Locusts, Hollywood, and the Valley of Ashes: Individualism Versus Collectivism

By David Sinclair

They are the cheated, they are the crushed, they are the cursed. They pray for the Day of the Locust when the Swarm will deliver them.

The sirens are sounding. The locusts are coming. Where will you hide?

The world is full of the cheated. That’s why the world is about to blow up. Nearly everyone belongs to the cheated. Who’s doing the cheating? It’s the 1%. Why do the 99% endure it? They always have. That’s the great mystery.

Get out of the way of the Swarm. No one gets out of this alive. When the Swarm arrives, judgment is delivered and the sentence carried out.

The locusts are heading to Hollywood to destroy it. That's where the myths are created that keep the 1% in power. That's the laboratory of fraud, the factory of illusions. The locusts will turn it into a Valley of Ashes. Tinseltown will be set on fire. They're gonna burn it down. Shall we all cheer?

Locusts start off as individuals before they join the collective. That's when they become powerful, an unstoppable force of nature.

Hollywood is the home of liberalism, but is it liberal at all? Isn't it devoted to a narcissistic, super-rich cabal trying to get inside everyone's heads and convert them to the strange religion of celebrity worship? The Beatles said they were more famous than Jesus Christ. Celebrities have displaced the old gods and become the new gods, just as the Olympians pushed the Titans off Mount Olympus and became the new rulers of the world.

Come inside and explore the strangest of worlds – the one where you join with the locusts to devour Tinseltown, and, with hope in your heart and a smile on your face, march through the Valley of Ashes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781447831488

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Locusts, Hollywood, and the Valley of Ashes

Individualism Versus Collectivism

David Sinclair

Copyright © David Sinclair 2022

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4478-3148-8

Imprint: Lulu.com

Table of Contents

Locusts, Hollywood, and the Valley of Ashes

Patriot Games

We’re All Critics Now

The Premiere

The Skull Flags

The Shit Show

The Gospel of the Tube

Blow it Up

The Fire Is Coming

When the Locusts Came

Fatal Attraction

The Dream

The Liberal Murderers

Path Or Destination?

The Successful Crime

The Locust Army

Consciousness

America

The Murder Game

The Cruel Agenda

Nietzsche

Enlightenment and Karma

The Transition to Individualism

The Conundrum

The Rise of the Cult of the Individual

Mass Age, Mess Age or Im-Age?

Swallowed by the Rabbit Hole

The War of Regressives and Progressives

Downstream

The War

Conclusion

Patriot Games

In a time-travel episode of Star Trek: Voyager, set on twentieth century earth, an American patriot says to a member of the Voyager crew: There are two forces at work in the world. The drive toward collectivity and the drive toward individuality. You are the former, and I am the latter.

In Freud’s model of the psyche, these two drives are built in, and are in direct conflict with each other. They are the id (individualism) and the superego (collectivism).

Freud wrote, [The id] is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learned from our study of the dreamwork, and, of course, the construction of neurotic symptoms and most of that is of a negative character, and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations. … It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.

The id is the element that seeks total freed of the individual, to do whatever it likes, regardless of others. It hates any constraint being applied to it by the collective. It hates the collective’s laws, rules, and regulations.

The superego is everything the id loathes, a shrine to the collective. Freud wrote, It would not surprise us if we were to find a special psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured and which, with this end in view, constantly watches the actual ego and measures it by that ideal. If such an agency does exist, we cannot possibly come upon it as a discovery – we can only recognize it; for we may reflect that what we call our ‘conscience’ has the required characteristics. … In the course of development the superego also takes on the influence of those who have stepped into the place of parents – educators, teachers, people chosen as ideal models. … the installation of the superego can be described as a successful instance of identification with the parental agency.

The superego is all about your parents and parent-substitutes, including abstractions such as the laws of the land. Your parents, provided they are decent people, are watching you and expecting you to behave properly, respectfully, with consideration for others. You must live up to the notion of the ideal citizen, the perfect member of society, the heaven-bound soul.

The id is destined for hell. It loves John Milton’s Lucifer: What though the field be lost? All is not Lost; the unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and the courage never to submit or yield. … Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

The id is an anarchist and libertarian. The superego is a communist, or a theocracy, or a police state.

The reality is that almost no actual individuals exist. It’s an untenable situation. The one can never beat the many. As Kafka said, In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world. This could be rephrased as: In the individual’s struggle against the collective, bet on the collective.

