I was right there when the Times Square bomb threat happened. This is the true story of how I toppled authority to bring my peers to safety. My motive for sharing this story is not to gloat or to brag. Those of you who know my character by now can attest to the fact that I have no need for admiration by anyone, except perhaps by those I love; I would not be so willing to be confrontational or contrarian if I wanted popularity. Instead, my motive for sharing this is rather to convey the lesson that can be gleaned from what happened – a lesson which I believe is pertinent to the Apollo-sphere, due to its intention of bringing about a paradigm change.

What Happened

It was a ~2-day field trip to New York City with my high school classmates. We took tours, walked all over Manhattan, checked out the Museums, and observed the street entertainment. Funny enough, I had never even heard of the Hard Rock Café, until I was in it. All in all, it was a pleasant and interesting experience.

However, on our first night, things went South. Real hard. We’re sitting in some Times Square restaurant. Half-way through my meal, I notice the street in front of the restaurant is suddenly full of police sirens and commotion. I initially thought nothing of it. “It’s a typical NYC Saturday evening”, I figured. Who cares.

A few minutes later, a waitress informs our table (which was on the 2nd floor) that there is a bomb threat and the police are “recommending” that we evacuate.

At this point, I’m thinking “well ok then. Someone’s trying to kill us.” As far as I’m concerned, this is now a war zone and I need to get the heck out of here. So I descend to the 1st floor to the teachers’ table and I inform them of what’s happening. They look at me with a straight face and go “oh come on. It’s NYC. This happens all the time. Now, sit down and finish your food.”

Let me put this in perspective. We have a table full of late 20’s / early 30’s female teachers who work for a private preppy school where you pay double the cost of a university semester to attend. These teachers are supposed to be responsible for us and our safety. You would think that’s a simple enough job, right? Like, if I were to explain to a 4-year-old the concept of keeping a child safe, removing said child from all dangers like.. say… a possible BOMB would be the obvious example.

As soon as the teachers finish telling me (and my peers) to go back upstairs, I pretty much lost all respect for them. They cared more about their comfort and their stomachs than our lives. And I’m supposed take orders from these psychos? That’s not happening.

Here’s what’s going to happen. Those of you who want to stay, it was nice knowing you. Those of you who want to live, you’re coming with me.

Me

The boys in the class loudly complained and universally sided with the teachers. They, too, preferred to finish their food. So I walked right out of the restaurant in the opposite direction of the bomb, thinking I’d be the only one. To my surprise, I look behind me and I see that I am being closely followed by the girls, some of whom were heartbreakingly in tears.

We make it past the first block and I look again to see that the boys are now trying to catch up to the girls and the teachers are nowhere to be found. Eventually, we made it to a monument we had previously agreed as a meet-up spot in case something went wrong or if someone went missing. It took another 15 minutes of waiting there before the teachers arrived, at which point there was an outpouring of emotions.

The teachers then had the audacity to convince the class that “you guys, it’s NYC, this happens all the time and you should never leave us again or there will be consequences.” They made me out to be a sensitive kid who basically just had a giant tantrum over nothing. Being an immature teenager, I believed the propaganda. I felt embarrassed and ashamed to have scared the girls over nothing, and the kids were looking down at me that night (and rightly so, I thought).

The Morning After

I timidly descend to the lobby and what I notice is that half of my peers and teachers have their eyes glued to the television whereas the other half would look down to the floor upon making eye contact with me. “Well, that’s strange”, I thought. I’m the one who is supposed to be embarrassed. What’s happening? I look at the screen and CNN’s report on the very real Times Square bomber is airing.

You can imagine how high my reputation bounced back that morning. From that point forward, the entire school’s attitude towards me changed. Before this, I was just a tough but arrogant kid who got respect with intimidation, which isn’t something I’m proud of at all but, then again, teenage immaturity is a real phenomenon. After NYC, I was authoritative. My words were taken seriously. This was a different kind of respect. Kids did not listen to me because of fear, they listened to me because my actions had given me legitimacy.

Nobody saw any point in challenging me for class president. The one fool who challenged me for school representative lost the election in a landslide. The teacher in charge said that over 95% of the vote was in my favor.

Once we had returned to school, local media wanted to cover the story. They needed someone to make a statement. The principal, along with her husband (who I assume co-owns the school), walks in my class explaining the situation. In front of the whole class, her husband raises his hand and points to me but before he could get a word out, the principal forcefully puts his hand down and instead asks her daughter (my peer) to come give a statement. In her statement, the daughter said that she was grateful… to the teachers… for having saved the day. Obviously, she was coached to say that.

They not only didn’t take responsibility for what happened, but they instead took advantage of the situation to get good publicity. From the perspective of the students and some parents, there was an attitude of utter contempt and disgust towards the staff because they saw with their own eyes what had just happened. The school quickly became unmanageable. The staff was completely incapable of enforcing the most basic of rules.

Students would walk out to pee without permission. They would come late to class. They would talk back to the teachers. Some wouldn’t even show up for detention. Pretty much every student conceived of suspension as a very welcome day off. A few students would fill water bottles with vodka and drink right in front of the math teacher. They would leave school premises during lunch. One of the older kids actually parked his car in the principal’s spot (lol). 3 teachers were brought to tears by their classrooms. Daring expulsion even became a common refrain, given the perception that the principal’s willingness to stoop so low for publicity was an indication of her being in need of money. “What are you going to do, expel us?” – the students would say.

Quite the contrast between the staff’s predicament and mine. I don’t think it is at all a stretch to say that a very small (and civilizationally insignificant) paradigm change had occurred in the school. Granted, it is a microcosm of what Apollonians intend to do, but the reactions of the students are worthy of examination.

