Assisted Suicide Mass Groupthink: Propaganda vs. Dystopian Novels

My theory is that once a means for anti-Christian or tyrannical dystopia becomes well-known in literature - its evil dramatized for the ages - the ruling class can never impose it on us.

That’s how it rolls. Established fiction somehow snatches away the means to tyranny. Look how quickly the Biden Disinformation Governance Board supposedly shut down, as soon as everyone remembered Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Do you think any drug company could successfully market pills labeled soma? No daily 21- or 30-year-old death rituals like Logan’s Run. And good luck ever watching the Two-Minute Hate Show on Fox or CNN someday. Also I’m pretty sure book-burning firemen and rat-cage-helmets won’t fly. (By the way, will everyone recall St. John’s dystopian visions in Revelation when the Federal Reserve announces its programmable Central Bank Digital Currency?)

That’s why dystopian novels are so valuable.

So I stopped dead in my tracks when I read this promotion for a real-life-evil-means that’s similar to one I myself had fictionalized: a video gamer death-machine. To repeat, a promotion. In the now-beleaguered Vice magazine no less. (Hat-tip, Anne Barnhardt for pointing this out.) 

Predicting Evil

I’m claiming some expertise in this field. It’s only been a few months since I re-tooled and released my own previously-un-marketed dystopian-flavored novel, Virtual Eternity: An Epic 90s-Retro Florida Techno Pro-Life Love Story and Conversion Journey. So it’s had no chance to be established like 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, Hunger Games, etc., and thus no chance to invoke the theory; that is, it hasn’t had time to stop any new evil masterstrokes from seeing the light of day.

But meanwhile I can do a self-retrospective on where I went wrong and where I got close. Let’s explore some lessons learned on how to forecast mass societal evil.

The “Techno” part of Virtual Eternity, and the dystopian element, is its gamer death-machine. In the novel, the mystery of this evil corporation-saving death-is-entertainment game concept, and its accompanying mass-mania, drive the story forward. Mass groupthink surrounds the main characters as their society slouches toward Gamer Gomorrah.

That mass groupthink concept had knocked around in my head daily during the “Peak-Covid” groupthink that I faced as I wandered around my hospital (former) employer as a non-clinical. “Pre-Covid,” my job had been to help teach clinicals to think scientifically about improving hospital efficiency and patient experience. But just-like-that, a seasonal virus they called Covid-19 hit, and all those phenomenally caring, creative, and intelligent co-workers started doing whatever new thing the government-slogan-blathering group said to do. Full disclosure: I did go along with the masking op, begrudgingly and now regretfully, since it seemed only ridiculous but harmless - then the vaccine segregation and mandate bridge-too-far pushed me to get out.

Also, I had a daily writing catharsis to power me through it. For catharsis, and to help dramatize a stark warning using dystopia, I took a stab at re-writing the novel I’d finished about 15 years ago. By taking it up again during the initial lockdowns, I got catharsis by building a fictional groupthink-infected world, which was so bad it might lead to everyone voluntarily dying. Or being saved by a previously philandering hero, who, while falling in love with a cradle Catholic and struggling to convert to Catholicism, helped mold the groupthink itself.

To build dystopias, novelists need credible evils. That is, the writer must predict what evil humans might actually do. Then, after writing the story, in a few decades or so, the theory kicks in: for example, no autocrats at any large computer company can use this particular idea to kill people.

Predicting evil accurately is challenging. Most people block themselves from entering the mind of the Satan-possessed or –influenced. This makes it difficult to concoct catastrophic atrocities and slaughters, such as World War I, Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the JFK assassination, or 9/11. That’s probably a good thing. Although stopping them in advance would’ve been nice.

No one could even envision more recent, seemingly smaller-scale, and less overt outrages, like Patriot Act mass surveillance, trillion-dollar bank bailouts with no jail time, same-sex wedding enforced baking, transvestite story hours, an idol prayed over at the Vatican, churches and schools shut down for months, virus-detecting chemicalized cotton swabs shoved up into the brain, children masked, heck everyone masked even outside, and unknown and weirdly-gene-based vaccines mandated or you-lose-your-job. Think back about fifteen years ago: all those were, literally, unimaginable. That is, few predicted them, other than the Experts writing the table-top scenarios probably used to plan the actual events.

The Euthanasia Death Trap

But turns out I got close on the death-machine thing. Again, that Vice article promotes a virtual reality game that kills its users. I suppose I shouldn’t kick myself for being off a bit, and just tip my hat to the real-life executioner, Palmer Luckey, who thought up this head-lopper.

The story showed up on November 7, 2022 in Vice, Yahoo News, and other Mainstream repeaters like Daily Beast, Sky News, and the New York Post.

