliment.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it is.

Jim Lee, the most famous, world-renowned comic book artist, writer, editor and publisher, of DC Comics would no doubt find all of this terribly amusing.

If an award were to go to the most influential creators of our Bizarro World, and Jim Lee were to present it, I place my bets he would bestow the honor on Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen.

As Jonathan Tauplin recently noted in a Vanity Fair article:

If we are to inquire how we got to a place of radical income inequality, post-truth reality, and the looming potential for a second American Civil War, we need look no further than these four—“the biggest wallets,” to paraphrase historian Timothy Snyder, “paying for the most blinding lights.”

Tauplin calls these men The Technocrats in recognition of the influence of the technocracy movement, founded in the 1930s by Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman”.

The Technocrats make up a kind of interlocking directorate of Silicon Valley, each investing in or sitting on the boards of the others’ companies. Their vast digital domain controls your personal information; affects how billions of people live, work, and love; and sows online chaos, inciting mob violence and sparking runs on stocks. These four men have long been regarded as technologically progressive heroes, but they are actually part of a broader antidemocratic, authoritarian turn within the tech world, deeply invested in preserving the status quo and in keeping their market-leadership positions or near-monopolies—and their multi-billion-dollar fortunes secure from higher taxes. (“Competition is for suckers,” Thiel once posited.)

CBC News

According to a 2021 CBC News article about The Technocrats, “Back in the first half of the 20th century, a group called Technocracy Incorporated wanted to reorganize society by putting scientists in charge. The movement flamed out, but its underlying message still appeals to many in Silicon Valley”.

Clearly, Musk was influenced by his grandfather in his quest to inhabit Mars.

Musk doesn’t talk about a Technate on Earth, but he has invested billions developing rockets to send people to Mars, with the intent to colonize it. He wants to see a city of a million people there by 2050.

In 2019, Musk tweeted, “accelerating Starship development to build the Martian Technocracy.”

Tauplin says it well:

Indeed, they are American oligarchs, controlling online access for billions of users on Facebook, Twitter, Threads, Instagram, and WhatsApp, including 80 percent of the US population. Moreover, from the outside, they appear to be more interested in replacing our current reality—and our economic system, imperfect as it is—with something far more opaque, concentrated, and unaccountable, which, if it comes to pass, they will control.

I use the term techno-determinism to describe the path the Technocrats have dictated for our country because they have sold, and we have bought into, the idea that they are going to deliver us a bright future. The future they are now selling us, however—crypto fortunes, the merger of the human and the computer via AI, the prospect of spending our lives in the Metaverse or on Mars—is a lie.

The path to removing us from the real world and putting us into an alternative one that they control is paved in chaos, fear and a sense where everything that we once thought was true is not. We are told we must learn to accept absurdity as common sense and common sense as absurdity.

Let’s look at this bizarro world in which we live, one that not long ago we would have never believed would be taken seriously and yet, it is now embraced. It is a return of The Technocrats, where science is king, albeit a science that would only make sense to inhabitants of Bizarro World.

First of all, we have “the most powerful man on earth”, Joe Biden, the President of the United States. Except that he is anything but powerful. He is weak, he is confused, he is basically out of his friggin’ mind, and yet there he is, presumably running the world. Except of course he isn’t.

And here we have First Lady, Jill Biden, proudly standing with some of her friends, a host of Drag Queens. I’m not sure who is the scariest one in the photo, perhaps the one in the blue suit? Why? Because she is the wife of the most powerful man in the world, and this is supposed to look perfectly normal to us. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure this photo is real, but then, that means it fits perfectly into Bizarro World, too.

In this upside-down world, it is reasonable that in the photos below, “the dude on the left is a brave woman and the woman on the right is a white supremacist:

Just to clarify, that’s Dr. Rachel Levine on the left, the U. S. Assistant Secretary of Health. Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, an ex-marine, stands on the right. The media claimed she was a “black mouth” with “white ideas.”

Thanks to the influence of the media, and people like Levine being in charge of our health, more children and adolescents are identifying as transgender and are being offered medical treatment, especially in the US according to researchers at General Psychiatry/BMJ Journals.

This led to bizarro responses from conservatives, adding confusion to the controversy and proving further that very few in the media, whether left or right, are really interested in truth, only in getting the most attention. The Twitter post below wasn’t true but that didn’t stop conservatives from eagerly hopping on the train of “disinformation” because it took them to the conclusion they wanted to make. It doesn’t need to be true it just needs to reinforce what I already believe.

Sadly, the photo below is real. A teen boy was just crowned homecoming queen, beating out four other girls in a Missouri school. Here he is with his proud parents and the other hopefuls, all smiling bravely, because they fear to do otherwise. Or perhaps they have been so brainwashed they believe in Bizarro World.

And the tragedy of vegan raw food diet influencer Zhanna Samsonova who shared a chilling message on Instagram just days before she allegedly “died of starvation” on July 21. And there is a host of starvation influencers, watched by millions as they slowly die online.

If there was ever a bizarro statement for our times, it’s what Samosonova posted on Instagram two weeks before her death, a post that generated 27.6 million views on TikTok.

“Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize it’s meaningless.”

