0. This will be the first in a series of essays where I try to break open the windows of the “mind” and shed some disinfecting sunlight on the subconscious

Ok, we’ll get to Plato’s Cave Allegory and the “trans-platonic caves,” but first we have to talk about Reality itself (hopefully you’ve brushed up on your Beaudrillard! :P). But even before we talk about Reality, we have to talk about Nature. But even before THAT, I have to do my silly little TBKTS self-therapy session (your patience is appreciated) where I have to recognize that my inner Continental Idealist Locked in the Basement is “pounding on my floor,” reminding me to discourage the reader, if need be, from any curiosity about my metaphysics. I never start from metaphysics. I always start from dialectics. And Dialectical Materialism is what lets me shout unabashedly from the rooftops that my metaphysics is simply “the friends I made along the way!” and “Thou shalt know my dialectical ‘tree’ by its metaphysical ‘fruits’!” Also, my Inner Marxist-Leninist Catgirl is telling me to remind the reader not to start accusing me of “eclecticism” (a term from “Leninese”) just because you don’t see all the components of my worldview (and how they connect to each other systematically) yet! Finally, yes, my Inner Liberal Behind the Drywall and Between the Studs Where Liberals Belong is telling me through muffled “voice” that you, dear reader, (in addition to being turned off by this opening “self-therapy session” itself, and by my general “impoliteness,” among other things :P) will be turned off by some of the names of some of the people and concepts I’ll be dropping/have already dropped¹, even though by all standards, I should have referenced and even based load-bearing portions of this essay on the works of enough conventional thinkers to satisfy the delicate sensibilities of any normie libcuck academic(!), but my response is simply to remind the Inner Liberal that they’re just having a fear/trauma response from over a century of anti-communist propaganda, and if they JUST READ THE GODDAMN ESSAY, they could at least see where I’m coming from, which would, not so ironically, allow them to argue against me more effectively, IF THAT’S SOMETHING THEY ACTUALLY GIVE A FUCK ABOUT AND ARE NOT JUST BULLSHITTING ME! Also, yes, I’ve read back through this essay a few times and I can see how it could be difficult to follow, including the material in the current paragraph. Don’t worry about that. It’s just an early draft. I have many more in my future, I’m afraid. But surely it’ll be easier to follow than the book of Ezekiel! (I’m not calling you surely!)

I. Nature is not “reality”

“Reality” is merely the world of social constructs (just keep reading). Nature lies underneath this. Nature is a level that undergirds the social! There could be nature without the social, but there certainly couldn’t be a social world without nature! But what does “social” mean? Remember your George Lakoff! The word “social” has literal and metaphorical meanings. One key feature of sociality is that all the components of the “system” should be interacting with each other (“connected,” “working together,” if you will) on some level. Interaction itself isn’t that big of a deal. The sun and its planets all interact with each other—gravitationally, at least. They don’t “know” what they’re doing. The elements all interact with each other for the most part, except for the “noble” gasses (there’s that metaphorical sociality creeping into our “pure sciences” again! Oh my! Somebody call the logical positivists!). For human beings, our sociality entails that our quality of life will greatly suffer if we have no other people in our lives. Getting along with others is important, (though not as important as not getting killed by others, ceteris paribus). Also, this is apparently controversial for some reason, but our sociality entails that we all have the same value and are all worthy of what we can call “the same rights.” Our sociality entails a bunch of other stuff too, but that should be enough for now!

