Why the World is Going Mad: The "Shame-Kick" Loop and the Evolutionary Bug Tearing Us Apart
Introduction: Look at the Ant Colony
Take a step back from the political theater. Block out the shouting on your feed, the talking heads, and the culture war gridlock. Imagine looking down at human civilization the way an observer looks at an ant colony. Something is fundamentally broken in the software of our species. We are behaving like a collective mind locked in a hyper-violent, self-eating glitch.
Polarization, culture wars, actual wars, political violence, mass deportations, cancelling, low birth rates, depression, deaths of despair and mass shooters are not separate phenomena. They are all connected to the same causes.
This isn’t a political debate anymore; it’s a metabolic crisis of the human ego. We are running a primitive evolutionary survival loop at a global, industrialized scale, and if we don't map the mechanics of the engine, the hardware itself is going to burn the world down.
The Global Madness: Why the Experts are Dead Wrong
Left-wing academics in Ivy League universities will tell you that the world's madness is caused purely by local economic inequality or systemic regional racism. Right-wing populists blame immigration, the erosion of traditional values, or outside globalist plots. Both are blind, trapped in their own motivated reasoning.
Look at the world. Why are completely different nations fracturing in the exact same way?
- Poland is largely homogenous, with minimal inequality and immigration, yet it suffered a massive constitutional crisis and hyper-polarization fighting over non-existent immigrants.
- South Korea is fairly equal and technologically advanced, yet it is collapsing from within, suffering the lowest birth rates and highest suicide rates in the world, culminating in a recent, chaotic martial law declaration by its president.
- Brazil has massive racial diversity and deep inequality, yet it experienced its own corporate-backed populist coup attempt matching Jan 6th playbook step-for-step.
- France, Germany, India, Turkey, the UK, and America are all breaking along the exact same lines.
This isn't about race, immigration, inequality, or culture. Those are just regional coats of paint.
The universal cause is an existential vacuum: loneliness and superfluousness identified by Hannah Arendt in her work The Origins of Totalitarianism explaining why people joined nazism and communism in the 20th century.
Technology and globalization have stripped away economic ladders of human dignity and isolated people into suburbus and digital silos. The pandemic - and its post pandemic stay home inertia - made people even more lonely. Social media, by amplifying social comparison and outrage, devalues people's self-esteem daily. We have created a world brilliant at building hierarchies, but entirely incapable of distributing baseline human dignity.
The Classic Example: The Schoolyard Bully
To understand how a society collapses into fascism or a digital lynch mob, you have to understand the classic schoolyard bully. The public assumes a bully acts out of unbridled confidence or cruelty for its own sake. The psychological reality is the exact opposite.
The bully is almost always a child drowning in severe internalized shame, usually born from neglect, emotional coldness, or abuse at home (a total lack of unconditional love). Their internal radar calculates that they are unloved, unsafe, unseen, and low-status in their primary tribe. Because their brain cannot handle the agonizing pain of that insignificance, it hyper-activates its threat center. The bully targets a vulnerable peer, projects their own worthlessness onto them, and executes a physical or social kick-down. Forcing that victim to cower or cry provides a massive, temporary chemical high. The bully walks away feeling giant, powerful, and secure. Not because they are strong, but because they successfully used another human being as a stepping stone to escape their own self-loathing.
The Origin of Hierarchy and Shame
Our tribal ancestors could not survive alone in the savannah. Being cast out of the tribe was a death sentence, the ultimate fear of humans. This is why belonging is a universal human psychological need. Our tribal ancestors were a paradox of equality and hierarchy at the same time. On one hand they were egalitarian, sharing everything and making decisions by consensus because they all needed each other to survive the savannah.
On the other hand, the best hunters, the healers, the most wise and the most attractive had leverage over the group, because they were needed by the others. They got to eat first and got more mates to pass their genes on. While the incompetent and the weak were submissive because they didn't have much to offer, they relied on the others. They often had no mates and were the first to be cast out of the tribe if they became a nuisance (a death sentence). This is the origin of human hierarchy. And this is why we seek status and fear losing the status we have, because those who had status passed their genes on to us.
Whenever we feel insulted or humiliated we feel the urge to fight back to not lose our respect and hierarchical status in the tribe.
