Introducing Pan-Dialectical Materialism (or: Cosmic Materialism): A Monografesto

Subtitles: Dialectical Materialism as Metaphysical and Synthetic Naturalism | Vivisection of Yaldabaoth via Dialectical Materialism | Towards a Shamanic, Alchemical, Promethean Marxism, i.e., “Marxism-Leninism-Maroofism” | Towards a Statistical (Bayesian) Metaphysics | Towards a Justice Beyond the Adversarial/Accusatory (Therefore Beyond the Satanic)

Author’s Note: What you are reading is a book! If it were printed, it would be about 900 pages (or, it’s about 270k words, about half as long as Infinite Jest)—therefore, it cannot be [fairly] regarded as a “piss take,” but rather, an “alchemical” take, where we alchemize piss into phosphorus, so to speak. What I would ask is that you read this book as if we were both Children of Mother Earth! Because that’s what we are! And not as if from within the prison of the literal. You’ll see what I mean by that.

When “cf.” is used in this book, it’s meant to encourage the seeking of correspondence rather than to encourage comparison.

Ok. Fine. My pronouns are they/them, because I’m nonbinary, and I contain multitudes.

From about page 580: Again, we are not dogs! And I am certainly not the Cesar Milanian “alpha”—a deeply flawed concept, by the way; nor am I some trainer with a whistle! If you are treating this book like an obstacle course for dogs a la the Westminster Kennel Club, you would immediately feel the urge rising up to attack the designer of the course! Because you are not a dog! So you would attack them like you were a dog, which is to say with all the viciousness of a dog, but in the form of a human, in “human forms”! But this book is not an obstacle course for dogs. It’s a slime mold path. You would have to see/imagine yourself as a slime mold. For you to see yourself as a slime mold, you would have to treat it like a science [or “science fair”] project. You would have to start seeing yourself as a part of the processes and relations you’re involved in just as much as they are a part of you. You would have to attain the metaphysical by synthesizing the dialectic. You would have to construct meaning out of what was previously meaningless to you—like the Engelsian thing-for-you/us! First it has to be a thing for you before it’s a thing for us! That’s called “prototyping”! They talk about it in the good old VDMT with the example of the good old AK-47 (p. 131-32, where they rightly place great metaphysical significance in the prototype’s status as, at the same time, unique, private, and common)! Well, we could just as easily say that this book is a reconstruction of the “tree of life” I climbed and crawled all over as a caterpillar that allowed me to metamorphose into the psychological butterfly I am today. But if you have already become a psychological butterfly, then you should be able to find whatever “nectar” you’re looking for in any random passage in this book.

From about page 60: Perhaps you detect some measure of “contempt” throughout this book! Preposterous! Pure projection! You’d like that, wouldn’t you? It would play very well into the narrative that upholds your stagnation! I’ve seen it before! But that only proves that you’re still shackled within the deep, dark pit of the framework of justification! For Mother Earth has no contempt! Neither does the Child of Mother Earth! And you shall see this “no contempt,” westoid, to the extent you continue dithering about in your bourgeois decadence, which you confuse for jouissance! You shall see it very well! […¶] For there is no contempt, no judgment within the framework of necessity! The framework of sufficiency! Only light! And if the picture of Dorian Gray looks ugly to you in this light, westoid, maybe you should just get it over with and stab the picture already! Or shall I continue?

From about page 250: We’re covering things in Wizard of Oz order. The more important things are being revealed nearer to the end. We are in a story where, in the end, you will find that the answer is as simple as clicking your heels together and saying there’s no place like home, but we are not yet at the point in this story where you would just try it. Because it’s not going to be an event. It’s going to be a struggle.

From about page 615: So where were we? Ah, yes, Marx’s Social Ontology, by Carol C. Gould, [University] Press 1978. Huh. [University]. Hey! That’s the school I flunked out of, but I could have just as easily (perhaps should have) gotten expelled for violating the harassment policy.

From about page 890: But all I’ve done is to have you chasing me in circles until this very point where we’ve reached the edge of the synthesis of the dialectic of ourselves, the bank of the river, so to speak! But you must “baptize” yourself, so to speak!

Dedicated to: AVL, LCP, Ronald P. Vincent, Robert W. Chambers, Peter the cockroach, “Dr. HUHA,” “Uncle Satan” (who said I should write a book), “Zoeye [pronounced like ‘Zoey’] Lazorova,” Barry Sanders, Vince Hannemann, Marina Karlova, Raven (AKA Dr. Kristina Kyser), Elijah McClain (though there are many “Elijah McClains”), The Public Universal Friend, Helen Keller, Deleuze & Gauttari, the late/great Maria Mies, the people of Turtle Island, the people of Vietnam, the people of North Sentinel Island, and, of course, my mom! But this list should not be considered exhaustive.

All Apologies to: “Mona Lisa O’Houlihan,” Eli H. Dadabhoy, anyone else named Mario Marrufo, and, of course, Wittgenstein

“Matter, space, and time are not separable; There is no matter that exists outside of space and time; there is also no space and time that exist outside of matter’s motion.”
–Vietnamese Dialectical Materialism Textbook, p. 63

“All things are ‘in-themselves,’ but that is not the end of the story”
-GWF Hegel

“If I were not Diogenes, I would wish to be Diogenes”
-Diogenes

“Yes, we are the godwhackers, who rip and chop and slice / For crimes beyond imagining, it’s time to pay the price.”
-Fagen & Becker

“You gotta go through hell to get to heaven”
-George Strait

“I’m gonna take mine of you with me”
-Lana Del Rey

“Now the whole damn bus is cheerin’, and I can’t believe I see a hundred yellow ribbons ’round the ole oak tree”
-Brown & Levine

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Introduction

This website is about communism (and communism, like everything else, is a process), but dialectical materialism is what entails communism. I use “pan-dialectical materialism” for a few reasons. For one, dialectical materialism has, fittingly, been called “the immortal science of dialectical materialism,” and calling it “pan-dialectical materialism” allows us to avoid saying the whole thing every time like it’s “A Tribe Called Quest.” Another reason I’m using “pan-dialectical materialism” is that we need to talk about metaphysics. The people yearn not only to yap about the metaphysical, but to attain it! And we must give the people what they yearn for! So the main reason I’m calling it “pan-dialectical materialism” is that there’s more to dialectical materialism (therefore, more to “materialism” as such) than you may have been led to believe! There’s more to EVERYTHING! As you read this, perhaps keep in mind the “(Unofficial) Park Ranger” from “Montana’s Yellowstone Country.” There are “more wonders to discover“! There’s always more! And if you can imagine her saying, “Yellowstone? Montana’s Yellowstone Country!,” then surely you can imagine her saying, “Materialism? Pan-Dialectical Materialism!”

If you don’t know what dialectical materialism is, I highly recommend the Vietnamese Dialectical Materialism Textbook (VDMT) (as well as its follow-up, the Vietnamese Historical Materialism Textbook (VHMT)) translated by Luna Nguyen (Luna Oi on youtube). If you don’t know what dialectical materialism is, then you’re not gonna be able to make your way very far into a book about pan-dialectical materialism, are you? But don’t worry. All the information will always be wherever it is, because, well, information doesn’t just get up and walk away. Truth exists. Not just information. That’s what dialectical materialism is all about! There’s always more to what you’re looking at than what you’re looking at! So, not to yadda yadda dialectical materialism, but, in brief, it is a systematic set of principles and methodology that allows us to find truth in the material world because the truth is that the world is material! Material is the substance of the world (the universe), but this material is not “cold and dead,” as you may have heard! This “material” is active and dynamic! Motion is “built-in” to material! Because energy is “built-in” to material! It’s important not to take the “built-in” literally, as if an agent “built” it in. Because we’re not starting from the metaphysical. We’re starting from the physical. Energy must be physical before it can be “metaphysical”! So you don’t start from the metaphysical. You start from the physical and only “attain” the metaphysical after you synthesize the dialectic. That’s why it’s called “dialectical materialism”! The whole universe is, indeed, a single dialectical-material process unfolding itself, “synthesizing” itself into new forms! We are an example of those forms! We ARE dialectical material, folding and unfolding itself, synthesizing itself into new forms in a single process of development that traces back to simple “material in motion”! Because pace a certain recently deceased hate-preacher, who denied that the universe is “merely [or ‘just’—I forget which —MM] matter in motion” (the clip I have in mind is hardly worth locating, but he says much the same thing in this clip), the truth is that there’s more to matter in motion than “meets the eye”! Because “matter in motion” is what becomes “matter in development,” including matter in EVOLUTION, and even matter in REVOLUTION!

The Metaphysical Spiral Staircase of Development

For our approach to metaphysics, let us imagine a caterpillar’s development into a butterfly. Imagine that, for some reason, there is a connection between the caterpillar’s “learning” the tree (its form and its content), and its developing into the butterfly. Imagine that, in some sense, it is “learning” about itself by “learning” about the tree. And there is such a connection. The caterpillar starts out by inching along a leaf on a tree. Eventually, the caterpillar “learns” it cannot eat bark, and must find a new leaf to munch on, so it inches along the bark, guided only by instinct. So, at first, it only moves one step at a time. It only “learns” about the tree one step at a time. But as it develops, as it “learns” about the branches of the tree, it “learns” about the dimensionality of the tree, indeed, “learns” about dimensionality itself. In a previous essay, I mentioned that, if you’re familiar with fractals, then you already know that higher dimensionality (a matter of degrees), can be achieved through iterative motion (twisting, say) in a compatible geometry. Indeed, the achievement of higher dimensionality IS the achievement of a “higher” degree of freedom! This is a higher degree of physical freedom, but it CORRESPONDS to a higher degree of “metaphysical” freedom. And that will be our approach to metaphysics. The butterfly attains a higher degree of metaphysical freedom through attaining a higher degree of PHYSICAL freedom! And so must we! Or you could say that we must attain a higher degree of experiential freedom through attaining a higher degree of physiological freedom. So this is not merely a “correspondence theory of truth.” It’s basically a “correspondence theory of all metaphysics.” The metaphysical corresponds to the synthesis of the dialectic! (Therefore, I also refer to this philosophy as “synthetic naturalism,” which is completely compatible with “metaphysical naturalism,” in case you’re wondering.)

So the metaphysical spiral staircase of development (MSSD) we (humans) are on traces from physics through chemistry, through biology, and then through the individual (psychological) and social (anthropological/sociological) “dimensions” of our lives. There is synthesis occurring between every level. And in every case, it is material synthesizing itself into “higher” levels of organization (you could even say “a higher vibrational state”). Indeed, the physics occurring at the “subphenomenal” level (“dark matter,” “quantum fluctuations,” particle accelerator shit, etc., etc.) becomes “phenomenal” when it “synthesizes” into “objects” we can detect. Consider the correspondence between Democritus’ model of materialism (atoms in the void) and today’s model of particles in the field. The important thing to recognize, the key that dialectical materialism brings to the table, is that there is a dialectical relationship between the particle and the field, and the field itself is just as much “material” as the particle!

Everything is made out of stuff! And if it’s all stuff, then it’s all the same stuff, and there’s only one kind of stuff, and we’re all it all at the same time! That’s why I call it “pan-dialectical materialism”!

Consider the photon. A photon is made of energized “stuff” traveling in a spiral (one writer says it can be modeled as the “peak” of a quantum “wave” traveling in the subphenomenal “quantum dimensions”), which is why it “looks like” two perpendicular sine waves. Indeed, there is a dialectical relationship between the electric and magnetic fields, but this dialectical relationship is already incorporated, “integrated,” “built-in,” even, within the spiral motion of the photon. Indeed, the fields, which exist even in what we think of as “empty space,” are just as much “material” as the particle, and when a photon “destructively interferes” with another photon (or with itself!) in the two-slit experiment, the particles aren’t “disappearing” so much as going back into the field, where they came from. The material is still there, but the energy has canceled itself out, not unlike what happens when two water waves “destructively interfere” with each other. For a water wave is merely the phenomenal aspect of (the “pattern of activity” that “emerges from”) the combined physical motion of the individual water “particles” interacting at the “individual” and “collective” levels (between which levels there is a dialectical relationship, of course!), being influenced by gravity, of course. And the water particles themselves are more or less moving up and down in a circle, or, perhaps, even in something like a spiral, which is what produces the phenomenon of the wave, and there is a dialectical relationship between the wave and the particle, because there are always particles on the surface of the water “performing” the wave, not unlike how the audience in a stadium can “perform” a “wave” just by moving up and down in the correct “pattern of activity,” and the more energy the particles have, the more energy the wave will have (and the energy of the wave can be described or characterized in terms of the energy of the particles, at least statistically). In short, the sum total of the MOTION of the water molecules both develops/synthesizes into the phenomenon of the wave and “metaphysically corresponds to” the phenomenon of the wave. The metaphysical correspondence and the synthesis of the dialectic are two aspects of the same dialectical material process unfolding itself in the dialectical material universe! A photon is the dialectical synthesis of the electric and magnetic fields! This dialectical synthesis corresponds to the phenomenon of the photon.

That’s Not an “Orbital”! That IS the Electron!

Consider also the electron. Most of the photons that enter our eyes are “released” by electrons, which is to say that the phenomenon of the photon is, in this case, the “result,” (the phenomenon IS the “phenomenal aspect of”) the synthesis of the dialectical process of the electron’s “moving” from a higher-energy configuration to a lower-, but one of the principles of dialectical materialism is that there is a dialectical relationship between phenomenon and “essence” (see VDMT, p. 156. Also, this paper uses the corresponding term “occurrent” with the corresponding relationship, and wasn’t even written by dirty commies! So what’s your excuse now, liberals? Popperians?). Yoda says, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter,” and, you know what? He’s not completely wrong! We ARE “luminous beings,” and it is precisely because, a) we ARE made of matter (that is our “essence” or “occurrent(s)”), and b) matter itself is not “crude”! It is dynamic! It is bristling with physical energy! You need to put more energy in just to keep it relatively still! Our “being” is the result of matter organized at what you could call a very “sophisticated” level! So the infrared photons we radiate come from (material) electrons in our bodies radiating “energy” from (the biochemical processing of) the (material) food we eat and the (material) air we breathe in the form of photons, which are just as much material as all those other things, because there’s a dialectical relationship between form and content (see VDMT, p. 147)!

Why Are You?

It is not an assumption of pan-dialectical materialism that planet earth is, in every way, our mother. It is a conclusion. But this conclusion becomes a basis for moving things further forward. Our solar system evolved from parts that were lying around. The universe itself already had to be in development for billions of years to generate the stars and star-explosions necessary to generate all the elements necessary to make the kind of chemistry that’s possible on earth possible because it had to be possible in the universe generally first! So chemistry is a synthesis of physics, because it is material organized at a level complicated enough to form complex “objects” like molecules, and, as such, has different qualtites than material at a “lower” level of organization. And you can say the same thing about the “transition” from chemical “forms” to biological “forms.” So our metaphysical approach to abiogenesis is simple enough. Let us imagine that Mother Earth was playing dice with her bath toys and, at some point, turned her head to cough, and those “dice” came together and found themselves in a configuration that allowed them to take on a life of their own and start playing their own games, and, 4 billion years later, here we are, still playing our own games. This is, of course, a myth I just made up, but the value in a myth is in its correspondence to actual processes of development. We can see in the “dice” of the myth the basic “building blocks of life” (nucleotides), which needed to exist in order for life to emerge and which came from natural processes already happening on earth, and in the “playing” of the dice, the random, “mindless” processes that resulted in arrangements of the nucleotides that could chemically reproduce themselves, which corresponds to the “playing” of “their own games,” and I say “game” because life itself carries itself forward through the same “positive sum logic” by which all other games are played! And, indeed, 4 billion years later, here we are!

The Phenomenon of Will

Will is a phenomenon, not an essence/occurrent. As such, there is no “will particle.” You will never find “will” as a “substance,” but as a phenomenon, we can see it all around us. Indeed, we can see the phenomenon of “will” in the processes of DNA. Because DNA is a way for chemistry to harness its own “power” (which is ultimately physical, though, in the form of chemistry “attains the metaphysical”) to carry itself “forward” through spacetime. This “power” corresponds in every meaningful way to what we could call “will”! It is, indeed, the source of the “will” we experience as humans, as biological organisms “built” on DNA “architecture”!

The Phenomenon of “Pure Experience”

Metaphysicians tend to get hung up on the metaphysical. No surprise. But in the framework of pan-dialectical materialism, the metaphysical is always tied to the material (the physical) through the synthesis of the dialectic. We create abstractions through the “trans-platonic formalism” I wrote about in a previous essay. The abstractions have no independent existence. So when we speak of something like “pure experience,” we are not speaking of an abstraction. We are talking about a “pure experience of the self”—something in the vein of a dream or a trip. And the dream or trip is simply the phenomenal aspect of dialectical (physiological) processes occuring within the body. Think of it as a picture generated on a screen, except you don’t need a screen because you ARE the motherfucking screen because you are all internally connected within yourself! Because, metaphysically, your being (“Being,” some call it) corresponds, roughly speaking, to the Sartrean “being-for-itself.” In the previous essay, I wrote about how the “visual field” is the result of “vision processes” whether from the eyes or elsewhere in the brain! “Pure experience” is very much not “out there”! It’s very much “within”! The only reason a TV needs a screen is because a TV, unlike a human being, is not a Sartrean being-for-itself, only a Kantian thing-in-itself/Engelsian thing-for-us (see VDMT p. 72-74). This is the difference between what’s happening in a computer and consciousness! Because only “being-for-itself” can be conscious! That’s what consciousness is! But Sarte wasn’t entirely correct about “being-for-itself.” Being-for-itself is not exclusive to human beings! The fact that we are (roughly speaking) being-for-itself comes from the fact that we are built on DNA architecture! Our DNA is what makes us being-for-itself! And you can say the same for any other organism built on DNA architecture!

I Literally Wipe My Ass With the Kantian Thing-In-Itself!

To back up a little bit, the Kantian thing-in-itself, the Engelsian thing-for-us, and Sartrean being-for-itself (as well as “being-for-others”) are all very important concepts to grasp. It would be “eclecticist” (and Comrade Lenin told us “just say no” to eclecticism!) to take these concepts at face-value, so they need to be thoroughly interrogated to find correspondence with the physical so they can be incorporated/integrated into the systematic materialist philosophy. So let us imagine taking a trip to the supermarket. I enter the supermarket and head for the toilet paper aisle. I find (an object that corresponds to) the Kantian thing-in-itself, a pack of 6 rolls of recycled, non-chlorine-bleached toilet paper wrapped in plastic (needless to say, a lot of human labor went into the process of converting the material into its current form). Of course, I cannot wipe my ass with the pack of 6 rolls of toilet paper, and I certainly can’t do it right there in the aisle, so I have to buy it, and then take it home, and THEN break the plastic wrapping, and then take out a roll, and then put it on the toilet paper dispenser in the bathroom, and then break the glue seal so I can unroll it, and then break off one or more squares, and NOW I can wipe my ass with the thing-in-itself because I have “transformed” the Kantian thing-in-itself into the Engelsian thing-for-me by “bringing the roll of toilet paper into being out of its conditions and making it serve my own purposes”! And the metaphysical transformation from the former to the latter corresponds to the synthesis of the dialectic! Because it corresponds to the completion of a process! The phenomenal “event” of my wiping my ass with the toilet paper corresponds to the completion of the dialectical process of bringing the toilet paper out of its conditions and making it serve my own purposes! The roll of toilet paper is, of course, still a thing-in-itself, but it can be both in-itself and for-me at the same time. There is no contradiction there. Indeed, when I am not using it, it can hardly be said to be “for-me.” And, of course, even when I am not using it, it is still “in-itself.”

The Phenomenon of Mind

I cannot emphasize strongly enough that dialectical materialism is what allows us to start from the material, to start from physics, and then incorporate metaphysics as it “tumbles out” of physical (dialectical material) processes (think of dice in a Yahtzee! game)! I repeat: metaphysics does not produce physics; metaphysics “tumbles out” of physical processes. I cannot caution strongly enough against identifying (read: confusing) “mind” with “thinking.” I cannot emphasize strongly enough that Decartes was wrong! It’s not “I think, therefore I am”; it’s “I EXPERIENCE, therefore I am”! It is said that “mind is a process, not an object,” and “the mind is what the brain does.” Very well, but this is not the whole story. “Mind” is not merely a process of the brain. “Mind” is a process of the fucking universe. But it would be more accurate to say that “mind” is a phenomenal aspect of universal dialectical (material) processes—a “result” of those processes.

Phenomenally, mind is not exclusively thinking. Thinking is a very human activity, but it is our human subjectivity that allows us to think in the way we can. But you can’t therefore take it in the opposite direction and say that thinking is all mind is or that anything that can be said to “have” “mind” must also “think.” Our minds think, but that is a product of how we evolved. Other “minds” evolved differently, therefore have different “specializations.” Phenomenally, we can’t reduce mind to thinking. Phenomenally, mind is “composed” of “modules” of other phenomena (“functions”). These “sub-” phenomena include sense (“sensing”), will, knowledge, memory (learning), judgment (or perhaps “discernment”), intuition, and even “wisdom.” Thinking might be how we humans by and large “perform” most of these “functions,” but they exist throughout the biological domain because being-for-itself is a product of “being” built on DNA architecture. Because there is correspondence between the phenomenon of “self” and the completion (moment by moment) of the process of carrying out the “self” in the world!

The Principle of Phenomenal Correspondence and the Slime Mold

“Correspondence theory of metaphysics” corresponds to “principle of phenomenal correspondence,” of course. And, in the right “metaphysical framework,” we can see correspondence between the “being-for-itself” of the slime mold, and our “being-for-itself,” which is to say “events”/phenomena that correspond to human “mental” events/phenomena. We perform these “mental events” (corresponding to “mental functions”) largely by thinking, but that is, largely, an “accident” of our particular evolutionary path. The point is that thinking is a kind of “experience of self.” And being-for-itself moves itself through the world in which it “be” through “experience of self” (of course, there’s also being-for-other as well as experience of other, but that’s not our current focus, but keep in mind that there is, of course, a dialectical relationship not only between self and other, but between the ego and the subconscious and between the individual and the collective! Not that slime molds have egos, per se!), because it then “remembers” that experience of self, and retains that memory through future “experiences,” which it then “builds” further upon! And it is these experiences of self (and the memory of them retained) that correspond to the universal process of mind (because these processes are undeniably also occurring on any remotely earth-like world in earth-like conditions). Because being-for-itself, as a phenomenon, must be instantiated in (“within”) a body. And a body wouldn’t be a body without “memory” in some sense (The Body Keeps the Score, remember). Because without “memory” in some sense, it couldn’t hold itself together as a coherent organism moving itself forward through spacetime. The legs must “remember” where they left the ass (“arse”)!

So when a researcher imposes a metaphysical framework upon a slime mold by putting it in a maze with irresistable oatmeal flakes in the middle and at both ends, its movement of itself toward the yummy flakes must undeniably correspond to the phenomenon of will, because it is the “result” of chemistry-as-DNA-molecule harnessing its own physical power into the “metaphysical” power to move itself forward through spacetime (and eventually through the generations, more on that later). Now consider the human. The human gains “knowledge” that it “needs” to eat (ignoring for now other reasons a person might eat) through the feeling of hunger, not through thinking “I am hungry.” Indeed, the only source for the thought “I am hungry” must be the feeling of hunger! This feeling of hunger is an experience of self! And so is the thought! If you didn’t have the feeling of hunger (whence would arise the thought?), you would perhaps need to regulate your eating pattern through some external means. You know, to generate the thought, if not, “I am hungry,” then at least, “now has come the time where I must eat or else my body would become disregulated, and that would not be in accordance with the furtherance of myself (my self) as a biological/social organism built on DNA architecture to carry itself forward through spacetime” or such (which you might still perhaps go on to Pavlovlianly internalize).

Must I go further!? I suppose I must! When a slime mold “takes a turn” in the maze toward the food and away from where food is not, this action can be said to correspond to “judgment” or “discernment” (perhaps even “decision”), which includes/incorporates/”uses” “knowledge” (put a pin in that), because being-for-itself harnesses physical power from electro-chemistry into metaphysical “power” to move itself forward through spacetime! Because “discernment” isn’t “thinking”! It’s a kind of “metaphysical power” that results from physical power! Because electro-chemical power (how both we and the slime mold move) is a kind of physical power! And a slime mold has harnessed physical power from electro-chemistry into the “metaphysical power” to sense and move with “purpose”! The “purpose” comes from “will,” which, again, is a kind of “metaphysical” power that is a “result” of physical power. When we practice (or “perform”—not necessarily the same thing) “discernment,” when we, so to speak, “knowingly turn toward where food is and away from where it is not,” perhaps involving thought, perhaps simply by LOOKING or SMELLING or HEARING, we are harnessing physical (electro-chemical) power into the “metaphysical power” to move ourselves forward through spacetime!

That is what consciousness is: the harnessing of physical power into “metaphysical” power by being-for-itself to carry itself (its self) forward through spacetime as a “relatively stable set of relationships” instantiated within a body built on DNA architecture! At least as far as biological organisms are concerned! Ok, so we humans can think! Thinking is simply a result of being-for-itself at a highly organized level! It still comes down to the harnessing of physical power into “metaphysical power” by being-for-itself!

A slime mold “knows” where food is (and where it is not) by sensing it through chemo-sensors in its body. Again, “knowledge” is a kind of power! It’s a kind of metaphysical power that is a result of physical power! It is a result of “processing” raw “signal” into “information.” Because signal, as a phenomenon, “tumbles out” of matter in motion. A hunter (of whatever species) can track a deer by, for example, the latter’s hoofprints. But these hoofprints are, in themselves, only “signal” and do not become “information” until they are processed into such by the information processing function instantiated in the body of the hunter (for example, the hunter sees the hoofprints through its eyes, and, through its memory, recognizes them as such). So the slime mold “knows” (because it has “learned,” because it has sensed) where the scrumptious oatmeal flakes are, and, because it has “will,” from being built on DNA architecture, has the power to move toward food and away from where food is not. And the sensing of the oats is not only an experience of other, but an experience of self! The chemical “signal” from the oats becomes “information” when it is “sensed” by the slime mold, but this “sensing” is an experience of the self, because the signal “changes” the slime mold, and the slime mold “experiences” this change! Because “sense” is an experience!

Being-For-Other

Look, I could keep going here (and I will! and I have!), but the real point is that, like I said, Sartre was a little out of his element when it came to being-for-itself, because he didn’t fully embrace pan-dialectical materialism as his metaphysical framework, which allows us to trace the “source” of being-for-itself to “be” our “being” built on DNA architecture. But even more than that, it allows us recognize that being-for-itself is the “consciousness” of the Child of Mother Earth. The Child of Mother Earth is the “being” built on DNA architecture, forged from “primordial” chemical compounds. This is “consciousness” of the BODY (all Children of Mother Earth “have” “bodies”! cf. “body knowledge,” Edwardes, p.2—see reference in previous essay). And it’s perfectly fine for most Children of Mother Earth! It serves their PURPOSES perfectly well! The problem with humans is that we have egos (and, yes, “superegos”), which, too often, “get in the way” of our attaining Child-of-Mother-Earth Consciousness, and, therefore, being-for-itself. But, of course, when you crucify the ego, it resurrects in a new form! A form that recognizes that it is not the center of the fucking universe! But let’s not get (too) ahead of ourselves! Sartre failed to recognize the true nature of being-for-itself because he failed to recognize the Child of Mother Earth and the “consciousness” of the body! The Child of Mother Earth (apart from considerations of organisms with “ego,” in which things work differently) is automatically being-for-itself, but because it can’t “become” something it always was (something it never was not), Sartre only recognized it as being-in-itself, as if it were a pack of toilet paper or something. But try wiping your ass with a Child of Mother Earth. Things will not go well for you. You will have to do something like tear a leaf off a tree so as to separate being-for-itself from itself. Fine! You’ve transformed being-for-itself directly into the thing-for-you! Congratulations, I guess! Just make sure it’s not poisonous!

Ok, so, sure, human consciousness is way more complicated than slime mold “consciousness” because it involves, among other things, much more signal/information processing, particularly visual signal/information processing. Other important considerations are the recursivity of the information processing (see, e.g., The Tell-Tale Brain) and the fact that we must not only “process” information, but “integrate” it as well, more or less by “stitching it together” (again, this is why Dennett et al call[ed] [human] consciousness an “illusion“).

So you have to recognize “consciousness of the (human) brain” as merely a highly organized form of “consciousness of the (human) body,” because brain itself is simply highly organized body.

I have heard that London cab drivers must memorize the entire map of London, and they call it “the knowledge,” and it literally changes their brains. I have heard that it literally changes the folds of their brains and this structural change corresponds to a change in thinking, in thinking at a higher level of organization (yes, even at higher “vibrational states”). And you can read about that in a book or watch a video about it, which is cool, OR you could experience it yourself. Cab driving is a growth industry these days. I experienced something of this change myself when I was a cyclist in Austin for over 7 years (because I gave up driving after totaling 4 cars my first 3 years there), particularly as a bike courier for over 6 years and especially as a pedicab driver the last 2+ months I was there. And this change is not so different from the metamorphosis through which a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, because you (or “I,” as the case may be) are learning in the same way, one trip, one turn at a time, and through learning the “branches of the tree,” the “paths through the maze,” you learn the “tree,” the “maze,” the city itself! And eventually, you learn the entire city, its entire dimensionality, and this experience of dimensionality is reflected in the increased dimensionality of the folding of the brain (that’s what it is) and the “higher vibrational mental processing” that allows one to move through the city with a higher degree of physical freedom (through, say, improving knowledge of available paths), which corresponds to the higher degree of “metaphysical” freedom of moving from point A to point B within the city more “smoothly,” with less “friction,” indeed, what enables one to move through the city in the “flow” state!

Because we are a social species with egos, there is a dialectical relationship between the ego and the subconscious (really, between the ego and the “whole self,” which includes the ego AND the subconscious), between the self and the other, and between the individual and the collective. This is why we don’t automatically start out as “pure” being-for-itself, and must attain consciousness of the other within the self and the self within the other, etc., etc. This means that, at least for human beings, there is no “self qua self.” What there is is the self AS a “character” in the “book” of life. No self can be seen (or “analyzed”) in total isolation from all the other “selves.”

Of course, when we talk about human consciousness, we are talking about consciousness that involves ego. It can be hazardous to tell the truth about the ego because, well, it’s a lot harder for a Child of Mother Earth to lie to itself if it doesn’t have an ego, let’s say. Our ego is, of course, a result of the way human consciousness evolved to “twist itself” into new (“higher”) dimensions of potential experience, including, importantly, new dimensions of awareness, especially of self-awareness (but also of other-awareness, of course).

All right, guess it’s time to rip the bandage off. Here’s the deal. Ego is the “source” (actually, “gate,” but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves) of our being-for-other. Had we not egos, we would (could, even!) have awareness of little else than being-for-itself. Consider the myth of Alexander the Dipshit and Diogenes. For Alexander, the body is the servant of the ego, whereas Diogenes has it the right way around and has attained the level of consciousness where his ego is (more or less) incorporated into the whole self, to the point where he has transcended (synthesized) the master-slave dialectic within himself (put a pin in that!) and attained the dialectic of friendship (yes, within himself—put a pin in that, too). Alexander’s ego carries him all the way to where Diogenes is. Diogenes has, so to speak, not moved a muscle. Alexander offers Diogenes something, anything. He offers Diogenes external validation. He offers Diogenes comfort. But the only “comfort” Diogenes, who is sitting in his wine jar, wants is that of sunbathing, which he is being prevented from by Alexander’s SHADOW (put a pin in that!), so all he requests of Alexander is that he get out of the way so that Diogenes can continue sunbathing. Alexander tries one last time to appeal to Diogenes’ ego. He says, “If I were not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes.” To which Diogenes replies, “If I were not Diogenes, I would wish to be Diogenes.” At every turn in the myth, Alexander’s (unhealthy) relationship to his own ego transformed Alexander into being-for-other! Whereas Diogenes had attained the level of consciousness of being-for-itself through having a healthier relationship with his own ego!

It’s not that being-for-other is necessarily good or bad. In fact, for us, it’s a necessary part of attaining being-for-itself because of the dialectical relationship between self and other because humans are a social species. The problem is that Alexander was lying to himself. Alexander was guilty of centering the ego, seeking external validation, projecting insecurities onto the other, comfort addiction, and justification rather than justice. In order for a human being to have a healthy relationship between being-for-self (the “part” of being-for-itself that is not being-for-other) and being-for-other, they need to have a healthy relationship between their ego and their DNA (which corresponds to the relationship between the ego and the subconscious, which, of course, is dialectical).

Again, this myth of Alexander and Diogenes might be “only a myth” (cf. the meeting of Alexander and Dandamis, which, for all we know, could also be mythical to some degree), but its value lies in its correspondence to real “types” (you could even say “archetypes”) of consciousness. It’s important not to confuse this analysis with the type of shit Jordan Peterson tries to pass off as “analysis.” It’s extremely important not to take what the myth says about itself at face value. That’s a form of “idealism.” Again, myths are only useful (for the present purposes) to the extent that they correspond to real types (“archetypes”) of consciousness. And the consciousness of the mythical Alexander certainly corresponds to westoid patriarchal colonizer consciousness—a type of consciousness we’re all familiar with.

(Overthrowing) Patriarchy and its Zero-Sum Logic and its Centering of Ego and its Class Society and its Master-Slave Dialectic and its Human Sacrifice Requirement

Ok, so let us reveal what I previously called ‘(human) “brain” consciousness’ as (human) ego-consciousness. And, of course, when analyzing the ego, we must “tread cautiously,” because the uncrucified ego violently resists being shown a “mirror” (cf. the mythical figure of Medusa, cf. myths of vampires), which is to say that it violently resists being shown a “reflection” of (or truths about) itself (cf. the myth of Bathsheba and Uriah and Nathan and King David the Terrorist—”you are the man!” cf. Luke Skywalker’s “That’s impossible!” cf. the “post-crucifixion” interaction of Jesus and Paul in The Last Temptation of Christ). But when you crucify the ego, it resurrects in a new form! A form not afraid to look at itself in the mirror! A form that accepts the truth, especially about itself, and does not waste time in denial of this truth!

So, a few thousand years ago (let’s say between 10 and 20), the most significant ongoing human (and, arguably, biosphere-wide) catastrophe began when the patriarchy began its campaign of domination over Mother Earth. We can see a plausible beginning of this tragedy in (“within”) the Garden of Eden myth in Genesis (which could very well be, as Chris Ryan says, a “cultural memory”). Again, in contrast with the “methodology” of Jordan Bernt “Ternt” Peterson, it’s important not to naively accept these myths at face value. Because, for one thing, the ruling classes in class societies inserted themselves into their own myths as gods (cf. the myth of Prometheus’ “stealing” fire, a natural phenomenon, a natural “technology,” “from” the gods). Why wouldn’t they? “The ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class,” after all.

It is extremely important to recognize the primary “function” of patriarchal myths as upholding the patriarchy. But the patriarchy, much like the subconscious, is constantly telling on itself. First, the patriarchy “writes” itself into its own myth as god. It takes credit for EVERYTHING, including the creation of the entire universe! (But note the obviously Hellenic influence in characterizing what was already lying around as without “form” and “void”). It “writes” ordinary humans into its myth as its slaves. It, of course, takes credit for creating the slaves, too (cf. the classic patriarchal dadism, “I brought you into this world, I can take you out!”). The patriarchy imagines that its being-for-self is somehow “necessary,” but for everyone else, contingency is perfectly fine. The patriarchy has obvious interest in tangling up being-for-self with being-for-other in the minds of the subordinated classes because that’s how the patriarchy has people in those classes (subconsciously) sign on to their own enslavement.

Marina Karlova has an excellent analysis of this myth. When she says that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was a “program” to “install” “binary thinking,” that corresponds to “zero-sum logic,” and when she says that the “shame” of the body installed by the program was “self-consciousness under imagined surveillance,” that corresponds to the tangling up of being-for-self and being-for-other that the patriarchy uses to “influence” us into subconsciously signing on to our own enslavement. Because (again, not to get too ahead of ourselves, but) positive-sum (“Hegelian”/”Wittgensteinian”) logic is what allows us to recognize alignment between being-for-self and being-for-other, because of the dialectical relationship between self and other inherent in humans as a TRULY social species!

The introduction of zero-sum logic IS (or “corresponds to”) the introduction of imposed categories (the introduction of the “metaphysical perspective,” see VDMT, e.g., p. 188-89), especially the categories of “good” and “evil.” “Good” and “evil,” of course, do not exist in nature. They were categories totally made up by patriarchal ego to serve patriachal purposes. “Good” and “evil” are not the “thing-in-itself,” but projections onto the thing-in-itself. Outside of imposed categories, harm exists, and is objective (a broken bone is an objective injury, an objective harm, regardless of/in addition to its subjective effects/results). But harm isn’t “binary” or “zero-sum.” It’s a matter of degrees. That kind of categorization can only be imposed from outside (from the “ego-standpoint” or “-perspective”). If I get injured as a result of a complete accident, where is the evil? Could it be that the “evil” is, perhaps, in a society that cares more about debating the “right” use of resources than actually providing for the needs of people when they get injured, when there is no true “scarcity” preventing this!? “Perhaps”! But I keep hearing that you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.