In the USA, which likes to think of itself as the land of the free individual, most of these so-called free people are actually fanatical members of the God Squad. They are evangelical Christians who submit unconditionally to the Cosmic Superego – their Christian God. These people are anything other than truly free individuals. They are absolutely constrained by the Commandments of their religion. It’s not in fact the collective or the superego to which they object. What incurs their wrath and resistance is any collective or superego which they dislike, i.e., anything liberal or left wing. They love the Christian collective and the Christian God as their Superego. They are individuals only in relation to the forces they hate, namely anything non-Christian, non-conservative, non-right-wing. Otherwise, they are obedient members of the collective, whether the conservative collective, libertarian collective, Christian collective, GOP collective, the capitalist collective, the nationalist collective, or whatever. Their individualism manifests itself only in opposition to collectives such as socialism, communism, liberalism, atheism, the Democratic Party, the State.

These right-wing Americans are pseudo-individualists. They imagine themselves as individualists when in fact they are collectivists who style themselves individualists only to strike political postures against the collectives they don’t want to join (as opposed to those they do).

Give them the opportunity, and they will all be wearing the same red hat, the same red T-shirt, bearing the same slogans, and all cheering the same things and waving the same flag – perfect collectivists, all marching in lockstep singing the same songs!

The other-directed Woke like to see themselves as a big happy family, a liberal, inclusive collective, all coming to each other’s help.

The tradition-directed, such as Muslims, like to see themselves as a worldwide community, all coming to each other’s assistance (against the infidels).

The parent-directed conservatives and libertarians see themselves as heroic individuals or families – as non-conformists and dissenters – standing up against tyranny. But of course most of these people belong to one Christian sect or another. They think they are the Saved, the Elect. They’re just another collective, but one which chooses not to emphasize the collective in most situations, and instead emphasizes the individual and the family. Faith, family and flag is the slogan that sums up these people. Their religion (faith) is their primary collective, and their nation (flag) is their tertiary collective. Their supposed secondary collective is the family, but this is actually their main collective: family before all else; family first. The family is a small collective where the individual members are obvious, so people who prioritize the family – the smallest effective collective – also automatically prioritize the individual. They dislike the non-family, the community, the greater collective, if it ever threatens their family, or in any way stands in the way of its success.

There’s a fascinating creature that can switch between individual mode and collective mode, and it changes its physical characteristics in the process. It’s the locust.

Hojun Song and his research colleagues wrote, Locusts are grasshoppers that can form dense migrating swarms through an extreme form of density-dependent phenotypic plasticity ... in which cryptically colored, shy individuals can transform into conspicuously colored, gregarious individuals in response to increases in population density. In addition to color and behavioral changes, these insects exhibit density-dependent morphological, reproductive, developmental, physiological, biochemical, molecular, and ecological changes. In nature, depending on local population density, locusts are polyphenic along the continuum between two extreme phenotypes, known as solitarious phase and gregarious phase. This syndrome of coordinated changes is known as locust phase polyphenism.

The locust has two phases: solitary (individual), and gregarious (collective). As locust density increases, locusts become gregarious. As the density falls, they become solitary. They can alternately inhabit two worlds, that of the individual and that of the collective, and they change their physical nature (their phenotype) depending on what state they are in. They exhibit phenotypic plasticity.

Humans exhibit mental phenotypic plasticity. Sometimes they are under id (individual) control and obey the pleasure principle, and sometimes under superego (collective) control and obey the morality principle. The agent that decides which mode to be in is the ego, which obeys the reality principle.

The world divides into those who emphasize freedom from the collective (these people support negative liberty), and those who emphasize collective action for the greater good (these people support positive liberty).

Philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote, The freedom which consists in being one’s own master [positive liberty], and the freedom which consists in not being prevented from choosing as I do by other men [negative liberty], may, on the face of it, seem concepts at no great logical distance from each other – no more than negative and positive ways of saying much the same thing. Yet the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ notions of freedom historically developed in divergent directions not always by logically reputable steps, until, in the end, they came into direct conflict with each other.

This is a fascinating point. How can these two ideas of liberty be so opposed? Think of the respective understanding of freedom of the Freudian id and the Freudian superego. They have diametrically opposed views on freedom. The id is not about self-mastery. Anything but. It’s about the release of self, surrendering to what the self wants right here and right now. It must deny itself nothing. It must fight anything that blocks it, that seeks to stop it expending its energy. It’s all about freedom from constraint, in order to fully explore its core desires. I must not be stopped is its defining idea. What I choose, I must be allowed to do. The emphasis is always on the individual. Self-expression is everything.

What of the superego? It has a wholly different worldview. It’s not about exploring base desires, as the id is. It’s not the Devil. Instead, it’s about becoming optimal, about leveling up, about becoming God. It’s about self-denial, self-overcoming, sublimation.