Yes, Vice released that promotion over six months ago. Because of its outlandishness, I gave it some time for debunking. But since then, other than a couple sentences in a Daily Mail story about a fake death VR show, no coverage; almost radio silence.

I had allowed this Vice promotion to simmer in the crackling oil of the Interwebs because, in my opinion, Luckey’s new killing machine is also a type of fiction. The Vice story itself is likely a 2020s alternative-fact trap, trolling, or trial ballooning, but with much more truth than we think. It’s one of those triple-dog-dare-you / hold-my-beer clarion calls to go-ahead-and-do-it.

In propaganda terms, it’s probably a “slam the door in the face” technique, where the proverbial salesman presents an absurd product. The victim slams the door, but next time, the salesman presents a more-palatable-but-still-bizarro idea. The first absurd product has softened the target to the new idea, which is what the salesmen wanted to sell anyway. So likely the actual, forthcoming evil death-machine will use a less violent means, with less creepy, more compassionate scenarios, probably associated with some sort of assisted suicide bent. When that more kindhearted legalized euthanasia suicide-booth death-machine hits the streets, not only is its market greased for success, but we alarmist forecasters look like tinfoil-hatters.

The Establishment encouragement of easy euthanasia and death should not surprise anyone. Nowhere are its results more clearly seen than in Canada, that great Five-Eyes frozen tundra anti-Christian Reset experiment looming over the United States like a polar bear stalking an elk: locking down for Covid with drunken vigor, vaccinating in huge numbers, and shutting down protesters’ bank accounts with legal ease. Up there, the numbers for suicide (4,500), plus the assisted type (10,000), plus abortion (87,485), add up to over 100,000 lives taken yearly. Compare to cancer, which claims over 80,000, and to heart disease, which kills over 50,000.

Four Areas Needing Realism to Enable Better Dystopian Predictions

Returning to the theory, my self-retrospective question is: if the literary world had ensconced Virtual Eternity over thirty years ago, and if it been a bit more accurate, could Luckey’s (maybe) real-life atrocity death-machine ever have existed? And, since my predictions didn’t replicate this Meta-Death invention as much as they could have, what did I miss? And how?

The theme to the four solutions below is obvious: be more realistic. Sure, novels and satire should exaggerate for entertainment and effectiveness, respectively. But nevertheless, to play the tyranny prediction and prevention game, fiction must not be stranger than truth.

(a) Bring up to date the mastermind’s generation. The Virtual Eternity villain and game mastermind was a Baby Boomer. On the other hand, Luckey is a Millennial. My excuse: Luckey’s death machine could be door-in-the-face at work, target: Millennials. In any case, not much I could do here, given the novel’s 90s setting. But maybe this is a clue as to where I got it wrong. Since I’m a Gen-Xer, maybe Boomer-evil is all-I-know. In fact, on his journey toward the villain and ultimately the afterlife, the Virtual Eternity main character encounters seven temptations, five of which are prompted by Boomers. Only one is a Gen-Xer who, OF COURSE, tempts with what we sadly do best: hedonism. (The seventh and final temptation is put forth by the Big Enemy.)

(b) Downgrade the mastermind’s genius. (After all, even Hitler failed art school.) The Virtual Eternity villain was a super-Renaissance Man: an expert at biology, psychology, religion, of course computers, and art. He was inspired by Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, borrowing the name of the game, Magic Theater, and the presentation format shown within the novel: in both novels, the fantasy-seeking user can select from a set of capital-lettered rooms in which to indulge his or her caprices. On the other hand, Luckey was only inspired by Sword Art Online, a Japanese anime-driven web novel series. And this real-life inventor of Meta-Death is apparently only a techno-expert; he even struggled to work out all the death-kinks. “I couldn’t come up with any way to make anything like this [kill device] work,” he said. He’s referring to the death-method in Sword Art Online. My excuse: I mistakenly believed that a real evil tyrant would need to learn evil from all kinds of disciplines and perspectives. A related discovery: By replicating this fiction, Luckey defied my theory that evil brains can’t duplicate the means expressed in dystopian literature. But Sword Art Online is too recent, and the target market might consider the web novel a paradise.

(c) Simplify the tech. The Virtual Eternity villain employed a handful of siloed-off Freemasonic scientists to develop Magic Theater full-body SensorSuits, MagicGloves, and MagicHelmets. All these the user could remove at any time, although in that death game, you’d never want to, because that's why you're there. On the other hand, Luckey provides only a small Zuckerbergian Meta-like goggles apparatus. My excuse: I couldn’t have predicted that, since I’ve never been near a Meta-headset, nor ever will. And I’m still naively skeptical that only that hardware could bring about the full experience. However, if having only goggles doesn’t grab you, check out Luckey’s plan to lock the headset on your head until you reach the end of the game, or until it explodes downward into your brain. Luckey states, “I have plans for an anti-tamper mechanism that, like the [Sword Art Online] NerveGear, will make it impossible to remove or destroy the headset.”