When you ask what’s “real,” we have to determine, accurately and precisely, what you mean by that. Fortunately, we can stand on the shoulders of Giant Douchebags! And today’s Giant Douchebag² is the man who will never be known as Uncle Karl, Karl Popper³! See!? I’m not in a commie bubble! I read (past and present tense) all the liberal cucks too! And Nephew Karl divided the factual space into three concentric domains, which, after Edwardes, we can call: The Actual, which includes everything in the universe from that which exists and interacts with each other at the largest and smallest scales down to the level of the natural world, i.e., “that which has actual existence even in the absence of humans, such as rock” (Edwardes, p. 137, and yet humans have “actual existence” too! Get your story straight, Marty!); the Real, which is what exists and interacts at the social/societal level external to the individual (this can have different sublayers, e.g., nation, city, neighborhood, family, subfamily), including “that which has actual existence without humans but has meaning only because of humans, such as crayon” (ibid., and yet humans do have “real” existence!); and the Virtual, which is what “exists” and interacts at levels internal to the individual, that “can’t be accessed externally” (which includes conscious and subconscious levels), i.e., “that which exists only inside human heads, such as my” (ibid.). I will add that what exists/interacts at the Virtual level is always connected to what exists/interacts at the physiological level (and this level can be “accessed externally”)!

Also, I would separate “Nature,” what exists and interacts on planet earth (especially in the biosphere), slightly from the “Actual,” i.e., from the universe as it exists on the level of the “particles” (lol) and fields, for the simple reason that, well, there’s a clear distinction between the way we interact with the planet (and vice versa) and the way we interact with the “particles and fields” (and vice versa). Since Nature is (i.e., for the purposes of the present essay, we could define “nature” as/in the terms of) planet earth and everything that exists and interacts with each other on it (including the rest of the universe to the extent that it interacts with our planet in some way!), that means it also includes humans and human society in regards to how we interact with the planet and her other children, including other humans, which means that, yes, there are “manifolds” where there is very little to no abstraction between the natural and social realms!⁴ So we have our four main levels of the universe or the fact space or whatever you want to call it—four nesting ecosystems, if you will. And these ecosystems all have sub-ecosystems and nesting ecosystems within them, so keep that in mind.

These levels all interact with each other in different ways too, but, remember, “what you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and what you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven!” and “As above so below”! A change in one domain will always correspond to a change in a different domain,⁵ but we have to make sure we’re matching the appropriate operations to the relevant domains! But even before we do that, we first have to make sure we’re operating within the correct domain! i.e., if you and I are having a conversation, we have to make sure our “Real” words match our “Virtual” meanings and our “Virtual” meanings match up well enough with each other. This is possible through knowing your conversation partner very well, or at least through sufficient mutual/overlapping knowledge between conversation partners of a common meaning/communication medium, e.g., a certain technical (or otherwise specialized) “language.”

As a side note, it seems to me like the whole point of conservatism, starting from that boot-fellator Edmund “Berk” himself, was/is, in effect, to perform a shell game to mystify between the social and natural domains in the collective consciousness of the proletariat in the interests of the ruling class! This is where scientific racism comes from! It’s where eugenics and fascism come from! It’s where “evopsych” and the “manosphere” come from! It’s how the ruling class has gotten away with the policies of caring more about things than about people and nature (caring more about making sure people act in certain ways than about whether their needs are met) they’ve inflicted on us for the past ten thousand years! But we can stop falling for it! Stop “sleep[ing] now in the fire” and start “tak[ing] what you need,” comrade!

II. This is where Dialectical Materialism (DM) comes in

The simplest way I can explain DM is to say that it’s a worldview that recognizes the existence (and primacy thereof) of the material universe while also recognizing, like the Daoists, that a change in quantity can produce a shift in a quality and that qualities from previous phases can be retained throughout future phases (say, of a life cycle) in some form, and that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”! It’s how evolution (of all sorts!) happens! DM isn’t even scary or anything! You don’t even have to be a communist to be a dialectical materialist! Daniel Dennett, certainly no filthy commie, discovered DM in his own roundabout way, but the shallow ideological pool the ruling class keeps most of us swimming in had him and everyone else convinced that what he was talking about had nothing to do with Marxism! But it absolutely is DM! Remember “cranes, not skyhooks”?⁶ That’s what a crane is! It’s something made out of stuff and it operates one step at a time! That’s what “free will compatibilism” is! It’s a framework for explaining, step by step, how the mind is what the brain/body does! And how what we call “choice” “emerges” from that!