How else can you be your own master if you cannot master yourself, if you cannot master your primitive desires? You are free because you know what you want to be and can pursue that goal, that ego ideal. It’s all about freedom for. This freedom for can be exercised in two ways: through self-actualization (the actualization of I), or through collective-actualization (the actualization of We).

How can you truly be free unless everyone is free too? How can you be actualized unless everyone around you is actualized too? Can one man be free if everyone else is a slave? The free man is no free man if every slave wants to kill him. The I that imagines it can be free in the absence of the freedom of We is always deluded. That is the exact delusion of the id, which cares only for itself. It is heedless of others, or actively contemptuous of them.

The id’s idea of freedom is that you are free to act as you will right now, as you are. You are not aiming to become anything. The future is not an issue. You are fully in the moment, and nothing must get in your way. You are an expression of freedom from.

American individualists invariably hate the power of the State and see it as a constraint on them. They want to be free from the State. They want to do their own thing, as they are, right now. They already feel themselves perfect, as devout Christians, God-fearing conservatives, and eager capitalists. What could be better? They cannot imagine being higher. They have no dreams of becoming God. That is a blasphemous and evil idea to them. They believe that perfection already exists – in God – and their perfection, such as it is, comes from obeying God. They must be free from any force that stands between them and their God and their current way of life. Any change to the way things are done is a potential threat to their identity, their way of life, their God, hence must be fought. They must be free from change.

The collectivists see that things are horribly wrong with society and everything must change. To optimize life, individually and collectively, all the things that hold back progress must be abolished.

For the collectivists, grand transformative projects must be undertaken to drive humanity to perfection (immanentize the eschaton). Current humanity is defective, and must be cured. Humanity must be free for changing itself in radical ways. A whole new humanity must emerge.

The collectivists are future-oriented. They do not look to the past for their inspiration. They see it as the horror that must be overcome.

For the individualists, they are not defective. They are everything they ought to be. The past is glorious and all traditions must be preserved. Everything must stay the same. The status quo is divine and whatever threatens it is Satanic.

The individualists are present- and past-oriented. The future is welcome only if it resembles what has already been. It must not be unrecognizable. It must not have new gods, new institutions, new constitutions, new ways of doing things, new people in charge. The State is the Whore of Babylon because it has the capacity, the power, to radically change the future, if it wishes, if it has the will.

That’s why individualists hate the State and support anarchy (no rulers), anomy (no laws), and free markets (which operate by way of an invisible hand, which is not trying to change anything).

Yet these same people are often God-intoxicated and happily bow to their God as their ruler and source of laws. So, they are not actually against rulers and laws. They are against the State as the ruler and the law. They see the State as Antichrist, as Satanic tyranny. They want to be free from it.

There is an enormous cultural clash between those who support negative liberty and those that support positive liberty. The clash has come to life in the most vivid way in the present day in the struggle for dominance between the USA and China.

The USA is a negative liberty, predatory capitalist, Christian nation, with castrated State power (the people want a small State, a constrained State, low taxation, low public spending). The individual is deified.

China is a positive liberty, State capitalist, atheist nation. It’s the Big State, with huge State power and State spending. The Communist Party is deified. The Chinese Collective is everything.

China is the Coming Power. It looks unstoppable. An individualist rabble who cannot agree on anything will never stand up to a unitary, intelligent State power with some of the smartest people in the world as its leaders.

America is a multicultural democracy. It is riven by division, by cultures doing their own thing and going their own way. There is no State direction. America has no teleology. It is not heading to any destination.

China is a monocultural one-party State. There is no culture war and no political dogfighting. The Chinese are marching in lockstep to their destiny. China will not put up with Islam corrupting China. It will not put up with the West corrupting China via Hong Kong and Taiwan. It’s willing to take the hard decisions and hard actions that mark great nations, nations with a true sense of purpose.

Negative liberty societies, torn apart by individualism, can never find a collective goal, and so they never go anywhere. Look at the West. It has no plan, no aim, no direction. It’s imploding. It’s giving birth to the Valley of Ashes, the Waste Land.

Every human has a Self (human), a Lower Self (Devil), and a Higher Self (God). In Freudian terms, these are the Ego, Id, and Superego. The Devil wants to have its own way at all times. It’s unsublimated power. It’s the great individual. Me, myself, I. The Devil refuses to serve the Superego (God, the moral force). The Devil refuses to kneel, so it is cast out of heaven, the home of the cooperative collective behaving morally, and sent to hell, the home of competitive individuals, behaving immorally. The Devil is determined to be free of God’s constraints and morals. The Devil want to be free from. He’s the great champion of negative liberty.