This is also the origin of shame. Guilt and shame are different. Guilt is for what you do, shame is for who you are as a person. Yet they both act as breaks in a car. When our ancestors harmed someone in the tribe, their brain triggered guilt to force them to apologize and make amends to not be cast out. But when the whole tribe didn't value them at all, their brain triggered shame to force them to become submissive and hide to not offend the tribe any further and not be cast out.
To understand how this feels, read these words: Nobody needs you. You are useless and have no value. You could just disappear and nobody would even notice. And you know that's true because you know you failed at life.
Notice how you feel bad. By just reading the words, your brain drops serotonin in real time. It hurts and it hurts a lot. This is the emotion behind what Hannah Arendt called superfluousness, the feeling that you are completely unneeded by the world.
And when shame breeds for long enough - making you feel you have no value at all as a human being - it becomes so unbearable it often mutates into suicide or into ressentiment (a deep bitter resentment) leading to revenge and a desperate need to climb up the hierarchy of the tribe.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
Human psychology operates like a two-sided coin designed for Pleistocene survival.
- Heads is the Campfire: This represents Isothymia. The evolutionary drive to be recognized as an equal member of the tribe. In an ancient hunter-gatherer group, survival depended on being included around the shared fire. Rejection meant literal freezing or starving to death. This side tracks belonging and cooperation.
- Tails is the Totem Pole: This represents Megalothymia. The driving urge to be recognized as superior to others. It is the realm of the will to power, competition, prestige, dominance, and relative social rank.
When society or technology destroys the Heads side, making people feel completely unloved, isolated, lonely and superfluous, like being at the bottom of the Totem Pole, the human brain enters an evolutionary panic state. It cannot tolerate a flat sociometer. It is biologically forced to flip the coin over to Tails, to leave the bottom of the Totem Pole and climb to the top seeking an artificial, aggressive substitute for love through raw dominance as a survival instinct.
The Neuroscience
This loop is hardwired directly into our brain tissue. SELF-ESTEEM is a real-time survival calculator managed by two warring neural networks:
- The Campfire Network (mPFC / Default Mode Network): This monitors your Sociometer. Your level of social inclusion. When you are canceled, excluded or deemed insignificant, the brain activates the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (dACC) and the Anterior Insula. Neurologically, social rejection registers as literal, physical pain. The brain uses the exact same hardware for a broken reputation as it does for a broken leg.
- The Totem Pole Network (vmPFC / Ventral Striatum): When the dACC pain of shame becomes unbearable, the Amygdala triggers a structural hijack. It routes that agonizing, passive shame through the hypothalamus, converting it into active, outward rage. The Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (vmPFC) calculates a target lower than you on the hierarchy. You execute the kick-down. The moment your victim is crushed or excluded, your Ventral Striatum floods your brain with dopamine and serotonin.
The brain registers a vertical status win as a supreme survival reward. You have successfully self-medicated your internal pain by stepping on someone else's neck.
Mundane Examples
We watch this software bug execute millions of times a day in ordinary life.
- Bar Fights: A fragile ego receives a minor verbal slight, experiences instant status threat, and resorts to physical violence to forcibly nail their rung on the totem pole back into place.
- Gossip, Bullying, and Slut-Shaming: Individuals feeling insecure gather to socially castrate a peer, using moralistic judgment as a weapon to feel superior and secure a false, exclusionary bond among themselves.
- Toxic Masculinity: Men lacking career or sexual success turn to hyper-aggressive dominance over others to shield themselves from the shame of insignificance.
- Canceling: Hyper-credentialed people locked out of the american dream and left with no future play complex status games on social media, using jargon and moral purity to kick-down others, masking their raw megalothymia under the banner of justice.
- Gangs: Poor youth in abandoned neighborhoods, with no fathers and left with no future join gangs to gain a tribe and dominate others.
- Riots: People who have been neglected or lacking dignity their whole life explode into rage in the streets when given the chance.
