(Cascadian National University, Lecture Hall)
Class Syllabus Here

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1d0ivyTTk]

Good morning, and thanks to everyone for a wonderful and thoughtful discussion after the last special lecture. While I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to shed some more light on the subject, I was not prepared for the breadth and depth of support, and I want to thank you for that.

Wow, got a little formal there. I do sometimes lapse into that when my mind drifts to that of the old Empire, and how grueling the process to truly understand it can be. It's not for the faint of heart, trust me. In order to get into the proper mindset, you must understand how socially isolated the average American actually was.

To start off, Many of us have traveled by car, of course, so that is not a foreign experience, but imagine doing it daily. Every day. Several times a day. When you were not inside your car, you were expected to carry your papers to drive one at all times. The entire economy, and the entire Empire was built off of this control, that every citizen would at all times be contained within a small metal box. Children were often unable to sleep at night unless their parents drove them around, cementing the central tenet of this cell as the place of safety, when in fact it was indeed a cell.

Owning a car was vital. If you did not own one, you were often not allowed to participate in the work fights, and without that ability, you of course could not afford a car. As a result, it became a cycle of dependency, with Americans unable to break free of the chains, because they were attached to their next meal.

Then within their homes, the propaganda was always there. It took many forms, from the blatant and obvious, which Americans often smugly felt did not affect them, or rather, only affected the weak minded among them, who of course, was nobody they knew. Of course, most Americans knew nearly no-one. They saw only the polished, outward appearances that would assure the cults would show approval. The truth they hid, and believed that everyone else was being honest.

Propaganda took on more insidious forms, with cultists jockeying to distract with supposedly serious concerns, tailored to as many individual Americans as they could. In that way, nearly every American felt special or particularly oppressed, when in fact it was quite nearly every American who was under the thumb. In other ways, the separation from reality became nearly the only escape for many.

Drugs were a popular escape, with the most popular and socially acceptable being Opium in its various forms. While we know it as a rare and valuable painkiller, to Americans they were as essential as breathing. Addiction was common, and rather than seeking other methods, these extremely powerful medications were often deployed at the first sign of discomfort, often by a Corporate Cult representative.

Other escapes included distilled reality. Americans would take essential human interaction and distill it down to the most harsh and guttural of emotions, then present that in a form as close as possible to "Natural". Think Theater or film, but instead of a set, they would film in the world, capturing the essences of horrid human tragedy then distilling it into a form meant to engage the base and cruel human emotions. Shootings reduced to clips of children running from buildings. Love affairs reduced to blatant betrayal and violence. The American Soldiers grabbing slaves off the street, shown as a justified and moral correction. And the people believed it.

Finally there were the games. These were everywhere, and managed to capture almost all of the creative and physical self improvement labor in the Empire. A man did not become a Boxer to become a better person, get into shape, or meet friends and learn from them. He became a boxer to win. A man did not play a strategy game for hours, learning the strategies and tactics to learn to think and to grow mentally, but rather to WIN. Often there would be ever higher ranks to aspire to in these activities. Ranks that were achievable only with single minded dedication to the activity. The economic incentive to reach these ranks was considerable, and so the entire direction of human growth became turned towards this end. Of course, the Average American was blind to these checks, for they could not see how their search for Eudaimonia was being channeled. The feelings of growth were expressed into a form that was easy to control.

American English had no word for Eudaimonia. The very concept would have been thought of as a ridiculous throwback to long discredited and simplistic philosophy. Yet that feeling of growth kept athletes coming back to sporting events, year after year. It kept gamers buying the next game to get to the "End" over and over. That feeling of growth and success that humans strive for was distilled into a cheap, quick, and overall addictive high.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy a good game the same as any of the rest of you. On a Friday night when I've had a long day and am tired, there's nothing like a little instant success to make me feel good. But it's empty victory, and just builds up mental fat. It's up to us to take that mental fat and turn it into mental muscle. But I'm not going to lecture you guys about getting to debate Class.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG5sFUROGX0]