Why is Steemit like high school?

Every time you go on Steemit, you are made painfully aware of where you stand in the pecking order. High school was the exact same way. It was filled with badly clashing archetypes, cliques and daily battles. So is Steemit.

An archetype is:

“a collectively-inherited unconscious image that is universally present in individual psyches”

We were all thrown together in a socially clashing heap in high school and those same forces are now being played out in Steemit.

We have all left our highly insular social, ego-stroking Facebook worlds that largely mirror our own tastes, beliefs, friends and world view. If we don’t like someone on Facebook, we simply throw them away with a block button. We’re not forced to see their posts on the trending pages and witness how much the whales give them in monetary rewards. The last time we had to confront the shit from people we hated was in high school. The last time our identities were challenged or threatened was also in high school. By college, most of us had figured out a way to create a tribe and become a functioning part of a group. High school, however, was a clash of the titans. We’re not used to it at all. It was brutal. But we learned because the fights for dominance taught us.

High school was a new environment rife with fights for dominance. There were new people and a new set of hierarchies. Battles for dominance, both intellectual and physical were found in every classroom, every hallway and in every football game. People lost their status overnight and were forced into social submission by the herd. Risk takers who were successful became instantly powerful. Risk takers who faltered ended up licking their wounds in a corner of submission with vicious ridicule ruining them. High school was filled with brutality and daily competition to stake one’s position in the pecking order which was determined not by how intelligent or magnanimous one was, but how dominant and socially manipulative one was.

Those who were skilled at dominating others, through any means necessary rose to the highest social levels and were given the lion’s share.

Then social submissives gathered around the select dominant ones and would get rewards doled out to them, based on how hard and deep they sucked their various body parts. The social submissives realized that in order to survive, they would need to pick a dominant leader and help them maintain their status, because their status was dependent upon their chosen leader’s status. They couldn’t become a powerful leader themselves, so it was in the submissive’s best interest to help maintain their chosen leader’s dominance.

The most manipulative teens tended to rise massively in popularity, up the food chain, gaining clear, easy access to the most desirable sexual mates, parties and goods while the various outcasted cliques shared more intimate and rebellious pursuits on their own, in the wild, away from the established hierarchy. They were generally bitter that they had been outcasted and therefore, created their own hierarchies within their own small tribes.

Among the established popular males, there was always one who was the supremely manipulative co-opter and pathological liar.

Whenever caught red-handed he would destroy the truth tellers’ reputations and accuse them of doing the reprehensible actions he in fact did. He’d steal musical taste from the punks, a few lines from the enfant terrible reading Nietzsche and secretly buy weed from the stoners. He’d wear a notnomde Varsity jacket with letters stolen from the quietest kid who he’d threaten to beat up if he ever told anyone. He was popular through his violence and exploitation of the honest, shy kids and no one dared to reveal his fraudulent, manipulative mask. He wasn’t the smartest but he was the most manipulative. The only one who had the guts to rip off his mask was the enfant terrible.

The enabler is the girlfriend of the #1 popular guy. The enabler drives the popular guy home from parties when he’s too drunk. The enabler ends up repairing the damage the popular guy did to others when he was drunk. She takes care of him when he’s sick and helps him with his homework. She cleans his car and cooks his meals. The enabler is the definition of a slave.

The enfant terrible was scared of no one.

He bowed to no one, not even to the leaders of the Anarchy club. His weapon was not manipulation but rather a blunt confrontation of the way a human operates. For those not familiar with the concept of enfant terrible here’s a definition:

a successful "genius" who is very unorthodox, striking, and in some cases, offensive, or rebellious.

He was not correct 100% of the time, for no human is capable of such a feat but he challenged everyone who crossed his path. He was the pure artist, terrifyingly candid, a free thinker who ascribed to no social niceties, no kissing of the king’s feet, no time period’s cognitive conveniences. He drew his sword instead of shaking hands, which in a flash, rendered weak minds into a pile of quivering ineptitude and disgust. To the enfant terrible, hierarchies appeared to be maintained through fakery, cowardice, and mediocrity not through truth, genius and brutal honesty. An enfant terrible is best characterized by French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, who after listening to a shitty writer at a dinner party, ends up doing and saying this:

"In the days of Francois, wise and benevolent giants roamed the countryside and one of their primary functions was to rid the world of pedants, fools and writers of no talent, by pissing on them from a great height."