The First Crusade
The mechanics scale perfectly across history. Look at the Siege and Massacre of Jerusalem in 1099. The driving engine behind the knights of the First Crusade was the European system of primogeniture, where only the first-born son inherited land and titles. The second, third, and younger sons were left with nothing, noble-born but asset-less, rendered completely superfluous on the European totem pole. They carried a profound, structural shame. They fought each other for crumbs for the few remaining land in Europe in bloody wars.
Pope Urban II gave these desperate "second sons" a psychological reset button. He offered them a holy crusade. Their subconscious minds instantly built a massive moral rationalization: they weren't greedy, landless invaders; they were the holy warriors of God, and the inhabitants of the Middle East were "infidels." When they breached the walls of Jerusalem, they slaughtered nearly every man, woman, and child in a legendary bloodbath. It was the ultimate, explosive discharge of three years of starvation and deep-seated status anxiety. By reducing an entire city to nothingness, these landless outcasts of Europe experienced a supreme surge of megalothymia, claiming the absolute top of the global spiritual hierarchy.
Mass Shooters and Despair
America, and much of the world, has been suffering with high levels of depression for a decade. Because the system has left so many people behind, their brains conclude they have no value. And because of the epidemic of loneliness, lonely people aren't receiving the recognition they need from others for their brain to conclude they do have value.
When the shame gets too great, it results in the modern phenomenon of Deaths of Despair, depression, opioid addiction, and suicide. The individual internalizes their perceived uselessness, and their sociometer flatlines into a slow, quiet self-extinction to numb the freezing cold of a world that doesn't need them.
But in some, the unbearable shame erupts into the Mass Shooter or Mass Stabber. These individuals are drowning in extreme, toxic shame and absolute social isolation. To survive the agonizing daily torture of being a an absolute zero, their minds launch a final, catastrophic Saturnalia. Because violence is the only thing that cannot be ignored, they pick up a firearm or a knife to force an indifferent world to finally look at them. By seizing absolute, god-like control over life and death for a few minutes, they use maximum, indiscriminate cruelty to violently drag innocent bystanders down below them. In their twisted, desperate calculation, dying as a notorious, universally feared monster is a vastly superior status position to living as an invisible, unloved nobody.
State-Sanctioned Atrocities
When collective status-shame hijacks a whole state, the loop becomes industrialized:
- The Nazis and the Holocaust: Devastated by the defeat of WWI and the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic, the German middle class experienced severe status vertigo and deep agonizing humiliation. To shield their egos, they embraced an ideology that framed Jews as an all-powerful, parasitic threat to the biological purity of their Volk. The Nuremberg Laws and the death camps were the ultimate, industrialized kick-down: a state-enforced guarantee that no matter how war-torn a German was, they were legally and biologically superior to the outcast group.
- The Rape of Nanjing: Trapped in a brutally punitive military hierarchy where soldiers were subjected to daily physical abuse and shame by their commanders, the Japanese army faced unexpected, bloody resistance at Shanghai. Arriving at Nanjing with wounded pride, the soldiers converted their intense internal shame into a sadistic, spontaneous explosion of mass slaughter and rape against a civilian population their propaganda had framed as subhuman, using raw horror to artificially restore their military self-esteem.
- Jim Crow and Lynching: Poor, economically exploited white Southerners were given a "public and psychological wage" by elites. The law legally guaranteed that no matter how uneducated or impoverished a white man was, he was structurally superior to every Black citizen. Desperate white mobs enforced this frozen hierarchy through the horrific cruelty of lynchings, masking their status panic as a noble defense against manufactured black criminality, while doing it openly in public, promoting it in newspapers and taking photographs.
- Vladimir Putin and Ukraine: Drowning in the collective shame of the Soviet collapse - which left Russia broken in the despair of the 1990s economic and social crisis (a trauma Russia never fully healed) while NATO expanded eastward - Putin felt a complete humiliation and threat to his regime status on the world stage. His mind inverted this anxiety into a righteous, defensive crusade against "Ukrainian Nazis." The invasion is a continental-scale kick-down to force Russia back to the top of the totem pole, trapping his regime in a loop where they cannot stop the war, because peace would force them to face the mirror of their own moral bankruptcy and ego death.
Rationalization
It’s important to understand that people who commit such atrocities often don’t see themselves as the villain. Their subconscious hijacks a narrative of moral rightousness so they feel free to reestablish their position in the tribe through dominance as a survival instinct before they are cast out to die alone in the savannah. It’s a desperate plan B for when our tribal mind concludes we are about to die.
