“Pay Yourself ” Politics; The Edited Concession and Popularity Fraud in Social Media and Politics

CW: R***

When I was in college, I went on a date with an individual who said, “You know what would make a lot of money? If there were a company that found the look alike of any woman and then found a porn star who looked like her.” Basically, the entirety of this man’s existence was premised on seeing a woman, finding a porn that reminded him of her, and then watching it. To this day, you would be surprised by the prevalence of this type of individual.

Welcome to “pay yourself” politics, where, despite the “obstacles” people get what they want despite whether or not the person giving it even wants to. Sounds related to r***? That’s because it is.

Here are several ways that people engage in “pay yourself” politics.

• Creating films that express the catharsis they so desire and then publicizing them as if they were fact
• Using deep technology not for its ability to help the population of the world, but to comfort one’s ego in numerous ways
• Creating fake accounts and fake movements that go straight into the pocket who would obviously not receive that care otherwise, and then patting oneself on the back for ingenuity
• Punishing employees monetarily when they don’t say what the boss wants to hear, but rather state actual facts about the corporation

In pay yourself politics, the individual says, “Pay yourself. Nobody else is going to.” Even if they were going to, the idea is a sham…there is no way to pay yourself, outside of extortion, exploitation, appropriation and r*** from those who were unwilling to pay or buy in a voluntary fashion. So, let’s call “pay yourself politics” what it really is, “forced and involuntary payment”. So, next time someone tells you to “pay yourself” tell them that they are an exploitation and r*** apologist.

Now, let’s take this same line of thinking and apply it to the political sphere. Let’s take the “concession” speech given by Trump. Whether or not I like Trump, I can recognize something that is reminiscent and carrying the principles of a very serious crime and I will stand up to that. In the concession speech, Trump has been edited into saying what the viewer wants to hear — “the concession speech we all deserve”. Whether or not we all deserve it, there it is. Trump has been compiled into stating what the person thinks they ought to receive. Like a man who is frustrated that a woman won’t marry him even though he “deserves her” (absolutely oblivious to the absolutely nonnegotiable “no” to his ability to do things like this), the person overlaid America’s favorite criminal into a montage satisfying his desires and validating his position whether or not this position was valid or his desires were worth satisfying.

What does this mean? This means that someone with an invalid position convinces oneself through tampered evidence that their position is valid. The more they replay it due to the hunger and demand they have to actually see their desire for validity satiated, the more their faculties of self-deception overlay the lie of the matter and convince the person that this, in fact,a sustainable truth. The deepest, ancestral parts of the brain don’t know the difference and slowly but surely the cognisant parts, unless there has been a top down operation that kicked such self-satisfying falsity out at the first sign to remain aligned with truth and not fetish, actually come to believe they are on the side of truth and operate in an invested fashion as if they were. Such self-deception is hardly uncommon and is as sick as it sounds.

Similarly, “pay yourself” politics may also happen in the realm of business. Despite individuals being beholden to their jobs, due to issue such as health insurance, job availability, or sheer unwillingness to scrap a trend of employment, a sick CEO or leader may “pay themselves” first, despite the fact their business has become a sinking ship. In this way, the individuals who are subjugated to their inability to keep the business healthy pay for their continuance in doing so — this is the same argument against being taxed to be murdered. We see this type of thinking where a CEO strips benefits, fires workers, lowers wages, steals covertly using tech, or forces overtime-or-fired politics in order to “save the company”. Despite the fact, the workers are netting out at 0 in their lives, the company itself did not die and therefore the CEO believes they deserved to be paid first for the bare essential, not destroying the company. Similarly to “I could kill you but I won’t” domestic abusers, these individuals reward themselves like someone who actually solved the problem and increased life quality for all employees despite possessing none of those qualities.

Finally, some individuals create fake or paid accounts to create the illusion of popularity or to deform/form opinion. In today’s insidious creep of moneyed interests into social media, the average risk of exposure to someone who is an insincere plant into your movement is generally solidly high. In this way, people can inform and shift vulnerable beginning or grassroots movements in a way that allow them to feel safe and organic but move them in the direction of hegemony. Similarly, covert wealthy interests can find the right “proxy” in terms of what is and isn’t a hot identity and use funded numbers to gain publicity. Then, data scientists pay attention to these proxies in the same way the public does, “by the numbers” and they can sell their own interests as moneyed, even if they are organically not. As we see in my piece on performative apathy this favoring of the moneyed interest as opposed to the accurate signal from a collapsing society ultimately is like a man holding a salute while sinking — the entire entity drowns.

The final danger of “pay yourself” politics is when it becomes hypernormalized, the self-deception is so engrained that people believe others operate in the same way. This can sound like, “Oh, I know what this person really wants” and then tries to create a situation of catharsis that does not in fact, actually impose the desire on the material world. For example, if someone erroneously believes and projects their violent impulse on an individual, they may inundate them with false propaganda of a person acting in a violent fashion in the way they believe this individual would like to act. The idea is to make the “offending” individual therefore feel satisfied that they got what they want, but of course someone who projects and engages in self-deception regularly is alien to what anything external possibly could want, because they only hear what they think is “fair” and correct.

This ties into our idea that not all justices are justices, some are just narcissism.

So, the next time someone tells you to “pay yourself”, you know what type of apologist they are. Economics and finance are, inherently, interdependent and do, inherently, depend on the accurate signal whether or not this inconveniences those immersed in their delusions.