James,

It appears your viewpoint is becoming mainstream.

Don Quotays.

"That is the final boss.  You can be red pilled about race, ethnicity, history or conservatism, but still believe public opinion matters. 

You only become fully aware when you defeat that final boss and realize that the people in charge are indifferent to public opinion and often contemptuous of it. 

The reason elections change nothing is the entirety of the political class is in agreement on most everything.  Mainly, they agree that they are in charge and your opinion does not matter."

…

Oh Don Quotays, I am honored to be placed in opinion next to the Zman, who I have thought for some six years is the most astute political commentator of the Redpilled movement, for lack of a better term. I do not understand politics and he explains this form of social shepherding so that I can grasp it at least for the moment.

I get to listen to him with Bob in the late summer and early autumn while sorting rose hips and elderberries and drinking coffee. I am most impressed that he has made roughly a post a day for some dozen years. He is a nonfiction writing stud.

His job, his role, as the steward of a casement pond of fringe minority discontent provides value to the same people who have tolerated my misbehavior. When I head east I will be contacted by a former military man working as an intelligence contractor most likely, and enjoy a friendly debriefing over beer. We serve the same shambling leviathan in our odd way, these men and the Zman and this hobo.

He is assigned the main hall in the ministry of fringe minority discontent and helps narrate the otherwise bemused plight of his listeners and readers, who tend to be men who have achieved success through hard work in compliance with a system that they now see turning against them. His symposium graphic, placing his voice among the powerless advisors and entertainers to the barbarian king’s semi-civilized court and his candid analysis of ancient and modern subjects is an opiate of sorts, a soothing therapy for the minds that cannot look away from the lie and can’t embrace the chemistry of drug addiction that the multitude does.

I share a small minority of readers with Zman, he charged with ministering to the middle and upper class and me the working and criminal class. Such statements as made above would make perfect sense to Edward Gibbon and scholars of his age, but must be gradually introduced to the comic book Murican mind lest rage or disbelief deafen the ears and close the eyes. Zman’s political commentary, at first seemingly in service to “getting our guy in office,” and more recently considered of a more stoic view spiced with the cynic’s humor, reminds me of my own coaching in 2002, and my combat and urban blight writing since 2011.

When Ron, the head coach, talked Chief into fighting over his weight class at the other guy’s gym, well, it was not my job, as Ron saw it, to get a win. Ron had breached trust and was using a young man’s honor as a diplomatic offering to Mister Mack Lewis, the other gym’s owner. My job was to keep Chief from getting knocked out, and we did it, practiced nothing but guarding and clinching and made it the worst fight of the night, delivering Chief unharmed back to his worried wife.

Likewise, when advising young men in thousands of articles concerning survival under the sneaker of Tyrone Crow and the batons of Officer Blew, I advise against trying to win, to not fight the system, but instead playing for the draw and avoiding disaster.

I have made the following statement before and will repeat myself here and suggest that the person seeking peace-of-mind and unable to look away from the evil that our rulers do, that he should avoid reading anything written on politics, war or statesmanship after 1940, and avoid reading all philosophy written after the 1500s. This will do much to calm the soul without dulling the sight, but rather heightening insight.

We wander and wonder here among the towering Peaks of Deception. It will be more useful to understand that water flows downward and find our way to firmer footing according to that maxim, then to trust any of the many hucksters shilling for their rope-walk to paradise.

The most concise and example rich description of the workings of state power are Edward Gibbon’s first 8 Chapters of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A good primer on what the state is can by had from roughly 1927 in Alfred J. Knock’s Our Enemy The State. Gibbon’s most insightful observation is that any political system which excludes the “multitude from choosing their own master” is better than democracy, for the simple fact that the wisest and the most numerous will never be permitted by the actual holders of power to select a leader of the human order.