So the patriarchy imposes arbitrary rules upon the subordinated classes with its zero-sum logic; then, when those classes are, essentially, framed for “violating” those arbitrary rules, women and nature are blamed for this violation, and equally arbitrary “punishment” is imposed upon them (women and nature and the subordinated classes, but I repeat myself). This “punishment,” of course, is merely camouflage for what the patriarchal agenda already was.

The patriarchy is essentially delusional. The patriarchy imagines that it invented fire. That’s really pathetic. The patriarchy kicked us out of the garden of eden so it could have straight lines (hierarchies, pyramids, large-scale agriculture, etc., etc.—basically, things that make power over others possible). You can’t make straight lines in the garden of eden. That would be ludicrous. It would be meaningless. It would, perhaps, be abominable. So they had to kick us out. There was no other way. And it wasn’t too difficult, apparently. Apparently, all they had to do was convince people. I joke. The problem with trying to “convince” people is that you’ve already separated yourself from the framework of truth. You can’t convince everyone, so you have to use force when “convincing” isn’t enough. But if you’ve already convinced enough people, you can simply get them to be the “force” behind the “mental” operations.

To accurately analyze the patriarchy, you need to do so from outside the patriarchy, i.e., outside of its structural/”(zero-sum) logical” frameworks, and especially, outside its PERMISSION structure! “When did the patriarchy give you permission to recognize yourself as naked!?” Wow! What a question! The patriarchy “gave permission” when it installed shame (Marina: “[Adam and Eve] became alienated from their own embodied existence. They saw their bodies not as living expressions of themselves, but as potential threats. As something wrong that they [had] to hide. And when you start hiding from yourself, the [patriarchy] already owns you”). But we don’t need shame (at least not anymore) to recognize [the truth of] ourselves as naked. Positive-sum logic can allow us once again to be naked AND unashamed!

LOVE is not only the “alignment” (as opposed to “entanglement”) of, not only the correspondence between, but the UNION, the “oneness,” of being-for-self and being-for-other. This is only possible (to its fullest potentials) in a society of truth. Without truth, without alignment (without “effective communication”), it’s too easy to fall into entanglement between being-for-self and being-for-other. It’s not that there is no “love” when there is entanglement rather than alignment, but it’s the kind of love that leads to what we could call “suffering,” not to be melodramatic. It’s the kind of love many (all?) of the sad-ass songs are about (it’s the kind of love that “hurts” and “bites” and “bleeds” and such).

Yes, patriarchy requires human sacrifice (you indeed may have heard that “greatness requires sacrifice”). We can see this in (“within”) the myth of the founding of Jericho in the book of Joshua, in which the founder “sacrificed” his eldest son at the foundation and his youngest at the setting of the gates. Hey, construction is a dangerous job. This human sacrifice continues today whenever patriarchy and the class-society it “constructed” (mentally speaking, of course) to enslave humanity (here begins the predicate of this phrase) use the framework of justification to excuse or minimize or downplay (for the purpose of continuing the human sacrifice into the future) what, outside of class society, would be avoidable deaths.

As it is one of “the master’s” most important, most effective “tools,” we must fully dismantle the framework of justification. From outside the framework of justification, we simply exist, and we have no need to “justify” our own fucking existence! Imagine having to justify your own existence! Wow! But that is what we have to deal with under the framework of justification! So the framework of justification isn’t FOR you—it’s certainly not a “thing-for-you”! It’s certainly not a leaf you tore from a tree to wipe your ass! The framework of justification is exclusively “for” “things” that “we” have no need “for”! The patriarchy created the framework of justification because there is no “need” for the patriarchy to exist, so it must find reasons other than “need” for it to exist, because it’s extremely easy, from the framework of need, to identify that the patriarchy is FAR more “trouble” than it’s “worth”!

Remember the “trans-Platonic cave.” Your eyes are trans-Platonic caves. You are not in the cave; the cave is in you. The imagination is a much darker, deeper trans-Platonic cave. And the patriarchy is the ultimate trans-Platonic cave. It’s a deep, dark, lonely place of bondage, where the most “real” things are no more real than shadows on the wall (but we don’t have to “curse the darkness,” we need only “turn on the light”). It’s a place of illusion and delusion. It turns men (and others, when it can) in patriarchal society not into “individuals,” not into “agents of self,” but into AGENTS OF PATRIARCHY, much like the Agent Smith character in The Matrix, who can “infect” (and “overtake”) any “individual” whenever The Matrix “needs” him to. Yes! The patriarchy turns men into NPCs!

Consider the modern, bourgeois, westoid theory of “knowledge.” This theory defines “knowledge” as “justified, true belief.” You can see immediately that we are dealing with the framework of justification. Indeed, we must recognize “justification” and “belief” for the surface-level ego-bullshit they truly are. Your patriarchal, bourgeois ego-righteousness is as filthy rags, westoid, and must be incinerated in the fires of your own personal hell! But I’m getting ahead of myself again! Here’s the deal! Truth exists, motherfucker! And we can LEARN this truth! And ACCEPT it! THAT’S what “knowledge” is! Remember! Knowledge is a type of “metaphysical” power that “tumbles out” of physical power! Knowledge IS power! That’s not just a metaphor!

Truth exists because there is an “actual” (Edwardes, p. 137) world—the MATERIAL world! And the “actual” world is what determines everything in the “real” and “virtual” worlds (the material determines the ideal, but the ideal can impact back on the material through practical activity)! It was here before us! It “created” us! So truth is what IS! What “exists” (“that which has actual existence even in the absence of humans,” Edwardes, ibid). And you don’t “accept” truth with your ego (you can only “believe” truth with your ego—yawn!); you accept truth with your whole self, which includes the subconscious (it’s a trans-Platonic cave, remember). So the opposite of “acceptance” (which, for the present purposes, means “acceptance of TRUTH”) isn’t “skepticism”; it’s not “disbelief”; it’s DENIAL! And if you are in denial, acceptance can only come, can only be attained, at the end of the grieving process (at the synthesis of the dialectic of grief).

Don’t you see, westoid? What is there to prevent the framework of justification (which ignores need) from shifting into the framework of “what can the ego get away with?”? There is nothing preventing this but westoid, bourgeois, ego-righteousness, which is as filthy rags, and must be incinerated! God “bless” America? No, no, no, no! It’s God Damn America! Reverend Jeremiah Wright was onto something! He caught a glimpse of the truth about America! And he was not afraid to share this glimpse! And they “crucified” him for it!

Atop the Texas state capitol building stands the false goddess of bourgeois liberty, bearing the star of the centered ego and the sword that “protected” Thomas Jefferson from Sally Hemings! Indeed, Thomas Jefferson (President Humbert Humbert) himself knew little else than the framework of justification! It comes from never having to struggle to meet one’s own needs! He may have been familiar with the “struggle” (or “striving”) to attain the desires of the ego, but those are two completely different things!

Ok, so now it’s time to take the pin out of the master-slave dialectic. Because TJ had slavemaster consciousness, which is “false consciousness,” of course. So TJ (through bourgeois processes/”events”) got a bunch of other people to build a life for him where he could be (or “act like”/”perform as” or “imagine himself as” or “believe himself to be”) a little prince in a little castle on top of a little hill on stolen land with stolen labor. TJ’s lifestyle was only possible within the framework of justification. Because slavery is only possible within the framework of justification. In the framework of love, where there is alignment between being-for-self and being-for-other, which corresponds to the framework of need, which corresponds to the framework of recognition of Mother Earth and her children, everyone will be conscious enough to recognize the injustice of stolen labor! Labor and land will be freely shared! Just as it was in pre-class, pre-patriarchal, pre-master-slave dialectic society! Because the people will recognize that the state (indeed, the BLESSINGS!) of friendship and cooperation in the society of equals is far more REWARDING than the lonely, individualistic, patriarchal striving to attain the status of a little prince on top of a little hill on stolen land with stolen labor. Because we will have alignment between being-for-self and being-for-other!

Hegel came up with the term, but there are numerous other treatments of the master-slave dialectic for us to reference. We can see it in (“within”) the myth of Jacob and Laban in Genesis. We can see it in the movie Free Willy. When we had slavery in this country (lol, “had”), many people freed themselves (“in such” if not “as such”) through synthesizing the master-slave dialectic. I myself have “synthesized the master-slave dialectic” numerous times, every time establishing (“manisfesting,” even :P) for myself a higher degree of freedom. The point is, if you don’t recognize yourself as a slave, as “in bondage,” how can you free yourself? If you don’t recognize yourself as a caterpillar on the tree of life, how can you metamorphose into a psychological butterfly? If you don’t recognize the shadows on the wall of your Platonic or trans-Platonic caves as “less than real,” how will you be motivated to escape the Platonic or trans-Platonic cave as the case may be, and step into the sunlight!? If you don’t recognize your westoid ego-righteousness as filthy rags, which must be incinerated in the fires of your own personal hell, how can your ego resurrect in a new form that recognizes that it is not the center of the fucking universe!? None of these things would be possible, comrade!

The reason these things ARE all possible IS positive-sum logic! Positive-sum logic exists! It’s the logic of transformation! It’s the “logic” of the universe! Yes! The universe transformed itself from “nothing,” so to speak, into something far more complicated than any particle accelerator! It carried out this transformation through processes of positive-sum logic!

As positive-sum (“Hegelian”) logic is the logic that drives the universe forward, it instantiates (“manifests” :P) itself in many forms. Once these forms are recognized, they can “take on a life of their own” as “living” fields of study and practice that can be transformed into “living bodies” of knowledge (“sciences,” “wissenschaften,” you might say). Positive-sum logic can be recognized as the “logic” of electron entanglement—and therefore, the logic of the quantum computer; the “logic” of Mendelian genetics—therefore a logic of biology, of evolution; the “logic” of Bayes’ theorem—therefore, the logic of epistemology; the logic of game theory—therefore, the logic of human social activity; the logic of Wittgenstein’s truth tables; the “logic” of the yin-yang symbol! It’s the “logic” that allows for the alignment (the UNION) of being-for-self and being-for-other!

Figure 1

Here (Figure 1), we have positive-sum logic diagrammed. Quadrants II and IV are the quadrants of identity. Quadrants I and III are quadrants of transformation. Quadrants II and IV can easily collapse back into zero-sum (“Aristotelian,” “either-or,” “binary”) logic whenever we need them to (less often than you might think!). Quadrants I and III are also the quadrants of metaphor. Metaphor might be an easy way to lie, but sometimes, it’s the only available way to tell the truth! If “A” is “caterpillar” and “B” is “butterfly,” we can say “caterpillar IS caterpiller,” “caterpiller BECOMES butterfly,” “butterfly IS butterfly.” The butterfly “logically follows from” the caterpillar.

From VDMT, p. 163:

As the science of common relations and development, materialist dialectics [“sciences” in general, but including “metaphysics,” i.e., “categorization,” but of a dynamic, active, “evolving” kind —MM] studies the universal laws that influence the entire natural world, human society [human “social-being” —MM], and human thought [human “mind” —MM], all together as a whole.

These universal laws are:

•The law of transformation between quantity and quality.
•The law of unification and contradiction between opposites.
•The law of negation of negation. [in which “characteristics” can be “retained” through successive “negations” —MM]

These “laws” are simply aspects of the same “law”: the “law” of positive-sum logic that drives the universe forward! The butterfly, for example, is merely the “opposite” of the caterpillar which “contradicts” and then “negates” it! Their “unification” is seen in their both being phases of the “life cycle” or “life processes” of the organism seen as an “entity” with a single, unbroken “life”! And the “quality” of “butterfly” was indeed a “transformation” caused by changes in quantities (time, food eaten, distance traveled, etc., etc.) the caterpillar experienced (“lived through,” “journeyed through”), and the butterfly retains characteristics (DNA, memory, etc.) of the caterpillar. And since the caterpillar is merely the “negation” of the egg, the butterfly is the “negation of the negation” of the egg! And it contains its own eggs (provided it has the right equipment)!

And, in much the same way, human class-society has progressed through the stages of the master-slave dialectic. A dialectic without the alignment of being-for-self and being-for-other. There can be no masters without slaves and there can be no slaves without masters. To put it another way, there can be no little prince in a little castle on top of a little hill without stolen labor on stolen land. There can be no hierarchy without force. There can be no class society without human sacrifice.

You can’t understand class society without understanding its history, specifically without understanding how new class formations and relations came about. Karl Marx directly addresses the relatively new capitalist class in the Communist Manifesto:

Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.
-Communist Manifesto, ch. 2

The truth is that the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class, haven’t always been the ruling class. And they didn’t become current the ruling class by asking the old ruling class, the kings and nobility, nicely. They became the ruling class through attaining consciousness of themselves (class-wide) as a class-for-itself (cf. “being-for-itself”), and then overthrowing the old feudal ruling classes in violent, bloody, bourgeois revolutions (e.g., the French and American revolutions) some 200 years ago! And if the capitalist class could attain consciousness of itself as a class-for-itself and revolt and become the new ruling class, then the working class (the “proletariat”) can certainly attain consciousness of itself as a class-for-itself and overthrow class society entirely by establishing the worker’s state! And once all workers in all nations do this, any “government” that exists will be reduced to simply managing the means of production and the distribution of resources, and we can attain the “higher stage of communism” of the global “stateless, classless, moneyless society,” because when you synthesize the master-slave dialectic, you can graduate to the dialectic of comradeship (the dialectic of alignment between being-for-self and being-for-other; the dialectic of LOVE)! Much like Willy freed himself through, in the right moment, the PERFORMANCE of the trick they TORTURED him into learning, and then joining a community of equals, the working classes can use the skills we learned in our toiling lives to free ourselves, to escape, from (at least the mental prison of) class subjugation, and to find the other master-slave dialectic escapees, and join them in building the society of freedom, equality, and comradeship!

But the raising of consciousness involves the whole self, not just the ego! That means it requires practice(s), not just “information”! Practice is, for example, how one learns the piano, or kung-fu (we’re not in The Matrix, after all!). Either way, the mind learns what the body needs to do through “sense-data” (reading it on a page, seeing a demonstration, etc.), then the body learns what it needs to do by repetition of the activity to be learned. The body “remembers.” “The body keeps the score.”

The Crucifixion and Resurrection of the Ego (and the Grieving Process)

In order to build socialism, first and foremost, we need to have socialist people who understand socialist ideology and have socialist values.

-Ho Chi Minh, quoted in VDMT, back cover.

Yes! For the working class to revolt and establish the worker’s state (“the lower stage of communism”), and eventually, the global stateless, classless, moneyless society (“the higher stage of communism”), the working class must attain consciousness of itself as a class-for-itself (being-for-itself as its class-being)! That means that the proletarians must attain proletarian consciousness! They must incinerate the filthy rags of their bourgeois false consciousness and use that fire as the pilot light to ignite the flame of proletarian consciousness! This means dismantling the framework of justification and adopting the framework of need!

The truth is that the ruling classes in all class societies are essentially patriarchal! And the patriarchy cannot reproduce itself by itself because the patriarchy does not have its own eggs/wombs and cannot perform its own labor! So the patriarchy “reproduces” itself through the master-slave dialectic. This is how Jacob, in the myth of Jacob and Laban in Genesis, “transforms” from a slave into a master in his own right. In this form of the myth, the slave buys into the patriarchal narrative, and, in doing so, becomes a patriarch in his own right. The relationship between the slave and the master is that of entanglement between being-for-self and being-for-other. The master does not recognize (or does not act as though he recognizes) the subjectivity of the slave; does not recognize the slave AS a subject, only as an object, a “thing-for-me.” This is only possible under the framework of justification. The master has no NEED to be a master (Diogenes knew this). So the master must deny truth. The master must deny that the slave is a Child of Mother Earth. The master must deny the being-for-self of the slave. The master must deny the memory of the body (the body needs only be whipped once to remember what it feels like) in order to increase the threshold of JUSTIFIABLE cruelty. For the law allows only JUSTIFIABLE cruelty, of course.

Within the framework of justification, the master (the patriarchy) centers the ego, seeks external validation, projects insecurities onto the other, is addicted to comfort, etc. And this is the form of consciousness the patriarchy seeks to instill in all of us, so that we uphold patriarchy for them in our daily lives. And they’ve been largely succeeding for the past ~10k years. So the westoid ego (ego infected with patriarchal consciousness) must be “nailed to a piece of wood,” so that it can be displayed, and so that it can stay in one place, so it doesn’t “move like the wind” somewhere else, so that the operation can commence.

Consider the film (haven’t read the book) The Last Temptation of Christ. This myth represents the crucifixion and resurrection of the ego in some ways better than the original Jesus myth. Because when Jesus is on the cross (in the logic of the myth, “when the ego is nailed to a piece of wood” and “lifted up”), a “beautiful angel” appears to him, and removes the nails from his hands and feet, and kisses the wounds, and carries him off the cross, and he moves on with his life (at least at first) as if nothing ever happened, or at most, that he passed some test. And you will see this whenever the patriarchal ego is nailed to a piece of wood, so that it can be displayed, so that it can “die” and resurrect. And since the ego is full of hot air, it will see that it has been flattened (as with a steamroller) instead of punctured, but it thought it was solid! How unfair to be flattened, it might think. Pathetic… And a beautiful angel will appear to the nailed ego in the form of a rationalization, in the form of a justification for why it doesn’t NEED to die and resurrect, and will remove the nails, kiss the wounds, and carry the ego off the piece of wood, and the subject will move on with their life as if nothing ever happened, except at most that they passed some test. Except the truth is the exact opposite! They failed the test!

So when your ego is punctured, and deflates, because it’s full of hot air, don’t flatter yourself that it was steamrolled! Accept the crucifixion of the ego and let it die! Because when you crucify the ego, it resurrects in a new form! A form that recognizes that it is not the center of the fucking universe!

Of course the ruling classes have always imagined their egos at the center of the universe! It’s why they came up with a god who placed earth at the center of the universe! That’s where all their ruling class egos were! Don’t you see, westoid!?

What do you want me to tell you? Yes! I experienced crucifixion and resurrection of the ego myself! Yes! My westoid righteousness was as filthy rags! And these rags were incinerated in the “fires” of “my own personal hell”! It was part of the “vision quest” I mentioned in a previous essay! It happened in April 2024, when I was taking Richard Carrier (AKA, Dr. Head-Up-His-Ass [Dr. HUHA]—that’s his Turtle Island name! It was given to him by a shaman!)’s “metaphysical naturalism” class ($49!) based on his book Sense and Goodness Without God. I highly recommend this class. Please tell him I sent you! Anyway, what do you want me to tell you? Yes! In my previous life, in the framework of justification, I harassed women! Not unlike Dr. HUHA! Indeed, within the framework of justification, what is there to prevent men from harassing women (most of the cases)? There is nothing preventing this but their westoid, bourgeois ego-righteousness, which is as filthy rags, and must be incinerated! Indeed, even when there are “consequences” for this harassment, from within the framework of justification, the uncrucified ego can still “rationalize” that the consequences were “unfair,” therefore “learn” nothing, except perhaps that the “system” is “out to get him,” or other such ego-flattering horseshit!

But outside the framework of justification, in “my own personal hell,” there was no devil. There was only me, confronted with my most harmful actions, each displayed in the pale green light of one in a field of “burning bushes.” Your own personal hell is outside of the framework of justification. As such, you can see your most harmful, most “selfish,” most antisocial actions in the full glory of their ugliness. There are no filthy rags to paper over this ugliness. They have been incinerated. So you see who you ACTUALLY are, or at least who you’ve ACTUALLY been. Again, this is knowledge of the “ACTUAL self,” MARTY (Edwardes, p. 137)! As frightening as it is to see a reflection of the actual self, the picture of Dorian Gray in the trans-Platonic attic, I immediately recognized that because there was “fire,” it meant that the space was lit up, and I could SEE what ego (and its yearning for justification) were formerly blocking me from seeing, and, as a consequence, could now “avoid obstacles” I had previously “stumbled over,” or, rather, avoid “violating people’s boundaries.” I immediately recognized that it was the framework of justification that had brought me to this point. And immediately, the framework of justification collapsed, and was replaced with the framework of need. And I found that the “burning bushes” were connected to each other, as if by a slime mold path (branching out from a single “line” and then the branches eventually join back together), and the path itself connected, as if by a cable, to the “power source,” and that I could pull that cable up the hill, and plug it into the “input” at the top, and then I “flipped the switch,” and the whole “valley” lit up, and my personal hell became my personal heaven, and all the roaches scattered (I could hear them. I didn’t turn around). What, are you too good for roaches in your own personal heaven? Roaches are Children of Mother Earth, too, comrade.

The grieving PROCESS is, of course, of vital importance to the “event” of crucifixion and resurrection of the ego. We must mourn the ego when (or perhaps before) it “dies”! I’ve certainly done my share of grieving, especially over the past couple of years (there’s been a lot to grieve about in the world). And we can see the Jesus of TLToC going through the grieving process in his transition from denial to acceptance that he must get back on the cross and finish the job, and we can see his framework of justification building and then collapsing. We can see this in his scene with Paul. There’s denial (“You’re a liar!”), anger (he grabs Paul and yells at him), bargaining (“don’t go around telling lies about me, or I’ll tell everyone the truth!”), and at the end of the scene, he hangs his head, depressed. All this in only three minutes. But it’s not until the end of the film, the end of his LIFE, in a final moment of confrontation, that he’s ready to ACCEPT that he must fulfill his destiny and die on the cross, just like the ego must die to be resurrected, and he recognizes the “angel” that saved him from the cross as Satan! And then, finally accepting his fate, he finds himself back on the cross, naked, punctured, having (eh, let’s say) “earned” the right to declare “IT IS ACCOMPLISHED!”

The “Monomyth”

Don’t you see, Westoid? All the prophets, all the philosophers, all the scientists, and all the storytellers were pointing to Karl Marx and to dialectical materialism! The prophets were all pointing toward the end of class society (the end of oppression)! The philosophers (that mattered) were all pointing to dialectics and/or materialism! The scientists were all pointing to material processes as processes of “evolution”! And all the storytellers were pointing toward the death and resurrection of the ego and the overcoming of the phobia of death (understanding of which is necessary for the working class to accomplish revolution)! For the so-called “monomyth” is merely the representation (in mythic form) of the ego’s plumbing the depths of the subconscious and returning to the surface in a new form at a higher “stage of development”! The story of the crucifixion and resurrection of the Jesus character is only one example of this. In the Turtle Island creation myth, it is the humble muskrat, out of all animals swimming around, that is able (and entrusted, even if “as a last resort”) to plumb the depths of the ocean to retrieve a clod of soil, and then place it on the back of the turtle for the turtle to grow into the great continent it is today! For the “monomyth” is a representation of the dialectic of the subconscious, and synthesizing the dialectic of the subconscious is (corresponds to) how we (metaphysically) “attain” consciousness of our “actual” self and how we “align” all our other “selves” with this “actual self” and attain our true power as a force of nature!

The Last Temptation of Richard Carrier | Dr. HUHA’s 9/11

Ok. We’ve been through hell. Now let’s have some fun. Perhaps Dr. HUHA thinks he has some dirt on me, so I’ll relay here exactly what I told him! And perhaps Dr. H. (and maybe even YOU!) can use my example as a guide to the crucifixion and resurrection of his own ego (but let’s not hold our breath). For I saw Dr. HUHA’s ego “nailed to a piece of wood” in a single e-mail exchange, but much like the Jesus character in The Last Temptation of Christ, he REFUSED to let it die, because a beautiful angel appeared to him in the form of a rationalization, a justification, and removed the nails from his punctured, deflated, flattened ego, and kissed/sealed the “wounds,” and carried his ego off the piece of wood, and pumped it back up, and he went on with his life as if nothing ever happened, except maybe that he passed some “test.” The problem is precisely that he FAILED that “test”! But when Dr. HUHA synthesizes the dialectic of the subconscious, when the dialectic of the subconscious is through with him, he will feel like the Jesus character at the end of The Last Temptation of Christ, and will have earned the right to declare, “IT IS ACCOMPLISHED”! And you will know this change has happened when Dr. HUHA apologizes to the universe for calling it a moron (Sense and Goodness without God, p. 273)! Because when you call the universe a moron, you are really only calling yourself a moron!

I have a disgusting story for you, but the point is that we are now conscious enough to recognize how disgusting it is and “do better” in the future! It is a story of my former life in the framework of justification. It is a story I told Dr. HUHA. And what I told him, I must now relay here. I was an open-mic comic in Austin, Texas from 2015-2023 (I was still in Austin in 2024, but I was doing other stuff—long story). In early 2019, I became friends with fellow open-mic comic “Mona Lisa O’Houlihan.” In my previous life in the framework of justification, I allowed my autism (I’ve mentioned it) to allow me to perform almost superhuman feats of entanglement of my being-for-self and being-for-other (this corresponds to the AA phenomenon of “enmeshment,” which often results in “codependency,” but I’m sure you don’t need to hear about that from me). In my adult life, there have been several instances when I would have one very close friend at a time (usually a woman) and (perhaps “too”) quickly grow very attached to them. And in early 2019, in Austin, I did not have much of a social circle outside open-mics, which is to say that I didn’t have much of a social circle outside MLO, whose social circle included friends from outside comedy whom she would bring with her to open mics (so I also became friends with those people). Ok, so none of that is inherently “wrong,” it’s just never “sustainable” in the long term. Ok, so what I did wrong was that I told her something I could JUSTIFY, but didn’t NEED to say. It is not “good intention” itself that is the road to hell! It is JUSTIFICATION! So she had a joke about how she doesn’t “trust men who don’t eat pussy” (actual quote). So I told her, in DMs, that I liked that joke, “because that’s one of my favorite things.” Now, at the time, this woman was my “best friend,” and you can “justify” saying anything to your “best friend,” but I had known this person only about two months! Sure, I had sat next to and had conversations with her at open-mics (many of which she had driven me to or from), or at least talked to her in DMs, almost every day out of those two months, but I was nowhere NEAR being HER best friend! I probably would have been lucky to, let’s say, crack the B tier! But, much more importantly, I didn’t NEED to say it, and she certainly didn’t NEED to hear it from me! Because she certainly didn’t need the thought (the question, let’s say) implanted in her head of whether or not I, someone who, for one thing, was nowhere near EARNING this level of trust, wanted to eat her pussy, every time she saw me! And so the friendship collapsed. At first, too slowly for me to notice. And she didn’t bring it up. I clearly hadn’t EARNED the prerequisite level of trust! The patriarchy teaches women not to trust that men will listen to women’s “hearts,” because men in patriarchal society are trained in the deep, dark trans-Platonic patriarchal cave, trained not to listen to THEIR OWN hearts! So “why?” the patriarchy “needs” men to ask themselves, “should I listen to the hearts of women!?” And so (a) woman puts herself at some measure of risk REVEALING her heart to (a) patriarchal man. You shall see! You shall see this very clearly! And so MLO did not “reveal” her heart to me in this manner on her way out the door! And there is no blame in this! One need not justify walking out of the door of the Sartrean “hell” of “other people”! You shall see, westoid! You shall see this very clearly!

We are not doing comparison. Comparison is the thief of joy, after all. More importantly, comparison is a tool of the framework of justification (therefore of the patriarchy), and “something something master’s tools.” This is, of course, not even close to the “worst” thing I’ve ever done, but it was bad enough. Because it was SEXUAL HARASSMENT! It caused harm. It was a violation of trust, of “boundaries.” It was creepy and gross. It was certainly bad enough to show up in one of the burning bushes of my own personal hell. And there were about 30 or so more. So you can let your imagination run wild with that. It was certainly bad enough for me to “torture myself” over for the next 5 years. Indeed, the “torture” is kind of a prerequisite for the “hell” experience. It’s how you “earn” your way there! For any TRUE “morality” we have comes from the same source as LOVE! The ALIGNMENT of being-for-self with being-for-other! And there is not a human alive who is not capable of some measure of this alignment! And any alignment you have now can be built upon in the future, so that the whole “head of hair” is “aligned”! And as we align, we can untangle! This is a PROCESS! That means it’s a DIALECTICAL process (all processes are dialectical)! Because there is a DIALECTICAL relationship between entanglement and alignment! Because entanglements can be unraveled! And once alignment is achieved, its EXTREMELY easy to see the damage wrought by entanglement! And I “tortured” myself over this damage! I “cursed the darkness” until I was able to “turn on the light”! But I couldn’t “turn on the light” until I went through the tunnel with the light at the end of it into my own personal hell! And I “pray to Gaia” that you experience this yourself, westoid! The framework of justification must be incinerated! That’s how we unlearn centering the ego, seeking external validation (and, perhaps more significantly, COMFORT), projecting insecurities onto The Other, and every other patriarchal corruption of the relationship between ego and subconscious—every other patriarchal entanglement of being-for-self and being-for-other! At least that’s how I unlearned all that shit. But I wouldn’t advise denying that you have any need whatsoever to unlearn this. That could wind you up in a lot more “grief” than necessary!

So we will not be “comparing” what I did to MLO to what Dr. HUHA did on 9/11 (2014), or in general. That would be foolish! You shall recognize more than enough CORRESPONDENCE! For Richard Carrier’s ego was nailed to a piece of wood on 11 September 2014 in an email correspondence (“email”) with Eli H. Dadabhoy (they/them, AFAB). But, not unlike the Jesus character in TLToC, he (Dr. HUHA) refused to let it die, because a beautiful angel appeared to him in the form of a justification, and he moved on with his life as if nothing ever happened! You can see very clearly that his ego was indeed “nailed” in this Rebecca Watson video (“destroyed,” “murdered,” RW says). And Dr. HUHA saw that his hot air balloon-ego had been punctured and deflated and FLATTENED, and appeared to have COMPLETELY mistaken the flattening of deflation for the flattening of steamrolling! He thought he was a dirigible! He thought there was structure in his hot air balloon! “How unfair to be flattened!?” the ego cries out in self-pity! “You have reduced it to the harshest and most blunt distillation, but alas.” (email p. 5) The ego, being flattened, perceives this as having been “reduced,” which is a form of denial. The “belief” that there is structure holding up the hot air balloon rather than simply hot air is a delusion, therefore a form of denial of truth. This denial must be transformed into acceptance through the grieving process. There is no other way.

For it wasn’t enough for Jesus to be confronted by Paul in TLToC. He had to be confronted again at the end of his life by Judas and Peter, by the destruction of Jerusalem, by the realization that without his self-sacrifice, there could be no “atonement” with “god” and therefore no access to “the world of god.” And indeed, the bourgeois westoid ego must be crucified to resurrect in a new form. A form that recognizes that it is not the center of the fucking universe. In order for the westoid subject to attain proletarian consciousness! And in doing so, the proletariat will attain consciousness of itself as a class-for-itself and seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie and establish the worker’s state, and, eventually, the stateless, classless, moneyless society! The World of Mother Earth! For the Jesus character in TLToC indeed identifies himself as the fulfillment of the prophecy of Daniel of the great rock which destroys the statue. “God threw the rock. I am the rock. The statue is Rome.” And, indeed, Mother Earth is god, and Mother Earth threw the rock (that will “break the statue,” thus ending the “Iron Age” or “Kali Yuga”), and the rock is the working class—those who have attained Child-of-Mother-Earth Consciousness; those who have attained consciousness of themselves as Children of Mother Earth, members of a TRULY social species, and descendants of their ancestors, especially the single-celled ones—and Rome might as well be class society in general, because that is what it has become! And Jesus says, I have come to “change” the world (to bring about “the world of god,” which corresponds in our framework to “the World of Mother Earth”), “not with killing, but with LOVE.” And Rome, in the person of and in the power vested in Pontius Pilate, says, “killing or love makes no difference. We don’t want things changed.” And so the class society will seek to eliminate the revolutionary in order to preserve itself, seeking, in effect, to halt the progress of the universe—a force of nature—which is, on top of everything else, a blasphemy of the World-Spirit—a highly dangerous enterprise—which is why the revolutionaries must become too numerous for the bourgeois dictatorship to overcome! Indeed, the Child of Mother Earth must be lifted up, as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, and if it’s not enough to nail the ego to a piece of wood, then the walking zombie-ego must be captured, dissected, pieces placed on pins, all that sort of thing, as if in the medical theater. And if the ego still refuses to accept its fate, then, well, I guess we’ll cross that bridge etc., etc.

When EHD said “conquests” (email, p. 2), they FUCKING MEANT “conquests”! Wait. Sorry. I’m doing “A=A” logic, and we “have to logic” better than Ayn Rand! I reiterate (or perhaps “iterate”): EHD meant something very REAL by “conquests”! For Dr. HUHA has the sexual consciousness of Alexander the Dipshit. This truth reveals itself in practically every sentence of his side of the exchange! For only someone with the sexual consciousness of Alexander the Dipshit goes around, goes out of their way, seeking to cut the Gordian Knot on pussy! We don’t achieve sexual liberation by cutting Gordian Knots, comrade! (Indeed, the “knot” that “prevents” sexual liberation and free love must unravel itself—we’re gonna need the rope! More on that later!) For when you cut a Gordian Knot, the “knot” might “disappear,” but the pieces take on a life of their own, and when Dr. Dick tried to cut this knot wrt EHD, EHD transformed those pieces into daggers to the ego of the former! And his ego was “nailed to a piece of wood.” And through an extremely complicated, but ultimately meaningless, series of justifications (“apologies,” if you will), Dr. HUHA was able to nurse his ego back to health, under the delusion that his “mortif[ication]” (email, p. 7) meant, well, something, anything. That “mortification” was, indeed, the “beautiful angel” that removed the daggers from his wounded ego, kissed/sealed the wounds, carried his ego off the piece of wood and pumped it back up, and he went on with his life acting like nothing ever happened, or at most that he passed some test. But the problem is precisely the opposite! He failed the test by failing to abandon the framework of justification for the framework of need. For the framework of justification must be incinerated, and the fire will light up the subconscious, and the framework of need will be recognized, “seen,” “deeply felt,” and will become REAL to you, and therefore will become REAL to the working class, and we can abandon and transcend the patriarchy and its framework of justification, and build the stateless, classless, moneyless society—the World of Mother Earth!

When EHD said “impressed” (ibid.), they also meant something very REAL by this! Consider the song, “That Don’t Impress Me Much” by Shania Twain! Dr. HUHA almost literally does have “being right down to an art”! He calls it “Bayesian epistemology”! And, indeed, Bayesian epistemology does correspond to the iterative improvement of the slime mold path! And perhaps Dr. HUHA can USE that “Bayesian epistemology” to tally out the proportion of times this Alexander the Dipshit of Sexual Liberation routine actually flies with women versus how many times it causes him to fall flat on his face! And whether he’s improving his “numbers” (“quantity”) or the “quality” of his responses! He could LITERALLY do the fucking math on this and show us the results! How would that look? And, indeed, how can Dr. HUHA justify NOT doing this so long as he remains within the deep, dark, lonely trans-Platonic cave of bondage that is the framework of justification!?

When EHD called Dr. HUHA’s “loveletter” what it truly was, “an ‘R U DTF’ email,” we can see exactly what they were talking about. Dr. C. was responding, so to speak, to this article EHD had written the previous day. If you are centering the ego, then you are certainly also seeking external validation (even if I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, I was certainly seeking external validation with the “eating pussy is one of my favorite things” shit), and Dr. C. was certainly seeking external validation when he sent the RU DTF email. What do you think that is? How can you see an email exchange like that and not recognize the seeking of external validation? He is repeatedly asking permission to feel certain feelings! That’s as external validation-y as it gets, comrade! He paraphrases Elizabeth Bennett, “I can’t bear the thought of [them] being in the world and thinking ill of me.” That’s absolutely seeking external validation! Now, EHD’s article from the previous day was about fatphobia. And within the framework of justification, it is practically impossible to understand fatphobia, because it is almost impossible not to BE fatphobic within the framework of justification, because the framework of justification IS THE SOURCE OF SOCIAL PHOBIA! Is the source of phobia of other human beings! For, in our patriarchal class-society, from the seed of unhealed trauma grows the tree of phobia, which bears the fruit of bigotry and hatred, which carries the seeds of new traumas. This is how the patriarchy “reproduces itself”—through cycles of abuse and trauma. And that is why “the wokes” are so against fatphobia! Because it perpetuates cycles of abuse and trauma! Not because they are “looking for pity” or whatever! Only someone who habitually sought external validation would also project their insecurities onto someone else in such a way! EHD was not “looking for pity” in that article! Dr. HUHA might not have noticed this, head, as it was, planted so firmly up there, but EHD was speaking out against cycles of abuse (through speaking out against the erasure of lived experience!), not seeking external validation! Don’t you see, westoid!? Don’t you see how the erasure of the lived experience of the marginalized perpetuates cycles of abuse and trauma and upholds the patriarchy!? If you don’t see that by now, it is likely that your smelly, uncrucified ego is in the way of your seeing of this, and must be crucified, so it can resurrect in a new form! A form that doesn’t think people are trying to scam you merely by talking about their own experiences in our justification society! Justification seeks, so to speak, to erase memory! Why wouldn’t it? The less you can remember, the more you can justify!