(d) Underestimate the propaganda needed. By witnessing the recent societal acceptance of masks, lockdowns, swab-testing, social distancing, and minimally-tested vaccines, Luckey may have learned that the New Normal market is more accepting of self-harm. Luckey sees fit to immediately draw people to the raw experience: the thrill of defying death, until maybe some Non-Player Character explodes your head, giving you the social honor of dying online. On the other hand, the Virtual Eternity villain needed months to prove that society was ready for mass-hypnosis, mass-hysteria, and mass-death, by pre-releasing dozens of networked video games to users whose moods and servitude-tendencies his devices could read. That is, to hook the user into the eventual death-scenario, Virtual Eternity’s villain provided teasers: fun, competitive, violent, and scary games, with the best graphics on the 90’s planet. It’s even implied he mixed in porn, complete with more than just visuals. My excuse: Not feasible to predict. See earlier statements on the current, unimagined insidiousness.

Results: Three Failures in Forecasting This Evil

(1) The Market Lure of Death

In Virtual Eternity’s death-game phase, the users knew they were entering a simulated death scenario that looked really real. But mystery existed as to whether it really was the real thing. On the other hand, for Luckey, after the user chooses to start the game, the only mystery is whether you’ll defeat his horror-laden scenarios to retain your life, or get killed in front of other gamers. Lesson Summary: Both present the users with stimulating, seemingly marketable unknowns about their fate. But I failed to predict that people might want to risk eternal death for fleeting gamer-culture fame.

(2) The Murder Weapon

Like a true Boomer would, the Virtual Eternity villain used artsy images and narcotizing gases to induce heart stoppages and death. On the other hand, Luckey uses explosives attached to the Meta-headset that explode on your forehead. Although he first says he “couldn’t come up with any way,” he then says he links a screen flash frequency that detonates explosives into the users’ heads, to bash them into a shower of blood and skull. Lesson Summary: Although I’m thrilled I didn’t even come close to fictionalizing this, I have that feeling Luckey is fictionalizing too, in a New Normaly way.

Related to this, both masterminds made their fortunes off wars, although the Virtual Eternity villain was adapting to the 1990s peace years. In the 80s, he led a publicly-owned company that made its fortune in DoD training applications. Then the Soviet collapse dried up Defense spending, “until the wars start up again,” as the Yoda-like “herald” character opines. The mid-90s ceasefire interlude was his chance to start selling to the new post-Atari virtual reality entertainment market. On the other hand, Luckey is still DoD, since the wars did start up again, and these wars needed his drones. Related question: Why doesn’t he just drone losing gamers?

(3) Life-After-Death Content

The Virtual Eternity villain believed his users’ afterlife was universalist heaven. Or oblivion. On the other hand, Luckey proposes an online social semi-virtual-immortality. Both masterminds favor “death-is-entertainment.” The Virtual Eternity villain had on his side a couple decades of “sex-and-religion-and-politics-is-entertainment.” But he also was curious about the afterlife, and wanted to murder God by heretically leading people to universal salvation – by giving them the real encounter. On the other hand, according to Vice, Luckey is only curious about how this affects people’s experiences in virtual worlds. He says, “You instantly raise the stakes to the maximum level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside it.” Before they’re dead, of course. Lesson Summary: I got close again, given both favor “death-is-entertainment.” But I’m again thrilled I missed. More importantly, the villain’s mission in the proposed Virtual Eternity afterlife scenario is to sell the public on the newfangled 20th-century heresy of human-declared universalism, which doesn’t even require morality on earth, or any relationship with the Holy Trinity for that matter, since under that scheme humans universally only need Christ’s “work,” done for every single human 2,000 years ago. Whether universalism is more evil that virtual-social-immortality-fame is debatable.

In summary, my lesson from the Luckey Vice story is that it’s almost impossible to accurately concoct what evil will come next. But missing some core evil notions is a relief, in some ways. It seems one can never predict the full extent of the wickedness that the Big Enemy can implant into some modern sycophant’s soul.

But if the evil you devise is fictional, if you take some techno-liberties, and if you use the evil to fashion some half-way credible adversarial thing to defeat, you might get close. Given a few decades, it might even prevent a means to evil.

Again, Luckey’s death-machine is probably a head-fake, reported faithfully by Vice and the other Establishment aggregators to help cushion the blow when, maybe in some mid-2020s Black Friday Sale, when some tech giant releases the compassionate assisted-suicide-headsets.

Pray this counter-prediction is totally off the mark.

And that maybe Palmer Luckey is merely a Non-Player Character in some metaverse somewhere.