Whether it’s the crusaders believing the civilians in Jerusalem were infidels, or Nazis believing Jews were plotting against them, or southern whites in the Jim Crow south believing blacks were raping white women, or Putin believing in CIA operations to install nazis in Ukraine, it doesn’t matter. What matters to the mind is to have a moral justification. Even mass shooters leave manifestos and share their grievences with other isolated anonymous individuals online, hoping to perform to them.
Narcissism
A narcissist is not someone in love with himself. Instead, it is someone who deep inside feels like a total failure harboring deep shame. They compensate by building a god-like image, demanding praise and attention. The term malignant narcissist was coined by psychologist Eric Fromm specifically to diagnose Hitler. In addition to being a narcissist, a malignant narcissist is someone who is also sadistic, enjoying the pain of others and also living paranoid. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Trump meet the criteria.
For those who are fans of anime, Azuka from Evangelion is a narcissist, but Azula from Avatar is a malignant narcissist.
But this is not restricted only to leaders. When a people feel profound shame - as the germans did in the crisis of the Weimar Republic - they compensate with collective narcissism, building an image of themselves as superior yet unappreciated and becoming sensitive to any slights. A collective narcissist crowd naturally gravitates towards a narcissistic leader, instead of a normal leader, because the narcissist projects the image they want to have for themselves: a God.
The American Deadlock: The DuBois Horseshoe
This brings us to the diagnosis of modern American politics: The DuBois Horseshoe. The American left and the American right are locked in a symbiotic, zero-sum war for psychological dominance, curving completely around to meet each other in the exact same psychological space: using a scapegoat to medicate their unhealed shame.
THE DuBOIS HORSESHOE (SHAME DISPLACEMENT)
[ THE LEFT HORSE ] [ THE RIGHT HORSE ]
Moral/Cultural Status National/Racial Status
▲ ▲
│ │
(Seeks Psychological Wage) (Seeks Psychological Wage)
│ │
└───────────────────┬───────────────────┘
│
[SHARED COGNITIVE BASE]
• Crushing Structural Shame
• Dread of Being Superfluous
• Instinct to Kick Downward
- The Left-Wing Shaming Engine: Composed of hyper-credentialed, highly compliant individuals who did everything right (gone to college, got degrees, worked hard, applied) but found themselves locked out of the American Dream by a failed and rigged system, leading to a profound sense of personal failure and shame. Their minds inverted this shame with a new hierarchy elevating themselves through language purity, virtue signaling and jargon to feel superior and numb their pain. They execute their kick-down through cancellations, circular firing squads and public shaming. By destroying a “heretic,” they experience a fleeting surge of megalothymia. They use equality, virtue and the phrase “the cruelty is the point” as a psychological mirror trick, projecting all malice onto the right - and onto their rivals on the left - to grant themselves absolute moral permission to be cruel.
- The Right-Wing Shaming Engine: Composed of the working class trapped in dying industrial and rural towns, with plants closing, local business dying, the youth moving away, feeling abandoned by the world and suffering from opioids and deaths of despair, experiencing severe status threat as mainstream culture mocks them and demographics shift. Their minds inverted this shame into a hierarchy of nationalistic and traditionalist purity to feel superior and numb their pain. They execute their kick-down through demands for mass deportations, legal exclusions, offensive language and displays. They rationalize their cruelty by portraying immigrants as invaders and criminals, trans people as threats to their children and multiple conspiracy theories.
A human tragedy.
What's worse is their "failure" isn't their fault. The system broke 50 years ago due to automation, trade, degree inflation and NIMBYism, leaving them behind. They did everything right and were still locked out and abandoned. But it's precisely because they did everything right, and still "failed", that their brain concluded it was their fault, leading to a sense of personal failure and shame. But nobody cared to tell them that, politicians and media simply wanted to use their rage as fuel for votes and clicks.
And because they live miles apart - the left in urban areas, the right in rural areas - they can’t see each other’s misery, they only see their own. Leading them to think they are the only ones who are doing poorly and the other side is just being a jerk for no reason. The echo chambers - both online and offline - makes human empathy impossible because you can’t even see the other side is suffering.