The Lesson

I would like to begin by establishing what I believe are the appropriate labels for what took place: a non-violent regime change or “revolution” of sorts. Unquestionably, we came to NYC with one authority and left with another. In my opinion, it does serve the Apollo-sphere to learn from this success if it is to replicate it. Why this case?

To be clear, I don’t argue that “true” revolutions or regime changes shouldn’t be studied – of course, they should; we must always learn from the winners. However, this story involves a relatively small number of people. As such, we have a very fine and granular detail of the steps taken to achieve the revolution as well as what the people involved were thinking in each step of this revolution. I think there are insights from this event that cannot be gleaned from merely studying actual political revolutions, due to the sheer size of those events and the fact that history is often distorted by the lens from which it is seen. E.g. Ancient Greece was not, in fact, a woke paradise but students in liberal subjects like sociology make it out to be a homosexual bordello.

Now that I’m older and understand women, the female reaction to my ultimatum seems like a no-brainer. There was a clear danger and only I offered a path to safety. Of course, women flock to he who makes them feel safe. This is neither new nor unique.

What’s interesting, however, is that the boys erred on the side of the teachers. Let’s examine why. We know that people generally err on the path of least resistance. They simply don’t want the trouble. Can this explain the difference in behaviors of the girls and boys?

Note: Click an image to expand.

One common cognitive distortion is the tendency to bias one’s perception of a situation in favor of that which is most convenient to the person. For example, Christian men tend to convince themselves that Christianity is why they are virgins. Similarly, dissidents tend to blame their loserdom on “the elites”; whether they are referring to WASPs or Jews depends on whether they are right-wing or left-wing dissidents, but the impulse remains the same.

This is not to say that this cognitive distortion is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it is likely that this trait may have been (and may still be) evolutionarily adaptive by virtue of it being so pervasive. We know that serotonin tends to increase in response to victory, and we know that victories and sexual access tend to increase in response to serotonin; for reference, see the effect of serotonin on lobsters. Therefore, it would make sense that such a cognitive distortion would be selected for if it results in overestimating one’s place in the social dominance hierarchy because that would correspond with an increase in serotonin and, by extension, victories and sexual access. More sexual access means that the trait will proliferate across the gene pool.

In the images above, we see the same phenomenon: 2 perceptions of the same situation, both of which are correct yet skewed according to each gender’s bias. In the Girls’ Dilemma, the girls are interpreting the situation with their most primal need in mind: safety. In the Boys’ Dilemma, the boys are interpreting the situation with a different primal need: food. From the perspective of the girls, there is only one course of action which offers a chance at getting what they want and that is to run from a possibly fake bomb. From the perspective of the boys, there is only one course of action which offers a chance at getting what they want and that is to eat within proximity of a possibly fake bomb.

Neither gender is actually misinterpreting the situation. They are both correct in their risk / reward assessments. They simply have different priorities and are making a decision according to their respective bias. Once the girls made up their minds, there was a change in the boys’ perception of the situation:

In the Apollo-sphere, we are going to have to accept that we will be faced with the same predicament. The smarter members of the bottom 80% of men who are not part of a woman’s sexual calculus (i.e. bourgeois / middle-class professional men) do often make it to high-functioning positions which are directly or indirectly a part of the intricate system of statecraft that is in place; I am referring here to the institutions of society whose ultimate purposes are to conserve the legitimacy of the state, namely academia, media, education, the justice system, and so on. These individuals operate within a variation of the Boys’ Dilemma, just as the Western women operate under a similar variation. These variant Dilemmas are depicted below.

Note 1: Click to expand.

Note 2: This article is only concerned with non-violent regime changes. As such, “reprisal” in the scenario above refers to measures which result in a loss of socio-economic status, such as a hit piece, loss of employment or business opportunities, legal repercussions, etc.

In the Bourgeois’ Dilemma, we see that commoner men get what they want by sticking their heads in the sand; the only way to have a chance at avoiding reprisal is to stay on the fence and hope that a regime change isn’t happening. In the Western Female’s Dilemma, picking a side – any side – whether or not a regime change is happening results in protection. However, the females invariably will choose who they think is the safer option.

At this point, I would like to point out a convenient fact. The general sentiment of Western women is to reject “the patriarchy” while supporting the arrival of even more patriarchal men; they certainly do not have a positive outlook vis-à-vis the future of the West. This tells me that women overwhelmingly do not support the current elites, albeit unwittingly. In fact, they blame the current elites for all the problems of the world, even African “hunger”. We can mock woke Hollywood celebrities all we want, but in the end, they are telling women what they want to hear: “we’re not happy the way things are.” Sure, they might phrase it in terms of “rape culture” or perhaps they will insist that women must be respected by not being cat-called, but those are really just saying the same thing: “we’re not safe”. And they are correct in feeling that way. You can’t tell me women are safe when pedophiles and rapists win Academy Awards.

As it is, women are already ripe for other options. They want a new elite which will enforce respect for women by illiberal means – something that is antithetical to Western “human-rights democracies”. I don’t know about you, but I’m more than happy to violate human rights if it’s for the right reasons. So, you tell me. Between the Old Regime and the New Regime, is it really that difficult of a choice for women? It’s a no-brainer. There is no question that women will side with the New Regime. From where I stand, that’s effectively a done deal.

Now, let’s look at the new incentive structure of middle class professional men, once women have picked a side. At this point, it should be clear where I’m headed with this.

Women will never sleep with someone who makes them feel unsafe. Once women have determined that the New Regime is the safer option, they will have absolutely no incentive to sleep with a man who does not share that allegiance.

To conclude, I think that we can summarize the lesson as such: commoners follow women follow elites. In internet-speak, betas follow women follow alphas. Get the women and the rest will follow.

Voilà: your paradigm change delivered on a silver platter.