III. Ok, now let’s talk about Plato’s Cave Allegory and the Trans-Platonic Caves

The Allegory comes from Plato’s Republic. I like this animation read by Orson Welles! My interpretation, which should come as no surprise, is that he was trying to illustrate that “reality,” whatever that meant to him—what we now know as the world of social constructs, is not strictly identical to the natural world! Fair enough! But Plato’s view was that there was a world of “forms” underlying nature that everything (all the “objects”) in nature and in the social world are imperfect copies of! And that realm of “forms” was what was “more real than reality”! (See The Fabric of Reality, by David Deutsch, esp. p. 240-243) This isn’t true, though! What’s closer to the truth is Aristotle’s view that the “forms” aren’t their own distinct entities in some separate metaphysical realm we don’t have access to; the “forms” are simply the shape that material can take, and they don’t have to BE any “where” other than whatever material takes that shape!

But what’s really going on is that we do unavoidably experience the world from within a set of a few “caves.” I call these the “trans-platonic⁷ caves” because we experience reality from them, but instead of being inside of them, they are inside of us. These are our eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. But let’s not forget the scariest “cave” of them all: the realm of the imagination!

Let’s start with the eyes. If you’re a person with standard color eyesight, “photons” of various wavelengths enter your open eyes directly through your corneas and lenses and hit your retinas, the walls of your trans-platonic vision caves, and your rods and cones. So, from the “perspective” of your retinas, what you “see” is two flat, rounded, upside-down, reversed images at the backs of your eyes. But, from your lived experience in the natural and social worlds, you know that you live in three (to you) continuous dimensions (plus, to you, continuous time), and not within a flat series of twenty or so double images per second—like the phantom zone or something—so your brain has to “convince yourself” of that before the visual component of your experience integrates with everything else you know at the back of your brain, so that you don’t “go crazy.” There’s a lot of processing your brain has to do for this to happen. Most of this takes place subconsciously. You don’t even know it’s happening. You don’t even think about it!

In other words, if you have ordinary 20/20 color vision, there’s a lot going on that you probably don’t even appreciate. First of all, let’s address the elephant in the room: It’s a known fucking fact that color exists absolutely fucking nowhere in the known fucking universe outside of a color-besighted organism’s visual field (ok, fine; color can also exist in said organism’s memory and imagination—the point is that it’s “Virtual” in the Edwardesian/Popperian sense!) when said field is interacting with “photons” of a certain wavelength/energy level! This simple fact makes some philosophers tie their brains in all sorts of knots⁸. So where does color come from? Well, we don’t need to have absolute metaphysical knowledge of Color Itself to know that, well, on the simplest level, color derives from the capability of the “cone cells” in our eyes to associate a certain wavelength of light with a certain chemical “pigment.” If it makes it any easier, we can think of color as simply a “dimension” or “[low positive integer]-dimensional space” of the imagination. If you remember your fractals, then you should remember that augmented dimensionality can be generated simply from iterative motion in a compatible geometry! This even works in the natural world! It’s how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. It’s how a slime mold spores at the end of its life cycle. It’s how Danny D can shoot 12 ropes in a single orgasm! The fact that visual color cells exist in the human eye and, in general, are connected to visual color neurons in the human brain should be enough to convince us that no “magic” (i.e., nothing supernatural; no “non-physical substance,” whatever that means) is required for us to perceive color as a dimension of our experience! We don’t have to know WHY our visual color neurons “invented” color as a way to “interpret” the wavelength/energy level of photons! It took the human species around 2000 years to mathematically “solve” Zeno’s “paradox,” but Comrade Diogenes is said to have debunked it (well enough for a casual observer to convince themselves they didn’t have to existentially worry about it) simply by running circles around him!