When EHD characterized Dr. HUHA’s “sexually promiscuous lifestyle” as “hallpass polyamory,” this was also not reductive or flattening. Carrier, at the time, admitted this. It is very well that he admitted this, for the framework of justification often has us LYING to ourselves, which was the real problem with Dr. C.’s lifestyle before the “crisis” that “redefine[d]” his “relationship” (email, p. 6) with his now ex-wife. But Dick Carrier doesn’t have to justify his consensual dick-carrying activity(ies). Outside of the framework of justification, within the framework of need, the whole love and sex thing works a lot differently. And, indeed, in the World of Mother Earth, it will work a lot differently!

Escaping the Cis- and Trans-Platonic Caves of the America Cult

So, have we wrung all the gamer girl bathwater (it’s just an expression) out of the dirty towel (“filthy rag”) of the EHD affair wrt Dr. HUHA? Is the bottle full? Is the ego dead yet? Well, perhaps not. You’ve heard of the Jungian shadow, right? To crucify the ego is (i.e., corresponds to…) to “step through” the Jungian shadow. Why was Richard Carrier “on airplanes all day” (email, p. 3) on 9/11? That’s what I’d like to know! Richard Carrier is very “patriotic.” He is very much a member of the America cult. The America cult is, of course, another Platonic (cis- and trans-) cave that must be escaped from for the would-be revolutionary to attain revolutionary consciousness. For this continent was Turtle Island for thousands of years before anyone ever DREAMED of calling it “America,” and will be known as Turtle Island once again after the name “America” has been relegated to the dustbin of history! For you cannot change what something is merely by changing what you call it! Dr. Carrier knows all about this! Consider the “country” of “Taiwan”! What is the official name of this “country” of “Taiwan,” westoid? Dare you look it up? The official name of this “country” is “Republic of China.” Westoids fail to see the humor in this. So imagine this, westoid. Imagine that the U.S., somehow, already “owned” Puerto Rico during the Civil War, and that the Confederates, instead of putting on a show of accepting defeat, fucked off to Puerto Rico and somehow took it over and somehow turned it into “The Confederate State(s?) of America,” and the world, for some 20 years, called that the “real” America instead of the gigantic mainland land mass on the island’s doorstep and the hundreds of millions of people living and laboring on it! Instead recognizing the slave society on the island as the legitimate one! The one worthy of legitimately bearing the name. That is the level of absurdity we are dealing with when it comes to “Taiwan.” And eventually, the westoid shall recognize that we are dealing with exactly the same level of absurdity when we make-believe and play-act that Turtle Island is “America.”

We can speak of “decolonization of the mind” all we want, but Richard Carrier is LITERALLY a colonizer! He was in the Coast Guard during Operation Desert Storm! That qualifies! With flying colors! And today, he enjoys the privilege of subsidized housing as a reward for his past service as an agent in the military force occupying Turtle Island. And he can justify this, of course. But there was no need for him to uphold empire by signing up, going out of his way, to act as the pointy end of the sword of the false goddess of bourgeois liberty on occupied Turtle Island!

Indeed, if you want to get specific, the issue of China and its rogue province “Taiwan” is precisely the issue over which Dr. Carrier distanced himself from me! Imagine that! He accused me of “defending China,” which is projection, of course. China exists. To some degree, China is a “force of nature.” It is absurd to “defend” forces of nature. The westoid refuses to acknowledge justice as a force of nature because the westoid refuses to recognize MIND and CONSCIOUSNESS itself as a force of nature! Indeed, Dr. Carrier comes closer than most westoids! And yet, there is still a chasm between him and true recognition! Indeed, the westoid mind shuns knowing true justice for the sake of learning (construction of) justification. For we do not have a “justice system” in this country. We have a justification system! Uncle Karl says this himself in the communist manifesto, ch. 2! Read ’em and weep! “Your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all”! Your bourgeois ego-righteousness is as filthy rags, westoid!

So, from the paternalistic westoid perspective of the framework of justification, if China does it, it can’t be “recognized” by The West as “justice,” because the westoid will always be able to “justify” not recognizing it as such.

The standard westoid view toward China is almost unbelievably sinophobic. This can be revealed clearly without spectacular effort. Richard Carrier himself is shockingly sinophobic. He is so racist against China (and the third world in general) that it’s a little hard to believe. I mean. Look at this shit: “China is a murderous regime that threatens death to effect its political will. That cannot be defended.” (personal correspondence, 29 June 2024). How Richard Carrier can say this with a straight face as a former member of the military force occupying Turtle Island is far beyond me! But that’s the framework of justification for you. China actually says who they’re gonna kill (in general). American cops simply execute about 1000 citizens a year without due process. And that’s just on the mainland. We also have hundreds of foreign military bases all over the world. “Taiwan is a free democracy,” he says (personal correspondence, 27 June 2024). Of course, he means that it’s a “liberal” bourgeois democracy, which can hardly be considered a “democracy” at all. “China is behaving in a way that requires only one response in defense. That’s on China. Not on us.” (28 June 2024). I still have no idea what that’s supposed to mean. Surely he’s not talking about invading China? “Did you see the latest? China announced that it intends to execute (aka murder) anyone who supports Taiwan’s independence. And you are defending these horrific people. It’s ghastly.” (29 June 2024). He did not provide me a source for this. But again, projection. Again, the framework of justification. Again, coming from a former agent of the military force occupying Turtle Island. This is precisely why he was given the name Dr. Head-Up-His-Ass. The fact that it makes absolutely no sense for a Chinese citizen to support “Taiwanese” “independence” in no way rouses suspicion from Dr. C. as to WHY a Chinese citizen would “support” “Taiwanese” “independence” (when westoid shitlibs have no problem imagining foreign influence campaigns around every corner spreading “misinformation” or “mischief” in their own countries). And what would this “independence” mean? What would it look like? Would it not unavoidably drift into DEPENDENCE on “America” fairly quickly? Look. We non-crackers notice what crackers jump to condemn and jump to defend. We notice when westoid states (and the dictatorships they support) kill people and we notice their reasons for this (stated AND “real”), and any discrepancies between what they say and what they do. A nation-state is not an indie vinyl that you can review on a 101-point scale like you write for Pitchfork. And it’s a real injustice for Yakubian patriarchal westoids to judge other nation-states, particularly in the global south, from the perspective of the saddle of their westoid imperial core high horse. Real gross. Literally Judge Holden shit. Cracker westoids have the framework of justification jammed so far up their ass that they have it confused for “morality.” And, again, westoid ego-righteousness is as filthy rags and must be incinerated! Westoid “morality” is more accurately characterized as everything standing in the way of true morality!

I don’t know what to tell you. Hatred (whether it’s called bigotry, racism, xenophobia, etc., etc.) isn’t merely an attitude. It can be something as simple as believing absolutely insane things about The Other with zero evidence. For from the seed of unhealed trauma grows the tree of phobia, which bears the fruit of bigotry/hatred, which contains its own “seeds of trauma.” So yankoids are programmed to hate countries that don’t program their citizens to live and die in abject subservience to the false goddess of bourgeois liberty (one of the patriarchy’s masks). Real weird! We don’t live in a moral society, remember? We live in class society! A society ruled by the “logic” of the master-slave dialectic, which requires human sacrifice. We’ll have more “morality” than we know what to do with when we attain “the World of Mother Earth”! The perspective that there is a place from within class societies to morally judge other societies that are working to move beyond class is a form of racism. You are literally choosing whiteness over your own humanity when you make such a judgment. We’re all on this planet together, but westoids never learn what that truly means. You don’t make judgments simply for the sake of being right about something. That’s not what judgments are for. What judgments are FOR is for you to keep yourself safe! You can keep yourself “safe” from China by, um, not traveling there. Congratulations! You are “safe” from the “law” that “prevents” people in China from advocating “independence” for “Taiwan”!

Richard Carrier is not a materialist. I would, in fact, characterize him as a “shadow idealist.” You shall see, westoid. Many of his categories come from bourgeois subjective idealism. In his current form, as a bourgeois citizen with bourgeois consciousness (and values and categories), he is only fit for bourgeois society. We can’t build socialism with these crackers walking around with their bourgeois consciousness and their smelly, uncrucified, unresurrected egos, and their filthy rag westoid righteousness! Toxic westoid consciousness is a result of the toxic westoid subconscious! Westoids have been programmed since birth to, in effect, guzzle subconscious mercury. The westoid subconscious is a toxic waste dump planted firmly in a rainforest! That’s all westoids know because all they’ve learned their whole lives is “the ego is the master; the body is its slave.” They are in extreme denial about even this. Imagine if the flower could think. Would it think of itself as the master and the tree its slave? The tree and the flowers are part of a single dialectical process unfolding in the material universe. There is no hierarchy. There is no zero-sum logic. No competition. No comparison. Merely the process unfolding. You think you can change things by thinking. The truth is that you can only change things through practice/practical activity. The material determines the ideal. The ideal “impacts”/”influences” the material through practical activity. For what is thought? Thought is an experience of self. Thought is a practice of the body. It’s possible because our bodies are specialized for thought, i.e., have specialized “thinking function.” But don’t confuse thought for something it’s not!

If Dr. Carrier were truly a materialist, he certainly wouldn’t go around, go out of his way, seeking out bourgeois decadence to indulge in, while telling himself the ego-serving narrative he was walking the path of sexual liberation! What does Uncle Karl say in the communist manifesto?

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.
The bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.
He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.
Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.
–Communist Manifesto, ch. 2

Dr. Carrier participates in this bourgeois system of “wives in common” that has existed “almost from time immemorial,” though, “openly” rather than “hypocritically concealed,” and tells himself the ego-flattering narrative that he is doing something “progressive.” This is not “materialism.”

I don’t know what to tell you. You have to become a racism-noticer. Look. If we can’t recognize Dr. C. as a racist, how can he ever BECOME a non-racist? And if he can’t become a non-racist, how could he ever possibly hope to become an anti-racist? This would be impossible, comrade! So you have to NOTICE, you have to WAKE UP and smell the racism when a westoid defines abstract, hypothetical Chinese state-killing, which they cite no real examples of, as “murder,” especially if they ARE (or have been) the pointy end of the sword of the false goddess of bourgeois liberty. The sword that “protected” Thomas Jefferson “from” Sally Hemings.

The Child of Mother Earth is disgusted at westoid blindness to bourgeois violence. The Child of Mother Earth is disgusted by westoid blindness in general. Helen Keller was way too nice to you neurotypicals! What she should have told you was something like, “I’M deaf and blind!? BITCH, you’re ALL deaf and blind! You are going to have a MUCH HARDER time learning to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ past this deafness and blindness than I did! But you MUST do it!” But instead, she told you ungrateful pieces of shit, “sometimes, when god closes a door, he opens a window,” and the thing about how you’re pushing against the door when you should be pulling or whatever! Maybe Helen Keller would have gotten through to you motherfuckers more if she had been a bit more like Uncle Ted! Just a bit!

Dr. Carrier, as the non-materialist and almost archetypical westoid scientistic subject he is, denies the World-Spirit, of course. This corresponds to “blasphemy” against the World-Spirit, and is a highly risky enterprise. Being-for-itself accesses the World-Spirit of the WORLD in which it BE through the Tree of Memory! Of course, there’s a “World-Spirit” and a “Tree of Memory,” westoid scum! Don’t be silly! Consider James Cameron’s series of Avatar films! The Na’vi access the World-Spirit of their WORLD, named “Eywa,” through tying their head-tails directly into the tree. So what? You think that’s different? You think humans don’t have availiable just as meaningful access to planet earth’s World-Spirit, Gaia? Gaia lives in all of us, comrade. The Tree of Memory lives within all of us. It lives within our DNA! “Spirit” isn’t “supernatural”; it’s metaphysical! Within the framework of metaphysical naturalism, we have to identify the World-Spirit by what it corresponds to in the actual world. And a “spirit” is (“corresponds to”) a pattern of activity! And the World-Spirit is simply the pattern of activity of the WORLD! Richard Dawkins identifies 4 kinds of “information.” He is a fucking moron! What he has identified are, in truth, 4 different kinds of MEMORY! These are the DNA, the immune system, the nervous system, and culture! And all of these are ways to access the Tree of Memory and therefore the World-Spirit! But the westoid will not see or hear. Their smelly, uncrucified ego is in the way. Remember the words of Matt Christman:

When Avatar came out, there was a real phenomenon of people talking about how they were depressed after the movie because they couldn’t go to Pandora, but what they were really depressed about is the fact that they fucking live on Pandora and we destroyed it!
-Matt Christman, Chapo Trap House, ep. 478, “World Tree Center” (2020/12/08)

Matt is right! WE DO FUCKING LIVE ON PANDORA! But despite how things may presently appear, it’s not totally “destroyed”! Not yet, anyway! I should also point out that the existence of the World-Spirit is not a “metaphysical claim,” as such. It is simply a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of being-for-itself in the WORLD in which it BE!

Dr. Carrier will not reason his way into accepting that he is racist (and must transform). That’s not how that works. He has to grieve his way there. And so far, he certainly hasn’t grieved his way past denial (perhaps anger) in this area. So let us review what kind of “grief” he got himself up to, i.e., the level of grief he attained, during the EHD affair. So we can gage how much further he has to go before he grieves enough to synthesize the dialectic of the subconscious. And, in the email exchange, he is so tangled up in bargaining that not even EHD’s razor sharp putting him in his place could get it through to him that bargaining was not remotely the sufficient level of grief for the occasion! Your ego was “destroyed,” “murdered,” motherfucker! You don’t get to “make a deal” to bring it back! You lost the violin competition with the devil (who was also you!)! You get no gold fiddle! You get nothing! You lose! Good day, sir! There was no “everlasting gobstopper” you could “give back” to EHD to “win” the “chocolate factory” you were striving for! You created a hell for yourself! EHD told you, “You don’t have to agonize,” (email, p. 4), but, in fact, you DID “have to agonize” because once you create a hell for yourself, YOU ARE ALREADY IN IT, because that “hell” is a trans-Platonic cave of your own construction! You are not in the cave, the cave is in you, comrade! “But I feel awful,” the ego says. Of course, the ego “feels awful.” It was just “punctured” with extremely “sharp” “nails”! I’m sure the mythical Jesus the first Christians believed in “felt awful” when the mythical demons “crucified” him up in one of the mythical levels of heaven! But he still had to go through with it! He still had to be crucified before he could resurrect! That’s the logic of the myth! And the same logic that exists in the myth is the logic of human social interaction and the logic of the human “psyche”!

So Dick Carrier makes a big deal about how sincerely he “admires” EHD (“Your bravado, your power, your honesty, your intelligence, your character. Your skill as a writer.” -email, p. 1. Wow! two whole sentences without anything sexual! Amazing!). As if it’s something to want credit for. As if. Yes, and I “sincerely admired” MLO, and I “sincerely admired” her pussy-eating joke! So what! Who gives a fuck!? This “sincere admiration” is, within the framework of justification, but a filthy rag, and must be incinerated!

Materialism and Shadow Idealism

Ok, so we’ve been mucking around Richard Carrier’s fetid subconscious for pages and pages now, but he’s the one who needs to pull the plug from the drain! It’s all the same thing! The crucifixion of the ego, the stepping through of the Jungian shadow, the stabbing of the picture of Dorian Gray in the trans-Platonic attic, the draining of the stagnant swamp water of the subconscious! These are all different names for the same “event”! The same synthesis of the dialectic of the subconscious! You might not yet appreciate it, but it is the only way to really escape the America cult! America was founded by Judge Holden and Humbert Humbert (types) so they could more effectively predate upon children. These are the same types running things today! It all comes down to Thomas Jefferson having the opportunity (the “liberty”) to strive to be a little prince in a little castle on top of a little hill on stolen land with stolen labor. You could say it all comes down to the kid in the Omelas basement! That’s peak liberalism! It’s all about the false goddess of bourgeois liberty, standing atop the Texas state capitol building, bearing the star of the centered ego and the SWORD that “protected” Thomas Jefferson from Sally Hemings. That’s what false bourgeois consciousness is all about. But when America falls away, all that’s left is Turtle Island. When the framework of justification falls away, all that’s left is the framework of necessity. When the ideal falls away, all that’s left is the material. When narrative falls away, all that’s left is the truth. When the filthy rags burn away, all that’s left is the flame!

Materialism is a “monist” philosophy, as opposed to “dualist.” Remember: “there’s only one kind of stuff,” etc., etc. Plenty of people (e.g., Dr. HUHA) CLAIM to be materialists, but are hiding (“smuggling”) idealism in their Jungian shadows, not unlike how our 3rd president smuggled slaves in his balls. I could easily tell you that Dr. HUHA gave me the Turtle Island name “Boxes With Shadows.” Yes, “You’re boxing with shadows,” he once told me. Indeed, I AM “boxing with shadows”! For I am not afraid to CONTEND with the Jungian shadow OR the shadows on the walls of your cis- and trans-Platonic caves, motherfucker! And Dr. Carrier’s “materialism,” which denies positive-sum logic (“that’s not a thing,” he says), which is therefore no materialism at all, relies on straight lines—which don’t exist outside the “ideal” “world” of the trans-Platonic cave, and relies on Aristotelian either-or logic—which, compared to Hegelian logic, is hardly “logic” at all! It is not a complete logic! As such, by itself, it’s hardly better than the other perversions of Hegelian logic I clued you in on earlier, namely Ayn Rand-style “A=A” “logic” (which is meaningless because “A” is meaningless without “B.” cf. ‘Expressions like “a=a”, or expressions deduced from these are neither elementary propositions nor otherwise significant signs.’ -Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 4.243) and “Orwellian” “war is peace” “logic.” Of course Aristotelian, Randian, and Orwellian “logics” are all “perversions” of Hegelian logic! Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Eric the Jew-finder were all GIGANTIC PERVERTS! And so is Dr. HUHA! I mean this in a very academic sense! A simple cursory glance at what, for example, Daniel Tutt or Slavoj Zizek have said about the Lacanian conception of the “pervert” will reveal the unholy trinity as TEXTBOOK examples of such! But we don’t need degree jockeys to tell us what a pervert is! A pervert is simply someone who “perverts” (manipulates, etc.) the truth in order to serve their agenda! Simply someone who makes a mockery of logic by PRETENDING (as in “to the throne”) to use it to draw straight lines! In short, Lacan was pointing to the advent of the internet troll! And don’t you fucking dare ask me what “agenda” Aristotle was serving over the truth! You know goddamn well! His agenda was to uphold hierarchy, particularly the “peculiar” institution of slavery! His logic is entirely well SUITED (see “suitability” principle in VHMT, annotation 36, p. 52-55) to this purpose! It’s almost like it was tailor-made or something! Ayn Rand’s “logic” is indeed also tailor-made for perversion. It’s really fun when perverts get their Randian logic tangled up in their Orwellian logic. Because westoid “conservative” and “liberal” bourgeois-state regimes do “bombing for peace” (with plenty of “conservative” and “liberal” support) all the time. Of course, on the more conservative side, you have logical entanglements like “peace through strength,” but when the soylib says, rightly, “strength through diversity,” all of a sudden, the conservative turns into Ayn Rand and says, “nuh-uh! STRENGTH IS STRENGTH! StReNgTh Is StReNgTh!” i.e., the conservative immediately, Agent Smith-style, takes on the persona of the pervert, i.e., becomes an internet troll! More “honest” “conservatives” will skip the Rand and go straight for the Orwell, e.g., “peace through superior firepower,” in which the “superior firepower” is directly substituted for “strength.” And you can see how well this “peace through superior firepower” “logic” is working for Israel right now. It’s certainly no surprise that the downright Boschian feast of bourgeois decadence/perversion that is the TV show Euphoria came from Israel.

We can see another “clue” to all of this in Lacan’s conception of jouissance. Now, you can be a degree jockey about it, but it’s really easier if you can simply “pick up what Lacan is putting down” when he says jouissance “Begins with a tickle and ends with blaze of petrol.” Ok, so, Lacan was a dude, and hadn’t, you know, crucified the patriarchal ego, let’s say, so he was actually terrified (perhaps phobic) of true jouissance. Within the framework of necessity, i.e./e.g., from any number of feminist/indigenous perspectives, we can easily recognize “jouissance” as experience of oneness (or at least “alignment”) with the World-Spirit… or we can simply identify it with “joy.” The only reason orgasm, if you were picking up what Lacan was putting down, can qualify as jouissance is that orgasm IS (corresponds to) the experience of self through which being-for-itself moves itself forward through spacetime in a new form, which precisely IS (corresponds to) WHY orgasm CAN qualify AS an experience of oneness (or at least alignment) with the world-spirit, because it is the alignment of the activity of the body (i.e., the body of being-for-itself) at the “top” (conscious) level with the activity of the body at the “bottom” (DNA) level! The only reason it’s more likely that women have felt this in our patriarchal society is that women aren’t encouraged QUITE as strongly as men to IGNORE their fkn FEELINGS! What do you want? I go outside. I notice the white blood cells passing in front of my retinas. I notice heavy correspondence between the paths of the white blood cells INSIDE my eye and the paths of the ants on the ground OUTSIDE my eyes that I see THROUGH my eyes. I feel oneness with mother earth. Boom! Jouissance attained! No cleanup required! Unless you cry so hard that snot comes out of your nose!

So bourgeois society can’t offer us true jouissance. The former can’t make money off it. The best bourgeois society can offer us is bourgeois decadence (“pleasure”), because they can profit off it. So it’s easy for the unreconstructed liberal subject in class society to subconsciously substitute, then confuse, then hopelessly entagle, their jouissance with their bourgeois decadence. This is PRECISELY why we have recently re-recognized the importance of TOUCHING GRASS!

What do you want? I rail against bourgeois decadence because it is one of the master’s most often used tools within the framework of justification! It’s easy to rail against it! It’ll be easy enough for you to rail against it once you’ve learned to recogize it and once you’ve recognized it for what it truly is!

So we have bourgeois decadence and pervert-logic within the framework of justification. Don’t you see, westoid? We really are getting somewhere! For the VDMT refers to pervert-logic as an aspect of the “metaphysical perspective.” On page 188, we can see the pervert who, not unlike Alexander the Dipshit, breaks a vase, thinking that this makes the vase “disappear” (which is, of course, an exercise in bourgeois decadence). But the truth is that what was a vase has not “disappeared,” but has “developed” into shards! “But that ‘development’ was simply an EVENT!” screams the bourgeoisie in chorus! But an “event” is “simply an event” only from the perverted logic of the metaphysical perspective. If you zoom in close enough, the process can be clearly seen. The event, in fact, can only be seen as an event (repeat that: “can only be SEEN as an event,” as in, not unlike how the picture on a TV screen “can only be SEEN as” a “picture”) if you zoom out far enough! So of course it’s a development, as in part of a process, and not “merely” an event! For, much like a Gordian knot, which, when you cut it, the “knot” may “disappear,” but the pieces take on lives of their own (which, within the logic of the myth, is “why” Alexander the Dipshit’s kingdom scattered to the four winds after his untimely demise), so the vase, when you break it, might “disappear,” but the shards will “take on a life of their own” (cf. kintsugi)! And, again, on p. 195, we can see the pervert drawing a straight line and declaring that they have “completely replaced,” metaphysically, the raw aluminum with the soda can, and, again, performed a feat of complete metaphysical replacement after replacing the soda can with recycled aluminum. But the pervert does not see, cannot admit to themselves, what is on the next page, which is the unbroken METAPHYSICAL SPIRAL STAIRCASE OF DEVELOPMENT connecting the raw aluminum with the soda can AND the recycled aluminum! “Negation of negation” is a continual process that never ends! Perverts don’t want things to develop! They want to stand athwart history yelling “stop!” And you know that’s what perverts do because William F. Buckley Jr., the guy who said it, WAS A GIGANTIC PERVERT! AND NOT JUST IN THE LACANIAN SENSE!

Consider another total pervert, Steven Miller. This motherfucker would lay claim to the legacy of Monticello. That qualifies as perversion. With flying colors. There is no Monticello without hundreds of slaves! Steve knows this! So liberalism is (or inexorably leads to) bourgeois decadence for the sake of bourgeois decadence, which, of course, has no need to exist, aaaaaaaand that’s where the sword of the false goddess of bourgeois liberty comes into play! Because Thomas Jefferson “must” “protect” himself “from” Sally Hemings. The Town Destroyer “must protect” bourgeois private property “from” the natives “by” destroying their towns, like his fathers before him! And that is how liberalism leads to fascism! Subconscious entanglement of bourgeois decadence with jouissance! Leading to the justification of cruelty in “defense” of the “jouissance,” which we should now be able to recognize as cruelty for the sake of upholding bourgeois decadence and its continuation! And regardless of whether cruelty can ever be “justified,” there is never a NEED for it! Moss only grows in shadow! Stagnant water “breeds” mosquitos! The garbage blanket putresces into the poison blanket! Elon Musk’s X sprouts stars and a red background! Richard Carrier “supports Taiwanese independence,” then goes on to cryptically imply some sort of “response” to China is necessary! Etc., etc.

So the straight lines drawn by the pervert cast numerous shadows, and these shadows correspond to the Jungian shadow AND the shadows on the walls of the cis- and trans-Platonic caves! And these shadows must be stepped through! Because you are not in them! They are in you! There is indeed no shadow in the tunnel with the light at the end of it! There is no shadow in the trans-Platonic cave of pure Ezekielian color! There is no shadow once you transform your own personal hell into your own personal heaven! There are no shadows in positive-sum logic! Shadows are for perverts to smuggle lies in! We won’t need them in the framework of necessity!

So how does Dr. Carrier smuggle idealism in his Jungian shadow? Through Aristotelian “exclusion” of middle, which is actually DENIAL of middle, of course! Indeed, Richard Carrier does not even claim to be a materialIST; he only claims to be a naturalIST. And naturalism is all well and good, but Richard Carrier views spacetime as fundamental. He does not view spacetime as “material.” Only as “real” and “natural.” And this, as Lenin says of agnosticism, is all fideism wants (see VDMT, p. 55-57)! For the failure to accept (which, in effect, amounts to nothing but a denial of!) the truth that spacetime IS (a “form” of) material (for the field is as much material as the particle!) already puts completely unnecessary restraints on our logical, and, in general, INTELLECTUAL, freedom! And this self-imposed restriction is all the ruling class needs to convince most people that the restriction they impose through their bourgeois superstructure/institutions/categories (on top of/attached to/supported by the self-imposed restriction) is “natural”! You have already shackled yourself in bourgeois chains of oppression! You have already done all the “work” for them! You have complied/conformed in advance! But you have not been called to CONFORM to this westoid world of fixed, static ruling class social constructs! You have not been called to dessicate in the desert of the real! Mother earth has called you to be TRANSFORMED by the decolonization of your mind! And the working class must heed the call of Mother Earth! Must heed the revolutionary call of the World-Spirit! Must fulfill our HISTORICAL MISSION of overthrowing class society (see VHMT, p. 43-44)! And we must achieve this through attaining oneness with Mother Earth! Oneness with the World-Spirit! This is how we align our being-for-self with our being-for-other! This is how we become our ACTUAL selves! This is how the working class attains consciousness of itself as a class-for-itself! This is how revolution will become inevitable! And this how the working class will build the global stateless, classless, moneyless society! The world of mother earth!

What do you want me to tell you!? Richard Carrier has experienced oneness with the World-Spirit (Sense and Goodness, p. 13-14)! But he would need to go through the grieving process WAY past the bargaining stage to ACCEPT this! There is, indeed, a reason the shaman dubbed him Dr. HUHA! Dr. Carrier says one of these experiences was “like a Vulcan Mind Meld with God” (Jesus, what a nerd! :P). What he is talking about is, in fact, an experience of oneness with the World-Spirit, because the World-Spirit flows through all of us. It was the World-Spirit rolling the dice that took on lives of their own and started playing their own games some 4 billion years ago in the so-called “primordial” chemical bath! And if Gamer Girl Mother Earth could wring out her dirty towel and seed the global bath with droplets of new life all those eons ago, then she can certainly still play games with us today! Of course, the World-Spirit is not “supernatural” (it’s natural, just like everything else)! The World-Spirit is metaphysical! That means it’s what you EXPERIENCE! And it is because we can ALL experience it that we can call it the World-Spirit! And you don’t need to go 36 hours without sleep to experience it! All you need is, for example, to DO something as simple as to WITNESS the CORRESPONDENCE between the PATTERN OF ACTIVITY of “ants marching” on the ground and white blood cells passing in front of your retinas! Now cry until snot comes out of your nose, westoid! Are you going to deny that this is an experience of oneness with the World-Spirit after you go through it!? Then fuck off! The Child of Mother Earth will grant you an audience again once you’ve grieved sufficiently to ACCEPT it! The Child of Mother Earth has no time to coddle westoid delusions and denials or to entertain the “logic” of perverts!

Consider the phenomenon of the “reality-based community“! American politics generally reduces to pervert-on-pervert logic-crimes because bourgeois politics is based on the bourgeois nation-state, which is based on the perverse “logic” of the master-slave dialectic! In this Platonic cave, the slave, I mean “citizen,” whoops(!), is said to have “rights” which are said to be “granted by” said state within imaginary lines called “borders” (which require militarization!), within a framework called the “social contract” (when did we sign it?). When the truth is that the bourgeois state is merely a holding pen for bourgeois exploitation of proletarian labor. The problem with yankoid liberals is that they live under the “framework of reality,” (Edwardes’ “real” world), which is hardly a “real world” at all, because the bourgeois state recognizes only bourgeois “realities”; never actual truth! When System of a Down says “science has failed our Mother Earth,” they are talking about BOURGEOIS science! The World-Spirit indeed “moves through all things” in the world! So the yankoid liberal accepts these liberal, bourgeois “realities” at face value, which is no “acceptance” at all, but goes no deeper than any surface-level “belief” or “opinion”! Conservatives don’t need to accept liberal “realities”! They only need to “accept” what amount to falsehoods that serve their fascist agenda! They “accept” these falsehoods through “false consciousness.” And false consciousness, because it shares certain features with actual consciousness, is stronger than the surface-level “belief” liberals place in their precious bourgeois realities! And so while the liberal is arguing about “reality,” the Conservative is “free” to say, “fuck your reality,” because who’s going to stop the conservative from using the power of the bourgeois state to “shift” reality to one that is more in line with conservative bigotries? The supreme court!? Don’t make me laugh! No! The only way to defeat false consciousness is with true consciousness! And true consciousness is unavailable to the liberal because they won’t drag their ass back on the ego-cross and fulfill their human destiny by synthesizing the dialectic of the subconscious! You sicken me!

False Consciousness and “Cordyceps”

To reiterate: the patriarchy has no independent existence (cannot reproduce itself) because it does not have its own eggs/wombs and cannot perform its own labor! It is therefore merely a parasitic program on human psychology and in human society, with its Aristotelian zero-sum pervert-logic for upholding hierarchy, etc., etc.! Marina Karlova very insightfully compares this parasitic program to the cordyceps that “takes over” the nervous system, and therefore, the activity, the “behavior,” of the infected ant! And the ant will climb the highest blade of grass, as if it were a ladder of success. This is what false consciousness does to a motherfucker! It does this by tangling up being-for-self with being-for-other in the mind, which can be evinced in the activity of the body! Of course ants have being-for-other! They’re a TRULY social species! Not unlike us!

The Synthesis of the Laplacian Demon with the Cartesian | The Marxian Demon

One of my most meaningful experiences of oneness with the world-spirit was when I saw the eclipse in Austin, TX on 8 April 2024. I wrote about this experience here. But this was the month in which I was taking Richard Carrier’s online metaphysical naturalism course ($49!). Like I said, tell him I sent you! During this month, I was also taking a page from the 19th century naturalists and using my body as a lab for various, well, let’s say “mental experiments” rather than “thought experiments.” Your body is doing a lot of shit you don’t know about (see, e.g., Thinking, Fast and Slow). So you have to LEARN what your body is doing, then, you can IMAGINE what is actually taking place! That’s one of the things imagination is “FOR”! So one of the mental experiments I performed on that day, when I was in the parking lot of the strip mall with the dispensary I frequented at the time, on my BMX bike, was “imagining” my vision as “based” in the rods and then “colored” by the cones, “zeroing in” on particular colors by comparing, for example, the color of every leaf to past experiences, past memories, of seeing similar shades of green, which is, roughly, what is actually happening in our eyes/brains when we see! Then, as I walked forward, I imagined that my eyes were like cameras connected to my brain with “wires,” as if the connection was artificial, and I imagined my eyes bobbing around and my field of vision being tied to vector calculations being performed in my subconscious to keep the bobbing from being “accurately perceived” because we didn’t evolve to perceive our eyes as bobbing around in there!

So now I was ready to perform the experiment where I imagined myself as the Cartesian Demon, i.e., as a mind without a body. I was walking across the parking lot, leaning on my BMX bike handles, and my body was not in my field of vision. So as I walked forward, I imagined myself floating, but I could, of course, still FEEL my body, even though I “could not see” it (when you “see,” what you are “seeing” is, of course, roughly speaking, an “image” on your retinas, which means that even when you “see” the external world, what you are “seeing” is actually your own body! Also, ow, my neck! Something else an actual Cartesian Demon wouldn’t have! A neck! Or neck pain!).

Dr. Carrier has written extensively about the concept of the Cartesian Demon. It’s another example of pervert-logic (but unlike with Aristotelian logic, Dr. HUHA can recognize the obvious perversion)! Indeed, the Cartesian Demon is a great metaphor for the parasitic programming the patriarchy seeks to install in the westoid mind! The Cartesian Demon can have no independent existence, as a mind without a body, therefore, can only “exist” as a parasitic program in the mind of a being that has a body (which is the only way it can “exist” in our institutions). The Cartesian Demon “lives” in the space between certainty and doubt. Of course we’re all hit with this infection, no matter how much it fails or succeeds to carry itself out in us! And we can see bourgeois, westoid society “using” the Cartesian Demon as a “tool” to break the trust the slave, whoops I mean citizen(!), has in their own body, and its “signals”! And we can see this at work in the minds of the slaves, erm, “citizens,” from an early age! From childhood! This is how the Cartesian Demon “takes on a life of its own” within the psychology of the westoid slave-citizen and becomes an “archetype” within the subconscious! And that is why we must delve into the subconscious, to “slay” this “Demon”! (I’m kidding. You can’t “slay” the Cartesian Demon. We’ll have to deal with him some other way).

Another equally important concept is the Laplacian Demon. The Laplacian Demon is absolutely certain about everything. God, how annoying! Of course, this concept can be seen in the form of an archetype of the subconscious in fiction/myth. An obvious example is Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen. In this myth, Jon Osterman becomes Dr. Manhattan through a “process of transformation” (though he experiences it as an explosion, at least at first), not unlike how a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly through a process that, at first glance, looks more like an explosion than anything else! And something very similar to this happened to me psychologically on or before 7 April 2024, very close to the time I “experienced my own personal hell.” I felt my psychology “explode” and “seep” along trails of my previous experience to take its new shape as my “wings,” and I “transformed” from a caterpillar on the tree of life into a psychological butterfly! I had freed myself from the mental shackles of patriarchy! The framework of pervert-logic in my psychology exploded and transformed into the framework of positive-sum logic! And there was no comparison, no competition, no hierarchy. Just “being.”

The Laplacian Demon is definitely an archetype that “lives” in the subconscious of Dr. HUHA. You can tell by how goddamn certain he is about so many goddamn things! He’s not unlike the character from the first verse of “That Don’t Impress Me Much” by Shania Twain! He does, in fact, “have being right down to an art” (though he didn’t invent it)! It’s called “Bayesian inference”! And it is, in fact, currently the most useful tool ever devised for the purpose of “inference”! But more on that later!

There’s a very important scene in Watchmen where the Laplacian Demon, represented by Dr. Manhattan, does “slay” (well, “zap”) the Cartesian Demon, represented by the character of Rorshach. And perhaps your inner Dr. Manhattan will come across your inner Rorshach some day, and you, imagining yourself the Laplacian Demon, will feel the need to “zap” this “demon,” but beware! That “demon” may turn out to have been a Gordian Knot, that when you “zap” it, may “disappear,” but the “pieces” will take on a life of their own and continue haunting you! And this is precisely how Dr. Carrier viewed me when I started telling him he was being racist about China! He viewed me as Dr. Manhattan viewed Rorshach! As something that needed to be zapped! Because the westoid will not listen to you when you tell them that they are being racist about China because they are backed up by the racist westoid media and all our other “statecraft,” “soft power” bullshit! It is all too easy for the westoid to be racist against China (and perhaps difficult for them not to be) within the framework of justification! China is, of course, a place of “illiberalism,” which is the worst thing a state can be from the westoid perspective. So Dr. Carrier views China as “evil,” which is an extremely childish, immature, unserious position. But I can’t say Dr. Carrier views me as “evil” (and I certainly don’t view him as “evil”—more on that later), but perhaps we could say that he, at the time, viewed me as like a mosquito, not “evil,” but “annoying” and “buzzing around in your ear,” seeking to penetrate you and infect you with a parasitic program. Except it’s the exact opposite! He is the one who is infected with the parasitic program and I am simply trying to relieve the westoid of this infection! But I guess one little mosquito isn’t powerful enough to disinfect the Laplacian Demon! And so he “had to” “zap” me! A person certainly cannot converse with a mosquito, after all! Nothing personal. I guess.