Actually, you will find almost the entire cast of Steemit characters in this clip, sitting around the dinner table, er, the Trending Page, listening to the latest whale-shilled writers of no talent.

Very few liked the enfant terrible because he refused to accept the flawed foundations on which the high school social hierarchy was built. He made people uncomfortable because he forced people to examine their own psychological constructs in a brutal way. The only ones who could stomach his presence were other enfant terribles, misanthropes or geniuses.

Then there was the rich kid who was nice because his daddy owned the land on which the school was built. He didn’t have to struggle in any way because he was already at the top and everybody knew it. Life was easy, but his intellectual abilities suffered because of the softness of his silver spoon. He couldn’t hold his own when mentally sparring with the enfant terrible and because of this, his modus operandi was just to keep quiet and only say what was absolutely necessary. Daddy’s bank account had created an intellectually weak mind.

The super geek was there and had his own ideas of how things should run and those ideas resembled a highly intricate maze that ordinary people were unable to navigate. But the geek could rarely get these ideas into reality because of his lack of social skills. The super geek tended to put his energy towards constant improvements of minutae instead of big picture changes based on social needs. The geek had good intentions, but lacked a basic understanding of how emotions rule decisions in most humans. Instead of producing frictionless social designs, which would alleviate distress, he tended to fine tune details that exacerbated in-fighting, chaos and friction. His world was full of absolutes, power struggles and hyper-intricate designs and his solutions unconsciously carried this cognitive load. The geek did not know how to read people or respond to their needs. He relied on others to navigate in social waters that he barely understood. He often chose the wrong people because of his inability to read or take note of social cues.

The cheerleader was happy even when she was not. She rarely delved into areas of unknown mysteries and thought everyone operated from a well-meaning perspective. She looked the other way when someone was mean and purposely avoided all conflict, preferring to remain in a happy and content environment. When asked what she liked, she waited for the other person’s response before she stated her preferences, making sure she aligned with the other. Critical thoughts were snuffed out instantly, before they had time to mature. The cheerleader died not knowing who she was or what she stood for in life.

The trending page is the lunch line at the high school cafeteria.

Image Source

The shitposts on the trending page are similar to the “meals” served in a high school cafeteria: bland, industrial grade mass-produced garbage that barely passes as edible. No one outside the school would ever dream of touching it.

Its taste inspires none or very few, and its production is carried out in a mechanical, thoughtless way. It looks like food, but it is not. It’s lacks artistry, freshness and vitality. The whale-shilled shitposts are the exact same thing.

When you examine the trending and hot pages, you can see who sits at the whales’ tables and who has carved out their own chair on the floor or in the basement. The hot pages usually contain more substantial meals than the trending page.

You can see what writers the minnows like and who they don’t. Oftentimes, the minnows’ preferences are not liked by the whales, but occasionally the two overlap. Once you establish yourself as a critical thinker, though, your whale support gets removed and you’ll be thrown to the basement to carve out your own table with pizza rinds, dirt and left-over fruit cocktail. The whales will go in search of new lobotomized sheep who will produce sterile, mediocre stories that fail to inspire humans on every level. Or the whale will just purchase his own lobotomized sheep writer kit to perform these writing container operations for him. Only the most innovative, stubborn or hungry writers will be able to build something remotely stable from these cast off ingredients. The sensible people will leave.

The pre-packaged whale-backed shitposts only serve to represent reading material, they are not real, authentic, talented reading material in and of themselves. They are symbolic written containers full of recycled half-assed garbage, fluff and tunnel vision drivel that should never have been released into public view.

But now we're all in the lunch line, forced to view the mediocre trays' monetary worth, comparing each pathetic tray with our own.