Both sides use Identity Fusion to turn politics into an elite football match. The individual fan doesn't need to accomplish anything in their own life; the moment their political tribe or their leader lands a blow or executes a kick-down against the enemy, the individual fan absorbs that win as a personal hit of dopamine, stealing the leader's megalothymia to temporarily numb the freezing cold of their own private life.
This is why the mass deportations by the second Trump administration are not done bureacratically outside of cameras. They are done in front of the cameras as a spectacle - showing immigrants in chains, being humiliated in prisons - to give the base a hit dominance they were seeking to numb the pain of their own sense of inferiority.
January 6th
The storming of the US Capitol on January 6th was a real-time eruption of this loop. The crowd was composed of individuals experiencing intense status threat. The MAGA movement was originally born in 2016 as a compensation for their personal shame. Losing the election wasn't just a political defeat; it signaled a catastrophic, permanent descent toward the floor: the total erasure of their self esteem, as Trump was the only thing making them believe they had any value as human beings.
Propaganda provided the precise moral shield their minds needed to avoid the shame of failure. They wore flags, carried religious relics, and convinced themselves they were the heroic, righteous protectors of America. Storming the building was a literal, physical attempt to manually nail the rungs of their collapsing totem pole back into place through force.
Moral Injury Feedback Loop
The ultimate tragedy of the software bug is that the brain cannot fully cheat its own biology. When an individual or a mob executes a cruel kick-down, the adrenaline eventually clears. The horizontal empathy sensor (the ACC) comes back online and registers the unnecessary harm, generating a deep moral injury and secondary shame.
Because the ego cannot tolerate the realization that it acted like a monster, it immediately represses this secondary shame, which makes the ego even more fragile and desperate. To escape this new, internal moral rot, the mind must immediately double down on its political religion, find a new target, and launch an even more vicious kick-down next time. It is a self-perpetuating, addictive loop: we try to wash the blood off our hands by spilling more blood.
This is why the nazis and imperial japan couldn’t stop expanding and seeking new enemies. Fascism is like a bicycle, it must keep moving forward to not fall over. If they stop, the shame and moral injury returns, so they must keep seeking more and more enemies to kick down. Until the bicycle hits a wall, either an unbeatable enemy - like the USSR was for Germany or the United States was for Japan - or logistical and economic collapse.
This is what is happening under the second Trump administration. The constant escalation of enemies and cruelty. First federal workers, then blue states, then immigrants, then protestors, then boats in the caribbean, then Maduro, then Greenland (almost), and now Iran. This is not about policy, it’s about dominance to feed Trump’s ego and those of his administration (who have all been rejected pariahs their whole lives) and their base. Like Germany, they cannot stop and will continue pedalling the bicycle forward until they hit an inevitable wall.
The Total Blindness of the Ego
This model explains why nothing ever changes the mind of a MAGA radical, and why nothing will ever change the mind of a far-left purity scold. Remember, shame is not embarrassment. Shame is the feeling you have no value as a human being. It is the ancient terror from our ancestors of being cast out of the tribe to be left to die alone in the savannah.
The one thing a person consumed by shame fears most - more than their enemies, more than failure, more than literal death itself - is a mirror. Because the mirror of their own sense of failure and insignificance is what they've been running away from their whole life. You cannot reason a person out of an ideological position when that position is the only psychological shield keeping them from complete ego death.
To admit they are wrong means surrendering the moral shield of their political religion. It means letting the vertical totem pole collapse, forcing them to look directly in the mirror to face the combined weight of their original shame and the secondary shame caused by their own past cruelty. The brain will choose to burn down the entire civilization before it allows its own ego to be annihilated.
In fact, you can test this yourself. If you force a person like this to look in the mirror - especially the mirror of their original shame they were running away from - they will most likely react with narcissistic rage to try to break the mirror (you) or collapse into absolute despair. Bringing back the anime examples, that's when Asuka loses her ability to pilot or when Azula is finally defeated.
The Post-Trump Acceleration
The public believes that polarization will end when Donald Trump leaves office. My model predicts the exact opposite: it will accelerate and mutate into a far more dangerous phase.