So hopefully, this should be enough to convince you, if you need it, to take a single step out of the Platonic Cave toward the path of recognition that, well, we don’t need to travel with ancient psychonaut Ezekiel to the Realm of Pure Color Itself to realize that color vision confers an evolutionary advantage over non-color vision, especially for a species descendent from prey animals! And this by itself should be enough of an explanation for us that the question itself doesn’t cause us existential distress.

In Rousseau’s “state of nature,” before the advent of classical dyeing techniques, there was probably a limit to the number of colors the average human was ever gonna run across. In my daily life in the Neoliberal Bourgeois Dictatorship of Austin, TX, I see green leaves, grasses, birds, and bugs; blue birds, bugs, flowers, and, of course, sky(!); red birds, bugs, and flowers; and, of course, the mostly grey, black, beige, kinda dingy pigeons and starlings, and the midnight black, but iridescently plumed grackles, the Texas Air Raid that is its own Siren! And, of course, you do see golden and purplish sunrises and sunsets in William Sydney Porter’s “city of the violet crown”! So there we have our red, our blue, and our green, etc., even! Our eyes can detect photons in the neighborhoods of three specific wavelengths very well, and this fact is responsible for much of our color vision. But I’m not a reductionist. I’m a dialectical materialist, and a dialectical materialist recognizes that you don’t just “see” what you see; your brain has to make sense of it! You tell what color something is by comparing it to every time you’ve seen a similar shade in the past, under similar lighting conditions (or at least your eyes compare what you’re seeing now to times in the past when you’ve seen the same thing). You kind of “zero in” on a color, not that it’s super precise. It’s as precise as you have “computing power,” not that this is some kind of “fixed value”!

This is why the first colors humans name are black, white, red, and yellow (or green)! That means color is real; not natural! It only “becomes” natural after we are able to consistently (socially) identify it!⁹

IV. The Trans-Platonic/Ezekielian Realm of Pure Color Itself

In modern times, with the development of modern dyes, inks, paints, etc., and especially screens and lighting, humans can live very “colorful” lives if they want. But, yes, to get an idea of what color really is, I see no alternative to travelling with ancient psychonaut Ezekiel to the Realm of Color Itself. There are several ways you can enter this realm. E-z-e entered by being schizophrenic. But if you’re not schizophrenic, you can have a “near-death experience” like my dad. Or you can “do” whatever Alex Grey “did/does.” Or you can be autistic and smoke weed like I did. I’m not sure it’s common for people to be able to enter this realm simply by smoking weed every day for a year starting at the age of 37, but, look, I do have autism, and autism is, so to speak, “just 3rd base in schizophrenic baseball“¹⁰, so I’m guessing I don’t need that much of a push to get into altered states of consciousness. I haven’t actually done a lot of experimentation in this area, believe it or not! Anyway, if you don’t have autism, I don’t know; you’re just gonna have to read someone’s trip report or something (to see how they entered that realm)! Wish I could help you out!

Anyway, when I “journeyed” to this realm, it was at a time when I was in a stage of my, well, “vision quest” (long story), where all my shitty, traumatic childhood/adolescent/adult memories were kinda flooding back to me, but I was slightly annoyed at this because it’s not like I’d forgotten any of them! But when I took that trip, I experienced one of those memories in brilliant, vivid color—more colors/more vibrant than a rainbow! I specifically remember a particular neon shade of green. When I “zoomed in” on this memory, as I was able to do, I saw the “pixels” of the memory, and they looked like snake scales, except the edges were a little fuzzy. But it’s pretty obvious to me that whatever I “saw” as “snake-scale pixels” was my internal, private, “Virtual” equivalent of whatever Ezekiel (and Alex Grey, though he doesn’t always color his artwork) saw as the “eyes” covering those “wheels within wheels” and those “wings” (I imagine feathered wings, but I don’t exactly see insectile wings as incompatible) his “living creatures” were covering themselves with. But my experience was [a reconstruction of] a memory, which means it came from my own fucking brain, which means that I must have somehow connected my visual neural network directly to my memory neural network, which means that the brain is what generates color! There was literally nowhere else for this color to come from!¹¹