The developers of the Jesus myth were very familiar with the pervert and their “logic.” The Jesus character identifies this logic in the “swine” consciousness of Matthew 7, (and) in the one who has the plank in his eye. And America is certainly the country with the plank in its eye. So revealing to the westoid the truth about their racism against China and the “global south” in general is about as effective as casting pearls before swine. A swine can’t eat pearls. A swine can only eat slop. And a swine only cares about what it can eat! So if you cast pearls before swine, they will famously trample the pearls and then you! So the swine must be removed from the pen and cast into a great pit and must be BURIED in pearls! Because then, in the struggle to escape the pit, the swine might learn a thing or two about pearls, and emerge from beneath them in a new form, with raised consciousness! But the swine must struggle! It won’t raise its consciousness just from lying there! And I certainly tried to bury the swine in pearls, but I had no pit to cast him into, so he trampled them and then me! For the thing to work, he will have to voluntarily, for example, read this whole book (or at least actually read and take to heart what I wrote to him at the time)! And so he will have to cast himself into the pit and release the pearls onto himself! Why wouldn’t he? He has nothing to lose but his chains!

Of course the domesticated swine, within the framework of the pen, is cut off from the true potential of its consciousness! It is cut off in great measure from expressing its being-for-self! But when the hog escapes, it becomes “feral,” and its being-for-self returns to it, like it was never missing!

And so you must synthesize your inner Laplacian Demon with your inner Cartesian Demon! We have clues on how to do this. Consider the song “Descending” by Lamb of God. “This god that I worship / this demon I blame / conspire as one, exactly the same.” Yes! Your “god” and your “devil” are the same person and they’re both YOU! And that’s what I realized on 16 April 2024! Mario the know-it-all and Mario the fuck-up weren’t different people! They were the same person and they were both me! This “revelation” was, perhaps, more “frightening” than the experience of “my own personal hell”! Because when I realized it, that’s when I had the experience of my Laplacian Demon synthesizing with my Cartesian Demon, and I “saw” the “spiral” lock into place, and I heard something like a squishing/popping/sucking noise in my head, and I thought a blood vessel had popped, so I immediately called 911. And I was, of course, “freaking out” to an extent, but I had learned everything I needed to maintain a sufficient level of calm. And they let me go after a few hours. But what happened? It turned out that my brain had not actually exploded. So now I just have a weird story that I can’t fully explain. But I’m one person now. Not different people in different settings. I am an autistic person who learned how to unmask! This is very important to learn! Especially if the working class ever wants to revolt and seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie, etc., etc.! Because when you synthesize the Laplacian Demon with the Cartesian Demon, all that’s left is the Marxian Demon! The indomitable revolutionary human spirit! The “spirit” unshackled from the framework of certainty and doubt! The “spirit” that is equipped to incorporate sense-data into its truth-seeking function rather than being Pyrrhonianly skeptical of such data! Etc., etc.!

The Patriarchal Mosquito | “Beyond Good and Evil” | Beyond Omelas

Again, we are not trying to “cancel” Richard Carrier. This isn’t even about him. It’s about YOU! More generally, it’s about the crucifixion of the westoid ego, because when you crucify the ego, it resurrects in a new form! A form that recognizes that it is not the center of the fucking universe! And Richard Carrier simply possesses among the finest UNCRUCIFIED egos that the westoid world has to offer us! And the Child of Mother Earth must be lifted up, as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness! And so the crucifixion of the ego must be displayed for all to see! Because we are all Children of Mother Earth! The patriarchy has been trying to make you forget your whole life. But the memory of it is “built-in” to your fkn DNA, westoid!

Remember, we must break, must shatter into pieces, the framework of justification to attain the framework of necessity. For when the framework of necessity is attained, it grows (and grows, not unlike the Turtle of Turtle Island myth fame) into the framework of sufficiency! And you shall see, westoid, that “good” and “evil” themselves are merely shadows within the cis- and trans-Platonic caves of the framework of justification! And maybe then you will remember that you are a child of mother earth! And there will be no judgment here! Only CONSCIOUSNESS!

It is said that a woman in our patriarchal westoid society would rather take her chances in a room with a strange bear than a strange man. Ok, so women in patriarchal westoid society have phobia of men! How did that happen?, the patriarchy asks, still wearing its wiener costume! Yes, we’re all trying to find the guy who did this! What did I say, westoid? The tree of phobia grows from the seed of unhealed trauma! And to be a woman in westoid society is to be regularly traumatized! Usually by a man! It doesn’t have to be any one particular man! The parasitic programming of the patriarchy has more than enough men infected to sustain itself! For now!

Perhaps you detect some measure of “contempt” throughout this book! Preposterous! Pure projection! You’d like that, wouldn’t you? It would play very well into the narrative that upholds your stagnation! I’ve seen it before! But that only proves that you’re still shackled within the deep, dark pit of the framework of justification! For Mother Earth has no contempt! Neither does the Child of Mother Earth! And you shall see this “no contempt,” westoid, to the extent you continue dithering about in your bourgeois decadence, which you confuse for jouissance! You shall see it very well! Oceans shall crash into cities (it’s already happening)! And there will be no contempt in this! The forests of continents shall burn (it’s already happening)! And there will be no contempt in this! Millions of people will die preventable deaths (it’s already happening)! And there will be no contempt in this! At least not from Mother Earth and her children! Not a drop!

For there is no contempt, no judgment within the framework of necessity! The framework of sufficiency! Only light! And if the picture of Dorian Gray looks ugly to you in this light, westoid, maybe you should just get it over with and stab the picture already! Or shall I continue?

“Good” and “evil” are a binary, which is to say that they DO NOT EXIST outside of binary logic, which, remember, is pervert-logic for upholding hierarchies. Outside of the deep, dark pit of the framework of justification, in the light of the framework of necessity and sufficiency (i.e., THRIVING, i.e., EUDAIMONIA), there is only Mother Earth and her children! None of us are “evil”! That’s preposterous! In the framework of necessity and sufficiency, Mother Earth gives us everything we NEED! Including everything we NEED in order to THRIVE! It is only within the framework of justification that Children of Mother Earth could possibly be DEPRIVED of their needs! Because it is only the framework of justification that “allows” (for) the patriarchy to claim ownership of, i.e., put walls and gunners around, i.e., HOARD, resources! Don’t you see, westoid!? It is only the framework of justification that allows for the possibility of private ownership (but see, of course, the distinction between “private” and “personal”) of property! We overcome the framework of justification through raising our consciousness! Because the framework of justification is like a maze for a slime mold, i.e., NOT OUR NATURAL HABITAT! But we escape the maze by raising our consciousness! Just like a slime mold could “escape” a maze (if they stop giving it food) by taking the form of a “mushroom” and “sporing”!

Don’t you see, westoid? The only “evil” is the framework of justification itself! Consider the short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. LeGuin! Omelas is peak liberalism, but it requires the torture basement, because it’s a society based on the framework of justification. It’s a society based on the phobia of what is outside of it, not unlike how westoid society is based on phobia of whatever can be considered “non-west.” And in the framework of the phobia, anything that “protects” one from the object of phobia can be considered “justified.” And it certainly doesn’t “have to make sense” outside of the framework of justification to be considered legitimate within that framework. From outside the framework of justification, it’s easy enough to see that the framework of justification doesn’t need to exist, especially not for anyone outside of it! Anyone who has stepped into the light of the framework of necessity and sufficiency! Who has walked away from Omelas and stepped back into the garden of eden! But we can’t stop there! We have to go back and rescue the kid from the basement. You shall see!

So if a woman has phobia of men from unhealed trauma (caused by men, but, really, caused by the patriarchy, i.e., the parasitic program that has infected many men in our society, but instantiated within the minds, hence brains, of particular men, through which it “carries itself out” in our institutions!), why are you surprised that (she claims) she would take her chances with the bear? If we lived in a society that wasn’t constantly traumatizing women, they would certainly have no phobia of men! So the framework of necessity and sufficiency allows us to see the problem clearly enough! But equally clear is the solution! Yes! Smash the framework of justification! The framework of necessity and sufficiency is IN OUR DNA, westoid! Why wouldn’t it be? It’s in the DNA of all Children of Mother Earth! It’s only the patriarchy and its framework of justification that could have “made” you “forget” it!

So, back to Dr. HUHA and the EHD “affair.” We don’t need it to be “evil” to send Dr. Carrier to his own personal hell over it. It’s perfectly “sufficient” that it was an attempt at justification without necessity (and certainly without THRIVING)! EHD was certainly not “phobic” of Dr. Carrier! They had no need to “turn him into a bear” in their mind! And, indeed, he was not a “bear”! Not a big, scary monster! But more a tiny, annoying monster! We can surmise, from the content of his “loveletter,” that he conceived of himself as something of “a mortal seeking union with a goddess,” but that was a category error, which is to say he was metaphysically incorrect, because he was more like a mosquito buzzing in the ear of a human being, and we can’t converse with mosquitos, can we? They wouldn’t understand, anyway. So there’s little to do but to swat them. Because they want to penetrate us, and, often through no consciousness of their own, infect us with parasitic programming. And we would just frankly rather not. What’s in it for us? Aside from being able to say that we got penetrated by a mosquito. And that doesn’t seem like much of a perk. But we have no contempt for mosquitos, right? That wouldn’t make any sense! They’re just as much Children of Mother Earth as we are!

So who is the kid in the Omelas basement? That kid is a lot of people! It’s your so-called “inner child,” which patriarchal society had you construct so you could have something to abuse, so the patriarchal abuse could perpetuate itself into future generations, because patriarchy turns men into NPCs! The kid in the Omelas basement is, in a sense, the people of Palestine! Westoid pervert-logic has certainly caused much harm, certainly prevented much thriving, in Palestine over the last 80 years plus! And you can see the pervert-logic (and the harm) very clearly if you’re paying attention! But all that needs to happen for Palestine to continue to thrive is for all the westoids to fuck off back home! And where is home? MOTHER EARTH IS HOME! And all you need to do to recognize this is to crucify your smelly westoid ego! The Child of Mother Earth can smell the uncrucified westoid ego from miles away! And I can say all this because I crucified my ego! Then I fucked off back home! My mom missed me! She wanted to see me every day! And how could I say no to that!?

One of the weird things about the email exchange in the EHD “affair” is that Dr. Carrier seems hung up about having made them feel “[un]comfort[able]” (email, p. 2). This is another big clue. The westoid can’t (or at least feigns not being able to) distinguish between comfort and safety. You can see this whenever the patriarchy sacrifices your safety for its comfort, and the westoid bats not an eye. And we can see this in times Dr. Carrier allegedly made women unsafe rather than merely uncomfortable. And we can certainly see this with the genocide in Palestine. The Zionist is not sufficiently pleased that the occupation seems to be working. They need the world to be ok with it, because anything less might make them feel uncomfortable. But that’s not how the world works. The world works a lot more like Palestine than like Israel. Israel, not unlike America, can only exist within the framework of justification. Because the framework of justification is what is required to expel millions of people from their land. Because there was never a NEED for it! Because it doesn’t contribute to human THRIVING! Only to bourgeois decadence, which is no “thriving” at all!

Beyond the Worker’s State

But we’re not done with Dr. HUHA yet! Because Dr. HUHA racistly views China through the framework of justification, which it, as a nation, has zero respect for, because China, not to damn them with faint praise, is a far more enlightened country than the US! Not unlike how the USSR was a far more enlightened country than Nazi Germany or the Jim Crow US, again, not to damn them with faint praise! I don’t know if you actually read 1984, but I feel like it said more about Eric the Jew-finder himself than about, say, the USSR. Because what’s missing from “Oceania”? Sexual harassment is “missing.” Men with top hats you have to call “sir” are “missing.” Bourgeois decadence is “missing.” And, apparently, Eric would’ve rather died than live without bourgeois decadence. And in the worker’s state, if you don’t want to live without bourgeois decadence, because your bourgeois-addled mind mistakes it for jouissance, well, certainly no one is going to force you to live, are they? Wouldn’t that be cruel? As far as dystopias go, 1984 certainly doesn’t hold a candle to Invisible Man by Ellison or Blood Meridian by McCarthy, i.e., historical fiction resembling real points in American history, not some imagined, future hypothetical state!

But the only reason we need the worker’s state in the first place is because we need to seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie! They’re not going to surrender the means of production voluntarily! Why do you think we need a worker’s state? To have tea parties? Wake up! The means of production aren’t going to seize themselves, comrade! And this can’t only happen in one country! That’s how we get degraded “siege socialism” (see, e.g., Blackshirts and Reds by Parenti)! I’m sure your westoid capitalist country wouldn’t be “thriving” if the rest of the world got a wild hair up its ass to put said country under siege for 80 years, would it? So if you’re “critical” of the People’s Republic of China, well, first of all, get the fuck over yourself! No one gives a fuck! But secondly, we won’t need “the People’s Republic of China” after every state is a worker’s state! Because after every state is a worker’s state, after the parasitic program of the bourgeoisie, of the patriarchy, has been defeated throughout the world, then we won’t NEED “government,” anymore! Only democratic management of shared prosperity!

So the worker’s state is not, pace Eric, “the end of history”! Quite the opposite! It will merely be the beginning of the end of the nightmare of patriarchy! Because all you need to do to end a nightmare is to WAKE UP!

“Authoritarianism” for Anarkiddies

The Anarchist (of which Eric was a shining example) is a logical pervert who believes in no gods, no bedtimes. Their perversion is that there is something in their subconscious that is totally in the way of their seeing of class. They are perfectly happy to recognize positive-sum logic when it comes to cooperation and, famously, “mutual aid,” but any time you try to bring up class around them, they suddenly transmogrify into Ayn Rand! “No! Race isn’t class! Only class is class! Race is race! A=A!!!” What!? The only reason race exists is that it was invented by racists! But why? So they could do racism? The “secret” is that the “doing” of racism entirely aligns with the purpose of upholding bourgeois class relations! They wouldn’t have invented it otherwise! Or at least it used to (align)! Now that it’s obvious that it’s such a hinderance to human THRIVING that it’s costing the bourgeoisie more than it’s worth, now they’re EMBARRASSED that they INVENTED racism and were largely responsible for UPHOLDING it for so many centuries! The truth that they have no one to blame but themselves does not prevent them from trying to blame it on everything and everyone but themselves! It’s pathetic!

The anarchist is not a materialist! They are a shadow idealist! They are smuggling idealism in their Jungian shadow! If they were a materialist, they would be a communist! They would recognize class! They would recognize the “authority” of the BODY and of MATERIAL! But they are totally lost in abstractions! In Platonic caves! And you can’t carry out revolution from within the Platonic cave! You have to step out into the light!

So let’s clear the air on Engels’ pamphlet “On Authority,” because the anarchists are not picking up what he is putting down! And they won’t pick up what he’s putting down unless they become communists! But that would require them to become MATERIALISTS! It would require them to step through their Jungian shadows so they can drop their shadowy pervert-logic! It would require them to recognize the AUTHORITY of the BODY and of MATERIAL! But the anarchoid falsely thinks, imagines, “believes,” perhaps “carries false consciousness of the tenet that” the mind, not the body, is the source of the will. This is idealism. This is putting the cart before the horse. The cart (which contains the driver in this metaphor) is the mind. The horse is the body. The body is the horse of the mind, of its “driver,” of its “will.” And so the will of the mind and the will of the body must be ALIGNED! Because this is simply more REWARDING than for the will of the mind and the will of the body to be at odds, or especially to be “entangled”! Furthermore, the anarchoid must learn that, in order to be a materialist, they must recognize that authority is a Gordian Knot! And much like Richard Carrier discovered that you can’t cut the Gordian Knot on sexual liberation, because the pieces take on a life of their own, the anarchoid must recognize that we must UNRAVEL the Gordian Knot of authority, becuase we’re gonna need the fucking rope! Because we’re going to need to use it to ALIGN with our collective WILL!

I repeat! Will comes from the body! Not the mind! To fail to recognize this is to fall into idealism, which is all the patriarchy needs for us to fail to carry out revolution! You are stabbing yourself in the back! Wake up!

The anarchoid fails to recognize the alignment of being-for-self with being-for-other! They are hopelessly tied in knots because they fail to recognize that DNA is the source of being-for-self and ego is the “source” of being-for-other (though less a “source” than a “gate”)! They don’t recognize that when you truly love yourself (that’s when you can truly love “the other”!), the two are completely aligned, and you can move through the world as a force of nature! “The spirit moves like the wind”! And that is what the working class must do! The working class must raise its “collective” consciousness to the point where it can UNRAVEL, UNTANGLE, and ALIGN its being-for-self with its being-for-other! We must attain consciousness of ourselves as Children of Mother Earth! We must recognize that we are all members of the working class because humans are a TRULY social species! And we must recognize that we are all descendants of our ancestors, especially the single-celled ones! For if those single cells “learned” to “cooperate,” to “align their being-for-self with their being-for-other” in such a way that all distinction between them faded away and they took on the form of a unified, coherent “metaphysical” entity, then the working class can certainly recapitulate this feat and attain consciousness of itself as a class-for-itself, and seize the means of production from the capitalists, and establish the worker’s state, and eventually build the global stateless, classless, moneyless society! The World of Mother Earth! Where LOVE will be the ultimate “authority”!

The Politics of Phobia and the “St. Paul of the Gaia Religion”

And, so, of course, the patriarchy shakes in its shiny boots at the very IDEA, the very MENTION of the World of Mother Earth (it was a specter haunting Europe some 200 years ago)! And why wouldn’t they? It would mean the end to their way of life! A way of life where they get to STRIVE for the CHANCE to be a little prince in a little castle on top of a little hill on stolen land with stolen labor. A “way of life” unavailable to some 99% of people (and, furthermore, not truly worth living, because it’s far more REWARDING to simply be a regular-ass SOCIAL human being, to live in ALIGNMENT, in UNION, of being-for-self with being-for-other)! But that’s the “American Dream,” and, like Carlin said, they call it that because you have to be asleep to believe it. But all that needs to happen for you to escape a dream is to wake up! And so the patriarchy needs to keep us frozen, which is why they invented the Platonic cave. To hijack our internal trans-Platonic caves. So another one of their tools is the politics of phobia. The politics of phobia fits within the framework of justification like a hand in a glove. It’s almost like they were tailor-made for each other! Imagine that! And so the patriarchy must instill phobia of everything that could possibly lead to the attainment of the World of Mother Earth! It must instill phobia of the body, of women, of nonconformity (“queerness,” “disability,” “ugliness,” “fatness”), of nature, of the “non-west,” of the other! It must instill phobia of alignment with being-for-self with being-for-other. It does this (very simply) by working in us from an early age to entangle BFS with BFO in the subconscious, and then instilling in us a phobia of examining our subconscious(es), ’cause then we might actually be able to untangle and align! And they can’t have that, can they? “Love or killing makes no difference! [The patriarchy] doesn’t want things changed”! But the truth is that the patriarchy cannot possibly stop LOVE from changing things! But they must try! And so they must seek to instill in us phobia of LOVE! Imagine being phobic of love! And they do this very simply by seeking (at every opportunity) to cut us off from the internal truth-seeking function given to us in our DNA by Mother Earth! And so Mother Earth has to send new “gnostics” to turn the light on in the trans-Platonic caves, because Hellen Keller (a SOCIALIST, by the way!) was way too nice to you neurotypicals!

And so Mother Earth, the World-Spirit, Gaia, if you will, sent us prophets of justice! But they were hampered by taking certain elements of their then-current class-based “justice” (really, JUSTIFICATION) systems at face-value. Consider Socrates, for example. For all his argumentativity (he had being right, or at least, being less wrong, down to an art, after all!), Socrates, at last, couldn’t argue his way out of drinking the hemlock. But he was no Jesus. His death did not usher in the World of Mother Earth. But Socrates was another Gordian Knot. Socrates the mortal might have “disappeared,” but his curiosity (perverse or not) lives on in the heart of every truth-seeker! Indeed, within the heart of every Child of Mother Earth!

And, in much the same way, Mother Earth got a wild hair up her ass and sent “Saint” Paul to the gentiles! St. Paul was probably the only person who ever convinced a bunch of dudes they could become Jews (abstracted to “Children of Abraham”) without getting circumcised! You gotta hand it to him for that! I guess! St. Paul indeed craved justice, but was, of course, trapped within patriarchal frameworks. So he only saw through the glass darkly! And he certainly didn’t recognize mother earth for the MOTHER she truly is (see, e.g., the infamous Rom. 1:26-27)! Big swing and a miss there, Paul! But anyway, you can read all about the justice Paul and Jesus and Philo and Muhammad were craving in Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God. And you can call Bobby a woo-peddler all you want, but he is not very far from recognizing positive-sum logic for what it truly is (which he has another book about, Nonzero, though I haven’t read it).

But the kinds of gods those dudes were preaching (about) had severe limitations owing to their failure to fully correspond to the World-Spirit, which, in every moment, if we’re paying attention, reveals herself to us as (the pattern of activity of) Mother Earth! And, of course, the failure to correspond lay in the failure to recognize materialism. In the presupposition of substance dualism, roughly speaking. And so, eventually, Mother Earth got her act together and sent us prophets of materialism, which is to say, prophets of communism! And Karl Marx was neither the first nor last of these prophets, nay, he was merely a dude in the right place at the right time with the right set of skills and the right support network!

And so Mother Earth is starting to feel herself! She’s starting to feel a little spicy! She’s simply a little “autistic”! She only “melts down” when you motherfuckers WON’T LISTEN! And so she’s sending weirdos like me now! As in, I am the kind of weirdo she is sending now! And, just as every other time, the kind of weirdo she sends and the circumstances of this “sending” are entirely based on the material conditions of the current society! “First as tragedy, then as farce,” indeed!

Look. St. Paul wasn’t actually “that big of a deal,” at least not at the time he was writing. He often had to practically beg people to take him seriously! I certainly know what that’s like! So we’re not doing self-aggrandizement, and we’re certainly not doing “other-aggrandizement” (see DFW’s “This is water” speech for that). Mother Earth “does not respect a man’s face,” after all! We’re all Children of Mother Earth! We just need to remember! We just need to WAKE UP!

For, much like St. Paul, I also “woke up” (of course, also not unlike him, it partially involved “going to sleep”)! I was also hopelessly (it seemed) lost within the framework of justification! And not unlike him, I am perhaps “chief of problematics,” because in my previous life within the framework of justification (especially growing up as a Christian), I used to HATE the Gaia religion and wanted to destroy it like my fathers before me! But I saw the light of the World-Spirit, which is reflected in the inner light, and I saw the Tree of Memory, which is what allows us to access union with the World-Spirit, which is how we access the World of Mother Earth! At least within the mind! For the world of the mind is an ACTIVE reflection of the material world (see Lenin on this)! Because the mind remembers, which means it can build on previously acquired knowledge, just like the body, just like any other Child of Mother Earth!

For to be a materialist is to recognize that “practical activity” (e.g., “labor,” “ritual”) is how we develop ourselves, because it is the union of “body” with “mind”; the alignment of effort with will! When we “labor,” we are developing our minds by developing our bodies and vice versa (see Engels on this)! Labor is, therefore, a sacred activity—it’s how we evolved from ape to human, after all—but it has been alienated in class society, disconnecting us from ourselves and our communities, etc. (see Marx on this).

But Mother Earth will keep sending her agents until you motherfuckers get the message! For Mother Earth cannot tolerate injustice! Because humans can’t tolerate injustice! It’s in our fkn DNA, comrade! It’s been in our DNA since before we were monkeys! For when the mad scientist gives one of his monkey prisoners a grape and another a slice of cucumber, the Child of Mother Earth revolts against this injustice! Because, for one thing, the mad scientist already put them in prison! Already deprived them of freedom, which [need for] freedom is in the DNA of the Child of Mother Earth! The unequal treatment is merely proverbial icing on the injustice cake!

Yes! The source of resistance to injustice is the injustice itself! Not a psychological “flaw” or “pathology” in the resistor! Wake up, westoid! The false goddess of bourgeois liberty wouldn’t need that pointy sword if she weren’t up to some fuckshit, now, would she!? For bourgeois liberty is merely the set of conditions that upholds bourgeois decadence! A set of conditions that requires slavery and human sacrifice! That requires stolen labor on stolen land! This injustice has no need to exist! Therefore, will stop existing once (though, most likely, not “all at once”) humanity wakes up to the framework of necessity and sufficiency! And that is why the patriarchy will continue and INTENSIFY the injustice until morale improves! Because they operate on pervert-logic for upholding hierarchy! The patriarchy views the phenomenon of behavior as something to be externally monitored (surveilled) and controlled. We autistic people are as familiar (i.e., have as much LIVED EXPERIENCE) with this as is/has any other pathologized group! This view, that CONSCIOUS will is the exclusive “source” of behavior, and that behavior can therefore be controlled externally through “conscious” external “incentives” or the classic “carrot and stick” setup (for example) is, of course, another example of shadow idealism! And we are going to have to recognize shadow idealism whenever we come across it! Because it upholds the ruling class and their politics of phobia! It stands in the way of revolution and human thriving! But pointing out every single example of it is slightly beyond the scope of this book!

Pathologization is indeed a very powerful tool of the patriarchy within the framework of justification! The patriarchy pathologizes every psychological nonconformity (any way of thinking that doesn’t uphold it) it can get its grubby hands (with short, stubby fingers) on! It certainly takes every opportunity it can get to pathologize SOLIDARITY (another word for alignment of BFS w/ BFO)! And why wouldn’t it!? The patriarchy is far better upheld when the proletariat is no more organized or aligned than “potatoes in a sack”!

And so, of course, the patriarchy must instill phobia of the workers’ state in the minds (in the subconscious) of the members of the proletariat! This is easy for them because the worker’s state doesn’t operate as much within the framework of justification, where you care so much about how things LOOK, that you start to neglect how things actually ARE! So the workers’ state doesn’t care as much as the bourgeois state about how things look, and it doesn’t care about liberalism, because liberalism isn’t “for” workers. It’s “for” little princes in little castles, etc., etc. Furthermore, the patriarchy pulls the wool over the eyes of the westoid “proletariat,” such as it is, and instills phobia of the workers’ state in them by giving us “treats” (“bourgeois decadence”) and then influencing us to “believe” that our joy is dependent on the treats and the treats are dependent on the bourgeois state, even, if possible, to the extent of insinuating, “wouldn’t you rather die than live without treats, like George Orwell said you should!?!?” Treats: the new opiate of the masses. The new flowers in our chains.

Bourgeois “Morality” (such as it is)

Bourgeois “morality” is no “morality” at all, as it is not based on friendship (comradeship), i.e., not upon positive-sum logic, but upon, come on, say it with me now, yes, that’s right, pervert-logic for upholding hierarchies! “It doesn’t matter whether I, a bourgeois, believe in god, but I want my maid to believe in god so she doesn’t steal my silverware!” That’s “bourgeois morality” for you. But westoid “leftists” tend to take bourgeois morality pretty much at face-value (“golly gosh gee, I sure hope that maid doesn’t steal that bourgois’s silverware!”). That’s more idealism for you. And what can I say about that that I haven’t already said? Do not conform to the pattern of activity of this liberal, bourgeois patriarchal world of ruling-class social constructs based on pervert-logic for upholding hierarchies, westoid, but be transformed by the decolonization of your mind! Of your body! That’s when we can recognize that the false goddess of bourgeois liberty is a false god and mother earth is a true god!

Logic is what moves things forward, not what keeps things standing still. That’s pervert-logic! That’s the logic of stagnation! That’s “swamp-logic” that breeds mosquitos! It’s the “logic” that “devolves” men into swine! It’s the logic of idealism, where mind has no (knowable) connection to material! Where history and even MEMORY are (considered) irrelevant! It’s one of the patriarchy’s most powerful tools for upholding itself! Because when things DO move forward, it’s goodbye patriarchy! And hello Mother Earth!

Introducing Lachrymology

Speaking of moving things forward: The grieving process! It’s how we “move forward” from denial to acceptance! It’s what the swine goes through on his way from the bottom to the top of the pearl-pit! It’s how he combs out and untangles his perversion, and learns true logic! And crying is, of course, a very important part of the grieving process! I suppose the term “lachrymology” was coined by Ronald P. Vincent in his book, The Joyful Guide to Lachrymology from 1949. Of course, you must understand that crying is not merely about being sad. If Helen Keller could learn that things have “names,” then we can certainly learn that crying has, so to speak, “colors,” which is to say, has its own QUALITIES that don’t necessarily “reduce” (though, of course, are still “tied,” dialectically and “synthetically”) to quantities (cf., the first “law” of materialist dialectics). For, what do you think crying is? Crying is an experience of self! As such, it’s (an example of) how being-for-itself moves itself forward through the world in which it “be”! Because we have experience of self, which results in memory of experience! This is how we learn! How we move forward through spacetime! How we develop! How we evolve! How we REVOLT against the bourgeoisie and seize the means of production from them, etc., etc.!

We can see this very clearly in the film Get Out! The protagonist, Chris, is sent to The Sunken Place (a representation of the subconscious) by the cracker hypnotist. Now, he didn’t need some cracker to send him to the sunken place! He would have been much better served being guided there by someone who loved, respected, cared for him, but “what the Yakubian Devil meant for evil,” Mother Earth can use for good! For, the reason he needed to go to the sunken place was, not to quit smoking (although, hey, not a bad thing), but, that it was the only way he could “forgive himself” for his mom’s death (for which he was in no way responsible)! But he couldn’t “enter” the sunken place until he started weeping! You shall see, westoid! For, when he forgave himself for his mom’s death, he was able to drop the guilt that was burdening him! That was stagnating him! He could move forward more freely! He could move forward so freely that he was able to escape all the traps the crackers in that house set for him! And finally, he was able to move through (and escape!) their Yakubian world like a force of nature! “The spirit moves like the wind”!

Mother Earth (indeed, The Universe!) gave us all the gift of tears, but we know about this “holy gift” AS (or perhaps “through”) “lachrymology” in no small part because of the band Tool. I’m not kidding. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Indeed, Mother Earth sent us Maynard as another prophet of justice! You can hear all about the justice Maynard craves in songs such as “Ænema” and “Hooker with a Penis” and “Ticks and Leeches” and, especially, in songs from their 10,000 Days album such as “Right in Two,” and, of course, the title track, in which he imagines his mom Judith being granted justice, at last, which is to say, granted alleviation from suffering (which is, perhaps, its own reward… who needs “wings” when you’ve been “granted” alleviation from suffering?), by “the spirit, the son, and the father” themselves! And, of course, Mother earth sent us Maynard as a lachrymological shaman! Why wouldn’t she? The Tree of Memory must be watered with tears! And how can we not cry when we hear him sing, “give me my wings!” and “you are the light and way that they will only read about!” and “Judith Marie, unconditional one!”!?

We can see the lachrymological path to acceptance of what IS (the “actual,” which, of course, includes positive-sum logic) right away in Vincent’s book when he witnesses a hawk “snatch” a sparrow. Indeed, an extended quotation is warranted:

I lay down in the grass with the sun warm on my face, a spinning inside my head like a galaxy in the throes of birth, was it a birth or rebirth. At the time I just felt. There was no thought; I felt. The warmth, the color of my closed eyelids filtering the sunlight, danced in my mind, blood red. But there was no thought — only experience. The grass touched my elbow; I saw ants crawling up my arm. I almost leaped up slapping at the ants, but I remained still. A shadow crossed my face. The minute coolness dispelled the thought. The ants vanished. Again, in stillness, without a thought, my eyes opened at just the moment a hawk swooped down to snatch a sparrow from the tree branch directly above me. I cried. I felt the despair of the sparrow and the triumph of the hawk. A salty tear formed in my field of vision. With that single blury [sic] eye I saw the truth in a drop of water. I saw eternity in a grain of sand. Through the apparent polarity of the triumph and despair there was no evil. All was. Being. Singular diversity grew: a monad of scattered unity decomposed into the great lizard of time. I saw the dragon without fear as I cried a single tear. Eternity grew in a cascade of light vibrations in color variations of intensity and density, concentrations of energy, matter. The logos emanated in a web of knitted energy-matter, substance. Did it matter? Reason? What intelligence?

In a moment, I saw eternity. I rode the dragon on a sea of darkness and light. I looked more closely at the scales of the serpentine beast on whose back I rode. I peered, squinting, and I saw my body lying there, eyes closed. The hawk devoured the sparrow. I cried a single tear: LOGOS, The Word.

This was the semenal [sic] experience of my lifetime to date. I realized, and I had to share with mankind the truth. But I had no words, only tears — these tears I share.
-Ronald P. Vincent, The Joyful Guide to Lachrymology, p. 1-2

We don’t do “comparison” here—there is no “comparison” in positive-sum logic (it is “the thief of joy,” after all), only “correspondence”—, but it’s worth looking at this passage in the light of a corresponding passage from Richard Carrier’s Sense and Goodness without God:

During all this, in cultivating the mental life that Taoism taught, I had powerful mystical visions, which only confirmed further that I was on the right track. These ranged from the simple to the fantastic. The simplest and most common was that clarity of an almost drug-like wonder, perceiving everything striking the senses as one unified whole. It is hard to describe this. Normally, your attention is focused, on something you are looking at or listening to, or in a semi-dream-state of reverie, but with a meditative sense of attention this focus and dreaminess vanishes and you are immersed in a total, holistic sense of the real. It is both magnificent and calming. It humbles you, and brings you to the realization of how beautiful simply living is, and how trivial all your worries and difficulties are. Profound insights about the world would strike me whenever in such a state, leading far more readily and powerfully to an understanding of myself and the world than studying or reasoning ever did.

The most fantastic experience I had was like that times ten. It happened at sea, well past midnight on the flight deck of a cutter, in international waters two hundred miles from the nearest land. Sleep deprivation affected my consciousness like a New Age shaman. I had not slept for over 36 hours, thanks to a common misfortune of overlapping duty schedules and emergency rescue operations. For hours we had been practicing helicopter landing and refueling drills and at long last the chopper was away and everything was calm. The ship was rocking slowly in a gentle, black sea, and I was alone beneath the starriest of skies that most people have never seen. I fell so deeply into the clear, total immersion in the real that I left my body, and my soul expanded to the size of the universe, so that I could at one thought perceive, almost ‘feel’, everything that existed in perfect and total clarity. It was like a Vulcan Mind Meld with God. Naturally, words cannot do justice to something like this. It cannot really be described, only experienced, or hinted at. What did I see? A beautiful, vast, harmonious and wonderful universe all at peace with the Tao. There was plenty of life scattered like tiny seeds everywhere, but no supernatural beings, no gods or demons or souls floating about, no heaven or hell. Just a perfect, complete universe, with no need for anything more. The experience was absolutely real to me. There was nothing about it that would suggest it was a dream or a mere flight of imagination. And it was magnificent.
-Richard Carrier, Sense and Goodness without God, p. 13-14

Carrier, of course, for the record, goes on to relay that he would eventually learn that there was a “natural explanation” for his experiences (of course there is) and would go on to “synthesi[ze]” his worldview from Taoism into “a science-based Secular Humanism rooted in Metaphysical Naturalism” (p. 14). Well!

So, what do we see from these two passages? The “Logos” and the “Tao.” These are, respectively, simply westoid and eastoid names for the same positive-sum logic that drives the universe forward! We see acceptance of what IS (the “actual”). We see the recognition that the universe is a single unfolding process, and everything we do is part of that process. Positive-sum logic means that all the (“relative”) truths are all true at the same time, and any “contradiction” is not “metaphysical” but only “dialectical.” “Triumph” and “despair” coexist, and there is no metaphysical contradiction! There is no “paradox”!

Richard Carrier, of course, for the record, denies positive-sum logic. He only affirms “positive-sum thinking” (I wasn’t able to find the comment, but I remember, “that’s not a thing,” he said of positive-sum logic). This is a grave error. It’s more shadow-idealism. It’s more straight line pervert-logic for upholding hierarchies. For how can one have “positive-sum thinking” without “positive-sum logic”? They both involve memory! They both involve first- and second-order experience (i.e., memory). Logic is what drives things forward, not what keeps things the same! That’s swamp-logic for breeding mosquitos! And we can’t have logical mosquitos buzzing around trying to penetrate us and infect us with parasitic programming! The point is to change the world, after all, not merely to “understand” the world that currently exists, which is itself constantly changing! And if the world changes, that means it CAN change, which means it can BE changed CONSCIOUSLY!

So what’s the difference between these two passages? Well, in Carrier’s vision, there was no “negative,” no “negativity.” This is because there was nothing “negative” within the experience. Nothing to “despair.” It’s easy to see the positive-sum logic (even if you can’t identify it as such) when there’s no hawk, when there’s no field of burning bushes, but that is the real test! To identify the positive-sum logic even when you are IN YOUR OWN PERSONAL HELL! And that is what Vincent’s book is all about! Because recognizing and aligning with positive-sum logic is the only way to walk out of your own personal hell!

And we can see Vincent, a humble bi-plane cropduster pilot, slowly (at first) walking out of his own personal hell in the 49 pages of his book, which was written in the grief he felt after his wife Laraine was killed in a snow plow collision. Again, a lengthy quotation is warranted! Who else is going to do it!?

“I’m not alone”

I thought, “There is no way! I never saw the body. The closed casket had to be empty. Laraine, the only love of my life can’t be gone. There is no way this could have happened to me.” I cried and cried. My tears fell like rain to the dust and were consumed as if they never were. “How could this be?”

I felt alone.