Trump is not the engineer of the machine; he is just the current conductor.
- The Right will view his departure as an unprovoked, systemic kick-down by a corrupt elite, sending their status vertigo into absolute panic. Lacking his psychological shield, the movement will fracture into smaller, hyper-radicalized factions fighting for his vacant rung on the totem pole by launching even harsher cultural and physical attacks.
- The Left will experience a triumphalist surge of megalothymia, feeling absolute moral permission to permanently purge and humiliate the half of the country that supported him. Lacking their grand external scapegoat, their internal circular firing squads will turn inward with hyper-vigilance, tearing their own ranks apart over microscopic purity tests to maintain their positions on the moral totem pole.
The automated loop will spin faster and faster, completely unanchored by traditional political figures.
The Nero Decree
When a system built entirely on the vertical logic of a shame-driven totem pole faces total, inevitable defeat, it enters the phase of the Götterdämmerung - the twilight of the gods.
In March 1945, facing total ruin, Adolf Hitler issued the Nero Decree, ordering the absolute destruction of Germany’s own infrastructure, sentencing his own people to starvation. Why? Because his ego could not survive the prospect of total failure. His final calculation was a suicidal expression of megalothymia: "If I am falling off the pole, I will pull the floor down with me. If I cannot exist at the top, the world itself has no right to exist."
The Nuclear Kick
This is the ultimate, catastrophic cliff-edge of our species. In 1945, a panicked, shame-driven tyrant could only burn down his own borders with conventional matches. Today, the Shame-Kick Loop is armed with nuclear weapons.
If a nuclear armed dictator or president - trapped in a state-level secondary shame loop -faces absolute structural defeat, their neurological software will run the exact same program as Hitler's Nero Decree. To a malignant narcissist, pushing the nuclear launch button is the final, ultimate assertion of cosmic megalothymia, a way to force the entire planet to burn alongside their failing ego.
We are a high-tech civilization flying a thermonuclear spaceship with a panicked, stone-age ape at the controls. The danger of the evolutionary bug depends entirely on the rigidity of the container it is placed in. While the constitutional, rule-of-law filters of the West are explicitly built to isolate and neutralize a panicked leader during a political transition, the centralized, vertical totem poles of absolute regimes offer no such brakes. The ape has direct access to the button.
Solutions
Reducing loneliness is paramount, because it’s through connection with other people where we receive natural validation to feel like we matter and secure self-esteem. We don’t need to force people out of their homes to touch grass. Humans naturally want to connect, they are just being prevented from doing so by the broken system. But other measures are also necessary to restore human dignity.
While I cannot provide bullet proof solutions to this existential failure, here are some proposals:
Affordable Housing
The most common reason for loneliness and low self-esteem is the housing crisis. When people cannot afford a home where they grew up in, they must move out and leave their family and friends behind just to afford a roof, arriving at a new place with no connections, remaining lonely.
High rents also impact third places (bars, cafes, clubs) where people meet for social interaction. When third places cannot afford rent either, they close their doors. And not being able to afford a home, and being stuck in poverty because half your income goes towards rent, is a constant source of shame. Breaking NIMBYism and building new homes is the only way to make housing affordable. Urban planning that prevents isolation, with close and free third places and meeting areas, also help lower loneliness.
Guilds and Age Based Ladder
A modern guild would work as a mix of a union and talent agency for workers. Because they only get paid if you do (by getting a tiny share of your salary) they have an incentive to find you a good paying job and negotiate for you in the work place. A form of “nepotism for everyone”.
And by having an internal ladder based on age, where everyone can climb up from apprentice to journeyman to master over a lifetime, where the elders lead and tutor the youth at becoming masters of their craft, everyone can feel they are climbing up the totem pole with no fear of falling, and everyone has a place and a role. This breaks loneliness, superflousness and status anxiety. Replacing dominance status with prestige status.
New Rural Industries and Investment
The original cause of rural decay were plants and mines closing, creating a trade deficit with the rest of the country where the community kept “importing” stuff but had nothing to “export”, causing capital to leak out of the community, lose the local multiplier effect and forcing businesses to close.