This means that if you give Mary the right drugs (or otherwise activate the correct neural activity patterns), she will fucking see color alright! In other words, this confirms that the brain is what generates imagination, since it is, in fact, very closely connected to how we see color. That is, the energy of photons entering our eyes is what tells our brains what color to “see” the photons as! And if this photon has been reflected into our eyes from an “object,” then, for all intents and purposes, the color we “see” the object as will be the same color we “remember” and “imagine” the object as (unless we, on purpose, imagine it as a different color). Therefore, energy is real, but color is imaginary! And when I say it’s “imaginary,” I only mean that it comes from or is very closely related to what is going on in our “imagination” neurons; not that it doesn’t exist! That’s what it means for something to be imaginary! In other words, everything “imaginary” (in the sense of “that which is imagined”) can be said to “exist” as a pattern of activity in what we can call “imagination neurons”! Don’t get it twisted!¹²

Incidentally, I don’t remember what the memory itself was, but it was part of a process where I was finally learning from my memories by finally recontextualizing them properly! I was finally learning/teaching myself where I was going wrong with my constant social fuck-ups! I was finally teaching myself what neurotypical people call “common sense”!¹³

V. Back to the Platonic Cave Allegory

Peter Coffin doesn’t like Plato’s Cave Allegory because, well, the way I would put it is that it doesn’t match up well with what “waking up” is like in the real world (among other things). Because to Plato, our real world IS “the cave,” and what’s “more real” is the world of the abstract Forms, so where, Peter asks, do you “go” when you “escape” this “cave” and “enter” the world of these Platonic Forms? Well, no “where”! In our reality, for the Allegory to make sense, you’d have to say that we live in the metaphorical “cave” of society and the “shadows on people’s walls” are the abstractions they live by! So Plato had it backwards! There are no “abstract objects”! There are only abstractions! And abstractions are actually LESS real than reality, but, since they help us organize our lives, we tend to treat them like they’re “more real.” Indeed, if your life is currently being organized by one set of abstractions, you might find it difficult to change them while you’re still using them. It’s sort of like performing construction on a building that still has to be used during construction. That’s why it’s so hard for people to change, and yet still possible!

To Plato, our real world was less real than the world of Forms, but you could only imagine that World, because it wasn’t any “where” in our known universe. But we know now that all imagination takes place “in” the brain, and, therefore, can’t directly (only indirectly) tell us anything about the outside world. So true color itself is actually in the “trans-platonic cave.” You have to go “inside” to see it. That’s what’s happening when you imagine anything. You’re consciously “seeing” “shadows” on the “wall” of your imagination, but what the “shadows” are “of” are patterns of neural activity going on in your subconscious brain networks. That’s what memory is too. Your brain “stores” information from events you’ve experienced as “memories” in the form of patterns of neural activity. Conceivably, with a measuring device of sufficient resolution, you could detect (and even graphically depict) which neurons are firing within a person’s brain, and with enough information from conscious reports, you could reconstruct their experience from their patterns of activity. i.e., Sapolsky is right about determinism (even though he’s wrong about free will/compatibilism, even though he did kind of beat Dennett in that debate).

So let’s review what we’ve learned so far. You’re made out of stuff, i.e., material. What you experience is that (material) stuff doing stuff, i.e., engaging in patterns of activity. The lie about materialism you’ve been told by anti-materialists is that matter is “cold” and “dead,” but that’s not really the case. Dialectical materialism recognizes the obvious: that matter is dynamic—in constant motion—it actually takes energy to keep matter still! (see, for example, Vietnam’s Curriculum of the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism, translated by Luna Nguyen). So it’s no surprise that the stuff you’re made of is constantly engaging in activity patterns too!