God denotes that part of ourselves that wants to transcend our base character, to escape from our lower self, to optimize itself. It wants to be free for, not free from. Freedom lies not in being liberated from constraints but in mastering the self, overcoming the self, imposing one’s own constraints on what one can do. God wants to achieve the highest things, and that means not giving into base impulses but following high ideals. This is positive liberty. God is the champion of this type of liberty.

Western capitalist democracies are defined by negative liberty. The free market is the basis of the negative-liberty economy. Capitalism is not trying to produce better humans, higher humans, optimized humans. It’s not trying to achieve true democracy, or meritocracy. It’s not trying to move into the religious sphere and take over from religion. It has only one function, to maximize the profits of those who control the capital. This means that these people – those that run the system of capital – become so rich that all power, influence and control in society defaults to them. So, these capitalists, the super-rich elite, become the de facto rulers. Capitalism, as its secondary effect, creates a ruling dynasty of wealthy families, passing on the family wealth down the generations, and ensuring that the same small number of families are always in charge, always running the show. These people are entirely self-serving. They love the way the world is because it has allowed them to shape the world in their own image.

Negative liberty never leads to the empowerment of all the people. It puts power in the hands of those best able to maximize that thing around which negative liberty revolves – money, the currency of power, the reification of power. The negative libertarians want to be free to accumulate and spend their money however they please. Negative liberty is ideally suited to consumerism. Consumerism is buying without constraint. Or, rather, there is only one constraint – the amount of money you have. For the multi-billionaires who run negative-liberty capitalism, there is no constraint at all. They can buy anything they like. Price is no object. They can have whatever they want. Everything has a price, and they can afford any price at all.

The Marquis de Sade said, Theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft.

All property is theft. Wealth always originates in crime, in stealing from the collective.

Positive liberty is not about money, consumerism, dynastic elites. It’s about a higher objective associated with a higher humanity. It moves into the same space as religion. All religions are themselves positive-liberty undertakings.

In the USA, people follow negative liberty with respect to the economy and political power. In the sphere of morals, conservatives follow the positive liberty of Christianity (one Christian path and one Christian truth), while liberals follow the positive liberty of the New Age religion of Wokeism (all paths and all truths).

A positive-liberty nation is one which seeks to control religion and culture. A negative-liberty capitalist democracy stays out of religion and culture as much as it can.

Nietzsche said of Napoleon: "Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has even been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh – one might well ponder what kind of problem it is; Napoleon this synthesis of the inhuman [Unmensch = monster] and the superhuman [Übermensch = superman]." Napoleon was a hybrid of the Id and Superego.

The Ego stands between God (the Superego) and the Devil (the Id). The Ego is Man. God is in heaven, the Devil in hell, and Man on earth, poised between heaven and hell. The Ego uses the reality principle to decide which influence to choose at any one time. Its instinct is to follow the Devil and the pleasure principle, but the necessity of living with others means that it mostly has to obey God and the morality principle.

Hegel said, The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

World history revolves around the proper way to define freedom, whether emphasizing the individual or the collective, or some balance between the two.

How does the freedom of a locust change as it goes from solitary mode to swarm mode? Humans likewise go from individuals to mobs. A mob is a very different thing from an individual. It has entirely different behavior.

What of Hollywood? It’s all about telling stories and some of these promote negative liberty and some positive liberty. Hollywood, like Wall Street, is committed to making money. Although Hollywood is associated with the liberal religion of Wokeism, its real religion is profit. It’s a thoroughly capitalist enterprise. It’s not there to improve the human race. It’s there to make the Hollywood studios sickeningly rich.

The Locust Army

Wouldn’t you like to exhibit phenotype plasticity? Locusts literally become visibly different creatures when they’re in swarm mode. No one wants to get in the way of the Locust Army.

Imagine human armies that changed from collections of scared human individuals into swarms of super-soldiers.

Imagine if humans had different modes where their appearance completely changed: individual mode versus collective mode, or id mode versus superego mode.

The tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is about a kind of phenotypic plasticity. Jekyll is the respectable superego. Hyde is the monstrous id. Jekyll and Hyde appear differently even though they are the same person. They have the same genotype, but very different phenotypes (appearances and behaviors).

It would be so much easier for people to get along with each other if they were color-coded, or whatever, to show what mode they were currently in. You could then avoid them or join in with them.

