Now, I think everyone knows that stupid people are easier to manipulate than others. But I think what a lot of times people don't think about is that it periods in your life or it periods in your mood when you are stupider, you are easier to manipulate. It's very simple principle. Now one thing that I see all the time now that is very annoying, and in fact many people basically make a career of this. They make a career of getting mad at things, especially political things. So they spend all day, all their free time on the internet, and they just like getting mad at things, look at all these things that are wrong in the world. It's so terrible. I'm getting so angry. Blah, blah, blah. Now there's a term in politics, or I guess in propaganda, called agit prop. That's agitation propaganda. That's put out there basically to make you angry. Now the thing is when you are angry, you are stupider in a very real sense. When you're governed by a passion, you are by definition not thinking through what you're doing. You're at a lower level of cognition than you are usually. So if you want to make someone stupid and therefore easier to manipulate, one very good thing to do is to make them angry if you are some kind of social engineer. Get them mad at something, right? If they're angry at something, if they fear for their lives, if they have all these pressing existential concerns that might be totally confabulated, they are much more likely to make extreme sacrifices. They're much more likely. If they feel, if they're juices, their anger juices are flowing all the time. If they're totally governed by their emotions and their passions, they can be basically made to do anything. Now I'm actually not talking about any specific political side or thing here. What I really mean is because the powers that be, they manipulate their people to do this. They keep them in a constant state of anger and fear and things like this to motivate them. But exactly in the same way, they want to put their enemies in the same position. They want them to be constantly angry. I see a lot of people, and these are basically the Twitter users out there. What based Twitter users do all day now is they just retweet stuff to make each other angry and get each other, quote unquote, motivated. They're not motivated to actually do something because really there's nothing to do in most of these cases, right? It's things that I think people need to understand or out of their control that are being forced on them, not even because of what they are, but because they are making you angry. The media likes doing that. They like throwing absurdities in your face. They like saying very blatant lies, not just to deceive people. In fact, really, it's not really to deceive people. It's really partially to get them mad and get them agitated, right? So there are a lot of people online now who will just be angry all the time. I mean, maybe not even like angry angry, but there is a sense in which they're constantly like pessimistic. They're constantly like, oh my goodness, like all this terrible stuff is happening and we can't do anything. I'm angry. Why don't congressmen do something? Why don't blah, blah, blah? People are going to rise up eventually, which is a total art. It's frankly like kind of fed-posing. You're basically being forced into doing fed-posing at that point. That's the point. The thing is when you're angry and you're not thinking through what you're doing, you want to fight battles that you can't win. You want to die on principles that might, like things aren't really as bad as you think, right? The media wants you to feel like the walls are closing in. They want to produce that vision of inevitability, right? And if you're on the internet all day, if you're reading posts on Twitter.com all the time and you're just getting angry at stuff and you're not out there talking to real people, you're going to have a very, I don't know, contorted view of the world, you know what I mean? And that's the point. I think the point, one thing that I think the media does very deliberately is they do try to make people angry. Even their enemies angry and you might think, oh, well, they're motivating them. That's bad. No, like if they're making you angry, they're making you angry in a domain that you don't have control over, okay? Because they want you to act out. They want you to feel like you can't do anything. Like that impotence is their desire, right? So you know, this is why it's very important not to fall into passions like anger and things like this because in most cases you actually can't do anything. You know, a lot of people, you know, a lot of, you know, there's that part in the sermon on the mountain when Jesus says something like, you know, if someone smacks you, you know, you shouldn't smack him back, right? You know what I mean? Like, turn the other cheek or whatever. And a lot of people will be like, oh, that's totally cocked. That's totally stupid. But the important principle there is that you cannot be in a state of reaction, right? If someone assaults you, in that example, if someone assaults you physically in real life, okay? A lot of the reason that they do that is because they know that they can beat you, right? They know that they're going to be able to pound you if you react. Like they want to provoke you, okay? This is the point. And in politics, it's the same way. If the media or the opinion molding class or any of these kind of people, if they're doing egregious things that, you know, might elicit a reaction, they are expecting that reaction. Because you work for them. If you are reacting emotionally to things, you are working for them. You're doing their bidding. I actually did a video a good bit ago about, you know, how this applies to, I guess, you know, how people view freedom or, I guess, especially in the sexual domain, right? There is a sense in which if you can get people thinking about sexual things all the time because that's a passion because that's something that, you know, they, it's more part of your animalistic brain. It's much easier to predict people's behavior if you're tying them to these lower, more base or instincts. And it's the same way in anger, right? You're going to end up, you're going to end up in the next Charlottesville January 6th hoax, the next op that they're going to do. And it's like, you have no one to blame but yourself. Now this isn't, you might be saying, oh, well, Luke, you're endorsing like some kind of apathy or something like that. No, what I endorse, what I've always endorsed, and that is you have to have control over your own life. Well, firstly, you do have control over your own life and people around you and who you associate with and who you work for and all of this kind of stuff. And these are the things that actually change things. Like the thing that annoys me, I should say, I'm not angry. I'm just annoyed is, you know, these people, again, people who go on Twitter.com and get angry all the time. And then, you know, they don't actually change anything about their own life. They're still buying from Amazon. They're still like using social media and, you know, interacting with friends on social media and doing all the stupid stuff. Like they're doing the exact same things that are feeding into the system. So they're not actually like making a difference. They're just getting angry in the meantime. And they're really losing on both fronts. The real solution, I mean, most of the issues in the world, you can voluntarily separate yourself from them. And by voluntarily separating yourself from them, you actually make the problem less bad. And if you separate it away from the beast system, there is a sense in which it loses power. And you also are basically publicly setting an example for what other people are doing. Right? What what other people should do. So, you know, that's just the issue. I have, so many norms are like, oh, I have to keep. I have to get my stuff from Amazon.com blah, blah, blah, blah. It's so hard. You know, I think if you just stop being reactive, okay. if you stop being reactive to these kind of political things and you look at things more rationally, you will, I don't know, there are a lot of things in people's lives that you will have to adjust, okay? That's what I'm trying to say. So if you ever find yourself angry on the internet, that is like first, just write off the bat, that is just super lame. If you're angry at something on the internet, it doesn't matter if it's super egregious. You gotta always watch yourself. There are reasons for having righteous anger. There are reasons for acting. There are reasons for, you know, I don't know, making risks in real life and doing stuff like that. But what I see so often is that people are just plugged into the social media feed all day and they just have these basically evil spirits in them. You know, they're angry and they get controlled by all these, I don't know, they're just kind of like automata that are being pushed around by whatever the targeted content is. And that's pathetic. Like you might think that you're fighting against the system but you're really not. If you are emotionally reactive, you're losing. That's all I have to say. So that's just something to think about. You know, there's a part in which I want people to be more positive, not because, you know, I'm one of those positive people. But most of the time when you are being reactive like that, you really are losing. You really are making the world a worse place and you're making it especially worse for yourself than everyone around you. So, you know, that's all I have to say.