Bizarrely, what is the number one career goal of most youth? To be a social media influencer.

Does anyone remember this from the Covid Bizarro Era? Nothing took us further into this upside-down and inside-out world than Covid.

A Santa Claus being arrested for doing what Santa is supposed to do, bring good cheer to all on Christmas.

Never fear, as all was made right again when superhero Anthony Fauci went on Sesame Street and declared, ““I went to the North Pole myself and vaccinated Santa Claus.”

How about actor Charlize Theron doing her celebrity virtue thing by magically turning her adopted daughter into a boy by putting him into a dress and giving him a new hairstyle.

What could be weirder than the photo below of a priest shooting a baby with a water gun at a baptism to keep everyone safe from Covid. Well, now that I think about it, there are those who would say this is the safest distance any priest should maintain from a child.

Here’s a highly educated woman proudly sharing with the rest of the Bizarro World:

And here’s some advice for tennis players in regard to tennis balls. “You can kick their balls but not touch them.”

Yes, that’s really what she said.

But what could be more bizarre than a recent video of AFU’s Territorial Defense Forces spokesperson, Sarah Ashton (a man dressed in Zalensky’s favored khaki color, sporting a blond wig and fake breasts).

Ashton lectures us about how America (history’s lone republic and the world’s greatest superpower), is saving the day and how Ukrainians are humbled by the support they are receiving from the American people. Chilling, in his righteously forthright voice, he tells us that while journalists are heroes and have “the right” to report on what they want…

all those Russian propagandists who are spreading lies and false narratives are not journalists. They are information agents spreading chaos and wreaking havoc across the globe. These enemies of freedom and democracy will have to answer for their crimes in a court of law.

Yes, yes! It isn’t the United States’ mad push for this war that is causing chaos, it’s the evil journalists who are reporting the truth about it.

This bizarro person looks and acts like he stepped straight out of a James Bond movie. Surely this can’t be real. But it is. Or is it?

Meanwhile, our Vice President, Kamala Harris (remember how in the beginning we all were chided we had better pronounce her name correctly, or else—and now it’s Kyev, no longer Kiev, by the way) just keeps on laughing hysterically, more and more hysterically as the months go by.

God forbid any of these psychos would be examined by a psychiatrist. What a disaster that would be. The psychiatrists are all crazy, too.

What is the point of Bizarro World, anyway?

It is to make the real world appear so chaotic, so dangerous, so uninhabitable, that we will happily give ourselves over to the Technocrats who promise to make it all better. And how will they do that? Through human-enhancement technologies. We are constantly being told how lacking we are as humans. We need all these enhancements to better ourselves, to protect ourselves, to enter a golden age.

The Golden Age of Transhumanism.

The Technocrats have four projects that they are foisting on us and that we need to reject. To quote Tauplin:

…the Metaverse, crypto, interplanetary colonization, and transhumanism, not to mention AI—are an existential risk to the world in political, economic, and, perhaps most fundamentally, moral terms. The moral danger comes from the fact that all four projects embody the first steps toward a realized transhumanism. The transhumanists believe that technological and biological enhancements will allow humans to live for several lifetimes, migrate to other planets, and merge our brains with computers so that our individual consciousnesses can live forever. Web3 is the first step to a wearable human technological augmentation. Living on Mars would require a permanent technological augmentation. And transhumanism itself envisions a point at which human and machine meld into some new species of cyborg. It is a movement that would undo the idea at the heart of political liberalism: equal rights for all. Instead, one’s wealth would determine one’s future prospects. Transhumanism is, to quote philosopher and political scientist Francis Fukuyama, “the world’s most dangerous idea.”

No longer will you have to live in Bizarro World. You will live in your cubicle connected to the Vast Machine, “A futuristic immersive virtual world where we can work, play, relax, socialize, and do more.”

We are being presented with all these ways to be saved from reality. Don’t fall for the traps that technologies such as Web 3.0, VR, AR, ubiquitous 5G high-speed internet, Blockchain, Crypto, NFTs, and others are setting for you, along with remote work and online socialization, will make you freer. No, bitcoin will not save you. Sorry.

What can we do about all of this?

Well, here’s some advice from Mary Oliver.

Wasn't it Emerson who said, 'My life is for itself and not for a spectacle'? I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private.

The Technocrats are pushing their way into every corner of our lives. They are seducing us with promises of how they will end the chaos. But just remember, they are the ones creating it. The world is a perfection of yin and yang, but the Technocrats are systematically destroying that balance. They’re making us believe we live in Bizarro World and no, we don’t need any superheroes to bring it back. We just need ordinary people to reject the lies and more and more people are doing this. We needed to remember that our greatest superpower, the one the Technocrats want us to think cannot be trusted, is Common Sense.

Just a small dose of Common Sense and Bizarro World is exposed for the ludicrous place that it is. Live free. Take back your lives. Live in the moment of enjoying a sunrise, a sunset, the sound of birds in the trees. The real colors of the mountains and the real sound of a waterfall. Not the enhanced fakery of virtual worlds. Get rid of any device that is attached to your person. Don’t rely on a machine to tell you how to think or what to eat or drink. Use your natural instincts. They are there for a reason.