When the Locust Army comes calling, you’d better be ready to get into swarm mode. Or they’ll eat you. If you’re not vibrating in harmony with the Swarm, they will identify you as non-Swarm, hence prey.

We’re All Critics Now

That’s the whole burden of this novel – the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory. – F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Locust Army turns literary critic... We eat whatever we hate!

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the great American novel. As we all know, there is only one theme fit for the great American novel and that’s the American Dream, the defining motif of America. The Great Gatsby exposes the American Dream as a fraud. If this dream ever had any reality, it’s now in total decay.

One aspect of the American Dream that is never discussed is that it was never any sort of dream for blacks. They were literally the slaves of the American Dreamers. The American Nightmare is what most blacks endure, especially when they encounter white cops.

Isn’t the essence of the American Dream that it delivers insane excess to a few and absolute horror to the many? What kind of dream is that?

Gatsby held fabulous parties at his opulent mansion. The American Dream takes place inside such gilded spaces. American reality is everything outside it. Outside the Dream is the Waste Land, the Valley of Ashes.

Fitzgerald wrote, About half-way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is the valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

The ghastly Valley of Ashes – standing like a spectral warning between the glitz and glamour of Manhattan (one dream) and the stately mansions of East and West Egg (another dream) – is where true America is located … the Waste Land (the nightmare), covered in dust, ash and pollution from the nearby factories.

An old advertising billboard stands over the Valley of Ashes. The huge, decaying billboard shows the bespectacled eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. Fitzgerald wrote, But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic – their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away.

These fading, bespectacled eyes are like the eyes of a dead God, overseeing and passing judgement on a moral waste land.

Another great American dystopian novel is The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, a good friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s all about how America’s Dream Laboratory – Hollywood (which defines American culture) – is fraudulent, a dream with no reality. In fact, it’s the heart of the nightmare, where all of Frankenstein’s monsters are manufactured.

Nathanael West’s real name was Nathan Weinstein. Like so many others in Hollywood, he hid the fact that he was Jewish and passed himself off as one of the Gentiles. The biggest problem for blacks in a racist society is that they can’t pass themselves off as white. If they could, how many would? If people could choose their skin color, which color would it be?

Would racism die out if everyone could change their physical appearance and color at whim? Even many racist whites might like to try out the black identity on vacation. What happens on tour, stays on tour, right? Would that make them less racist when they came back to reality?

Try walking in another’s shoes, they say. If we could, would we? Or do we love our own shoes and will never give them up?

Just as West invented a new name to furnish him with a new identity, Hollywood is all about inventing a new America to hide the country’s real identity.

America, thanks to Hollywood, is the most mythic nation in the world. It’s constantly manufacturing and consuming its own myth. When American politicians conclude speeches with God bless America, non-Americans can’t help sniggering. No European nation suffers from that degree of self-delusion and narcissism. As if God gives a special fuck about Americans. Are the Americans seriously claiming to be a godly people? This is the fucking 21st century, not the Bronze Age. Get real. Stop fooling yourselves that you’re the new Chosen People. You’re not. Even as we speak, America is being eclipsed by Communist China, a godless nation.

The basic American myth is that you get what you deserve, and there’s no bigger myth than that. If you work hard, so the myth says, you will have a great life. If you work really hard, you will be super rich. Of course, the facts say otherwise. The richest people in America barely work at all (many inherited their wealth), or what they do can’t be described as work given how undemanding or enjoyable it is, while the poorest are often holding down three or four exhausting, miserable, depressing jobs at a time and working all the hours under the sun.

The physically most demanding jobs are the minimum-wage jobs. The people who are shattered after a day’s work are not the ones having a good life. They are the ones having a nightmare. That’s the reality of America’s famous dream. George Carlin passed definitive judgment on it: That’s why they call it the American dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

When are people going to wake up?

Carlin should have been the president. Then the bullshit would have ended. America needs to find a new George Carlin, and God bless America should be declared illegal. A country that keeps making that demented statement will never be a healthy, sane country, obeying the reality principle.

Look at Israel. Israel literally means wrestles with God or struggles with God. Imagine if Israel was always referred to as Struggles with God … The President of Struggles with God comes to the podium, with a row of Star of David Struggles with God flags behind him, and congratulates the gold medal winner of the Struggles with God Olympic team." Would anyone be able to keep a straight face?

Should America be renamed Blessed of God? You would imagine that’s its real name given how many times people say, God bless America.

The Handmaid’s Tale Wiki says, "The Republic of Gilead, colloquially referred to as simply Gilead or the ‘Divine Republic’, is the totalitarian, theonomic, and neo-Puritanical regime that takes over most of the continental United States of America in