The Small-Souled Bugman

Not to be confused with the gigantic insect — the alienated man — of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the small-souled bugman is very much a ‘well-adjusted', fully integrated neuron in today’s neoliberalist techno-corporate hive mind.

A consequence of a perilously overpopulated, brutally capitalistic, shamelessly hedonistic, morally decaying society, the humble bugman has come to define an age of technological dystopia in which everyone has everything — their gadgets, their fast foods, their fashion accessories — but somehow everyone also has nothing — no community, no natural spirit, no substance of mind. He is a zombified consumer, an emasculated wage slave, a vessel emptied of meaning and refilled with plastic, pixels and silicone.

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The bugman now occupies one of two living situations. One, the city bugman lives atop, beneath and besides his fellow bugs in what is an actual human-scale bug colony, hence the name. Two, the suburban bugman living just as unnaturally and miserably, lined up in careful symmetry among neighbours he will never know and trees that will never grow, house by house, street by street, as far as the eye can see.

The deliberate draining of purpose and passion from the bugman’s soul made it easy to assign him without complaint to a vapid, good-boy ‘job’ and a ‘career’ that does little but prop up the demented corporatist structure. He is a willing cog in the grinding bullshit machine — a marketer, an analyst, a ‘project manager’ — or has perhaps handed his life over to preserving the insanity of the state by becoming a lawyer or a bureaucrat. Worse yet, he gobbled up the STEM dream sold by grubby toy merchants, dooming himself to an existence of zeroes and ones. Zero purpose. One sad bugman.

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Failing to find fulfilment in his work, the bugman has become fully immersed in Content, Digital Socializing and Entertainment. Facing the monumental task of salvaging his soul, he has instead resorted to seeking escape at every turn. He upgrades his 60” 4K TV to a 75” 4K TV. He buys more video games and a virtual reality set, finds a pot dealer and gets a prescription for anti-depressants.

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Social media is the bugman’s public square. This is where he ‘debates’, makes jokes and flaunts his status and moral virtue to the hive. This is where he seeks respite from the alienation of modern life, but never quite seems to find it. He flicks through his Twitter feed aimlessly, chuckles along to Jimmy Kimmel clips on YouTube, and smugly describes himself as “socially liberal and fiscally conservative” in New York Times comments sections.

The bugman’s severe paucity of skepticism has led him down a mainstream media-saturated path of tech adulation, social justice fallacies and “progress”-at-all-costs morality. The dearth of historical, rational and spiritual context in his mind leaves only the possibility of suffering in the panicked bustle of the present day, antenna twitching in response to the prevailing Bad News.

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He conceals his intellectual cowardice amid ideological rhetoric and Orwellian newspeak. Cogent debate and the search for truth are challenges to his dominance of public discourse, so the bugman must become masterful at distorting arguments in a desperate attempt to portray himself as the well-reasoned and righteous party. Beware of his powerful toolkit, including but not limited to virtue signalling, cries of “hate speech”, straw man arguments, and ad hominem attacks. This all sprouts from his fear of countering the ‘correct’ views of the day. If he simply parrots mainstream commentary, he can be sure of being on the right side of history.

Despite all the inhumanity and misery of a bugman’s life laid before you, be assured it is no mean feat to come across one in person who reveals his trauma. He will present himself invariably as polite, gentle, happy and ‘nice’. He is remarkably non-confrontational, avoiding controversy at virtually any cost. PC culture has him shaken, terrified of being ostracized for wrongthink. This is the bugman’s tough outer shell, and it will never be penetrated. Underneath this shell lies his small soul, searching fruitlessly for subsistence.

While he may carry himself with an air of intellectual and moral superiority, the bugman has stopped asking the big questions. He can distantly recall the sense of awe he felt as a child, those times looking up at the stars and the moon; those times reflecting on his ancestry, where he came from, the history and traditions of mankind and the wild beauty of Earth. Now his mind is so distracted by pixelated inanity, trash culture and his ridiculous job that he cannot, for the love of god, simply sit and think. He can no longer be at peace or derive joy from nature and blissful simplicity. He feels frustration over his powerlessness to bring an end to the mysterious forces chipping away at his soul day by day, but does nothing about it. And so he remains, indefinitely and emphatically, a small-souled bugman.

Images of Vitality

Many are domestic animals and happy that way. I speak instead to the men who feel stifled by this bug world.

People at all times try to domesticate each other. Language is used to clobber and deceive others into submission and domestication. Ideas and arguments and stories are manufactured for the same. The modern world is no different in this regard from any wretched tribal society. I’m sure that Europe prior to the Bronze Age, before the coming of the Aryans, was similar to modern Europe. People lived in communal longhouses and were likely browbeaten and ruled by obese mammies who instilled in them socialism and feminism.

Most of those so-called males of the longhouse age were probably similar to the modern leftist “herb” who doesn’t lift. Which is why those societies were so easily conquered.

The left realizes they look weak and lame — because they are. They know they have nothing to offer youth but submission and lectures. They know they’re unsexy and staid. If indeed young leftist men will start lifting and worshipping beauty, they will be forced to leave the left.

The bugman pretends to be motivated by compassion, but is instead motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful. The bugman seeks to bury beauty under a morass of ubiquitous ugliness and garbage. So much of the Pacific and the pristine oceans are now full of garbage and plastic. This garbage is flowing out of ciies built on piles of unimaginable filth. The waters are polluted with birth control pills and mind-bending drugs emitted by obese high-fructose-corn-syrup-guzzling beasts. Then of course there is the ugliness of the people. And it’s only getting uglier with the crowded, unhygenic new cities of our age, populated by hordes of dwarf-like zombies that are imported for slave labor and political agitation from the fly-swept latrines of the world.

People feel they can’t escape this, they know this is an aggressive method to demoralize and oppress. When I post my images of vitality in the clear sun of a long noon, they feel a weight lifted off them. Many feel as if they’ve escaped the gravity of this trash world and returned to a time when the natural beauty of man could be displayed, indicating this is a form of life free to develop its powers.