To revert this, new industries must be established in these communities so they have something to export to bring capital in and reestablish the multiplier effect, spawing economic growth and revival. But for businesses to be interested in investing in those communities, they need reliable infrastructure and a skilled population. Investment in infrastructure and trades in rural communities, as well as local tax breaks or tax credits for the industries that hire there, are necessary to bring back this revival. This would replenish the self-esteem of rural populations.
Mirror Corporate Tax
A normal corporate tax taxes a business profit. No matter their size or their profit margins - a small grocery store making 1% profit margin or a giant big tech conglomerate making 30% - they pay the same tax on their profits. In America it currently sits at 21%.
A mirror tax would tax the profit based on the margin, not the value, ideally 2 to 1. If a business is making a 10% margin (the business average) they pay 20% on their profits. But if they are making a 30% margin, they would pay 60% on their profits, where they start losing money. This would force them to lower prices and raise wages, to lower their margins and avoid the tax. When people have higher real wages, they feel their status increasing, and their dignity and self-esteem restored.
This would also avoid so-so automation, when a business fires a worker just to save a dollar an hour, while still paying high rent to the developer of the AI, software or robot. Because the money saved by the employer is so little, they can’t even lower their prices, they just pad their margins a little bit, leaving the former worker unemployed. The mirror tax would force the developer to lower the rent of their machine, freeing up capital for the original employer to lower prices and raise wages, given he would also be subject to the same mirror tax.
Radical Social Media Reform
Social media increases social comparison by constantly showing us people who are more successful than us and pushing us outraging content, making us feel devalued and attacked. And by measuring everything through likes, social comparison increases and we become anxious about our value. This further erodes people’s self-esteem while at the same time making people dependent on it for validation like a drug, and using it to kick down others in cancelling and rage, which only devalues others, forming a feedback loop. They both create the problem and sell the solution. Big Tech are less like vampires and more like ghouls. They didn’t kill the body, they are just feeding on the corpse.
The solution cannot be a band-aid like age verification or harmful content moderation, because the problem is the social comparison and the outrage driven by engagement algorithms. To solve this, the law should ban platforms from showing content the user didn’t ask for, showing only content from accounts they follow or from search results. And only allowing to sort content in chronological order or most liked to get the most relevant stuff of the day. This would effectively kill engagement algorithms and restore people’s natural self-esteem by making social media social again, to connect with friends and family, not showing you random influencers who don't even know you, nor a desperate need for validation in a digital void.
For America, they don’t need to fight over the first amendment for this, they can simply change Section 230 to remove the liability shield from content the user didn’t expressively requested (didn’t choose to follow or searched for). With no loopholes for pop ups where they user cannot simply tap “accept” to be delivered unrequested content anyway. Section 230 was already changed in 2018 with the FOSTA-SESTA Acts, and the internet didn’t break.
Human Recognition
Lastly, recognizing the pain of either side and from people in general, not with pity but with respect and genuine empathy, helps restore people’s self-esteem and cure their shame. As much as we might hate the other side and want to kick them down the totem pole, this only acts as a violent boomerang. It sounds cheesy, but evil is often a lack of love that turns into resentment and revenge. For your own safety, and the safety of mankind, don’t feed the beast.
References & Intellectual Lineage
This framework is built upon the structural consolidation of six foundational thinkers:
- Mark Leary (1995): Sociometer Theory — Proving biologically that self-esteem is an internal radar tracking social inclusion and exclusion.
- W.E.B. Du Bois (1935): The Public and Psychological Wage — Identifying how elites use artificial status rungs over an out-group to keep marginalized populations addicted to the vertical pole.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1887): On the Genealogy of Morals — Diagnosing ressentiment and how the human mind uses the mask of moral righteousness to execute the will to power.
- Hannah Arendt (1951): The Origins of Totalitarianism — Isolating loneliness and superfluousness as the absolute psychological raw material for ideological possession and mass violence.
- Francis Fukuyama (2018): Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment — Formatting the historic engines of isothymia (the demand for equal recognition) and megalothymia (the drive for superior recognition).
- Émile Durkheim (1897): Suicide — Defining anomie and how the breakdown of shared social contracts and campfires fractures the human psyche into self-destructive alienation.