Now we can address the “idealism” question (i.e., the anti-materialist position). Actually, you know what? It’s hard for me to say what idealism is—what “idealists” are really saying. So, for the purpose of avoiding misrepresenting them, let’s go back to our Popperian map of the fact space. If we start from the premise that the physics scientists do every day isn’t some trick played on them by a Cartesian Demon, then we can say that, from the subjectified, constructed “perspective” of any object (this can be constructed for any object), what is real to that object is what can interact with it. If the object has, through some Darwinian evolutionary process, say, developed a subjectivity, then what is real to the [object which we can now at least call an] “organism” will be whatever it can interact with or can interact with it (that it can detect). The subjectified object known as the human being (an object capable of constructing its own subjectivity, consciously and/or otherwise) is a social animal, and an animal with an imagination. These two facts are inextricably linked to each other. Therefore, it is very difficult (though still possible! It’s what we’re trying to do right now!) to precisely and accurately delineate between the “real” and the “imaginary” in the human domain. And don’t forget that, as a direct and ineluctable consequence of the fact that material is dynamic, ideas are also dynamic! But like stagnant water is not “static,” neither are stagnant idea spaces! They fester with many of what Judith Butler would call “phantasms“!

So let’s take a step back. Let’s think about things this way: Dialectical Materialism really does run on the same principle as Mendellian genetics/Darwinian evolution: descent with modification. This is how ideas work as well. There’s a whole chapter on memes in The Selfish Gene! That’s where the word “meme” comes from!¹⁴ Every idea we have is a modified copy of an idea that came before. Even my ideas are modifications of my earlier ideas and, of course, other people’s ideas. An “idea” is not a “thing in itself.” In Popper’s World 1, it’s only an abstraction, and, thus, can only be said to “exist” (if at all, especially in World 1) as a pattern of neural activity in the brain of a human (though it has quite different “existences” in Worlds 2 and 3! You can be sure of that!). For the idea to be spread, all that’s required is for other people’s brains to repeat the same pattern. A simple way to strengthen this pattern is to accompany it with a pattern of physical activity. That’s why song lyrics are easier to remember than sentences organized as prose.

One way a person can spread their ideas is through language. This is because our brains just so happened to be able to encode information and ideas into language. A very important step in the “primordial generation” and evolution of memes was the human discovery and development of the idea/ability to encode language into (eventually) written symbols. This was an outgrowth of our ability to encode meaning into visual objects. The one follows from the other as a journey of a thousand miles can follow from a single step in a compatible geometry! And, as Burman says, it’s not that a “meme” is a “thing” that makes copying “errors” in “itself” as it “leaps” from brain to brain (i.e., it is not always useful to interact with a meme through what Dennett [PBUH] would call “the intentional stance”); it’s more that our brains make errors “reconstructing” these memes (when viewing a meme as a pattern of brain activity we can construct and reconstruct ourselves, though in the conscious domain, we may merely be “thinking a thought”). That’s how I’m able to communicate—and hopefully spread—my ideas through writing.

You see, comrade, the trans-platonic cave of the imagination works both ways! It’s how a building goes from the trans-platonic “Form” of an idea (in an architect’s head/brain/imagination) to a blueprint to a finished product¹⁵; but it all starts with the material world. That’s where culture comes from. That’s where the cultural elements that become memes (that later “congeal” and “cohere” into ideas) come from! But, again, don’t get it twisted! Ideas don’t become reality “by magic”! Dialectical Materialism is how we can join Comrade Britney in proclaiming that for an idea to become reality, you gotta “get to work, bitch!”

