Mental toughness is something that can be taught... to a point. This is the entire purpose of basic training methods used in the military: To take mundane details and elevate them in the minds of trainees while wearing them down with physical punishment. The goal is to condition the mind to ignore distraction and to ignore fear and pain while focusing on the task at hand. Failure is not an option in war, just as it is not an option in survival. Those who embrace distraction and embrace failure because they think it will make things easier for them are filtered out of the recruitment pool, or the gene pool.
It is no coincidence that the U.S. military is dealing with some of the worst recruitment conditions they have ever seen in terms of people being physically and mentally capable of finishing basic training. The Pentagon currently estimates that 77 percent of young Americans are unfit for recruitment without a waiver for obesity, drug use and mental health problems. Meaning, Gen Z is so unfit physically and mentally that if there was a major war, almost 80 percent of them would be erased from existence.
The problem has gotten so bad that militaries in the U.S. and throughout the west are being forced to lower standards just to meet minimum personnel goals. One can argue that many young people don't want to join the military anyway, but this is beside the point. Even if they wanted to, they would be incapable.
There are a number of reasons for this development, but I would suggest that the spread of leftist ideology among 63 percent of Americans aged 18-29 has created a survival vacuum. A generation of mental weaklings. It's important to remember that younger people have adopted more liberal views for decades, but the political left is not liberal today. The leftists of today are full-bore Marxists, both economically and culturally. They support establishment centralization, they support economic centralization, they support corporate centralization, they support authoritarianism and censorship, they support moral relativism, and they applaud the concept of an all-pervasive welfare state.
In 1980 you might have been able to find a large number of mentally tough people that considered themselves on the left. Today, you will not find anyone.
With America hovering in a precarious netherworld between stagflationary crisis and deflationary crisis depending on which poison the Federal Reserve chooses to give the country, the stage has been set for an economic disaster similar to the Great Depression or worse. In two years, our system, which is already dealing with a number of threats including high prices and supply chain instability, will not remain functional in the manner most people are accustomed.
If we accept this inevitability, we must then ask a logical question: Who is going to rebuild? Whoever inherits the mantle will either bring America back to freedom and prosperity or plunge our society into perpetual tyranny. It all depends on who survives the crisis.
One thing that gives me some hope is the fact that leftists as a sub-group of our population are completely incapable of surviving a major economic crisis event. This is not to say that I wish them all to die; I'm only pointing out the reality that most of them won't make it because they are ill-equipped to handle a calamity. Here are the reasons why a post-collapse world would probably be devoid of leftists...
Leftists Thrive On Crisis... But Die Out During Collapse
Leftists tend to exploit crisis and tragedy to shore up power and expand their numbers through fear, but there's a problem with this tactic. If the crisis is fabricated, a tempest in a teapot, then they do very well; if the crisis turns into an actual disaster with real-world consequences including financial decline, supply chain disruptions, shortages, and civil unrest, they have no tools to deal with the effects other than mob action and looting.
What happens if they use mob action and looting when the rule of law is no longer a factor in a country with millions of guns? They will die, by the tens of thousands, as people defend their businesses and homes. The violent hordes we witnessed during the BLM riots would not last long during a collapse scenario where people are more inclined to fight back.
Leftists Are Anti-Preparedness
The political left has spent the better part of the past 15 years demonizing the concept of preparedness as a tinfoil hat philosophy for “right-wing extremists.” They have set themselves up for complete failure by refusing to acknowledge the practicality of prepping, just so they can attack their political opponents. The stupidity of it is truly mind-boggling.
There are some indications that the COVID lockdowns may have shocked a small number of them out of their foolishness. It's hard to deny the threat of economic collapse when the beginnings of collapse are right in front of your face. That said, prepping is not the only requirement for survival, and progressives buying a few months of food and some guns is not going to save them.