I slammed my fist into the hanger [sic] wall — I felt angry at the world and especially angry at God. “She was a good woman; she was the love of my life [sic] the only person I could ever love like that.” Tears of rage flew from my eyes and I didn’t care. I thrashed about mad with unbridled grief. I cried in anger for the unjust loss of my beloved. I thought, “If I find that snow plough [sic] operator I will kill him! If I find that accursed machine, I will destroy that snow plow too. I will find out who made it and destroy them too. Someone made the steel. Someone invented that machine, the destroyer of life. It’s their fault! All of them, all of Rushville; it is their fault!” I cried.

Maybe if I was a better person, behaved better, God wouldn’t have taken her so violently from me. I resolved to do better. I thought, “if only God would bring her back to me I will never miss church again; I will go to church every Sunday. I will never get angry at her. I will bring her flowers every day and always have a smile when I look in her eyes.” I cried. I could be better.

But God wouldn’t bring Laraine back. I was alone. It was my fault she went out that day. I felt terrible. There was no reason to go on. My life had no meaning. I had no reason to awake and get up in the morning. I didn’t want to work or eat. There was no laughter left in me. I cried tears of despair. I pulled my pistol from its holster [sic] I laid it against my head and I cried. I set it down and stared at it. I thought, “…she is watching me…” I cried.

“If I can’t pull that trigger I have to move on. She is still here.” I felt her in my gut. She wanted me to go on with life. I cried. I pulled out my date book, got dressed, and walked outside. I walked the miles to the hanger [sic] thinking of her. I had crops to dust. My tears moistened the dust of the dirt roads upon which I walked. I didn’t care who saw my tears; if they said anything they’d get the wrath!
-Vincent, p. 3-5

And what do we see here? Vincent goes through the grieving process in a deeply felt way, with tears (or at least “crying”) at every stage. We see tears of denial. Tears of anger. Tears of bargaining. Tears of depression. Finally, tears of acceptance. Acceptance is, of course, a matter of degrees. But we see his having attaing a SUFFICIENT level of acceptance to carry on, to move forward with his life, and therefore, to move his life forward. Of course, he still has much work to do. He still has not shed his “wrath,” for example.

Acceptance is, of course, a matter of degrees. Vincent could hardly have been expected to leap to full acceptance in a single act. For when a loved one dies, it’s like part of ourselves has died. And, in a sense, a part of ourselves has died. The other within the self. The future self that had the deceased in their life, and the future deceased within the future self and the future self in the life of the deceased, etc., etc. We must grieve all of those selves. We must untangle all the knots. It’s difficult to roll ourselves forward when parts of it have been cut off. More straight lines. It’s much harder to roll forward a shape with edges than a wheel. And so the roundness of the wheel must grow back. Slowly (at least at first).

And so Vincent continues, moves on with life, at first only “going through the motions,” so to speak, and we see him continuing the cycle by starting it over again. This time, perhaps recapitulating the pre-denial stage of avoidance:

Days turned into weeks; weeks turned into months. I kept up the sharade [sic] of life. I did the things a man does. I ate; I washed; I worked; I slept; I cried. I missed her so much, but I buried my grief. I wanted to hold her [sic] to hear her call my name. I was forever distracted from reality. I longed for my beloved. I felt bruised — a giant purple contusion. I kept moving; I went through the motions of life.
-Vincent, p. 5

He “buried” his grief. He was “distracted.” All through this, more tears. And, of course, the pain knots itself up into something of a bruise.

Our dreams are a reflection of what’s going on in our subconscious. Indeed, dreams are a way that the subconscious can become conscious. Now, often, dreams don’t mean very much, but sometimes that “not very much” is all we need (for now, say). My anxiety often used to show up in my dreams, but these dreams were never exactly a revelation. I didn’t need dreams about my anxieties to know that I was having anxieties. I was already conscious of them. But the point is that we weren’t meant to live with anxieties long term, so their showing up in our dreams means that, well, something is out of alignment. And, of course, the modern lifestyle many people live in capitalist countries is out of alignment with Mother Nature. So Vincent has a dream after the “bruised” passage in which a knight strikes a lion with her sword (yes, the knight in this dream… was a woman!), but the scene goes dark, and suddenly, there is a white rabbit where the lion once stood, who leads him down a hole, which is not a surprising thing to happen in a dream. The subconscious itself often represents itself to us as a giant hole (cf. Nietzsche’s “abyss,” the eye staring back at itself through the subconscious—terrifying, if you haven’t yet synthesized the dialectic of the subconscious).

As she smote a mighty blow, the sky went dark and only the Moon [sic] illumed the scene. I heard the screech of a hawk. The lion was gone, but in its place was a rabbit as white as the snow, freshly fallen. Bewildered, I glanced behind and all around, but the lion was nowhere to be found. In the silver light I did happen to see a burrow, a small hole in the earth, an entrance to the womb of the Mother, a portal to what lies beyond. Testing the air with twitching nose, down the hole, the rabbit dove. A hawk swooped down; missing its prey, it arched back up to the sky. My mind did follow the rabbit as the burrow grew wide enough to accomodate two. I bent doubled over to peer into the earth [sic] I looked up and a honey colored drop from the Sun [sic] did land upon my head just between my lachrymal glands. Centered it was between my eyes and sticky-struck I cursed my luck and fell in the hole tumbling down and feeling small and small and smaller still. I noticed no light and I turned with fright and darkness fell and so did I, deeper and deeper down until I fell inside. I fell so long and fell so far and suddenly I a purchase found; I stood once more my feet on solid ground. I closed my eyes not wanting to see tho [sic] darkness was all there was, all around me darkness was. To my surprise my open eyes could see. I stood on a sandbar of solid sulfur surrounded by a quicksilver sea. A craft, a ship, was navigating the waters underground. As I looked on, I knew all the metels [sic] that made up the ship. There was silver, copper and gold; iron, lead and tin; I knew for sure without any words and without a thought all the metels [sic] of which the craft was wrought. The spaces BETWEEN where ethaer [sic] filled, the stuff of dreams, the stuff of mind — spirit divine; if I looked even farther I knew I would find the dust of the stars and substance fine. There was a pattern to it all; I knew if I could remember that pattern I would have the recipe for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life — quintessence. Looking up I saw the stars, and looking down again I saw the stars. The night sky below and the night sky above all the same all different, all inside. No language would come. I missed her; I cried. I felt her so near and so far away. I missed her; I cried honey’d tears.
-Vincent, p. 6-8

Notice that the hawk misses its prey “this time.” Something has changed. Things have progressed. And once again, we see correspondence with Carrier’s vision, a universe full of life at one with the Tao, so to speak. For if there are stars, life can’t be too far away! “We are stardust,” after all. We see acceptance of what IS in the recognition that what IS is beautiful, i.e., that it has beauty, i.e., that beauty “flows through” what IS, so to speak. And we recognize this because we are PART OF what IS! So how could we not recognize our own beauty? The beauty of our own experiences, including our “experiences of self”!

In the next scene in the dream, he sees two monks. One of them carries a lady in a dress across a muddy river, and then the monks continue on their journey.

The monks continued on their way, traveling the rest of a long day. When they finally arrived at the monestery [sic] gate the shorter monk asked the taller one, “Why did you pick up that young lady and carry her across the mud? We are not supposed to touch or associate with women, especially not young and pretty women.” In answer the taller monk replied, “I left that young lady at the bank of the muddy river; how long have you been carrying her?”
-Vincent, p. 9

This is a very important scene. The taller monk was only “burdened” a short distance. The shorter monk was burdened a much longer distance. We have no need to carry these burdens, though of course, we have justifications. But those justifications are just as much “burdens” as anything else, i.e., they can be as burdenSOME as possible (you might be surprised), AND there is no real “function” they serve OTHER THAN that of a burden (though, of course, we can always “justify” them, claiming that they serve some “purpose”).

And what do you want me to tell you, westoid? The liberal (the Thomas Jefferson) in your head IS such a burden! The ruling class and the rules they impose upon the rest of us ARE such burdens! And just as surely as the tall monk dropped the woman off at the other end of the muddy river, the proletariat can surely attain consciousness of itself as a class-for-itself (attain being-for-itself as its class-being) and “drop” the ruling class on its ass like a pile of bricks! Like a snake sheds its skin! Like a camel shakes off dust! There’s a word for that in Arabic! It’s intifada! For the ruling class IS dust! And the Children of Mother Earth will shake it off like dust!

Indeed, as Vincent wakes from his dream, he is caught in a rainstorm and runs across a field of waist-high corn. At the end, he is PAYING SUFFICIENT ATTENTION to notice a path forward! A path that ALIGNS with the direction he’s heading!

I could see nothing through the growing darkness and torrents of rain. A dirt track opened up before me. I remember thinking that I had never noticed a road here before; there was neither tractor nor trail. One would think that flying above a field while spraying for locust would reveal a dirt track such as this; it would be obvious. I followed the trail. The further I ran the less it rained. Tired from the exertion and not feeling as cold, I slowed my pace to a brisk walk and then I could see now through the drizzle that the row crops had disappeared, replaced by dense undergrowth and old forest trees. I was somewhat bewildered because I knew there was not supposed to […]
-Vincent, p. 10

And here, the scanned text in the file becomes unreadable, but is still encoded in the metadata and so still able to be read by the robot voice, so we’ll return to it later, but, for now, you can surely see the point well enough. But you are not ready to move forward yet, are you, westoid? The bourgeoisie has implanted within you a deep phobia of revolution. All they needed to do this was to instill in you a phobia of revolutionary (and post-) figures. This is more framework of justification bullshit. For the revolution cannot justify itself within the framework of justification invented by the ruling classes based on zero-sum pervert-logic for upholding hierarchies (this is one of the revolution’s most admirable qualities). For the liberal cares more about the fantasy of upholding liberal stagnations than moving society forward. To the liberal, the basement in Omelas (the sweatshop, the illegal cocoa plantation, etc., etc.) is out of sight, out of mind. The American Dream requires us to be asleep and all that sort of thing. The “good news” is that you can cry yourself awake if you’re doing it right!

And so of course I am a “Leninist”! The means of production must be seized and the worker’s state must be established to do the bean-counting, as Lenin said in State and Revolution! But here’s the “secret,” comrade: The indomitable revolutionary human spirit, given to us by Mother Earth in our DNA, which you simply need to “remember” you possess, is the gate that unleashes the flood of revolutionary activity! Lenin knew that the only way the revolution could come about would be for the working class to attain revolutionary consciousness, i.e., consciousness of itself as a class-for-itself, i.e., being-for-itself as its class-being, because when the working class seizes the means of production and becomes “the new ruling class,” that’s when it can end (by superseding) class society altogether! And every position in society will be determined by the frameworks of necessity and suffiency (i.e., THRIVING) rather than justification (i.e., hierarchy). The point is that consciousness (and the raising of it!) is possible because truth exists and because Mother Earth gave us truth-seeking function in our DNA, of which MEMORY is a vital “component”! So, once the working class attains consciousness of itself as a class-for-itself, it will certainly have sufficient consciousness to RECOGNIZE it if the Leninian bean-counter state is not “withering away” (as he predicted it would) quickly enough, and will already be CONSCIOUS of everything they need to do in order to revolt again! The point is that Lenin led the seizing of the means of production! The important thing is that the means of production are seized! If you had a better program than Comrade Lenin, you and your cadre would have seized the means of production already! So all this yapping about what to do once the means of production are seized is so much navel-gazing and putting the cart before the horse unless and until you achieve the same degree of success as Lenin! But you haven’t! You lose! You get nothing! Good day, sir!

And what of Comrade Stalin? Yes, not long after Stalin’s death, the westoid bourgeoisie decided it would be in their interests to instill Stalinophobia within the hearts and minds, within the nightmares of the sleeping westoid working classes, which had little if any revolutionary consciousness to begin with at the time. The simple reason to avoid the phobia response is that, well, that’s not how you defeat Stalin. It’s not how you defeat anyone. It’s certainly not how Stalin led the defeat of Nazi Germany. No. Phobia is, in effect, just more pervert-logic for stagnation that breeds mosquitos. It doesn’t move things forward. But it also doesn’t prevent change from happening. Mosquitos certainly bring about change. Whether or not we want it.

The problem is that you take what the ruling classes say about themselves at face value. You might ask yourself why that is. You might ask yourself why you expect any politician to be a boy scout (or just “scout,” we could say, but you have a specific image in your mind when I say “boy scout”) when every politician you’ve ever known has been either the biggest gangster or biggest empty suit in the race! And Comrade Stalin was certainly no empty suit, was he? But the truth is that there’s a dialectical relationship between the gangster and the boy scout! I said this to my dad, who shall remain anonymous, and he ordinarily wouldn’t have known what the fuck I was talking about (dialectics?), except, in this case, he knew EXACTLY what I was talking about because he was IN the boy scouts and he witnessed them DOING gangster shit! He witnessed them putting rocks in one of the soap boxes for the soap box derby! This was a politically connected soap box (as in, not his)! So my dad was VERY familiar with the dialectical relationship between the gangster and the boy scout from an early age! And I’m sure anyone else who was in any other organization who tries to maintain some kind of reputation as some kind of scout-like entity shares the same awareness! Gangsters get things done! They move things forward! Shall I insult your intelligence by telling you that MLK Jr. got things done without possessing any gangster instincts? You think MLK Jr. got things done exclusively by being a boy scout? They don’t listen to unalloyed boy scouts. Lisa Simpson is an unalloyed boy scout type, and she certainly never seized the means of production! And it is not a coincidence that she is fictional! And not even a politician!

The reason you worship Karl Marx is that he never actually seized the means of production! Therefore, in your mind, his purity was maintained! Marx would’ve thought you were an absolute sucker for this! Marx would’ve rather been involved in an organization that seized the means of production! He was certain very excited and enthusiastic about the experiment of the Paris Commune, though he was not personally involved, though his “ideas,” and more importantly, recommended actions, were! It certainly CORRESPONDED to his proposed “dictatorship of the proletariat” from his “Critique of the Gotha Program”!

So what did Comrade Stalin do? He defeated the Nazis and kept the Union together! In that way, he was not unlike the USSR’s Abraham Lincoln! And many things you can say about Stalin, you can certainly say about Abraham Lincoln, except perhaps that Lincoln, due to his untimely demise, was unable to fulfill his destiny to, in his turn, become the American Stalin and finish the job started by Nat Turner, John Brown, and William Tecumseh (“Cump”) Sherman! And we still mourn his failure today! (Not that he would’ve actually done it, but it’s nice to imagine). But Lincoln did not turn out to be a Stalin. He didn’t even turn out to be a Lenin! He didn’t even seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie! And to this day, the U.S. still owes its black citizens reparations! And not just for things that happened before Juneteenth! In fact, seizing the means of production will only be the beginning of reparations! There will obviously be much more to do after this! Remember, westoid! Seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie is in no way the end of the revolution! It’s hardly even the end of the beginning!

And what is the job Lincoln needed to finish? Well, the American south can only quench the fires Cump set by crying an ocean of tears! First of all, they need to ACCEPT that THEY FUCKING LOST THE CIVIL WAR! In the words of my “Uncle Bitch” (aka “Uncle Satan,” The Accuser), “build a bridge and get over it”! It is a common sentiment in the south that black people need to get over slavery. Yes, the same people say this who refuse to get over a war that their ancestors started and lost over 160 years ago! And you don’t think Lincoln needed to be a little more Stalinesque (i.e., “authoritarian”)!? You think it’s a coincidence that Lincoln’s successor allowed the south to basically get away with everything consequence-free, and the south is still buried in toxic subconscious racist sludge? No, the south must drain the sludge by unplugging the tear ducts, and then, once the sludge is drained, the subconscious must be power-washed with still more tears. No. We’re not talking about Stalin anymore. Stalin died over 70 years ago. The USSR is gone. America is still racist. Let’s talk about that! It’s a far more pressing concern!

Speaking of tears, something that America (the colonizer entity occupying Turtle Island) apparently still needs to mourn is the Vietnam War! A war America started and then lost. A war that racists think America lost for “stabbed in the back” reasons! In other words, a lot of the same problems with the toxic subconscious racist sludge as in the American south as a result of their defeat in the Civil war! So I have a story for you in the effort to help you accept the fact that AMERICA FUCKING LOST THE VIETNAM WAR, WHICH IT ALSO STARTED! AND WE LOST BECAUSE VIETNAM KICKED OUR FUCKING ASSES! FUCKING GET OVER IT!

Anyway, in the Watchmen comics, the U.S. government basically hires Dr. Manhattan to win the Vietnam war for them by, in effect, blowing up Vietnam, which is not too different from what the U.S. tried to do in real life, but “we” didn’t have our own little god to send. So let us imagine an alternate Watchmen timeline in which a very similar thing that happened to Jon Osterman also happened to a scientist in Vietnam, because if America can harness and unleash the power of the atom for bourgeois purposes, then, certainly Vietnam could utilize it for peaceful purposes! And so, instead of becoming a Laplacian Demon, who merely knows where all the particles are, this brave, patriotic scientist, because they were well educated in dialectical and historical materialism, was able to become the Marxian Demon, which carries the indomitable revolutionary human spirit, and relates to memory not merely as something they have immediate access to, but as something they dwell in. And so this brave Vietnamese patriot was able to win the Vietnam war almost single-handedly by scanning the physiology of every American GI and manipulating it (the physiology, through knowledge of their memories) in such a way that they cried until they passed out, and they kept doing this until they refused to fight and begged to be sent back home! Or they gained the consciousness to defect and join the Vietnamese! And, finally, this brave scientist, let’s call them Dr. Tet the Offensive, defeats Dr. Manhattan himself “without firing a single shot” by convincing him that it is Vietnam itself that is, in fact, the “statistical miracle” he is looking for, and not the sob story of some nepo-baby! For Vietnam used the principles of Marxism-Leninism to synthesize, and free itself from (to an extent), the master-slave dialectic! Because it was under the fascist, colonial boots of France, of Japan, of the United States of Lebensraum, and it kicked their asses every single time! And so Dr. Manhattan too would fuck off back home! Or, perhaps, he would himself defect and join the struggle of the Children of Mother Earth against the patriarchy! For in Vietnam, it is known that we are Children of Mother Earth, and our institutions must (eventually!) grow to reflect this! And we must attain alignment, indeed, UNION, and, indeed, must BECOME ONE with mother earth! “An aspect of the historical mission of the working class, therefore, is to develop harmonious unity between humanity and nature. Class society has led to destructive exploitation of both the working class and of nature itself. In bringing about the stateless, classless [and, don’t forget, moneyless! —MM] society of communism, we must take into consideration the role which nature plays in the sustaining and development of human life. As Marx and Engels advised, we must strive to develop relations and forces of production which preserve nature and, by extension, preserve our own continued existence as part of nature and as a species with a natural aspect” (VHMT, p. 44).

The Tactic of Disagreement

And so what does pervert-logic say in response to all this? “I disagree!”? Ok. So? I recognize your disagreement. But the truth is that “agreement” comes from “opinion,” which has to do with “subjective will” (see VDMT & VHMT, passim.), which has to do with “ego.” Because opinion passes through the gate of the ego from the river of the subconscious, and is INFORMATION relayed to the “captain” of the ego by the “crew” of the ship (the ego as captain and the subconscious as “crew” of the ship of the body), and the gate, the captain, the uncrucified ego, takes credit for the opinion as if it they were not merely the gate, but also the source! As if an opinion were something worth taking credit for! That is idealism! You are smuggling idealism in your Jungian shadow! You had better step through it! You had better turn all the lights on in your ship!

For opinions are like assholes! We all have one and they must all be examined regularly to make sure they’re not harboring cancer! Conversely, an opinion is like a flower or like a butterfly. The “purpose” (what is encoded in the DNA) of the flower and of the butterfly is to reproduce itself! Is to bear fruit, so to speak! And a flower cannot reproduce itself without bearing fruit! At which point, it is no longer a flower! The flower is dead, so to speak, and has been “replaced” (but see VDMT, p. 188-89) by the fruit! And that is what an “opinion” is for! To “bear the fruit” of ACTION! What good is an opinion otherwise!? Something to look at? Something to collect in a gallery? Something to curate in a museum? You can’t live in a museum! They will kick you out at the end of the night! You can’t eat an opinion! Your opinions are not even pearls! They are at best, only pale REFLECTIONS of truth! Truth exists, remember! And so what do you do with your opinions? You pick them from mother nature. You catch them in your nets. Then you display them in your museum as if you created them! But that is not the point of opinions! That is pervert-logic for upholding hierarchies! It is the logic of stagnation for accumulating dust! For when you let all your opinions stagnate in the same room for too long, they will accumulate dust! They may even BECOME dust!

And so, if you and your cadre haven’t seized the means of production and established the dictatorship of the proletariat yet, what the fuck am I supposed to do with your OPINION about Comrade Lenin!? And if you and your cadre haven’t defeated the Nazis and kept the union together, what the fuck am I supposed to do with your OPINION about Comrade Stalin!? Those motherfuckers are dead anyway! We are the Children of Mother Earth riding the wave of history, motherfucker! We can’t be standing on the shore waiting for the waves to die down! “I am not the storm! I am the ocean! I am not the storm! I am the sky!” And what does the storm say to the ocean!? Who cares? The ocean doesn’t take the storm very seriously! Not nearly as seriously as the storm takes itself!

For opinions in themselves (opinions-in-themselves) are merely shadows on the wall of your trans-Platonic cave! A vision board is just pictures in a frame without action! You cannot play the piano very well with closed fists! And so the shadows on the wall of your trans-Platonic cave must not be merely things you enjoy looking at, but a goddamn MAP for future ACTION! Anything less is merely pervert-logic for stagnation! It’s trying to freeze what should be flowing! It’s trying to sclerotize what should be elastic! You can’t live in a museum! Some day, many of the opinions you hold now will not even exist outside of a museum! And you won’t be able to live in that museum either! You will not be able to eat those opinions! And they will, at that point, not even REFLECT truth! So you lose! You get nothing! Good day, sir!

The Tactic of Pathologization

And what does pervert-logic say to this? The next step (at least the next one we’re looking at—there may be others in between) is pathologization. Yes, the problem can’t be with the stagnatory pervert-logic of the current class-society! The problem must be within the psyche of the injustice-noticer! Yes, very good! Very good Platonic cave-logic for upholding hierarchy! This will garner you many wreaths within the Platonic cave! Many pats on the head! Much external validation! Pathologization is a very powerful tool within the politics of phobia, within the framework of justification! Phobia and justification are extremely powerful tools for instilling conformity. And justification societies have always sought to instill conformity in their slaves—whoops, citizens! And why wouldn’t they? It’s a lot less of a headache! And in a hierarchical society, their headaches matter a lot more than your life. Ok, so what do you want me to tell you? The USSR was a lot LESS hierarchical than the US still is! Hierarchy is a matter of degrees, after all! Hierarchy is another one of those Gordian knots we have to unravel. If you think it’s not a Gordian knot, then maybe you should try cutting it and see if the pieces won’t take on a life of their own and scatter you and your cadre’s “kingdom” to the four winds after your untimely demise! For Stalin’s successors did see him as a Gordian knot! And so they cut his legacy up, but those pieces took on a life of their own and their little empire scattered to the four winds after their untimely demise.

And so you are the ultimate Gordian knot! Are you going to cut yourself into pieces or are you going to unravel yourself? The truth is that you’re gonna need the rope! Because when the working classes all have their Gordian ropes, that’s when we can tie them together into a net to bring down Alexander the Dipshit! And the net can be weaved and unraveled practically at will! Because we will have alignment (rather than entanglement) between being-for-self and being-for-other!

It’s worth taking a closer look at pathologization. For even Jesus himself has not been immune from this. I suppose we can do a bit of an autopsy on the dead horse that is the Lewis Trilemma. The right answer is, of course, legend, which option Lewis fails to present us with, and he gets SUPER precious about the implications of the notion that it could be either of the non-Lord options he DOES present us with! Because he had his ego very entangled in Christianity, because he credited Christianity with saving him from his own personal hell. “Mere” Christianity, of course. But, in truth, we must save ourselves from our own personal hell by climbing the Tree of Memory (which is not a cross!), but this Tree of Memory IS the truth-seeking function given to us by Mother Earth in our DNA, and therefore, to grow within us to its full potential, must be must be watered with the tears of the Child of Mother Earth! You shall see, westoid! When you recognize yourself as a Child of Mother Earth! As the Child of Mother Earth who must water their own Tree of Memory with their own tears!

Ok, so back to the Jesus in Lewis’s head, which has no independent existence, and therefore “died” with Lewis, but the “corpse” of this Jesus can always be exhumed! Because it did not resurrect! We can see its grave within the writings of Lewis, because, whatever you think of “death of the author,” the author Lewis is in fact dead, as is his Jesus, but in dialectical materialism, the corpse is recognized as the form of the body that continues its existence after the “person” has died. The corpse is still “material” after all, though it “contains” no ideas. This is very important. A person’s body of work becomes a “corpse” after the person dies! But it may very well “resurrect” by “inspiring” the works of others, either as adaptation or indirectly, just as the corpse of Lewis’s Jesus is raised to new life (“resurrects”) in film adaptations of his Aslan character.

But Lewis wants us to take what the gospels say Jesus said about himself in a very specific way. It is so specific that it has become flattened to a shadow on the wall of the late Clive’s trans-platonic cave, and he projects that shadow back out again in the Jesus of his writings, and wants his reader to AGREE (well, he wants them to ACCEPT it, but that’s not up to him) that this Jesus does not merely “correspond to,” but, in fact, WAS “THE historical Jesus.” This is, of course, preposterous, but the point is that he wants us to choose between (a) Jesus was the screaming, unhoused dude at the bus stop of his day, and, (b) Jesus WAS the logos in the flesh! This is, of course, nonsense. The Children of Mother Earth are the Logos in the flesh. And we can recognize enough correspondence between attaining so-called “Christ-consciousness,” i.e., “consciousness” (however specious) of oneself as a “child of god” and “made in the image of god” and attaining true consciousness of oneself as a Child of Mother Earth (and made in her image—beautiful and stupid, but immanently capable of transformation)! But this has absolutely nothing to do with “believing in” a false historical Jesus or that he claimed to be God in the flesh or that he died and resurrected!

So the very simple refutation to Lewis’s trilemma, infinilemma, or whatever is that the screaming, unhoused dude at the bus stop IS THE LOGOS IN THE FLESH, WESTOID! FUCKING DEAL WITH IT! That is, indeed, what the Jesus character meant by “how you treated the least of these, you treated me”!

But Jesus is, of course, pathologized. He was certainly pathologized in The Last Temptation of Christ. Because the Child of Mother Earth is always pathologized in the justification society, because the Children of Mother Earth want to bring about the World of Mother Earth, but the justification society wants to preserve itself. The justification society and the World of Mother Earth cannot coexist. And so the ruling classes (the justifiers) have always used the tool of pathologization against the Children of Mother Earth. Don’t you see, westoid? When the capitalists took over from the “aristocrats” and became the new ruling class, they made damn sure to, at least, put their grubby thumbs on the scales in the effort to bring about a society suitable for capitalism (see VHMT, p. 53-55)! That’s called the base and the superstructure (see VHMT, p. 56)! This “suitability” must apply even to philosophy itself!

Historically, as Marx and Engels observed, philosophy has tended to exist to justify the ruling class in any given era of class society, and this extended to conceptions of human nature. For example, in the feudal era, “human nature” was conceived of in ways that tended to justify the feudal mode of production and the dominance of the ruling class of feudal lords, who were described as “noble” and inherenly superior and separated from peasants and other oppressed classes who were seen as subservient “by nature.”

Such limitations are present today in bourgeois philosophy and ideology, which tends to be formulated to defend the capitalist mode of production. For example, a common conception of human nature in bourgeois ideology suggests that human beings are “naturally competitive” or “inherently greedy” and that capitalism thus “harnesses” this “innate capitalist human nature.” Capitalism is therefore described in many forms of bourgeois philosophy as a “natural fit” for humanity, even though capitalism has only existed for a very short time in comparison to the thousands of years of human history.
–VHMT, p. 221-22

But maybe Lewis had a point. If you don’t believe Jesus was actually god, aren’t you kinda already “injuring” Lewis’s fragile ego? And then aren’t you kinda adding “insult” to that “injury” by condescending that Jesus was not god, even though Lewis insists he claimed he was, but instead, a “good moral teacher”? The “Mere” Christian can only see this as a smokescreen. Well, this is, in fact, what Thomas Jefferson, America’s biggest bullshitter, believed! But C.S. Lewis was a different kind of bullshitter! Both Thomas Jefferson and Clive Staples Lewis were lost within the framework of justification! Which means they both voluntarily cut themselves off (to some degree) from the internal truth-seeking function granted to them by Mother Earth in their DNA! Imagine the insane conversations they would’ve had with each other! It would’ve been like The Three Christs of Ypsilanti! It would’ve been like listening to a flat-earther argue with a hollow-earther! When the “realest” Jesus is actually just an archetype in the subconscious! The realest Jesus is a “mere” shadow on the wall of your trans-Platonic cave! But am I not showing more respect to Lewis the person (than, say, Jefferson was showing) by not attempting to flatter or coddle Lewis’s fragile ego!? Only the framework of justification would say otherwise! But remember, the shadows on the walls of your trans-Platonic cave are supposed to be a map for action, not “merely” a painting on the wall of a museum! And if your map directs you to help people and not harm them, then you might just be doing something right, Jesus-involved or no. In the moment, it’s what we do that matters more than what we think!

And so Jesus is pathologized in TLToC, especially by Pilate. This pathologization, as it is “based” in the material conditions of the current society, is characterized by (tangled up in) intense racism, as it usually is in any justification society. Pilate tells Jesus, “you people,” whom the Romans are occupying, might learn a thing or two by counting the 3,000 skulls on Golgotha. As if to ask, “can’t you Jews count!?” “Are you stupid!?” But finally, says, “probably not,” i.e., “Maybe you won’t learn a thing or two after all! Maybe you can’t count!” Perhaps this Pilate would’ve thought the classic “joke” that begins, “what do you tell a woman with two black eyes?” was funny. It’s the same abuser “logic.” It’s the same pervert-logic. Where the abuser wants not your “acceptance” of the present state of affairs, but your resignation to it! But acceptance is not resignation! That’s what the framework of justification “wants” you to THINK! Accepting something doesn’t mean resigning yourself to it! Acceptance, in fact, always entails the possibility of change, because acceptance always entails moving forward! Because acceptance EVOLVES! Because the situation evolves! But dialectical materialism informs us that change can be “influenced,” even “directed” by practical activity, like how a director directs a film! But I’m autistic. I have meltdowns. A meltdown can be practical activity! A meltdown can produce real change in the real world! But a meltdown is also one of the most pathologized things a person can do! See, a meltdown is not a tantrum! You have to “throw” a tantrum. A meltdown “tumbles out” from the subconscious! So what if it “passes through” the gate of the ego and is “delivered” by the captain of the ego (“ego as captain”)? That doesn’t mean the gate is the source! That’s more shadow-idealism! It’s more pervert-logic for upholding hierarchies! The source is the subconscious! That means the source is Mother Earth! That means that the pathologization of autism (and all our “idiosyncrasies”) is pathologization of Mother Earth! And when you pathologize Mother Earth, you’re only pathologizing yourself! When Richard Carrier said, “the universe is a moron,” he was really only saying, “I am a moron”! And, indeed, he was being a moron! Because he was, in a sense, cutting himself off from, “standing over against,” the universe! And why would you cut yourself off from the universe? It’s where we get our tacos, after all! And Carrier, of course, intensely pathologized me when I had my little meltdown with him about China. But that is, of course, not the only time I or my meltdowns have been pathologized. And perhaps you’ve been pathologizing me this whole time. And if you think I AM pathological, then perhaps you should call for my institutionalization. That was sorta Lewis’s point too. If you think Jesus claimed to be god, but you don’t think he was god, then isn’t that a dangerous person to have in society? Shouldn’t you have been calling for his crucifixion (they didn’t exactly have institutionalization back then)? But, of course, he was the one doing the pathologization of the “crazy” person who “claims to be god.” He was not calling for the end of pathologization; he was merely pointing out that you and him weren’t on the same pathologization page. But, of course, the truth is that I have been institutionalized! And if I’ve been institutionalized in the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, why are you trying to make me afraid that I will be institutionalized in the dictatorship of the proletariat!? Why are you trying to infect me with your phobia!? Indeed, it is precisely that autism, and, indeed, even SOLIDARITY, is pathologized in the justification society! Of course it is! The justification society has to pathologize solidarity because solidarity is one of the proletariat’s most powerful tools to break the chains of class society! Because when we’re all proletarians, there’s no more class! Because there’s no one to crack down on the proletarians! Because the proletarians will all have solidarity with each other! Because consciousness exists! And if it exists, it can be raised! And if it can be raised, then it can be raised within every human! There’s no limit! There’s only infinite development! So your phobia of revolution only shows that you have insufficient revolutionary consciousness! Of course you have phobia of revolution! If you don’t have phobia of revolution, why are you afraid to talk about it? I talk about revolution all the time! It doesn’t mean I have the ability to carry it out, especially not single-handedly; it only means I’m not phobic of it! So overcoming phobia of revolution is a necessary step!

But the politics of phobia within the framework of justification “seeks” to instill within us phobia of ourselves (including our subconscious) and our neighbors, and, indeed, anything that is not in front of our eyes right now. This is where the phobia of “what if” comes from. It’s really the phobia of possibility, of potential. So it (phobia itself) is really a form of pervert-logic for stagnation that breeds logical mosquitos! But all you need to do to drain the swamp is unplug (Jeremiah would’ve said “circumcise“) the tear ducts, which will then water the Tree of Memory. For the Tree of Memory within must be watered by the tears of the Child of Mother Earth!

And what does the framework of justification say in response to this? Would you dare challenge me at this point? Would you dare say, “Marx never said anything about no goddamn ‘Tree of Memory’!” (or maybe you weren’t thinking it until I brought it up! Doesn’t matter!)? Of course he did! Don’t be ridiculous! Marx talked about the flowers in our chains! Where do you think those flowers come from!? They come from the Tree of Memory, you swine! You clearly haven’t been reading Uncle Karl correctly! You clearly haven’t been picking up what he was putting down! For the metaphysics must correspond to the dialectics, which is to say, the physics, the physical! Marx was not “hiding idealism in his Jungian shadow,” was he? If he was, we must detangle the straight lines! These “flowers” cannot come from “nowhere”! Marx was not an idealist! These metaphorical flowers must have a source! An idea cannot be its own source! A gate cannot be its own source! Ayn Rand said “the ego is the fountainhead.” Indeed. But that’s A=A logic for being a selfish, lonely prick! Positive sum logic requires us to say, “The ego is the fountainhead, and/but the subconscious is the city that supplies the goddamn water!”

The Power and Logic of Metaphor

And so I speak in the language of metaphor, indeed, of living metaphor, because it’s one of the “languages” of positive-sum logic (of moving things forward), though it’s easy for the westoid to mistake this for the language of madness. More pathologization. More stagnation-logic. The truth is that westoid language is full of metaphors. We live by them, after all. It’s just that westoid metaphor is so hammered down and flattened that it’s easy for the westoid to mistake this metaphor for propositional language (consider “time is money,” speaking of madness). So it’s worth taking a much closer look at this so you can really see what I mean. First we’ll take a look at this metaphor from Marx and then we’ll look at a passage from another pair of writers on the nature of metaphor itself. And then maybe we’ll see some ways it applied within my own “lived experience.” That’s not a “dirty word [pair].” It certainly doesn’t have to be “postmodern” or “subjective idealist.” Because lived experience is not what your ideas about your experience are. It’s tied to material realities and it’s tied to the physiological effects your experiences have had on you. You’ll see. And of course, both of these passages are worth quoting at length. Who else is going to do it?

For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.

The profane existence of error is compromised as soon as its heavenly oratio pro aris et focis [“speech for the altars and hearths,” i.e., for God and country] has been refuted. Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man [Unmensch], where he seeks and must seek his true reality.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.
-Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

And what is Uncle Karl saying here? He is indeed, in identifying the flowers as “imaginary,” identifying the imagination as the “branch from which they grow,” so to speak, which is to say he is identifying their source as the subconscious (the “source” of the imagination), which is “where” the Tree of Memory “is”! Addressing Marx’s early stance on humanity as its own “sun” rather than mother earth as our “sun” is beyond the scope of this writing.

Another key point is that he is, in a sense, confirming the “worst fear” (worst phobia) of the yankoid evangelical Christian by putting naturalism in its rightful place at the foundation of our philosophy. “Supernaturalism” can only exist within the framework of justification, as it is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain either phenomena (the “metaphysical”) or essences, for that matter (see VDMT). And the yankoid evangelical would have to take their turn in the pearl-pit to understand the distinction between “supernatural” and metaphysical, and to disabuse themselves of the notion that the collapse of supernaturalism would entail such “horrors” as the “collapse of morality” (hilarious), and so an explication of such is beyond the scope of this writing. Suffice it to say that morality is a phenomenon, not an essence. Because a phenomenon cannot be its own essence. The gate cannot be its own source. The fountainhead cannot be its own supply. The supernatural “mind without a body” god, whether or not it can be said to be “dead,” simply has/can have no independent existence, whereas Mother Earth is alive and well! And certainly does have independent existence! Therefore, when we adopt the framework of necessity and sufficiency, the “morality” will, so to speak, “tumble out” freely! It will, so to speak, “flow like rivers of living water”! Because the true “source” of “morality” IS necessity and sufficiency!

