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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Hidden chains need to be broken, so I’ve become a reluctant rebel

By David McElroy · November 26, 2020

I never wanted to be a rebel. I didn’t want to oppose the established order of my culture. In fact, I was raised to be a conformist.

My teachers taught me the same myths which you probably learned as a child. My country was great. Our leaders were wise. Right would prevail, because my culture stood for all that was good in the world.

Preachers and parents taught me to obey authority. They taught me to obey the rules I was given. I wasn’t taught to think for myself. I was taught to obey without question. I was trained to be a cog in a very large and well-oiled machine — one which would bring me happiness and prosperity one day.

I was happy with that picture. The world made sense to me. I had my place as a part of that culture. I would be a leader and I would one day do great things to help build the society which I had been taught to love.

But an honest man can’t close his eyes to what he’s seen. Even though it’s not convenient for me, I’ve become a rebel against a culture which binds us with hidden chains and which is leading most of us to spiritual death.

I’m a rebel against what modern culture has become, but I’m a reluctant rebel. It would be so much easier if I could go back to believing what I once believed. There would be less to struggle against if I could just be a part of that great society which I once believed I was joining.

Holidays such as Thanksgiving leave me thinking about the idealistic myths which I once believed so completely. There’s nothing wrong with Thanksgiving — either in concept or in practice — but such holidays represent what I had believed the world would be.

Days such as this still represent what I want my world to be.

I still want holidays that center around the values which I once believed my culture represented. I want them to be about family and love and good will to others.

I don’t want such days to represent consumption and angry competition and unhappiness. I don’t want them to be about hiding from unpleasant truths and even hiding from the lies on which we’ve built our lives. I don’t want them to be about squabbling relatives or hateful political arguments.

It’s impossible to live a “normal” American life and have what I want — because the culture we have built for ourselves leads inevitably to the lies and unhappiness and over-consumption which characterizes our holidays. And our entire culture.

When I first realized something was wrong in our culture, I thought we could just fix things at the edges. I thought we could reform the society by returning to what I thought the country was intended to be. But I slowly realized that even that was mistaken, because I was still relying on the dishonest old myths about what we were from the start.

I finally realized the problems were all the way at the core of what the culture is based on — and the more I studied it, the more I realized that things are getting much worse, not better.

I’ve talked with you repeatedly about rejecting Postmodern ideas and going back to the foundations of the Enlightenment. We have to go back that far to find the concepts on which a sane and moral culture can thrive in peace. You won’t find it in the dehumanization of Modernism, but you also won’t find it in the nihilistic reaction to Modernism which is Postmodernism.

Living a life which is sane and emotionally healthy by my standards has slowly become “radical” by this culture’s standards. To step back from the conformity and collectivism and nihilism demanded by this culture is now considered weird and radical.

Once you understand that — and if you want a life of meaning and love — you don’t have any choice but to become a rebel against the ugliness of what this culture has become.

I still want what I once believed my society to be. I want a culture that’s built on family and love and decency and honor. I desperately want those things — and I want to live with people who value those things as much as I do.

We can’t change this dying culture. Most people will continue to live in lies and unhappiness and nihilism. We can’t stop them.

But we can do something different. At least for ourselves.

I want to talk some more about that — about what it might look like and what it might mean — but for now, just accept that there’s an alternative.

You don’t have to live by the standards of this dying culture. You don’t have to accept screwed-up values. You don’t have to be so miserable. You don’t have to accept your children growing up to be like their peers and learning to be nihilistic consumers. If you ever see the hidden chains that bind you to all that, you won’t be able to pretend they’re not there.

The good news is that you can change all that. At least for yourself. But you have to join me. You have to become a rebel, too. You have no idea how much change we can create together.

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Ever since a neighbor strung some decorative light Ever since a neighbor strung some decorative lights in his back yard a year or so ago, I’ve been trying to figure out how to photograph them. In person, the effect is stunning on the yard, but I’ve struggled to figure out any sort of perspective that would be interesting. I’m still not entirely happy with this, but it’s th best I’ve been able to come up with so far. #lights #backyard #birmingham #alabama
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The moonlight is bright and widely diffused in the The moonlight is bright and widely diffused in the heavy fog in my neighborhood tonight. #moonlight #trees #night #birmingham #alabama
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For “throwback Thursday,” here’s a shot of M For “throwback Thursday,” here’s a shot of Molly’s late sister, Bessie, who I lost almost three years ago. This was shortly after I brought Molly and Bessie in as kittens in about 2008. They looked pretty much identical as kittens and grew up to look like twins as well. #cats #tbt
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It’s 4 in the morning, but Merlin is still awake It’s 4 in the morning, but Merlin is still awake with me in the bedroom to keep my company. Everybody else has given up and gone to sleep. #cat #cats #catstagram #catsofinstagram #cute #cutecat #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #merlin2024 #instacat #ilovecats #birmingham #alabama #caturday
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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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