Leftists Have An Aversion To Hardship
The vast majority of people that argue in favor of an expanding welfare state are on the left. While conservatives support individual charity for those that deserve it, leftists believe that people need to be forced by the government to provide and pay for others who may not deserve it. This ideal is driven by their desire to avoid hardship.
I often find that leftists have delusions of grandeur. They assume that they are destined for great things, that they are smarter than the rest of us and that work or sacrifice are problems relegated to the rural “peasants” in “flyover country.” Their vision of work is a daycare, a place to socialize, find comfort and self-identity, do the minimal amount of labor required and then collect a paycheck. Just look how leftist-dominated Twitter was being operated a few months ago. It was not a workplace, it was a day spa for lunatics.
These kinds of people are not equipped to endure backbreaking struggle to build a survivable environment. They wouldn't know where to begin.
Leftists Have No Practical Skill Sets
The avoidance of technical skill sets is a real problem for progressives. There are a handful of people on the left that engage in micro-farming and other basic skills as a form of activism, but they are few and their methods are limited by their ideology. As noted above, leftists believe themselves to be too valuable to be wasted on production. Rather, they see themselves as “management,” the people in charge of the people that do the actual work.
A person could get by on that kind of thinking in a first-world environment where office jobs, tech jobs and social work is the norm, but in a collapse environment there are no management positions, there are no office workers, there are no elementary school teachers, there are no trust and safety advisers, there are no platform moderators and there are no bureaucrats. You either have a valued knowledge set that can be traded, or you have nothing. You can either produce necessities for yourself, or you can't.
The development of the information age and the data-driven economy of first-world nations has made matters even worse by convincing people that data is a currency. This is a concept that leftists in particular adore because they think labor will become a thing of the past; they will only need their brains and laptop to provide everything they need. This is a delusion. The “Metaverse” is a facade, a con, and there will always be a need for humans to dig in the dirt, to forage and hunt, to farm and to build with their own hands. As the economy derails further, progressives are going to realize this too late.
Leftists Rely on Government To Fix Their Problems
If the idea of taking matters into your own hands is abhorrent to you, then you might be a leftist. Leftists view individual action during a crisis as almost criminal; it is important to them that the correct authorities with the correct permissions handle any dangerous situation. Leftists love to defer to the “experts” because this takes the responsibility out of their hands, along with the blame should something go wrong.
But what happens when government is not functional enough to save the day? What happens when inflation or supply chains or personnel shortages make it impossible for government officials to help? What happens when government officials don't want to help? What happens when they are corrupt and want to see you suffer?
Leftists rarely consider such possibilities. For them, the idea that government could break down, that the grid could break down and that the rule of law could break down is a conspiracy theory. It's only happened hundreds of times around the world in modern history, but because they have never experienced the threat personally, they think it is impossible. These are the kinds of people that die very quickly during collapse.
Leftists Value Feelings Over Reason
The root foundation of leftist ideology is that everything is relative according to one's personal feelings. That is to say, they believe that their feelings shape their reality, and that “their truth” is the only truth that matters. There are some subjective truths that are near-universal which is why moral conscience is a thing that exists in every culture in the world. That said, personal ideals are still subject to the forces of nature.
You cannot pretend that you are not starving when you are starving. You cannot pretend that you are not dehydrated when you are desperately thirsty. You cannot feel your way out of a crisis, the crisis is not subject to your fantasies, the crisis will step on your throat and teach you otherwise.
At bottom, their feelings do not matter. They are irrelevant. And this is a lesson leftists will learn as the system continues to degrade. They can cry and scream and wail and make all the demands they want for fairness and equity and welfare but in the end, they will face the clarity of self-reliance or they will face the Ferryman.
It's not my purpose here to revel in the erasure of the political left. I am only pointing out that leftist ideology is a product of extremely safe and controlled environments where people have the privilege to engage in frivolity.
They think they want deconstruction. They think they want chaos as a means to break the system and rebuild it in their image. What they don't realize is that if they get what they want most of them will die in the process and they will not be around to rebuild.
To truth and knowledge,
Brandon Smith
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