And so you must understand the opiate metaphor in the light of the metaphor of the flowers in our chains. Marx should not be read as “singling out” religion as “THE” opiate of the masses, as in, everywhere and for all time. That would be an idealist/metaphysical interpretation rather than a dialectical and material interpretation. For one must always read Marx in the light (the context—Marx did not just fall out of the coconut tree, after all) of the time and place in which he was writing. And perhaps, if you were around at the time of Marx, religion would’ve seemed, appeared to be, THE “opium of the people.” But this was simply a consequence of, contingent upon, the material conditions of the societies in which Marx found himself at the time. But Marx would’ve felt a bit silly having to point this out here as he had already pointed it out elsewhere. But the point is that the opiate metaphor is simply an encapsulation of the “flowers in our chains” metaphor. Opiates had widespread (“legitimate”) medical usage in Marx’s time. And opium is a flower, indeed, the “flower” that springs forth from its own “chain.” The flower of the high tangled up in the chain of the addiction.

On my first “official” day as a pedicab driver in Austin, TX, 28 June 2024, the man who was staying in the tent in the parking lot across the street from the shop walked up to me as I was taking the pedicab I was renting—The Spirit of Diogenes, I called it—out of the gate. I saw him walking towards me away from his tent, then across the parking lot, then across the street. I could feel the time passing as I saw him walking—I must have been trying/failing to look busy. Finally, as he approached and stood about 5 feet from me as I was standing next to the driver’s seat of the pedicab, still right outside the gate, at the threshold where the street meets the sidewalk ramp, he told me he was coming down from a high and felt terrible. And he couldn’t figure out why he kept getting high if, afterwards, he kept feeling worse! Yes, he came right up to me and just blurted this out! Ordinarily, “what the fuck ya askin’ me for!?,” you might think. But I could see where this man was coming from (and I don’t just mean the tent across the street!), because, of course, I’ve dealt with my own “substance abuse issues,” or whatever you want to call it. So, indeed, I could speak to him from the heart! And, “All I can tell you,” I said, “is that you have to remember how you’re feeling right now the next time you want to use!” And I wept… And that’s lachrymology, motherfucker! For how many times have we kept ourselves in chains of stagnation while trying to “justify” it by pointing to the flowers tangled up in them? Only to find those “justifications” do not hold up in the light of day! And so you too must “remember how THAT feels” the next time you want to “use” the framework of justification! For we do ourselves no favors by pathologizing ourselves within the framework of Aristotelian pervert-logic for measuring skulls! Indeed, “opiates” may have played a role in the “stagnation” of the man staying in the tent! But they were merely a personal cage within a larger societal cage. They were not what was keeping him homeless! WHAT WAS KEEPING HIM HOMELESS WAS CAPITALISM! For capitalism raises up a large gate between you, the slave—whoops! citizen!, and housing, and uses its entire bourgeois ideological societal superstructure (see VHMT, p. 56-57) to try to convince you that that gate is the SOURCE of housing! But the “source” of housing must be recognized as LABOR acting upon NATURE! Labor-in-the-world, so to speak! And it must also be recognized as the LOVE that motivates us to build housing for our fellow human beings! Because housing is necessary! Especially to human THRIVING! And so we must recognize the importance to finding “the solution of our problems” in finding new ways to view/perceive/analyze our problems! Because finding new ways of seeing things (constructing “new meaning”) can lead to new kinds of actions! Flowers are for bearing fruit! Not “merely” for looking at! Behold what Lakoff and Johnson have to say about this in Metaphors We Live By:

Another example of how a metaphor can create new meaning for us [cf. the Engelsian thing-for-us! The “thing” brought into “being” out of its circumstances! In this case, MEANING ITSELF brought into being out of its circumstances! As flowers on the tree of memory! —MM] came about by accident. An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, took a seminar on metaphor from one of us. Among the wondrous things that he found in Berkeley was an expression that he heard over and over and understood as a beautifully sane metaphor. The expression was “the solution of my problems”—which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling and smoking, containing all of your problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipitating out others. He was terribly disillusioned to find that the residents of Berkeley had no such chemical metaphor in mind. And well he might be, for the chemical metaphor is both beautiful and insightful. It gives us a view of problems as things that never disappear utterly and that cannot be solved once and for all. All of your problems are always present, only they may be dissolved and in solution, or they may be in solid form. The best you can hope for is to find a catalyst that will make one problem dissolve without making another one precipitate out. And since you do not have complete control over what goes into the solution, you are constantly finding old and new problems precipitating out and present problems dissolving, partly because of your efforts and partly despite anything you do.

The CHEMICAL metaphor gives us a new view of human problems. It is appropriate to the experience of finding that problems which we once thought were “solved” turn up again and again. The CHEMICAL metaphor says that problems are not the kind of things that can be made to disappear forever. To treat them as things that can be “solved” once and for all is pointless. To live by the CHEMICAL metaphor would be to accept it as a fact that no problem ever disappears forever. Rather than direct your energies toward solving your problems once and for all, you would direct your energies toward finding out what catalysts will dissolve your most pressing problems for the longest time without precipitating out worse ones. The reappearance of a problem is viewed as a natural occurrence rather than a failure on your part to find “the right way to solve it.”

To live by the CHEMICAL metaphor would mean that your problems have a different kind of reality for you. A temporary solution would be an accomplishment rather than a failure. Problems would be part of the natural order of things rather than disorders to be “cured.” The way you would understand your everyday life and the way you would act in it would be different if you lived by the CHEMICAL metaphor.

We see this as a clear case of the power of metaphor to create a reality [cf. the Edwardesian “real” (social) world, cf. “reality-based community”! cf. not just “understand the world,” but “change it” —MM] rather than simply to give us a way of conceptualizing a preexisting reality. This should not be surprising. As we saw in the case of the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor, there are natural kinds of activity (e.g., arguing) that are metaphorical in nature. What the CHEMICAL metaphor reveals is that our current way of dealing with problems is another kind of metaphorical activity. At present most of us deal with problems according to what we might call the PUZZLE metaphor, in which problems are PUZZLES for which, typically, there is a correct solution—and, once solved, they are solved forever. The PROBLEMS ARE PUZZLES metaphor characterizes our present reality, A shift to the CHEMICAL metaphor would characterize a new reality.

But it is by no means an easy matter to change the metaphors we live by. It is one thing to be aware of the possibilities inherent in the CHEMICAL metaphor, but it is a very different and far more difficult thing to live by it. Each of us has, consciously or unconsciously, identified hundreds of problems, and we are constantly at work on solutions for many of them—via the PUZZLE metaphor. So much of our unconscious everyday activity is structured in terms of the PUZZLE metaphor that we could not possibly make a quick or easy change to the CHEMICAL metaphor on the basis of a conscious decision.

Many of our activities (arguing, solving problems, budgeting time, etc.) are metaphorical in nature. The metaphorical concepts that characterize those activities structure our present reality. New metaphors have the power to create a new reality. This can begin to happen
when we start to comprehend our experience in terms of a metaphor, and it becomes a deeper reality when we begin to act in terms of it. If a new metaphor enters the conceptual system that we base our actions on, it will alter that conceptual system and the perceptions and actions that the system gives rise to. Much of cultural change arises from the introduction of new metaphorical concepts and the loss of old ones. For example, the Westernization of cultures throughout the world is partly a matter of introducing the TIME IS MONEY metaphor into those cultures [cf. “westoid,” “westoidization,” “westoiditis” —MM].

The idea that metaphors can create realities goes against most traditional views of metaphor. The reason is that metaphor has traditionally been viewed as a matter of mere language rather than primarily as a means of structuring our conceptual system and the kinds of everyday activities we perform [and “we” will show that the concept of “mere language” is “merely” shadow-idealism! i.e., you will see that this misconception of language traces back to “belief in” idealism over materialism! And you will see that idealism cannot survive without the framework of justification! Because it is false! And therefore its only “function” is to uphold the ruling class, to uphold stagnation, to stand in the way of progress, regardless of what “purposes” it can be said to have! —MM]. It is reasonable enough to assume that words alone don’t change reality. But changes in our conceptual system do change what is real for us [reality we can USE, not merely reality we can “exchange,” i.e., yap (“discourse”) about, cf. use-value vs. exchange-value, cf. thing-for-us again, cf. the Edwardesian “virtual” world —MM] and affect how we perceive the world and act upon those perceptions.

The idea that metaphor is just a matter of language and can at best only describe reality stems from the view that what is real is wholly external to, and independent of, how human beings conceptualize the world—as if the study of reality were just the study of the physical world. Such a view of reality—so-called objective reality—leaves out human aspects of reality [“virtual” again —MM], in particular the real perceptions, conceptualizations, motivations, and actions that constitute most of what we experience. But the human aspects of reality are most of what matters to us, and these vary from culture to culture, since different cultures have different conceptual systems. Cultures also exist within physical environments [cf. the Edwardesian “actual” world —MM], some of them radically different—jungles, deserts, islands, tundra, mountains, cities, etc. In each case there is a physical environment that we interact with, more or less successfully. The conceptual systems of various cultures partly depend on the physical environments they have developed in.

Each culture must provide a more or less successful way of dealing with its environment, both adapting to it and changing it. Moreover, each culture must define a social reality within which people have roles that make sense to them and in terms of which they can function socially. Not surprisingly, the social reality defined by a culture affects its conception of physical reality. What is real for an individual as a member of a culture is a product both of his social reality and of the way in which that shapes his experience of the physical world. Since much of our social reality is understood in metaphorical terms, and since our conception of the physical world is partly metaphorical, metaphor plays a very significant role in determining what is real for us [don’t mind whatever “postmodernism” you might perceive in this paragraph. We’ll be dealing with that too. —MM].
-Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, p. 143-46

Are you picking up what Lakoff and Johnson are putting down, westoid? The puzzle metaphor is obscenely well suited to the straight line pervert-logic of the framework of justification! It’s almost like they were tailor-made for each other! Imagine that! I am very familiar with this bullshit metaphor! I have autism! I am not a puzzle! I am not missing a piece! Perhaps you are “missing” some “chemicals.” Perhaps the chemical of empathy! The chemical of (at least IMAGINING) walking in someone else’s shoes (and then recognizing the correspondence with your shoes, your walk)! The chemical of solidarity! Perhaps you are overrun with the precipitate of phobia! “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate,” as they say! So we must recognize Marx’s opiate metaphor within the larger “framework” of the PROBLEMS ARE CHEMICALS metaphor! For, to paraphrase the Rastafari, mother earth “made” chemicals; man made puzzles—you decide! And the chemical metaphor moves things forward, “flows” into future action, unlike the puzzle metaphor, in which you’re always searching for some “missing piece” that prevents the puzzle from being put together, because it was never a “puzzle” to begin with! That was really a form of Orwellian logic hiding within Aristotelian logic (by wrapping itself around it, for the Orwellian logic is in the lie that the problem is a puzzle—cf. Wittgenstein’s infamous “poker” incident with Nephew Karl—and the Aristotelian logic is “free” to concern itself with finding those goddamn pieces)! And the flower metaphor is an expansion on this, because biology is a “product” of chemistry, and in this metaphor, the biological flower (whether “living” or “imaginary”; there is no contradiction) is wrapped in the mechanical chain of the master-slave dialectic, which can only “exist” within the framework of justification.

And what “action” am I speaking of? Revolutionary action, of course! And what do you think revolutionary action is!? It starts within the self! It starts with aligning (which is itself a process) being-for-self and being-for-other within the self! You may find that this will require you to crucify your ego, which you must then do. And then you will recognize this alignment within the other! Comrade Marina talks about this too! And I have experienced it in my own life as I have autism and learned to unmask over the past few years! This is how the authentic self can reveal itself to itself and to others! Because once you crack open the framework of justification, you will find that it was only the seed that develops into the tree of the framework of necessity and sufficiency, and the caterpillar on the tree of life will split open and metamorphose into the psychological butterfly! And you will recognize yourself as this psychological butterfly!

Madness, you say? Westoid, please! You haven’t heard the half of it! Or I’m not the St. Francis of roaches! For revolutionary action flows from revolutionary power, which is “generated” by alignment of being-for-self with being-for-other! Yes! Love is the engine that generates solidarity! And love grows from the framework of necessity and sufficiency “like” a flower and “like” a fruit from the Tree of Memory! Because the framework of necessity and sufficiency is what grows into the Tree of Memory (or perhaps you could say the one “flows into” the other)!

And we must recognize this as the true power of myth! For we (in large part, subconsciously) treat myths as metaphors for our own lives! And indeed they are, or they can be if we can find “maps to action” in them that we can use in our own lives. And that is the true origin of dying and rising god myths, including the Jesus myth(s)! Because that myth is a very powerful form of the so-called monomyth, which, remember, represents the ego’s plumbing the depths of the subconscious and returning to the surface in a new form, at an advanced stage of development! And our living-out of that myth is how we crucify and resurrect the ego, which is to say how we grow the framework of necessity and sufficiency from the busted-ass seed of the framework of justification! It’s how we, among other things, overcome the phobia of death!

Because “reincarnation” isn’t “superstition”; it’s myth! It’s only “superstition” if you “believe” in it as fact instead of myth with your westoid swine ego! For myth is how we construct meaning. For it’s a way to align the “story” of our lives with positive-sum logic (the logic that moves things forward). And to the extent that we “inhabit” the pattern of activity, the “spirit,” if you will, of the “ancestor”… and if you feel “silly” reading this, then the point is to overcome the phobia of “silliness.” For “folly is bound up in the heart of a child”, and only an asshole would try to drive it away with the “rod of correction”! But that is what is necessary for the patriarchy to reproduce itself! Because the patriarchy must instill (subconsciously) in the children that they are slaves! It makes it easier for the slaves—whoops, citizens!, to accept the yoke of the master-slave dialectic once they reach adulthood. And the patriarchy, as a tool in its reproduction, has you construct an inner child in order for you to have something to abuse, etc., etc.!

But perhaps, westoid, you’ve been led to believe that “facts” are how we construct meaning. What? Westoid facts? Please! Yes! Your westoid “facts” are puzzle pieces for constructing 3D castles in the sky for the ruling class and 3D prisons to confine truth for everyone else! These “facts” will reduce to, or perhaps grow into, shadows (yes, on the wall of your TPC) for scaring (or lulling, the ruling class doesn’t care much) you into inactivity to the extent the TRUTH those shadows are “supposed” to reflect conflicts with bourgeois interests!

And so there is no “pseudoscience.” Because there is no “science”! There is only the immortal science of dialectical materialism! Of which anthropology is one of the branches! And anthropology certainly includes myth! And so, again, there is no “pseudoscience” (there is only abuse, i.e., unnecessary/”not-for-sufficiency” use, of myth, but that “problem” will “vanish” with the “vanishing” of the framework of justification)! That’s Popperian pervert-logic for instilling phobia of communism and mother earth and the indomitable revolutionary human spirit in westoid eggheads who love having wreaths placed on those heads within the Platonic cave and (and!) for getting your head bashed in by Wittgenstein’s poker! And I refuse to “believe” it’s “merely” a coincidence that what Wittgenstein and Popper were arguing about in that incident was whether problems were puzzles! That’s the kind of CONFLICT all this inevitably leads to!

But the framework of justification seeks to avoid conflict! Conflict might draw attention to material contradictions! It always does! And so it (the FoJ) tells us that absence of conflict is peace (instead of the presence of justice)! The truth, the “secret,” is that conflict, if you’re doing it right, leads to accountability (which has to do with discipline and, we shall see, “internalizing the statistical metaphysics,” rather than justification), and the framework of justification doesn’t want that. Because if the patriarchy had accountability (“bottom-up”), they wouldn’t need justification (“top-down”), which is to say that accountability is much better at keeping people accountable than justification is (imagine that!), but the justification is how they draw the straight lines that lead to the concentration of their power! How convenient!

But the consequence of the previous “secret,” that conflict is necessary for accountability, is the next “secret,” that conflict, therefore, accountability, can move things forward! And we can see this in myth just as we can see it in real life! We can see it, for example, in the film Only the Lonely, directed by some guy named Chris and starring John Candy, Ally Sheedy, and Maureen O’Hara. And what is the central “conflict” of this film? It is, in truth, that Maureen’s character, Rose, doesn’t want to spend her final years and, at last, die, alone! And so she desperately seeks to preserve her relationship with John’s character, her son Danny, but, because of how her consciousness was organized, this (seeking to preserve…) is expressed toxically through logic(s) of stagnation, forming, at times, swamp-like conditions in the relationship. This swamp breeds mosquitos. In this case, the mosquito of (imitating the original accent is strictly optional) “telling it like it is.” Stinging remarks unleashed under the Orwellian logic of “pain = truth.” Indeed, that is the logic of “stagnation = preservation.” And so, when Danny (who is 37, btw, and, by today’s standards, could very well be considered something of an “incel”) starts dating a shy woman who works at her father’s mortuary, Ally’s character, Theresa, Rose is “understandably” (if not, say, “reasonably”) concerned that this will bring about change(s) in her life she won’t be able to accept/retain joy through/however else you want to put it. It is apparent that she “fears,” subconsciously (the kind of subconscious fear I’m talking about is an animal instinct—you could almost call it “primordial”), that this new relationship will “drain her swamp,” and, therefore, “jeopardize her relationship” with her son, and, therefore, lead her to die alone and all that sort of thing. And this creates tension. And, long story short, we can see this tension breaking in a very important scene in which all three are about to have a “fancy-shmancy dinner” together. If you are walking in on the movie only as this scene is starting, it looks absolutely insane, but the movie has been slowly working up to this level. Maureen has a permanent scowl on her face, it seems,—quite a performance—except when her character is firing stinging, abusive remarks at Theresa, when her face gleams with an almost “demonic” smile. Misogynistic, body-shaming remarks about her breasts; old-timey, white-on-white-racist remarks about her ethnicity; etc. All this time, Danny is not taking sufficient or necessary action to stop this. He’s basically telling her to knock it off. He’s essentially bargaining with her, which is still well within the framework of justification! The most he can work himself up to say is, “are you trying to ruin this dinner?” and “don’t do this, ma.” All the while, Theresa is trying to tread water. She orders a vodka. And in response to Rose’s line about how vodka is highly calorically dense, Theresa says, “Good. Maybe I’ll gain some weight. And grow breasts for you.” And Danny laughs, but on Rose’s face immediately appears the scowl again. Things do not improve from here, and less than two minutes later, Theresa is done with this shit, and is on her way out the door of the Hell of Other People! And, in leaving, she tells Rose, “I think it’s better if you and Danny have dinner alone. Why don’t you have my grilled chicken? Cut it up in small pieces and devour it. You seem to be very good at that.” And exit Theresa! Danny, of course, still deep in his bargaining stage, chases after her, and when he catches up to her outside, she tells him, “I’ve never been in an argument before. I’ve never said those things to anybody. I feel like I’m going to throw up.” And then she says, “I actually stood up for myself. For the first time in my life.” And here, we can almost see the insula lighting up! We can practically see the authentic self revealing itself to itself! And it makes her want to throw up! But she can see who she really is now! And she is ready to move forward! And it moves the plot of the film forward as well (Danny expresses conflict with his mom after this, probably also “for the first time”), but for now, we must recognize how significant this is! For, if the age of the actress is anything to go on, the character must be almost 30 years old! And maybe you don’t have to imagine never standing up for yourself until you’ve reached that age! But the thing the Hollywood movies don’t tell you is that standing up for yourself isn’t a one-time thing, and once you start standing up for yourself, you might have to start standing up for yourself again and again. And eventually, you might realize that you like standing up for yourself! You might find yourself experiencing joy from it! And then, won’t the forces of justification be shaking in their shiny boots!

I saw a Britt Hartley video not too long ago (can’t remember which one) where was talking about the prodigal son parable (but she also talks about it in a recent interview with TV’s Rainn Wilson). She was talking about how, at one point in her life, she maybe only saw herself (reflected) in the son who stayed home, but somehow, at some point, she learned to see herself in all the characters, because we are all reflected in different characters in different stories at different times in our lives. And here, I can even cite something as ridiculous as a song from the contemporary Christian music “genre” (I sometimes call it “the cathedral of garbage”—more on that later), for in his song “The Great Adventure,” Stephen Curtis Chapman says, “Opened up the Bible, and I read about me,” and that’s when he recognizes that his life is/can be a “great adventure”! And there is a grain of truth in his drivel (which, frankly, bears more than a whiff of Christian nationalism/colonialism/missionarism—it’s all the same thing), for when we learn to see ourselves in the stories we read, that’s when our lives can become an “adventure” to us! Or at least a “story” rather than “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”! Rather than a “relentless series of events”! And, indeed, I did see myself as “the prodigal son” when I had to move back home the first time, after running out of money, in 2010 and, unlike him, become a source of free labor! And I did feel like Jacob when I owed a life-debt (it’s called “rent,” though, thankfully, I had help in this area—I would never deny this) and had to sell my labor to “Laban,” which is what we’re calling my “boss” at the pedicab shop (the guy who owned all the pedicabs, apparently through the “magic” of being a successwin-type petit bourgeois striver). And, in much of my life, I felt like the Danny character in Only The Lonely, because, what can I say, that character did reflect my life to a substantial degree (though, crucially, not with respect to my relationship with my mom! At least not the “bad parts.” Don’t misunderstand)! But there were a few times in my life where I had to “become” the Theresa character! And it changed my life! And that is what the working class must do in order to seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie, and then establish the workers’ state, and then the worldwide stateless, classless, moneyless society! The World of Mother Earth!

And now you are ready to hear about how this has applied to my life! For the story of how I became the St. Francis of roaches is also the story of how I became the Theresa Luna of the pedicab shop!

But first, I should provide some background “information” on pedicab driving. I can hear it now, “Hey! They were only a pedicab driver for two months! We don’t claim them!” It doesn’t matter! It was more than enough time for me to “inhabit the Spirit of Diogenes“! It was more than enough time for me to set and accomplish (or close enough) certain goals! Anyway, on my pedicab-driver “Training Day,” 27 June 2024, yes, the day before the other incident I talked about (yes, we only need one day of training on the bike itself because if you’re used to riding a bicycle, or especially a heavier e-bike, that’s all the time it takes to get used to it, you know, stopping and steering and such. The city has different hoops you have to jump through before you can place your ass on the driver’s seat of the pedicab as it [the city] classifies pedicab drivers as “chauffeurs.” There’s a licensing process. There’s a rulebook. Oh my god, there’s even a quiz), my trainer “Ralphie” told me many wondrous things about the profession, for example, that he was able to earn enough money to invest in a bullshit class-collaborationist 401k, providing him with some petit bourgeois notion (see Hegel on “notions”) of “security” (which really, in bourgeois society, can easily “reduce” to comfort, which is itself “merely” a “notion”). This is a very delicious wreath of oat flakes for the inner slime mold (or shall I say “slop for the inner swine”?) within the platonic cave-maze. Some people treat a 401k (or even just a job where they can “get” one) as if it were the proverbial “Pearl of Great Price.” These people are storing up treasures in the bourgeois world, where the moth can eat through and all that sort of thing. But our friend Ralphie was wise to that. At least a bit. He told me that, beyond the 401k-type stuff, there was a certain “magic” to the job. I could’ve easily taken the skeptical route and scoffed at him about this, but I was already picking up what he was putting down. I was already feeling the magic of the pedicab! I was already feeling the Spirit of Diogenes! “The spirit moves like the wind”! But Ralphie told me about, for example, times when a ride-seeker would come along at what, to him, subjectively, was “just the right time” or whatever. And our subjectivity is “where the magic happens,” so to speak. And, just at that moment, as if by “magic,” a couple came along out of nowhere seeking a ride, when neither of us were expecting it, and he indicated to me that this was exactly the sort of thing he was talking about! Of course, he was still largely talking about the petit bourgeois “magic” of an unexpected “sale,” but I knew he had something a little more substantial in mind. I could feel he knew that the real “magic” was that he and I would both remember that moment, and that that memory would connect us to the World-Spirit. And this was “merely” a coincidence, but nothing is ever “merely” a coincidence, is it? For when we EXPERIENCE a coincidence, that’s when it becomes not “merely” a coincidence, but ALSO an experience! And experience is the seed that (after growth) bears the fruit of memory! Because experience of self is how being-for-itself moves itself through the world in which it “be”! And that’s why Jung made such a big deal out of coincidence and gave it the head-up-the-ass name of “synchronicity”! And so we have revealed that “synchronicity” is not “merely” coincidence, but experience of coincidence! Because experience leaves an “impression” in our perception that “seeps into” the subconscious. And through this, it takes the form of something we can “recall.” And just as no two flowers are exactly alike, no two recollections are exactly alike. But we don’t call flowers “fake” just because one is not a perfect match for another (the criteria for determining fake flowers is more of a dialectical process than something that can be “pinpointed”—for example, if it is plastic, it is fake, but perhaps it takes some EXPERIENCE to be able to quickly distinguish between plastic and organic plant material with the naked eye! Or by touch, for that matter!). The recollection is inherently subjective. But it is a “reflection” of objective “facts” in the material world.

“Laban,” my “boss” at the pedicab shop (a pedicab driver is, in theory, “their own boss,” but in practice, this is more or less a joke… a practical joke, so to speak; the point is that he owned the pedicabs, and the drivers rented them from him on a monthly basis) was a nice enough dude, but I could tell I was getting on his nerves right away because I was refusing to flatter his nice-guy ego about the nature of our relationship. I am on record as texting him (yes, over SMS) on 21 July 2024, “Maybe I can be like Jacob and make [buying] the cab a part of my 7-year plan and the permit a part of my 14-year-plan!”—yes, there’s a permit too, of course—and, “Maybe they should’ve named you Laban instead of [Laban].” To which he responded, “I’m trying to figure out if Laban is a good or bad reference”—ah, there it is, Aristotelian zero-sum, either-or pervert-logic again! To which I could only reply, “You’re in Laban’s equivalent role in the current economy. That’s the thing. Economies *always* have roles! But I’m assuming you’re more moral than Laban (because if you had the same morality as him, you’d be in jail! [cry-laugh emoji])”. For, indeed, the only thing preventing him from “sinking to the level” of Labanian “morality” (“the Labanality of evil,” if you will) was, come on, say it with me, his westoid, bourgeois ego-righteousness, which is as filthy rags and must be incinerated in the fires of his own personal hell! And I basically told him as much eventually! So what led up to this? Well, many things. Many cooks in this kitchen, so to speak. For one thing, the rent had increased from around $300/month in 2019, the first time I had looked into being a pedicab driver, to, at the particular shop at which I worked in 2024, $650/month. Look, motherfucker. I made less than twice that amount in my first full month of pedicab driving, July 2024. And it wasn’t from sitting on my ass! I worked very hard in what you might call brutal conditions (e.g., 100+°F weather, being surrounded by cars and drunk assholes) for that $1100! Did Laban work for that $1100? NO! The gate is not the source! We are very grateful for the gate, but it must recognize that it is not the source! Chantecler must recognize it is not he who raises the sun! It’s Helios! But the petit bourgeois striver (“small business tyrant”) feels entitled to the full rental amount regardless of the so-called “market conditions.” Regardless of the fact the that subordinate needs to EAT! Needs to pay RENT! And $450 (1100 – 650) would not have covered food, much less rent! It would’ve barely covered my minimum credit card payment! So being a pedicab driver turns out to be a bit of a scam. At least during July and January, apparently (I didn’t make it to January in Austin), when it’s too hot and too cold, respectively. But the small booj expects the subordinate to save enough money for lean months (I shit you not). I guess this makes sense if you make above a certain amount in a year, but I hadn’t made that much yet, motherfucker! And there was little if any way for me to predict whether I ever would!

And so in my short career in pedicabbing I was reminded of a few “tales” I had heard, which can be viewed as illustrations of metaphors, not unlike how the myth of Jacob and Laban is an illlustration of the master-slave dialectic. I recalled the story of the swine and the chicken, who both have, let’s say, “swine consciousness,” because, in the myth, they both want to show gratitude to their human overlord, because of gate-source “confusion,” and so the chicken suggests they give the farmer bacon and eggs for breakfast, and the swine says, “am I in some kind of joke?” or something. Obviously, the bacon “costs” (though “costs” is a metaphor from markets and money, so should not be taken at “face-value”) the swine more than the eggs “cost” the chicken. All the money I make as a pedicab driver comes from “the sweat of my brow.” The calories I burn could, in theory, be represented in units of bacon strips, as in, literal human bacon strips are being burned from my body as I pedal. And instead of eating them directly, Laban is eating them in the form of money. Ah, but Laban might say, it’s not me eating it, it is The Business! I’m sorry… whose business is this again? I thought “other people’s money” was only something you needed (and could “run out of”) in socialism! Whoops! And so I needed to remind the small booj that, for me, making money was not a matter of gathering eggs from a chicken’s nest; it was a matter of burning bacon off a living metaphorical/symbolic pig! In Ayn Rand’s logic, money is money, but in the real world, that is not the end of the story! And that’s Hegelian logic! For the logic of the Kantian thing-in-itself is indeed a form of Randian A=A logic! And what does Hegel say to this? “All things are ‘in-themselves,’ but that is not the end of the story”! And we can see this in the poker story! Popper sees problems as instantiations of the Kantian thing-in-itself! This is not a logic that moves things forward! If we’re familiar with Wittgenstein, we can almost hear him insisting, “No, you idiot! You are taking words at face-value! Don’t you realize that language is a game, you asshole!?” And we can almost hear Popper responding, “What on earth are you talking about? Language is language.” At this point, we can almost hear the poker calling out to Witty from next to the fireplace, “This motherfucker is not listening! He is a not-listen! Perhaps he will listen to me!” Of course, to zoom in a little further, the problem is not with the ears themselves, but in certain “blockages” of the “information” processing functions. As Ralph Ellison says of his protagonist’s “invisibility” in Invisible Man; and he is worth quoting at length here, for it is, indeed, adjacent to a moment where the authentic self reveals itself to itself and to the other, in this case, the not-listen, and the not-listen, who, at this point, has Pokémon-evolved into the not-see, has no idea what the fuck is going on:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me.

Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful.

One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize. He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled. I pulled his chin down sharp upon the crown of my head, butting him as I had seen the West Indians do, and I felt his flesh tear and the blood gush out, and I yelled, “Apologize! Apologize!” But he continued to curse and struggle, and I butted him again and again until he went down heavily, on his knees, profusely bleeding. I kicked him repeatedly, in a frenzy because he still uttered insults though his lips were frothy with blood. Oh yes, I kicked him! And in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him by the collar with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth — when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare! And I stopped the blade, slicing the air as I pushed him away, letting him fall back to the street. I stared at him hard as the lights of a car stabbed through the darkness. He lay there, moaning on the asphalt; a man almost killed by a phantom. It unnerved me. I was both disgusted and ashamed. I was like a drunken man myself, wavering about on weakened legs. Then I was amused. Something in this man’s thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life. I began to laugh at this crazy discovery. Would he have awakened at the point of death? Would Death himself have freed him for wakeful living? But I didn’t linger. I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. The next day I saw his picture in the Daily News, beneath a caption stating that he had been “mugged.” Poor fool, poor blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man!
-Ellison, Invisible Man (prologue)

So he says that when people look at him, they see “everything and anything except me.” What he’s saying is, “I am a human being.” As in, “I am not a problem.” As in, “I am not a puzzle.” And, in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which you may know only from MLK Jr’s “I have a dream” speech, many men held up signs that said, “I am a man.” As in, “I am not a ‘boy,’ you goddamn crackers! And I am certainly not YOUR ‘boy’!” And black people aren’t a problem (or a puzzle) for you to solve! And they’re not unwell people for you to pathologize! We can see when society does this! And we can see when society does this to queer and disabled people and women too! And we can see that it’s all the same trick: DEHUMANIZATION! The trick of, “I am a human. You are a problem. You are something I cannot accept for what it is.” And you can call it “gaslighting” or whatever you want, but the point is that we can already feel the poker calling to us! The Children of Mother Earth crave justice! Calling this craving “ressentiment” is just more gaslighting! The cause of Ellison’s protagonist’s “resentment” is very clearly the absence of justice! If anything, ressentiment is what our whitey (the not-listen/not-see) seems to feel toward the protagonist! That whitey reports being “mugged” is, of course, hilarious. What happened was that whitey fucked around and found out. He played a stupid game and won a stupid prize. And, of course, we see the authentic self revealing itself to itself. And, again, it makes our protagonist feel like throwing up. And then, suddenly, it makes him laugh! He finds that it has brought him joy. This scene is from the “prologue” of the book, but it’s a “frame” that occurs after the events of the main body of the story, where we learn how he gained (earned) so much awareness of and confidence in his authentic self. And I really wish I had read this book earlier, but ultimately, I still had to learn the lessons of this book and others as much through my own experiences as through reading about those of other people.

Another “tale” I kept thinking of during this time was another one of those “mad scientist” experiments they do on animals because their justification society has brainwashed them not to accept that animals are, you know, “people.” And as with all phenomena, the “tale” “tumbles out” of the experiment. Because in this experiment, the mad scientist has separated a baby monkey from its mother, has separated the baby monkey from how its needs are met, so he could see what CHOICES the baby monkey makes under duress. Hopefully, by now, you can see that this is more pervert-logic. It’s treating a monkey like a puzzle instead of like being-for-itself. Some day there will be very stringent codes of conduct for dealing with being-for-itself. These codes will be “written on the tablet of the heart” of every human being. Because they’re already “written” in the “hearts” of most other instantiations of being-for-itself. It’s not that we’re “broken”; we’re just grossly out of alignment. And so the mad scientist puts the baby monkey in a room with two “dummies,” which, including the scientist, brings the total number of dummies involved in the experiment to three. One of the dummies is made of wire, but, let’s say, “provides” milk. The other dummy is wrapped in cloth, but has no milk. So the monkey, a natural clinger, spends much more time clinging to the “cloth mother” than the “wire mother.” Because the monkey needs comfort, even when it doesn’t need milk. But the thing is, you can comfort yourself. Comfort naturally “tumbles out” of safety. If you are in an unsafe environment, it will only be natural for you to feel uncomfortable. This is a “sign” that you might want to move to a safer environment, or otherwise should have your awareness heightened of a need to protect yourself. But I spent so much time on the pedicab that it got me thinking about that monkey and its wire mother and cloth mother. Because it was easy for me to feel like a monkey clinging to a wire for a drop of milk when I’d be riding around on my contraption of wire desperate for a customer. And it was easy for me to feel like a monkey clinging to cloth when I’d get too tired and would have to lie down on the bench seat of the cab. And I did sleep in it once, too, for a couple of hours. It was after a shift. It must have been almost 3 am. So I must have been the last one to the shop. There was no one else there. Usually, we pull into the driveway and when we get to the back of the lot, that’s where the battery shed is, and then, past that, is the gate to the pedicab shed, but, this time, as I pulled up next to the battery shed, I was too tired to do anything other than pass out. So that’s what I did. Like Diogenes in his jar. And I can’t say this was “comfortable,” but moreso than sleeping on the sidewalk, which I’ve also done before, when I was tired. Safer, too! And when I woke up, I was, maybe not “energized,” but I was ready to put everything away and lock everything back up so I could go back home. To my bigger “jar.” Farther from the street. So, even though the job requires being around other people A LOT, there are times when it can be, well, lonely, and there are other times when it can be, well, grueling, and so you have to be aware of how you can comfort yourself, when you need to. Which means you have to be confident that you are safe.

And so I speak of revolutionary action. This action “tumbles out” of the subconscious. But it can be “controlled,” much like a gymnast can (must) “control” their own “tumbling.” This is a skill that must be learned through practice! We must all learn revolutionary skills! One of Comrade Stalin’s revolutionary skills was robbing banks! But we’ll get back to your precipitated Stalinophobia later, westoid! The Soviet Union only “carried” Comrade Stalin for some 30 years! A historical blip! How long have you been carrying him!? Anyway, we know about using the gate to regulate flow from the source through our experience with the humble garden hose and the attachment that allows the user to regulate flow with a lever. But you are not a garden hose! You are a whole goddamn CITY! And you cannot put out a house fire with the garden hose! That’s not where the water comes from anyway! The water, for our present purposes, comes “from” the big blue tower with the name of the town printed on the side of it in big block-letters! And it flows through pipes to get to every point in the city! And so, when a house is on fire, you must find your inner FIRE HOSE and your inner 5-sided wrench, and you must use those to access your inner FIRE HYDRANT, and must use them to put out the fire! And so, pace Rand, progress doesn’t come out of a “fountainhead,” because a fountainhead is merely for looking at! Progress comes out of something that can be used! Like a water fountain you can drink out of! Or a fire hose! And sometimes, the westoid has to drink out of the fire hose! Because they are grossly misinformed about the nature of water! And require EXPERIENCE in order to learn! And that is what a meltdown is! The autist has merely connected their inner fire hose to their inner hydrant! Because there is a fire that needs to be put out! And the fire doesn’t listen to the garden hose.