Hold your head high
Fingers to the sky
They gon’ try and try ya, but they can’t deny ya
Keep it moving higher, and higher
You better work bitch
Now get to work bitch

Britney spears, “work bitch”

VI. Back to the Platonic Cave Itself

We’ve come to the point of the Allegory where we [can, if we want] go back into Plato’s Cave to see that our eyes “don’t work as well,” just because they haven’t [yet] adjusted to the lack of light; back into the place where people get all their meaning from the shadows on the walls. These people think there can be no other source of meaning aside from those shadows. They think you’re crazy for telling them there’s any meaning “out there” at all! We can think of this cave as any old “club” we used to belong to that we no longer identify with; that we’ve evolved beyond, so to speak—we can admit it: the obvious exemplar of this cave is religion. There certainly are individuals and movements that see the real world as meaningless and only see what happens in the cave of their church or the cave of their religious experiences as bearing meaning. In the Allegory, the captives are rewarded for their proficiency in identifying the shapes of the shadows on the walls. You could easily identify this with the “treasures in heaven” some people think they’re storing up. I certainly wouldn’t want any “treasures” I was offered if it meant I had to hate queer people!

But, look, here’s the deal. The fact is that there are “treasures” we can “earn” that, once we have them, can never be taken away from us! I’m talking about having a healthy sense of self! (Oscar Wilde knew a thing or two about that!) Likewise, there are a lot of “treasures” we can “store up” for future generations (that don’t necessarily have anything to do with biological/genetic reproduction)! I regard the Socratic Method as one of these “treasures”! Furthermore, there IS a lot of meaning to be found in the trans-platonic cave of the imagination! Also, sometimes, the real world can be truly dangerous for us! Elijah McClain knew that! (Google him!). So, yes, sometimes people are at a puppet show because that truly is where they believe ALL meaning comes from, but sometimes people are at a puppet show just because they like the show! And, ok, yes, some fans of puppet shows see the show as symbolically representing stuff in the Real (or even Natural or Actual) World/Universe that they don’t fully understand because the real world is difficult to understand! This doesn’t necessarily make these people weak or “evil”; it just makes them wrong! We should have a certain measure of compassion on them!

Sometimes, these people are even right about certain things in the real world, even if not for exactly the reasons they think! Cornel West’s characterization of (among other things) the commercialization of the human being¹⁶ as “spiritual warfare” doesn’t strike me as that much of a stretch. I’m not sensitive enough to take it literally. It’s just one way of understanding the issue. It’s certainly more compatible with my naturalist/humanist/materialist worldview than the Conservative/Fundamentalist/Evangelical/Christian/Nationalist understanding of “spiritual warfare” held by someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene! Sure, it would be a more comprehensive viewpoint to see it as a war over meaning itself and a war over the value of human life and the natural world itself (I’m on the side that thinks humans are more valuable than things and that nature is more valuable than capitalism/money!), but that’s a conceptual mountain you have to climb! It’s the job of people like me to make “ladders” (or “bridges,” whatever! I don’t care! It’s not a big deal! Don’t get bent out of shape over it!) from the “spiritual meaning” viewpoint to the “material meaning” viewpoint, not like that prick Wittgenstein who kicked the ladder out from under him at the end of his manifesto! But that’s for another essay!

VII. Meaning Itself

That leads us to the stage where we’re finally ready to discuss meaning itself! Well, actually, you can’t talk about meaning itself (Wittgenstein is smirking somewhere). You can only talk about meaning TO something or someone. Don’t freak out about this. It’s not scary. People are only scared of this idea because the ruling class has poisoned their minds with the false consciousness of the paternalist metaphysical traditions (for example) or liberalism or whatever. I know how this sounds, but it’s our job (those of us who can communicate truths in whatever way) to counter false consciousness at its source: fear, pain, and need! Not with paternalism! Not with “Christian Love” (Google it!)! But with REAL love! By actually meeting people’s needs! Mr. Dr. No Gods, No Bedtimes, the OG AnarKid himself, Peter Kropotkin, an evolutionary biologist, recognized cooperation and “mutual aid” as “a factor of evolution”! That was the title of one of his books (Google it)! So get out there and fucking help someone, comrade! “To each according to their need” means “to each according to their need”! And if you are gonna participate in/on the internet, at least do or say something constructive (or at least something nice) once in a while! Tell/show someone you love them! Ask them what they need, and do what you can to help them get it! Please! Thanks!

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