And so the action I speak of is encompassed within the category I call “militant self-advocacy.” If you can manage this, you can scale it up into “militant friendship” or, preferably, “militant comradeship.” This is definitely something the working class will need to engender within itself if it is to have any hope of seizing the means of production, etc., etc. For in order for the self to have solidarity with the other, the ego must have solidarity with the subconscious, and that’s when there can be solidarity between the collective and the individual (“all for one and one for all”). This is all necessary in order for humanity to attain oneness with Mother Earth, in order for us to build the stateless, classless, moneyless society of “communism,” the World of Mother Earth. And so we must have conflict! And we must be “developed” enough to “steer” through this conflict! For the water from the fire hose must be directed at/toward the base of the fire, and so requires some measure of control! And this is a skill that must be developed! And so the shadows on the walls of the trans-Platonic cave must congeal into a map for action! And then the action will come as naturally to you as the water out of a fire hose. For I have had meltdowns when I needed to in order to stand up for myself, or for my coworkers, or just random marginalized people I was around—total strangers! And when you need to access the inner fire hose of progress, you will know. “When you know, you know.”

And so, by the 2nd half of August 2024, Laban was starting to get a little nervous because it was starting to appear that I was “falling behind” with my rent payments. I feel like what it comes down to is that we had grossly different (perhaps incompatible) understandings of the principle of hakuna matata. You see, westoid, the way not to worry is simply not to worry. This “not worrying” is supposed to simply “tumble out” of having nothing to worry about. Ah. But where does worry come from? It comes from internalizing your problems, which are usually, in fact, not your problems at all! Usually, someone else’s problem that they’ve convinced you is yours! Either way, these are generally only states of affairs that appear to fit the fuzzy category of what the westoid considers a “problem,” for the westoid sees “problems” everywhere, because they can’t accept Mother Earth for who she is! But, of course, this is a skill that must be learned. And so you must learn to separate, to DETANGLE, yourself from your worries. I remember 10 May 2024, because I recorded the bike ride on Strava. Yes, I’m a cyclist. I gave up driving in 2018 after totalling my 4th car after less than 3 full years in Austin. None of these collisions (the majority single-vehicle) involved “substances.” I just suck at driving. Or I got unlucky. Or I got sleepy. And it’s a lot harder (though still possible, unfortunately) to fall asleep behind the “wheel” of a bicycle than the wheel of a car. This is also a big part of the reason I mostly switched from going to music open mics to comedy open mics. It’s a bit harder to carry your guitar around with you when you’re on a bike AND wearing a backpack. So on 10 May, I had to do something at the city transportation office as part of getting the ball rolling on the pedicab driver job, and after that, there wouldn’t be “anything for me to worry about” for the rest of the day. And you must understand that I mean that in a very real way. Because I guess you could say I had been anxious about getting this particular thing taken care of. And getting it taken care of (to whatever extent—I did end up having to go back there one more time) felt like a burden had been removed from me. And that feeling was enough for me to realize that if you are worried about something, it is using a certain amount of “energy” that could otherwise be used to focus on what you’re experiencing right now, which, we’ll get to the aforementioned Vincent and Keenan on that later. See, I had planned out the day so that I would go to the city office, and then, basically chill out (you’ll see what I mean) the rest of the day. So, yes, I planned out my day in such a way as to isolate the worry to a specific segment! Yes, I scheduled my day around my worry! That is just what I had to do at the time! For after I got out of the city office, I had planned to go to the dispensary (a different one—I was in a different part of town), then get lunch from the vegan food truck outside the corporate bike shop, then take a nice 20-mile ride home. And that’s exactly what I did. And by the time I was sitting down at the park-style bench with my vegan tacos in front of me, I realized that, not only was I not worried about the pedicab thing; I wasn’t worried about ANYTHING! I wasn’t worried about rent or global warming or looming fascism! It’s not that I had emptied my head of all thoughts of those things. The point is that worry is a very specific kind of (mental) activity. It’s a very specific kind of thinking and feeling (sentiment, perhaps?) in which being-for-self and being-for-other are entangled. And when there’s entanglement, it’s invariably to the detriment of alignment. In the chemical metaphor, it’s a “precipitate.” And when there’s no worry, there’s no precipitate; and when there’s no precipitate, there’s no problem, only solution. And so, to drop the metaphors for a bit (if that’s possible), I had (let’s say) zero neurons “engaged” in worrying “processes,” and so all available neurons were free to “engage” in the experience. The experience of being in the shade, with a cool breeze blowing, in the city, people all around, walking, driving, but still surrounded by “glints” of nature, the exposed cliffside across Lamar Boulevard from where I was sitting, for example. And they (the neurons) were, and consequently I was, soaking up the experience to such a degree that I imagined myself floating away, and that all that was left was the experience itself. And I felt like I might as well have attained Nirvana in that moment. And I wept.

And so what was Laban telling me about worry? Perhaps, again, an extended quotation of our conversation is warranted.

21 August 2024

Laban: Hi.
Checkin in as I pay some bills this week!
Can you make some lease pmt?
I’d appreciate [white prayer-hands emoji]

Me: And *I* will remind *you* that the best way for *you* to get *your* money is for *me* not to be stressed out! Please be conscious of when you’re “trying to help me out” by leaking your Jungian shadow in my direction!
My dad always used to tell me to tell him that I loved him!

L: Dood I’m not trying to stress you out.
You’re stressing me and the company out by not paying weekly.
Please pay weekly

M: Dood! The money has to go through me first! You’re the one who’s stressing out! You messaged me! The shadow told me to tell him I loved him!

L: What does that have to do with renting a pedicab [nervous laugh emoji]

M: I have autism! I see the fkn shadow!
I’m not paying your shadow! I’m paying you! You’re not paying me to talk to your shadow! [tongue out with crazy eyes emoji][sunglasses emoji]
If your shadow wants to talk to me, he has to pay [same crazy eyes emoji]
Am I talking to [Laban] or am I talking to his shadow? [nervous laugh emoji][crazy eyes emoji]

L: Dood what?
I see plenty of shadow too friend.
[Simeon] will talk with you further about a payment plan.
It’s not my job to beg for rent… it’s my job to rent you the equipment and provide the services that enable you to succeed.
Today’s 8/21… You last made a payment the first week of August.

M: Sir! I’m a Marxist! I know a thing or two about capitalism! I know a thing or two about the patriarchy! I don’t have time to go into the details on this, but capitalism and patriarchy are the same thing, [Laban]’s shadow

L: I’m trying to help you from falling behind any further [white boy shrugs emoji]
And yes, it’s stressful feeding feeding feeding and hardly being fed enough to keep the kitchen open

M: Sir!
The autistic have gone unlistened to for far too long!
I’m trying to break the cycle, sir!
Does [Laban] wish to be Alexander or does [Laban] wish to be [Laban]!?

L: Refuse to pay lease – and I may need to ask you to leave.
Display your abilities to pay incrementally and alls fine.

M: Sir! You are not listening to me, sir!
Vibes don’t lie, sir!

L: I’m done here.
[Simeon] will catchup with you moreso soon.
It’s not my job to need to explain and beg.

M: And it’s not my job to beg you to listen to me, but no one else is going to do it!
[Laban]’s shadow!

L: I’ve been listening.
You’re not hearing my ask/s

M: [something about my parents in relation to the fable of the wind and the sun —MM], sir
Didn’t you hear the fable about the wind and the sun?

L: At least you have living parents. May [sic] Dad’s passed

M: The man who takes off the jacket is the one who had to decide who was the more powerful!
THIS ISN’T ABOUT YOU, [LABAN]’S SHADOW!
PLEASE do not accuse me of not listening to you! If you suspect I do not understand you, please try to resonate with my vibe!
PEACE THROUGH FRIENDSHIP! FRIENDSHIP THROUGH STRUGGLE, [LABAN]’S SHADOW!
THE INDOMITABLE HUMAN SPIRIT IS NOT A MYTH, [LABAN]’S SHADOW!
STEP THROUGH YOUR SHADOW, [LABAN]! I KNOW YOU’RE STILL IN THERE!
EVER HEARD OF REASONABLE ACCOMODATIONS FOR THE DISABLED, [LABAN]’S SHADOW!? YOU THINK YOU GET TO DECIDE WHAT’S REASONABLE, [LABAN]’S SHADOW!? THINK AGAIN!
I KNOW WHEN I’M TALKING TO THE SHADOW AND WHEN I’M TALKING TO [LABAN]!
SIR! YOU HAVE A LOT TO LEARN ABOUT DEALING WITH THE AUTISTIC, [LABAN]’S SHADOW!
I ONLY HAVE MELTDOWNS WHEN PEOPLE DON’T LISTEN, [LABAN]’S SHADOW!
That’s what motley crue [sic] meant by “shout at the devil”! They were talking about the shadow! THEY KNEW A THING OR TWO ABOUT THE SHADOW, [LABAN]’S SHADOW!
I DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT MONEY, [LABAN]’S SHADOW! AND IF I HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT, NO ONE ELSE IS GONNA GIVE A FUCK ABOUT MONEY EITHER! THEY’RE ONLY GONNA GIVE A FUCK ABOUT WHAT REALLY MATTERS! AND MONEY ONLY MATTERS WHEN IT MATTERS!

L: I’m not trying to bother you.
I’m also not trying to be operate [sic] at a loss…
Or
have you/us fall deeper into a debt hole as you’re still just getting started.
I’m happy to jump on a call if we need to discuss.
I’d like to clear up any potential confusion – if there’s any at all

Hi.
Checkin in as I pay some bills this week!
Can you make some lease pmt?
I’d appreciate [white prayer-hands emoji]
I do like that you’ve reference [sic] Motley Crue.
Loved them growing up
Money matters for me this week.
Because I’m paying company bills.
Please see my inquiry… hear my ask.
I wish you all that’s well in this life.
I’m just trying to run my biz, which yes requires monies.
I appreciate you Mario

M: Sir, even Jesus had a fkn shadow! it was Jesus’ shadow that cursed the fig tree! It was his shadow who called the Syrophonecian woman a dog! It was his shadow who said, “who among you, if he has a slave, doesn’t [work your slave in a particular way]?” [previous brackets in original —MM]
It was Alexander’s shadow who asked Diogenes “what do you want from me?” Diogenes just wanted out of Alexander’s literal shadow
BUT DIOGENES DIDN’T HAVE TO RENT HIS GODDAMN JAR!
THEY WON’T LET ME LIVE IN A JAR, [LABAN]’S SHADOW! I’VE TRIED! [cry-laugh emoji, 4 crazy eyes emojis]

L: Don’t live in a jar.
You are not a slave.
I am calling upon you as I am everyone.
We are a village.
We all do our relative part.

M: Yes! I’m sure Laban thought he was in a “village” with Jacob when he (this is diabolically evil, now that I think about it) raped Jacob by forcing his daughter to rape him, [Laban]’s shadow [3 skull emojis]
Laban was just following the rules. And the rules said he had to rape Jacob, so that’s what he did
Laban cared about the rules more than he cared about people. I’m sure it’s a total coincidence that the rules just so happened to align with his interests and against Jacob’s

L: I appreciate your biblical knowledge

M: YOU *CAN’T* ASK *EXACTLY* THE SAME THING FROM ME AS FROM EVERYONE ELSE! THAT’S NOT FAIRNESS! IT’S “FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITIES,” [LABAN]’S SHADOW!

[skipping some stuff about bacon and eggs and the wire mother and the cloth mother, etc., etc. —MM]

M [cont]: [LABAN]’S SHADOW HAS TO GET HIS MONEY FROM [LABAN]! ‘CAUSE THAT’S WHO I’M PAYING! I’M NOT PAYING [LABAN]’S SHADOW! IF [LABAN]’S SHADOW DOESN’T LIKE IT, HE CAN TAKE IT UP WITH [LABAN]!
[Laban]! There’s no law protecting me or my bacon from your shadow! You have to do it! Don’t you think there should be a law, so it’s not always “David fighting Goliath”? [laugh and cry emojis]
I was talking to my mom about the shadow and she said, “my shadow says you better love me or else!” and I said, “yes! That’s exactly what the shadow says!” [laugh-cry emoji]

Ok, so what’s going on here? Laban, in his mind, already had me tangled up in the company. He was basically (subconsciously, we could say) blaming me for his worry. He was also characterizing the company as something that could “stress out,” which is complete nonsense. He has himself tangled up in the company. He’s treating the company as an extension of himself. Note that, like Carrier in the EHD correspondence, he says he’s done talking, but then keeps saying stuff. Ok, so what’s really going on here? Well, what do you want from me? Laban wanted money. I needed that money to live. He “needed” that money to preserve his little empire. And, what, can’t you feel the implicit, ominous threat at play when your overlord is bringing up money with you when you’re the one who has to pay him, and you have no idea whether you’re going to be able to keep yourself fed for the month? And these jobs where you have to work just for the OPPORTUNITY to make money are already kind of a scam in our economy, because, what, you think we have money saved up for a rainy day? The rainy days come faster than the money these days, haven’t you noticed that? So, yes, the simple fact that he was bringing up money with me was stressing me out! And stressing me out wasn’t going to help me with getting “his” money to him, was it? Stressing me out wasn’t going to add hair to his head, was it? And so I said what I needed to say to stand up for myself, to avoid talking to my boss about money, which, why would I want to do that anyway? And, believe it or not, I didn’t get fired. But he was obviously done speaking to me at this point, and so “handed me off” to his designated taskmaster “Simeon” (“one who hears”) for collection of funds, so it becomes a slightly different story at this point, and so I become more like, well, Joseph. And, yes, there are tears. (This is a complete side note, but the day I had this text exchange with Laban, 21 August, was the same day I had my first accidental “lachrymology session” with my former friend “Jordana Petrasdaughter,” but we’ll have to talk about that later, maybe some other time!)

Ok, this is where the St. Francis of roaches story comes in! See? I’ve talked about this story before, here, but that was only half of the story! 23-25 August was going to be a big weekend for pedicab drivers, because that was when the rodeo was coming to Austin’s Moody Center. So on the 23rd, I was getting ready for work, cleaning myself up a little. I didn’t have time for a full shower, so, sometimes you just have to focus on Carlin’s “four main areas.” So I wash my underarms over the sink, careful as possible not to spill water everywhere. At this point, I had been living in this studio apartment for almost 2 years and had declared a unilateral cease-fire in any so-called “war on roaches” I might have felt myself engaged in when I moved into the apartment, because, what, roaches are Children of Mother Earth, too! And I was learning from them, watching them. For example, you may know that a roach somehow will end up on its back when it dies. But a roach will die if it lands on its back (on a flat surface, say) and cannot right itself. And I saw roaches take great effort to right themselves whenever they did land on their backs, and sometimes succeed. They knew, in some sense, what was going on. They have a self-preservation instinct. They are instantiations of being-for-itself, after all! They are Children of Mother Earth, after all! And so I was blow-drying my underarms when I felt something. I felt something tap my left underarm. So I looked on the floor in front of me, between me and the base of the sink cabinet, and there was a roach lying on its back, taking great effort to right itself. It must have been crawling on the ceiling, and then fell, and then got caught up in the airstream from the blow-dryer and then bounced off my underarm and onto the ground. But look at it from the roach’s perspective! “He” (let’s say) fell from a great height! Then he was “caught up by the spirit” (“the spirit moves like the wind!”) and encountered a, to him, “god-like entity,” and had a “near-death experience.” For, if our lives can be stories, why can’t the lives of all Children of Mother Earth be stories? Because maybe then we wouldn’t be able to just kill animals whenever we wanted! Because we wouldn’t find ourselves “just wanting to”! And what would the justification society, the stagnation society, do about that? Well, you know the playbook. Ignore (avoid), then disagree (denial), then pathologize (anger, or perhaps angry bargaining), then institutionalize (depression… of your level of freedom). Regular bargaining is in there too, but that’s what they call “achieving success”! And I wouldn’t know very much about that! In any event, the grieving process keeps running into stagnation. Stagnation keeps rolling, so to speak.

Indeed, it is worth looking at this incident through the lens of the “trip” or “vision” or “-experience.” For these are all the same kind of thing. An experience of self. An experience of the subconscious. A “conscious” “vision” of the subconscious. The subconscious making itself conscious, establishing itself in the consciousness. Consciousness (being-for-itself, the Child of Mother Earth, the organism “built” on DNA “architechture”) coming into consciousness of the subconscious, and therefore into greater consciousness of itself. And our shaman Maynard has written about these “experiences” (subjectively, of course) in several of the songs he’s written. For there is remarkable correspondence between the “entity” Maynard “encounters” in “Third Eye” and the entity his protagonist encounters in “Rosetta Stoned.” Well, they’re both blue, at least. And they’re both “entities.” “Rosetta Stoned” is notable for the lines the entity tells the protagonist: “You are the chosen one. The one who will deliver the message. A message of hope to those who choose to hear it and a warning to those who do not.” And this sounds like “villain shit,” but, look, dear westoid, many messages worth hearing take the form of the message of hope “on the one hand” and a warning “on the other,” for there certainly need be no contempt in a warning. Brother Maynard clearly saw his message in “Ænema” as such a message. The bad news is that Los Angeles will be destroyed. The good news is that Los Angeles will be destroyed. Ok. The bad news is the millions of deaths. The good news is no more fretting for Prozac, I guess? Seems a bit muddled. But it’s important not to take Maynard too literally here. “Don’t just call me pessimist! Try and read between the lines! I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t welcome any change my friend!” On a more serious note, global warming can be construed as such a message. Mother Earth does, indeed, respond to our activity! That can be considered a very hopeful message! Or a warning! Depending on your perspective! Depending on what you’re willing to DO about it! Indeed, what is perhaps Maynard’s most hopeful message (we can perhaps call it “The Prophecy of Maynard”) also contains something of a warning. “So crucify the ego, before it’s far too late to leave behind this place so negative and blind and cynical, and we will come to find that we are all one mind, and capable of all that’s imagined and all conceivable, so let the light touch you, and let the words spill through, [can’t quite tell what he’s saying here; “pass” or “past” or something else? —MM], bringing out our hope and reason! …before we pine away!” This is, indeed, a message of hope united with a warning! He might not be conscious of this, but his hopeful warning is echoed in the socialist “hopeful warning” of “socialism or barbarism.” On some level, the difference between war and peace traces back to choices, which means it traces back to consciousness, which means it’s tied to systems for building (or repressing, as the case may be) consciousness.

But another important point to draw from “Rosetta Stoned” is that the whole idea of the “chosen one” is kind of silly, because what if the chosen one forgot his pen? And so, for everyone to “get the message,” they must “take that trip” and “meet that messenger” themselves! Because they keep misunderstanding the goddamn messengers, hence, the messages! And we can see this very clearly in reactions to Tool (not merely “yapping”) by fans and critics alike. I can’t remember where I saw this, but I remember reading a negative review where a critic was talking about how they went to a Tool concert and someone was yapping about how the song “Reflection” referenced the myth of Narcissus and Echo and tied it in to the crucifixion of the ego… but this concertgoer was spilling beer on our humble critic. And you can’t be yapping about Narcissus and the crucifixion of the ego while you’re spilling beer on someone. That doesn’t… align. And so our concertgoer did not seem to be exhibiting the, let’s say, “fruits” of the crucifixion of the ego, and this was seen as, let’s say, a “stumbling block” (Greek: skandalon) by our critic to their acceptance of “the message.” And so our critic was “robbed” of an/the opportunity to accept this message. And looking for someone to “blame” for this is more pervert-logic, when we can see rather clearly that this whole thing was a result of a lack of consciousness in the larger society. Because the critic in the know would’ve been able to see that, spilled beer or no, our concertgoer had a point, as they (the critic) would’ve been familiar with the myth of Narcissus and Echo and its relation to the crucifixion of the ego, as we all would be in a society that had respect for, well, itself! That had respect for anthropology! That had respect for myth! As human activities! As activites that mean something because humans carry them out!

But how many fans of Tool have treated their music like some kind of “puzzle” they need to figure out? You don’t “figure out” Tool by solving some puzzle! You “figure out” Tool by living life! But you must live the sort of life where you grow to (among other things) recognize injustice, and see it as something that you cannot resign yourself to, something you cannot “tolerate”! And then you will find yourself RESONATING with what Maynard is saying! The resonation will “tumble out” (of the subconscious), so to speak! For acceptance is not resignment! The “serenity prayer” has it all wrong! “The courage to change what I can, the serenity to accept what I cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference”? Acceptance evolves! Serenity isn’t something you pray for and then it drops from the sky! True “serenity” must be forged in the fires of your own personal hell! Change is a process, not an event! Wisdom also does not fall from the sky! It is a “fruit” from the Tree of Memory, which, remember, must be watered with tears! Courage is another “fruit” from the tree of memory, which means it also does not “fall from the sky” until/unless it “falls on your head” FROM the Tree of Memory! How are you growing that tree? You must realize that tears are not the only way to grow it. We could say they’re necessary, but not sufficient. But, what? There aren’t Tool songs that make you cry? What are you, a robot?

Acceptance isn’t “tolerance” either! What does “tolerance” mean? What would it mean for you to “tolerate” my meltdowns? Look. I don’t WANT to have meltdowns. I mean, I would rather not have them. And certainly you would rather I not have them. But I only have them when you motherfuckers aren’t listening! If you (neurotypicals) started listening to us (autistic people of all “stripes”), we would have a lot less meltdowns! If you are merely “tolerating” our meltdowns, then you’re not LEARNING from them, are you? That’s why we have them! In the moment, WE need to teach YOU that there is something that needs to be changed. If this had changed earlier, we wouldn’t be having the meltdown! We wouldn’t be having it if we had been listened to from the beginning! But the problem is that we tend to be ignored, because we often don’t conform to the “language” of neurotypical pervert-logic for upholding hierarchies. You will see!

It could also be instructive to reference the Futurama episode “Godfellas” here, in which Bender Bending Rodriguez (that’s his name) “takes a trip” and then “meets god” and then “becomes god.” You kinda have to watch the episode. The important thing is to learn, to be able, to imagine, to envision, vast differences of scale. To “see the world in a grain of sand” and to see the world as a pale, blue dot. These are the differences of scale we’re talking about. And they’re not “meaningless.” They certainly have meaning to/for (three?) us! We live on that “pale, blue dot”! So it’s very important to/for us what happens on/to that pale, blue dot! Even if it’s not important to any possible inhabitants of Europa! And I had an experience of this “scale” when I saw the eclipse on 8 April 2024! Because I was able to imagine (“seeing”) the eclipse from space, seeing the shadow cast on the earth by the moon, and I was under that shadow! I was so small, experiencing, being a part of, something so big! And that “(experience of) vastness of scale” is what (we might even say “everything”) people mean when they talk about their most “profound” (or “spiritual” or whatever) experiences. It’s certainly a big part of what Carrier experienced in his “hypnagogic hallucination”! And so, there I was, some four months later, on 23 August 2024, with the shoe suddenly on the other foot. I can only say I was astonished. Or astounded. The same thing that happened to Bender Bending Rodriguez had happened to me. The same thing that happened to Maynard had happened to me. And this was not “merely” a coincidence! It was an EXPERIENCE of coincidence! Which means it’s now part of the story of my life! And so I gave the roach a story! I named him Peter! As in “Rocky,” as in “Simon Rocky Peter,” as in “on this rock I shall build my church”! But this Peter was on his back, struggling desperately to right himself. And how many times have we been flat on our backs, struggling desperately to right ourselves, hoping against hope that some kind soul would come to our aid in our time of need? But Peter, remember, was a roach, which means, in the context of my apartment, he was a parasite, and we don’t have to go out of our way to preserve the lives of parasites, do we? Except now, Peter was not “merely” a roach! He was a roach with a name! And a story! But I had to get to work. And he was a roach, so I felt no compunction letting him struggle a bit. We all struggle. And so I decided that if he was still alive when I got back, that I would help him back up. But if he wasn’t alive… look, I have compassion! I’m not Ivan Drago! I’m not some caricature written by some westoid! And so I couldn’t say, “If he dies, [then] he dies.” That’s A=A pervert-logic for westoids to use to write caricatures that promote phobia of glorious communism! I instead had to say, “If he dies, [then] I will mourn him.” That’s the logic of acceptance! That’s the logic that moves things forward! The logic that reminds us (if we need it) that we have more power than we think!

So when I got to the shop, some of my coworkers were there. One in particular, we’ll call “Jean-Paul,” because that’s not his real name, and, like Sartre, he, to me, seemed to have his being-for-self and his being-for-other a bit tangled up. He seemed to do everything a little too frantically. This isn’t “wrong,” it’s just an indication that you’re not, you know, “centered.” Because there’s no reason to be frantic when you’re centered. And if there ever IS a “reason to be frantic” (difficult to imagine, but whatever), you will be prepared. You might be so prepared that you may find you don’t even need to be frantic! Who knows? Anyway, “Simeon” was there, too, of course. I still had to talk to him about setting up some kind of payment plan. Fine. No big deal. Anyway, I was with JP and one of the mechanics in the front part of the shed, where the mechanic area was, closer to the street, and Simeon was roaming around somewhere, and JP was being his usual hilarious self, and I laughed really hard and high-pitched at something he said, and then I pointed it out! I said, “hey! That was an example of that ‘autistic screeching’ you might have heard about!” And we all had a good laugh at that. A few minutes later, I was with JP again in one of the other rooms of the shop. I think he was showing me something. But he was being too frantic again and he was interrupting me or otherwise not, you know, “actively listening” or whatever, so I got a bit loud with him. I needed to get his attention. But it wasn’t a big deal. We both left the room totally cool with each other. A few minutes after that, we were both in the back of the main shed getting our pedicabs out the door, there in the back of the lot, next to the battery shed. And JP was being frantic again, and not listening, and sufficient conditions had been achieved this time for me to start having a meltdown! So I was yelling! Maybe even screaming! I was practically begging for him to slow down! To be present! To listen! But this was when Simeon came in, and told me to knock it off. Oh! Yes! Of course! “Knock it off”! Why didn’t I think of that? Look. The way for me to stop having a meltdown is DEFINITELY NOT for you to tell me to stop having a meltdown! You need to prove to me that I can trust you to FKN LISTEN! But I couldn’t escalate things, of course. I had no way of knowing whether I’d be safe doing that. So I slowly walked away, as I was screaming, as I responded to some bullshit he was saying about my behavior with something like, “YOU’RE OBSESSED WITH OUR BEHAVIOR! AUTISTIC SELF-ADVOCACY RECOGNIZES BEING OBSESSED WITH OUR BEHAVIOR AS A FORM OF TORTURE!” And, indeed, it does! For behavior is a phenomenon, not an essence! My behavior isn’t a puzzle for you to solve! My “behavior” is a force of nature! And behavior from/by me that is “acceptable” to you “flows naturally” from your not imposing conditions on me that are not “acceptable” to me! But this wasn’t good enough for Simeon. He asked me if I could remain calm. I said, “I can remain calm if everyone can remain present!” Yes, I think he literally said, “not good enough.” And then he told me to go home for the day! Aside from, you know, the discrimination, I wasn’t going to be earning any money for Laban to extract from me that day, what he seemed to be so worried about, if I wasn’t going to be able to get out there on the pedicab, was I? Oh well. There was still the rest of the weekend. Fine. So I went back home “to live to fight another day.”

So I get home, I put my bike in the corner, I put down my backpack, I go to the bathroom, I turn on the light… OH MY GOD! PETER! Was he still there? Was he still alive!? Well, he was still there, and just from how things had just shaken out at work, with my being sent home early, he’d been there for under 5 hours, so he had a good sporting chance, didn’t he? So I tore off a square of toilet paper from the roll on the dispenser and poked at him with it, and he flinched, so I used the square to flip him over, and he “shook himself off” and stumbled away, disappearing under the sink cabinet. And so I guess you could say I saved a life that day. I guess. And so, like I told Matt and Darante later, we have more power than we think! But in this case, I wouldn’t learn what that really meant until a couple of days later.

I had shown Simeon that I’d only made $1100 the whole month of July, so he conceded that it would be pretty unreasonable for them to make me pay the whole $650 for that month, at least in the short term. So he stipulated that, for the future, I pay 25% of the day’s earnings until I made up the amount. Looking back on this, 25% is a bit much. To make the full rent for the month, at that rate, you would have to “garner” $2600 from “field” work. It turns out that I did not take in $2600 in August either (only slightly less), so I still wouldn’t have been able to pay the full amount at that rate! And even if I had, that only leaves $1950. If I had worked any more last year, I might have made enough to have to pay taxes! That’s another $500/month, on top of rent and food and the credit card payment. Good thing I didn’t also have a car hanging around my neck! Look. I’m not complaining. All of these “problems” “solved” themselves within a month when I had to fuck off back home all of a sudden like Jesus, Mary, and Joseph fleeing to Egypt in the fictional gospel of Matthew. But at this point, in August, I was in a bit of a “spot.” I felt like I was in absolutely no position to “negotiate” a lower amount, but the stipulation of it all really rubbed me the wrong way. And I told Simeon as much over text.

But perhaps we should pause here. For when the authentic self reveals itself to itself, it reveals itself to the other, and that makes itself feel like throwing up. And if I felt like throwing up when this was happening, I certainly feel all the more like throwing up revealing it to, well, whoever the fuck is (still?) reading this. But if the authentic Theresa Luna could reveal herself in Only the Lonely, and the authentic Ellison could reveal himself in his Invisible Man, then why should I be afraid to reveal my authentic self? Well, here’s the thing. It’s only an aspect of the authentic self. And the thing about AN aspect is that it alone can’t tell the whole story. From all the aspects taken together and their relationships with each other (because there’s a dialectical relationship between the self and the other and between the individual and the collective that must be taken into account), we can draw (or “draw out”) a “whole story” that reflects truth. That’s important. So the aspect in this case is revolutionary action that flows from the authentic self. And revolution isn’t the end of anything. It’s only the beginning. That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? You westoids are drunk on fantasies, on flims and comic books, where revolution is an end. But “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end,” westoid! Indeed, the authentic self must reveal itself because “the Child of Mother Earth must be lifted up.” But what does that mean? It doesn’t mean to be “exalted” or “glorified” or “worshipped” or whatever. That’s westoid pervert-logic for Oedipus-worshipping motherfuckerists. It means as an example, and you can take that however you want! For, in the justification society, the child of mother earth is indeed lifted up, as a chimpanzee “lifts up” termites from holes with a stick. And in the justification society, the Child of Mother Earth is constantly “lifted up” and HELD up for examination, for scrutinization, for experimentation, for measurement, for categorization, for psychologization, for pathologization, for institutionalization! For we live in a sick society, and the disease is the framework of justification.

Speaking of how “one aspect doesn’t tell the whole story,” perhaps you’ve heard the one about the blind assholes harrassing the elephant. Well, in this story, the elephant has frankly gotten tired of their shit and grabs them all with his great trunk in one fell swoop like jacks, like Mickey with the flies, and uses them to swat flies off itself, and pokes them with its tusks, and kicks them around a little, and, why not, shits on them, and as the blind assholes feel themselves bouncing off the elephant’s skin, they grow to a great appreciation of certain aspects of the elephant, its dimensionality, for example, and they even grow to see their blood splattered on the elephant’s skin, and realize that in this, an aspect of themselves (their blood) has been revealed to them in the same moment that an aspect of the elephant (its outline, an aspect of its “form”) has been revealed. Yes, getting poked and kicked is definitely one way to learn about the elephant. And this is a story you’d rather not find yourself in, but it is the story we become a part of in class-society, in justification society, when it comes to the ruling class, the justifiers, and the structures they’ve put in place to uphold their “self-preservation” (their self-preservation must be “upheld,” as the ruling class, the justification class, has no independent existence). And so we must make a better story for ourselves. Perhaps we will come back as a tribe of hunters to hunt the elephant. But at this point, I fear the elephant might be unfit for human consumption. An elephant dies when it runs out of teeth. And I can feel this elephant losing its teeth now. But in some senses, the elephant is already dead, because it’s become overrun with parasites! And so maybe the working class must become the ant-superorganism that carries away the rotting corpse of the capitalism elephant, and metabolizes it, and absorbs its power, and, in the process, brings about the end of the conditions that supported the goddamn parasitism!

And you’re not “blind” (and, certainly, in a world that sufficiently supported the “visually” blind, this “blindness” would not be experienced as a “disability”). You only have westoid cobwebs covering your eyes! When the cobwebs dissolve, through tears, perhaps, your blood splatter on the elephant will be very “visible” to you. And so maybe now the authentic self is ready to reveal (an aspect of) itself to the other, and, who knows, maybe the collective. And so we pick the events back up at:

25 August 2024

Me: I’ve been paying more attention to my feelings lately. That didn’t feel right! I was not involved in your stipulation that I hand over to you 25% of the day’s earnings. People feel like their lives are more their own when they have something called agency!
I shouldn’t have to be “earning” my own agency! I’m not being punished! That’s a thing they make you fill out in therapy! “Do I feel punished?” I definitely don’t want to FEEL like I’m being punished if I’m NOT being punished!
I’m not being punished, correct!?
It’s a big deal that I’m just coming out and saying this stuff! A lot of us have trained ourselves to keep it bottled up! It’s not healthy!
I have to call my uncle today as part of a process to start making sure he won’t overreact and shoot me if I have a meltdown in front of him if I stay at his house when I visit San Antonio in October! This is no joke! [yes, and if you read my post about it, you’d know that I DID have a meltdown in front of “Uncle Puto,” and, though he did not end up shooting me, he did overreact! —MM]
I’ve had meltdowns in front of him before, but they were all “shutdowns.” I imagine he would get freaked out if I started screaming at him “all of a sudden after 39 years” [crazy eyes emoji, face melting into a puddle emoji]
The reason I’m being such an “asshole” is the old ways weren’t working! I had to try something different! I had to evolve! I had to step through my shadow! I’ll be 39 next month! That means I’ll have 38 years experience with things that don’t work and one year experience in “fucking around to find out”! [crazy eyes emoji]
The reason I’m not afraid of you, [Laban], or myself is that I love you, [Laban], and myself! Love is stronger than fear!

Simeon: Mario, the pedicab business model is ***Equipment Rental***
The $162.50 you had paid so far for 2 months of equipment rental is far below the amount [Laban] had set, at $650/month. He tasked me with getting you and a couple other people who are behind on payment plans. Rather than demand big chuncks of the balance at once, I am trying to work with you in an accommodating way. 25% per night is very reasonable.
If this is going to be an issue for you, we won’t let you ride for [the company] anymore. And no other pedicab company will let you ride for free either. All the owners know each other. Paying lease for your cab is non-negotiable. You can ask [Laban] if you want, but he was already thinking of firing you due to non-payment and all the texts you sent talking about his shadow.
If you have someone you trust in your life for advise, [sic] please show them this text exchange and get their opinion. I’m being as understanding as I can, but paying lease for renting a pedicab is a basic requirement. And I don’t want to engage in a big discussion about it either. This is my last explanation. Just pay your lease or don’t work.

M: Sir! You don’t need to discriminate against me! I understand EVERYTHING you’re saying very well! I don’t expect anything more from you than I expect from myself! So, again, I understand extremely, painfully well what you told me! Do you understand what I told you? I am ABSOLUTELY willing to work WITH you! That’s what positive sum logic is all about! What positive sum logic is NOT about is one way streets! If I don’t have agency, that’s when it IS a one-way street! That’s the DEFINITION of a one-way street! We live in a society! That means YOU live in a society! That means that YOU have to learn to work with other disabled people! It means you have to work with them! It means you have to meet them where they are! I am telling you that, for the sake of ALL DISABLED PEOPLE EVERYWHERE, YOU HAVE TO BE *MORE* UNDERSTANDING THAN YOU THINK YOU CAN CURRENTLY BE! I HAVE FAITH IN YOU!
I AM TELLING YOU THAT I AM THE ONE WHO IS BEING REASONABLE HERE! I AM TELLING YOU THAT A LOT ABOUT SOCIETY IS UNREASONABLE! YOU DON’T NEED ME TO TELL YOU THAT! YOU ALREADY KNOW!
Don’t be afraid! Don’t respond with phobia!
You have to FEEL what I’m saying! I know this sounds corny as fuck, but you have to listen to me with your heart!
I’M TRYING TO TURN UGLINESS INTO BEAUTY HERE!
Haven’t you heard of the Nash equilibrium!? It won John Nash the Fields medal! It was in that movie “A Beautiful Mind”!
The game can’t get any better unless we all change our strategy at the same time!
IF YOU FIRE ME, THEN YOU WOULD LITERALLY BE FIRING ME FOR COMPLICATIONS ARISING FROM MY AUTISM! THAT MIGHT AS WELL BE DISCRIMINATION, SIR!
I’M SPEAKING FROM THE HEART!
I CAN’T TURN OFF MY HEART, SIR!
People aren’t speaking from the heart these days!
I DIDN’T TELL YOU OR [LABAN] ANYTHING I DIDN’T NEED TO!
We have to listen FIRST!
I’m not being disrespectful to you! I’m speaking to you as an equal! That’s what respect IS!

S: I can’t “fire” you because you are NOT an “employee”. You are an “independent contractor” with a permit to drive a vehicle for hire in Austin, TX. You have chose to RENT EQUIPMENT from [the company]. We have chosen, at our sole right of discretion, to LEASE said pedicab equipment to you.
[Laban] has been out of town a lot and allowed you to fall behind on your lease payment. He has brought me in to run the regular operations of the company while he is gone. This includes collecting payment from drivers who rent pedicabs from [the company]. That includes you, Mario.
You have currently earned revenue of approx $3,000 since you started, and paid aprox [sic] $200 to company thus far. (That = 6.67%)
Rather than demand all the back payments at once, or even a significant %, I have chosen to WORK WITH YOU and collect 25% of your daily earnings until further notice. Until we get some big events that will allow you to catch up more.
Even this very reasonable accommodation has resulted in multiple texts from you accusing me of discriminating against your diability, etc.
Mario, at some point, the juice becomes not worth the squeeze. Stop texting me, ride the pedicab and pay me 25%, or we will no longer choose to rent to you. I won’t interfere with you trying to ride for another company, but I will also be honest if another shop owner calls me about your delinquent payments and excessive demands over simple things when we are ALREADY accommodating you.

M: YOU DON’T GET TO DICATATE WHAT “ACCOMMODATION” MEANS, SIR! THAT’S NOT WHAT ACCOMMODATION MEANS! I’M TRYING TO GET YOU TO STOP *WANTING* TO DISCRIMINATE AGAINST ME! I’M TRYING TO GET YOU TO REALIZE THAT THE ACCOMMODATIONS ARE DEFINED BY WHETHER I CAN BE A HUMAN BEING! IT MATTERS! DON’T TELL ME IT DOESN’T! I CAN FEEL IT! CAN YOU FEEL IT!?

S: I’m not feeling it, dude.

M: All I am trying to do is get you to see things from my perspective!
If you already saw things from my perspective, I wouldn’t be saying these things!
You are aware that, you know, I have the right not to be discriminated against! I’m acting in good faith! This doesn’t have to feel like a standoff! All I’m asking for is agency! It’s ok for me to ask for agency, sir!

S: What “agency” are you asking for. Define your terms.

M: Thanks
I’ll get right back to you
[8 minutes later]
25% is fine. It just felt kinda “gross” that you made the stipulation in advance. It just “felt” like you had negotiated it with me in your head without consulting me
The main reason I had anxiety about money my whole life was that, you know, it’s not like we went hungry, but, you know, sometimes we did have to get help. I’ve never been greedy. I just, you know, wasn’t getting all my needs met. One of those needs was an autism diagnosis. I didn’t get that until the month before I turned 26! [laughing and crying emojis]

S: I had indeed decided in my head that 25% was a reasonable place to start. I understand that you are navigating challenges in defining yourself and your needs vs others, and society. I can “help” to an extent by also defining the company’s needs, as well as my own.
I need you to pay the lease at the terms I set. I need you to not yell at others in the shop. If you feel a meltdown coming on, go outside the gate and get it out of your system, or however you need to cope. Not in the shop. We can’t have any more incidents like the other day.

[after my shift]

M: I made [full amount] today. Where do you want your [25%]? [Jean-Paul] and I are working out or discrepancies in “pace”! [Latin for “peace” —MM] [smiley face emoji]

S: Im [sic] at the shop now

Ok, what the fuck was that, you might be asking. Well, it was the moment, like Ralphie in A Christmas Story after he revealed [an aspect of] his authentic self, when I realized that I was not about to be destroyed, just like Peter the cockroach must have “realized” (materially) at some point that he was not about to be destroyed! It was the moment when I was recognized, like Sir William Thatcher by Prince Edward in A Knight’s Tale, as, in truth, an equal by those our justification society deems my superiors, not unlike how I had recognized Peter the cockroach as an “equal” in terms of our status in common as Children of Mother Earth! And I realized that I was, well, relatively, for now, “safe”! I had nothing to hide! I had nothing to be ashamed of! And when you realize that you have nothing to be ashamed of, when you’ve toppled every possible reason for shame… all you have left is “pride.” And so true “pride” simply “tumbles out” of having nothing to be ashamed of! And I said as much to Simeon when I “surrendered” my 25% for the day, tears (of pride) streaming down my face, that I had finally, after 38 years, metamorphosed my “autistic shame” into “autistic pride.” And I recalled the moment Diogenes told Alexander, “If I were not Diogenes, I would wish to be Diogenes.” Because you HAVE to be yourself. So you might as well WANT to be!

But, look. I’m a communist. I take seizing the means of production very seriously. When the time comes, that will include pedicabs. For the revolution will have pedicabs—Rosa Luxemburg wouldn’t have it any other way! And not just the pedicabs, but the entire infrastructure supporting their operation! This must also be seized by the working class. The point is that once revolutionary action begins, it can be scaled up as necessary and sufficient, until the working class has seized the government itself. But revolutionary action starts small. It starts at home, at the workplace. Really, it starts within the self. But then it flows out like a river! Like a tidal wave! Like the force of nature it is!

Revolution as “Paradigm Shift” | The Obsolete Paradigm of Motherfuckerism

Ok, I know the word “paradigm” itself is already a little up its own ass, but it’s a useful concept to analyze. Because a paradigm is a lot like a framework, and the problem with westoid “paradigms” is they keep crashing headlong, Wile E. Coyote-style, into the brick wall of the framework of justification! This is what is happening right now with “the obsolete paradigm of a historical Jesus“! Ah. Perhaps the good Dr. Carrier thinks he can contribute to a “shift” in this paradigm by writing books and yapping about them and his research on yapping-head shows and conferences, completely incidentally of course, things that also contribute to his professional standing. But, of course, he’s not THAT naïve about this. Oh dear no. He knows there’s something missing. What could it be? Perhaps the answer is hiding in our Jungian shadows. For the raising of consciousness involves the whole self, not just the ego, which means it requires practices, not just information. Information tends not to do us much good if we don’t have a way to organize it, because, while all information can have relevance, not all of it can have relevance all the time. Carrier will tell you this himself. Over and over again. Of course, there is, in fact, a glaringly obsolete paradigm hiding itself in plain sight in Carrier’s research. I am referring to the “paradigm” of who is considered a hero in westoid ruling class propaganda about itself. For Carrier heavily draws upon the Rank-Raglan hero. This is fine scholarship for Carrier’s purposes. Indeed, this aspect of his scholarship has not been “debunked,” pace Hansen and Frenchie. But what Carrier wouldn’t see as relevant to his research is that the Rank-Raglan hero lines up most closely with Oedipus. Carrier completely passes over (at least in On the Historicity of Jesus) that the westoid “hero” is, in practice, based on Oedipus. We cannot be so naïve as to assume it must be merely a coincidence that this “hero” Oedipus was a motherfucker (I haven’t read Anti-Oedipus, but surely Deleuze and Gauttari cannot have thought this was merely a coincidence either). This (Oedipus’s being a motherfucker) requires “repression.” Repression of knowledge. Repression of memory. And we can see that your westoid heroes are all repressed. Because they must believe themselves to be heroic, which, being a hero, in westoid culture, is almost inescapably something of a zero-sum game, which is just more pervert-logic for justifying destroying half of the megalopolis, because the villain in the fairy tale is going to destroy the whole megalopolis, and only destroying half of it is the lesser of two evils, which, in zero-sum logic (because it is often wrapped or tangled up in less-than-zero-sum logic), usually turns out to be the only available “good.” Funny. Just keeps happening over and over again. Weird. Good thing we’ve repressed our westoid memory! Phew! Otherwise something might start to smell fishy! But you can’t smell if the chemosensors in your nose are sufficiently “repressed”! The point is that the hero cult requires the cutting off of the “hero” from their own humanity and their own equality with the people they’re “saving” (cf. Peter the cockroach, and our “equality,” with respect to Mother Earth at least), and requires the proles to have swine consciousness so that the “getting saved” feels very real to them and not, well, a trick, which it often is. Remember gate-source confusion. But, ok, some westoids must have said at some point, but what if, they said, what if OUR motherfucker didn’t fuck his mother, because his mother was a virgin. And what if, they must have also said, he wasn’t repressed because he was, uh, just that good? Well that sounds crazy. So crazy it just might work. And so Jesus was “born” (or shall we say “made in a lab”?). No, dear westoid. I am not saying it was a “conspiracy.” This was no “conspiracy.” Carrier is very clear that no “conspiracy” was required. The westoid is constantly gobsmacked by how easy it is to pervert truth because their inner Tree of Memory (“internal memory tree”?) is “repressed” in shadows cast by the straight-line pervert-logic the ruling class sold them off a shelf. No (or at least very little) conscious “conspiracy” is required to pervert truth and logic in the justification society. Everything that “appears” conspiratorial is simply a projection “back” onto what have become “cobwebs” of justification. Carrier goes very into depth in this in OHJ. Christianity isn’t one big conspiracy. It’s a bunch of justifications stacked on top of each other over hundreds and thousands of years. And Carrier, in OHJ, goes over every justification he can find, and incinerates it, and finds nothing left of the historical Jesus outside of justifications, which, as in most academic fields, Carrier recognizes as illegitimate, because justification is pervert-logic for obfuscating truth. If we had accountability, we wouldn’t need justification. And if we knew the truth, we wouldn’t need permission (a form of justification) to proclaim it! It’s almost like Carrier tied a hundred yellow ribbons around the oak tree of the Jesus myth, and you motherfuckers are trying to argue that the ribbons aren’t yellow enough. Motherfucker, there is a goddamn tree there!

Ok, so what’s the problem? Why aren’t you motherfuckers seeing the goddamn tree? Well, we will see that it traces back to the grieving process. I can’t say Dr. Carrier doesn’t understand the grieving process. His father just died, after all. But “fortunately” (very relative term, I know—unfortunate though the relativity may be), this death does not appear to have been particularly tragic. Let us breathe a sigh of relief for that. Dr. Carrier’s life, in fact, seems tragically untragic, from what he has shared publicly about it. The tragedy seems tragically missing! Does this sound like a “judgment”? More projection, I see! Either he has experienced tragedy or he hasn’t. The point is that experiencing our own tragedies can help us understand other people’s tragedies. Not that it’s an absolute necessity. But, indeed, where can the tragedy come from in the life of a cracker in our society built for (some of) the crackers by the slaves? Well, from what we keep seeing in the news, crackers must create their own tragedies by becoming, well, psychopaths. Very strange. But it’s not that “strange,” is it? Freud recognized this, didn’t he, in the “death drive.” Well, the cracker finds theirself in a world of tragedy, but is alienated from this tragedy in their cracker bubble. If you think by “cracker,” I mean “all white people,” you’re part of the problem, i.e., you’re part of the precipitate rather than the solution. “Whiteness” itself is false consciousness. There is no “metaphysical property” of “whiteness.” That’s just your skin. As such, it only goes skin deep. And if you have an ounce of decency in you, you must recognize in your daily life that something that is only surface level, while not necessarily determinative of anything, has profound influence over our lives in the justification society (where it’s used to justify injustice), and this has to weigh on you somewhat. Do not repress this feeling! That’s how people sink into racism! You must see your “task” as to act against this injustice! You must not shrink into a bystander!

Ok, so what the fuck does any of this “cracker grief” shit have to do with the obsolete historical Jesus paradigm, you might ask? A lot, actually. Because we will find that the same framework of justification that pathologizes grief (which, you will see, also happens to serve to uphold injustice, including racism) also holds back the adoption of the mythical Jesus paradigm, and holds back “sexual liberation,” and holds back the stateless, classless, moneyless society—the World of Mother Earth!

Ok, look, I’m not going to “condemn” Comrade Mao. That’s politics of phobia and (Piers) Morganian pervert-logic for upholding westoid hegemony and keeping the the overall vibe of the cultural consciousness (cf. “discourse”) down. But I’m not a MaoIST. The main reason is, well, look, I don’t know that much about the “cultural revolution,” and maybe that’s a bad translation, but you can’t be a real materialist and do something that YOU CALL a “cultural revolution.” That’s about as silly as having a “sexual revolution.” It’s putting the cart before the horse. It’s shadow-idealism. It often has tragic consequences. But that’s not the point of any of this, so don’t come at me with your Maophobia. The point is that what we need is a CONSCIOUSNESS REVOLUTION, and then the cultural and sexual liberation will “flow freely”! “Free your mind, and the rest will follow”; “seek ye first the [World of Mother Earth]…”; etc., etc.! And what did we say about consciousness? The raising of consciousness involves the whole self, not merely the ego, which means it requires practices (cf. praxis), not merely information. In many cases, these practices must be of the sort that guides us through the grieving process! Crying, for example! Because crying comes from deep connections to perceptions (to “external” experience or even to memories) within the subconscious. Crying is an experience of self by which being-for-itself can move itself forward through the world in which it “be”! Can move itself forward through the grieving process. I’m not trying to “sell you” on lachrymology in particular or crying in general, westoid. When the conditions are right, the tears will flow naturally. You might even say “automagically.” But, hey, whatever, maybe crying isn’t your thing. So what. “Your thing isn’t THE thing.” Someone must have said that at some point. What I’m saying is that, when the conditions are right, whatever your thing IS will “flow like a force of nature.” But of course, I can’t recommend crying-as-a-practice highly enough. Simply because it’s one out of many practices that can help us connect with ourselves. Because we will see that we are in grave NEED of decompartmentalizing (“integrating,” “synthesizing”) ourselves.

Ok, so what the fuck is a paradigm anyway, and what does it mean when one “shifts,” you might be asking. Well, a paradigm is more of a quality than a quantity. We can say it’s a certain framework under which certain activities are carried out. We can say that the mode of production of a society is a “paradigm.” And we can say that the transition from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist mode of production was such a shift. These shifts are possible because of the dialectical relationship between quality and quantity, which you may remember from earlier. Changes in quantity(ies), at a certain point, determine (and correspond to) changes/shifts in quality(ies). Because there must be “suitability” between the qualities and the quantities. And so, in any society, there must be suitability between the “base” and the “superstructure.”

Understanding the relationship between the material base and superstructure is key to understanding Social Formation Theory, which is the core of Historical Materialism. According to this theory, productive forces develop until they are no longer suitable with existing relations of production. This eventually leads to a fundamental change in the relations of production and the development of a new social-economic formation with new relations of production and a new mode of production, and this, in turn, leads to changes in the superstructure of society. This pattern of development of human society reflects the Law of Suitability Between the Relations of Production and the Productive Forces […] as well as the Law of the Base Determining the Superstructure of Society […]
–VHMT, p. 59

Ok, so we’ve seen that the current paradigm of consciousness in westoid justification society is “based” on various forms of pervert-logic. But, again, that’s merely a shadow on the wall of society’s platonic cave. The real “base” of consciousness is to be found in the base of society, which has to do with the forces and relations of material production. This should come as no surprise to us. You were schooled in westoid society. You could have raised your consciousness by paying very close attention to life/being-in-the-world (including/especially your own), but the justification society has kept its foot on the scale in such a way as to make that extremely difficult for us. So your consciousness was most likely “raised” in westoid schools. What do you think a westoid school is? Marina Karlova has identified three “pillars” (though if you remember the story about the elephant, these are probably more accurately characterized as “legs” the “system” uses to step on us) of what she calls “the system” (which I identify as “the framework/society of justification”): Hierarchy, scarcity, and shame. These are all defining features of westoid schooling. It’s how the justification society reproduces its ruling class, but also how it “reproduces” its working class. Because it needs to “prepare” students for the prison of the workplace… or just actual prison, the ruling class doesn’t care that much. Westoid school is literally a platonic cave, where the most real thing is a shadow on the wall (or writing on a chalkboard). This isn’t necessarily a “bad” thing. We don’t have to call it “bad.” We can simply look at the results! We can see the school to prison pipeline. We can’t deny that it exists. And we can’t say (or think or believe) it’s merely a coincidence. We can’t solve our problems by denying they exist. You’ve heard “Denial is not just a river in Egypt.” And, indeed, it’s not! DENIAL is that the source of the Nile is named “Lake Victoria”! Lake who? That name doesn’t sound African. It sounds British. Wonder why.

You have to understand that dialectical materialism is not merely about “understanding” the world, but changing it! Because the world is constantly changing, and dialectical and historical materialism is all about studying that change! Because if it is constantly changing, then our conscious activity can have (strong) influence “around” that change! Because change happens through transformation processes. Evolution is one of these processes. And we will find that biological evolution is merely a subset of the “evolution” all material forms go through. That’s why this asshole called it “evolutionary materialism” instead of “dialectical materialism,” even though, in practice, this is a distinction without a difference! And he would have known this if he had studied dialectical materialism and did not view it as merely “dialectical scientism” begotten “when Marx turned Hegelianism upside down”!

And evolution has had its own paradigm shifts! One of these shifts was away from “gradualism,” which proposed that evolution happened in, say, more or less a straight line, and toward “punctuated equilibrium” (maybe not the best term for it, but whatever), which just so happens to line up better with the social formation theory of historical materialism, which recognizes the role of social revolutions in social change (or “progress” or “evolution”). Roughly speaking, small (perhaps imperceptible) changes keep happening under the surface, but don’t change the appearance of the “surface” much until they reach a certain “threshhold.” Then the change in “appearance” (“form”) happens relatively quickly. And we can see this reflected in processes of metamorphosis. The caterpillar doesn’t “gradually” become a butterfly, after all, not “gradually in a straight line,” anyway. All the “gradual” changes don’t change the “form” much (though there is molting, of course) until the right “moment” when the metamorphosis happens. We have replicated this sort of thing in our “industry” with, for example, locks on doors. First all the “changes” need to “line up” in the right way; then you can turn the key; then the door opens. And we can see this in myth, too. Once the muskrat was able to place the clod of soil on the turtle’s back, that’s when the turtle “metamorphosed” into “Turtle Island.” And we can see this in, well, “visions,” because, well, ok, let me explain.

There is a certain “holographic principle” in synthetic naturalism (naturalism in which the metaphysical is “attained” through and corresponds to the synthesis of the dialectic) because of trans-Platonic formalism (see previous essay). This is how we “build” a 3D “picture” of the world through the dual “flat” retinas. When we see the world, it spreads out before us. This spreading out must be reconstructed in our perception. This relies on memory. It relies on remembering, say, that there’s more to what we’re looking at than what we’re looking at. When we look at a car driving past, we know (we remember) that the car has 4 sides, which is usually 2 more than we can see at any given time. This is simply a well-known example. This holography shows up in trip reports all the time. See my previous essay on the trans-Platonic cave for that. But we can recognize the “holographicity” of the (“creatures covered in”) eye shapes from Ezekiel’s visions just as we can recognize the holographicity represented in the eye shapes covering the artwork of Alex Grey. And you can read in the previous essay about how I experienced these holographic eye shapes myself. I didn’t call it “holographicity” in the last essay. I called it “pixels.” Whatever. Very similar concept. The eye shapes are the “pixels” of the “holograph.” This holograph is generated by (the activity of) subconscious brain networks, perhaps the same ones that “generate” dreams—well, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to us if that were the case, because, well, dreams are no less holographic than trips, they are only (usually) less intense!

We can talk about how the holograph can metamorphose in a second, but there are a lot of concepts this ties into that we have to talk about. One of these concepts is the so-called “leap of faith.” We’ve probably all done this at some point, and most of us should have enough “lived experience” by now to recognize it’s a bad idea. What we will be talking about is “good faith.” We have a lot to learn about good faith from Helen Keller (who was a socialist, btw!). We must see ourselves, in some sense, reflected in Helen Keller. For westoid society works to install, within the domesticated human swine, parasitic mental programming that grossly entagles their sense of self with their sense of other (see Edwardes on SoS/SoO), which has the effect of dimming and blurring and even “blinding” what we could call “social vision.” It’s important not to pathologize blindness. Blindness is not a “pathology.” That’s westoid pervert-logic for upholding hierarchies. But we can’t fix a problem by denying it exists. A problem is not a pathology. It’s something that must be unraveled. Or dissolved. And blindness is only a “problem” in societies that aren’t organized to support the needs and thriving of blind people. And even in those cases, the “problem” is with the society itself; not with the blind people. “Disability” is not a bug of human existence; it is a feature. If you think disability is a “bug,” what is there to prevent you from viewing the disabled themselves as “bugs”? Yes, say it with the spirits of your ancestors: only your westoid, bourgeois ego-righteousness, which is as filthy rags and must be incinerated in the fires of your own personal hell! Indeed, how do you treat the “bugs” with 6 legs? But what did we say? You’re not blind. You simply have westoid cobwebs of justification covering your eyes. These cobwebs can be dissolved, perhaps by/through tears.

Another concept you might have heard of is the so-called “thought experiment” of the tornado in the junkyard assembling the jumbo jet. This is a “strawperson” of evolution and abiogenesis. Dawkins has a whole book inspired by a related “thought experiment,” the so-called “watchmaker argument” for a (specifically “theistic”) “creator,” called The Blind Watchmaker, if you want to read more about that. So evolution doesn’t work by “leaps.” It works by the accumulation of changes in quantities with which there is a dialectical relationship between changes in qualities, specifically a “synthetic” relationship. The quality change “synthesizes” from reaching a certain threshhold of “quantity” changes. But a real life, let’s say, “counterpoint” to the tornado-in-a-junkyard “thought experiment” is the Cathedral of Junk in Austin, TX. This place is a testament to the power of metaphor! You might even say it’s a testament to the power of tears. I rode my bicycle there a few times, but never stepped beyond the gates to this “heaven.” But more on this later.

A fundamental aspect of good faith is “the next step.” Indeed, steps are often recognized as metaphorical “units” of the “progress” of processes: “12 steps,” “baby steps” from What About Bob?, “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” etc., etc. And we will see that “stepwise” and “iterative” and “fractal” and “dialectical” are all basically different ways of saying the same thing. Again, you must see yourself reflected in Helen Keller, for before she could learn words, before she could learn letters, she had to learn to walk to the fucking bathroom without stubbing her goddamn toes on all the furniture! And that is what you must learn as well, westoid! Because, you didn’t see this, but the “toenails” of your ego have been creeping along the ground around you your whole life. These “toenails” get tangled up in a bunch of shit wherever you go, so you will have to discover that they must be trimmed. Even if you can see all the “obstacles” in front of you, if you can’t see the toenails, there is nothing preventing them from getting tangled up in whatever you pass by, even if you didn’t step on it directly. So if you were in Helen Keller’s house, and saw her running to the bathroom, it’s no “miracle” that she didn’t stub her toes on anything! She’s just done it thousands of times before! Like Barry Sanders, she’s simply “acting like she’s been there before,” because she has! She doesn’t have “blind faith” that she can make it to the bathroom! She has lived experience! She has memory! She has to trust her family not to move shit around without letting her know! If you look at her running to the bathroom and see “blind faith,” you’re simply not looking at it clearly enough! That’s A=A pervert-logic for institutionalizing the disabled! That’s viewing a knot as simply a knot and not as a rope that’s gotten tangled up! You must see the rope “within” the knot! But, what? Is there a problem? I say you’re “tangled up.” Do you see that as an insult? If I said that your hair was tangled, you don’t necessarily, in the moment, have access to vision of your hair, but you would remember looking at it in the mirror before you left your sty for the day, and would think, “I don’t remember seeing any goddamn tangles in my hair! This motherfucker is trolling me!” And maybe you would feel insulted. You have your morality all tangled up in your conformity to such standards, such habits, as combing your hair before you leave your sty for the day, so you might feel, subconsciously, that aspersions are being cast upon your morality. The problem is that you don’t look in the ego-mirror or the subconscious-mirror before you leave your sty for the day. You’ve probably never looked in one of those mirrors before. You probably haven’t even found the door to the attic in the subconscious ceiling through which you could access the picture of Dorian Gray you’re projecting out to the rest of the world. Perhaps this is your, so to speak, “tragedy.”

For Dr. HUHA did not see the picture of Dorian Gray he was projecting out to EHD when he sent them that RUDTF email! Oh dear no. There’s no need to sugar-coat the pill. He viewed the email as a hot air baloon he could ride to the top of a mountain. Specifically, Mt. EHD’s pussy. Hey, don’t look at me. I’m not the one who was trying to get in there. I’m just the messenger. EHD theirself clearly viewed it as such. The problem is that, within the framework of justification, the only thing preventing you from viewing sex (or mountains) as something to be “conquered” rather than simply, you know, an experience you have to “earn” (for lack of a better term) through “cooperation” with Mother Earth, is… you know the answer: your westoid, bourgeois ego-righteousness which is as filthy rags and must be incinerated in the fires of your own personal hell. We can see this disease in the corpses littering Mt. Everest. What. People are dying and you don’t want me to call it a disease… We can’t fix a problem by denying we have it. DENIAL is not just a lake in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, after all! The disease is motherfuckerism. The cure for this disease is the crucifixion of the ego. Because when you crucify the ego, it resurrects in a new form! A form that recognizes that it is not the center of the fucking universe! Why do you want to climb a mountain? Because it’s meaningful to you? What makes it meaningful? The height of the mountain? Compared to what? When you’re at the top of a mountain, you’re on a local peak. You can see all around you. There’s no NEED to worry about the existence of higher peaks. There’s no need for “fear of missing out” (“FOMO”) on that, in the moment, hypothetical higher peak. That’s westoid swine logic for upholding hierarchy by buying into it. The westoid thinks Mt. Everest is meaningful because it’s the “highest” mountain. This mountain had to be recognized as the “highest” mountain. This recognition had to be “publicized.” To the westoid, superlatives are inherently meaningful. I was the valedictorian at my high school. So what. It didn’t help me graduate college. My “brother,” Luigi Mangione was also the valedictorian of his high school. So? Ok, so he allegedly made that gun and found his alleged quarry through OSINT. He himself sought to downplay the “cleverness” of this in his little note. As well he did. For the whole anarchoid project of this 19th century “propaganda of the deed” bullshit is only a valve on revolutionary pressure. True revolutionary action must lead to further revolutionary action. It must be organized! Of course, we live in a society. The patriarchy trains boys (especially white ones) to be motherfuckerists. Trains boys as they grow up to use their power in specific ways. Indeed, what greater (“superlative”) expression of westoid power is there than killing someone? Especially someone who’s been getting away with crimes for decades, which is what our late healthcare CEO was doing. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, the reason this particular CEO was allegedly targeted had more to do with certain “superlatives” his company was involved in than anything it had to do with the personal case of his alleged unaliver. So when an agent of power within the framework of justification keeps causing unnecessary deaths without facing consequences, eventually, someone will find within themselves an agent of consequence to/for this power. If it happens within the framework of justification, there will be a justification for it; there will be someone who justifies it. This is simply the nature of the framework of justification. And the same law of justification is not written on the tablet of everyone’s hearts, for this law depends entirely on the atomized individual (“A=A”), and so the ruling class must make laws to keep the slaves, whoops, citizens(!) in line. But eventually, some from among the proles realize that the rules do not apply to the rulers! Of course they don’t! They serve only as justification for the status quo and its power over society. And so some of the proles take matters into their own hands. This should come as no surprise. The ruling class will never extinguish the indomitable revolutionary human spirit given to us by Mother Earth in our DNA which is the source of, among other things, our craving for justice! But the bourgeois “justice” system is only a system for justifying the rule of the ruling class. “[Y]our jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all.” This is why the raising of class consciousness is so important! For the working class must build (and “play by”) its own rules if it is to seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat! And these rules must be based on the framework of necessity and sufficiency! Or else classes will start creeping back in. And so we need a new model of the hero! And we have such a model! The muskrat from the Turtle Island myth! The hero in this myth is not the main character! That’s a big problem with westoid consciousness: main character syndrome! That was Dr. HUHA’s problem too: He envisioned himself as having something of a “main character” status within the “world” of atheist conferences and shit. And we see what consequences this has had. I really wouldn’t be riding his ass nearly as hard on this point if he had evolved past the bargaining stage in his grief trip, in his ego crucifixion process. But here we are. It’s worth taking a look at what he has said on these points. And we will find the level of introspection he has achieved sorely insufficient.

From “Evidence Pertaining to [Eli H.] Dadabhoy” by Richard Carrier, May 2018:

What actually happened:

[E.H.] Dadabhoy and I were friends who flirted and partied together for years. Shortly after they joined my blog network as a peer, I sent them a loveletter. It was cheesy but not offensive. They were nevertheless insulted, and listed in their response all the reasons they didn’t like me—none of which had been communicated to me before, despite their having been unequivocally nice, friendly, and flirty with me for years. I apologized and never repeated any interest in them.

That’s it.

That’s all that happened.

How Do We Know That?

Because they said so[…]

Hence I wrote in my Affidavit, “in our e-mail correspondence after rejecting my singular advance, [E.H.] Dadabhoy wrote to me that they did not request any of my behavior toward them to change, did not regard my letter to them as wrong, and admitted I had never expressed sexual interest before” (Par. 63). By “hinting” they can only mean my being nice or flirty or bantery; I never verbally hinted at starting anything with them. And their stated list of grievances against me did not involve any unwanted advances, touching, or harassment, or any violating of their consent (indeed, little to do with our interactions at all), demonstrating no such things happened (as surely they’d have brought them up here).

So this is all that happened. I asked for consent. They were glad I did. And I respected the no. I even apologized profusely; and they said I didn’t need to, my behavior needn’t change, they were not offended or harmed by it, and in fact glad to have had it out and resolved. I never repeated any advances toward them or indeed even flirted with them again. This was politely resolved between long time friends and peers. I had no more power over them than they did me. I crossed no stated boundaries but respected them all. It took place at no event. It was governed by no policy. And no harassment occurred.

So why is this incident being included? I don’t know.

From “Judging from the Evidence: Richard Carrier’s Alleged Harassment” (2018, updated through 2021):

It’s not as if I haven’t been very honest and forthcoming about my own failures and mistakes in human relations, all of which I have apologized for and taken successful steps not to repeat. I wrote about that myself long before this defamation occurred. And I took even further steps afterward, continuing my commitment to learning how to improve my interactions with people to ensure everyone can be as comfortable with me as possible. And still I am being defamed with false claims that I have violated sexual harassment policies and persisted in behaviors even after being told not to. How can we have a just or honest world, if you participate in allowing this? But that’s what you do when you believe their claims without evaluating the evidence first.

From “Apology and Going Forward,” 25 July 2016:

My Apology
I recognize that some of my actions have contributed to this situation. I have not always been as wise or sensitive to context when I ask or approach someone as I should have been. And I have sometimes been too assertive. That has meant that my actions have made some women in our community uncomfortable. That is the furthest thing from what I want for our community, and for that I am very sorry.

I am not guilty of pursuing anyone after being told no. Nor have I touched anyone inappropriately. Nor have I harassed anyone. Nor have I done anything worse than what I already wrote about a year ago. But I want to acknowledge again that I have asked women out in situations where I was not as sensitive to the context or power dynamic as I should have been. In that way, my behavior was contributing to a long-standing climate in which women, especially younger women, may have felt that their value in this community is related to their sexual desirability rather than their activism or intellect. That is the exact opposite of what I want for our community.

I recognize that my role as a speaker and leader in this community requires me to hold myself to a higher standard than I would expect of a regular community member, and that in the past I haven’t always met that standard. To remedy that I will implement the following step to ensure my standards of behavior will meet a higher bar. I also intend to continue listening to and participating in the ongoing community dialog about sexual ethics and leadership standards to continue improving myself.

My New Conduct Standard
I also recognize that the current allegations against me, although largely false, would give event and group leaders pause when considering inviting me to speak or attend. So I want to lay out very clearly what anyone inviting me to an event, or encountering me at one, can expect from me from here on. I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that this is how everyone, or even all speakers, should behave at events. This is the standard that I am adopting for my own behavior in recognition that I have not been as well calibrated on this as I believed I was in the past, and in recognition that I have to restore trust by being more circumspect than I would expect of others if I’m going to be able to continue doing the work I love for a community that I value. I am revising this rule now that my case is settled (which I will also announce here) [some 9 years later, there is no announcement linked here. Hmm. —MM]. The rule I observed until then:

When at any freethought-community event or associated afterparties, whether speaking, tabling, or merely attending, I will not seek or accept a sexual relationship with anyone at them, except those I have an already-established sexual relationship with, or someone who has expressed interest in advance of the event and we’ve already discussed it before I’ve arrived.
The rule I’m observing now:

When at any freethought-community event or associated afterparties, whether speaking, tabling, or merely attending, I might once and only politely ask after someone’s interest, and only if they have already discussed personal matters with me, and I will only seek or accept a sexual relationship with someone who clearly expresses their interest in it.

Although conferences and events are excellent places to meet fascinating like-minded people, Greta Christina is correct that they aren’t hook-up bars, and I largely agree with what she says in Sex-Positive Does Not Mean Anything Goes. But I can see how some of my past behavior has given the mistaken impression that conquesting is how I pursue women or view events in our community. Because of that, I want to be clear that my motive for being at these events is to advance the goals of the secular movement, including education and morale. That is the work I dedicate myself to. Partners and other friends of mine have in the past told me about various ways they set boundaries to separate their personal lives from their work. Like them I need to do this more than I have been. At events in the freethought community I intend to keep my focus on my work. I will only pursue new relationships at them in clear and exceptional cases.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah! In other words, ‘I can keep myself accountable through justification!’ What a goddamn load of horseshit! We keep ourselves accountable through accountability, which must be generated through the process of building solidarity (and we hold ourselves accountable through discipline, which is a practice, not an event)! I cannot fucking imagine saying with a straight face that I never harassed anyone! If I harassed “MLO,” then Dr. HUHA DEFINITELY harassed EHD. And if Dr. HUHA didn’t harass EHD, then I guess I didn’t harass “MLO.” But that would be fucking absurd! It would be absurd to say that! Because it would be equally absurd to say that “MLO” was the only woman I ever harassed. Just as it would, by this, let’s say, “standard,” be equally absurd to say that EHD was the only person Richard Carrier ever harassed! You don’t even have to, say, blurt out to someone that you want to fuck them for the act to constitute sexual harassment! The bar is a lot “lower” than that! But, yes, women and, well, the “genderally otherized” (or however you want to put it) in general know what it’s like to see someone and think, “Oh, there’s one of the dudes who said he wanted to fuck me. Great.” And that’s just the ones who said it! And if you’re a “man” or whatever… look. The REAL “red pill” for the Matrix you’re in right now is whatever strengthens the imagination. The whole fucking “purpose” of the goddamn imagination, “evolutionarily speaking” (as in, “how it fucking helps you survive”!), is to help you connect and relate your experience to that of others, is to help you connect your being-for-self with your being-for-other, westoid scum! Specifically, it’s so you can construct an understanding of how it feels to be a woman! Oh my god! You think gender is “real” (it is “real,” but maybe not in the way you think)! You are a shadow-idealist! Gender is literally about the “masculine” and “feminine,” which are literally vibes, which is another way of saying that they’re archetypes of the subconscious! And there is a dialectical relationship between them! Not an Aristotelian zero-sum pervert-logic hierarchical relationship of excluded middle! The point is they have no more to do with anything “essential” to “biological sex” than blue and pink! And biological sex itself is not a “binary.” It’s more dialectics. Everyone has at least one X chromosome. You can’t live otherwise. But you can, indeed, survive with only one X chromosome and no Y. It’s not binary logic. Because of Mendelian genetics, it’s positive sum logic that moves things forward. But you want to categorize, still? Why? Zero-sum pervert-logic for upholding hierarchies? The authentic self must reveal itself to itself and then to the other! And then realize it is not about to be destroyed! And then it can move forward, having achieved a higher level of consciousness! But to further reveal the authentic self of patriarchal-man-in-denial, a matter of layers, of course, we must travel even further down into hell, or perhaps higher up into Dorian Gray’s attic. For the real story underneath all this is far deeper and darker than you might currently imagine… but maybe we’re still not ready for that.

Perhaps as a show of good faith, as a demonstration that I have no-contempt for Dr. Carrier, we can discuss our actual background together. Why not. I have nothing to hide. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I don’t exactly have anything (personal or private) to “accuse” Dr. Carrier of either. I’m not ashamed that I supported him on patreon for some 8 or 9 months! I’m not ashamed that I used to send him practically impenetrable book-chapter-length walls of text throughout the week roughly every week on facebook messenger during that time (this sort of thing is a bit of an occupational hazard in Dr. Carrier’s line of work)! I learned a lot from him. I’m still learning from him. He’s a lot like Dr. Manhattan. And he zapped me like Dr. Manhattan zapped Rorshach. Ah, but I’m not a villain in this story. If anything, I’m more like an anti-villain, like Elsa from Frozen or Ralph from Wreck-it Ralph. Except those were main characters, and I’m not… I shouldn’t have to remind you that Rorshach and Dr. Manhattan were fictional characters. It’s not silly that I’m bringing them up. What’s silly is that Dr. Carrier treated me like a fictional character and not like a human being. I’m not Rorshach the fictional character. I’m Mario the human. I’m not a character in the play of your personal hell; I’m a human being. But maybe I am a character in your personal hell. Or maybe I will be. Only you can decide that.

During the time I was a patreon-supporter of Dr. Carrier, I took three of his online correspondence courses. The one on Jesus mythicism (Jan 2024), the one on free will compatibilism (Mar 2024), and the one on “metaphysical naturalism” as a “worldview” (Apr 2024). These courses are no tea party. They’re about serious academic subjects. But let’s not take them too seriously. The form (and, in subtle ways, the content) of these courses is determined by the material conditions in which Dr. Carrier finds himself in the current society. Dr. Carrier lives in a society dominated by hustle culture. He has learned to be a very productive hamster on the wheel of this culture. Did I mention I have no contempt for him. But the good Dr. finds himself in a society where it is deemed a legitimate business model to act as a gate to a body of knowledge, because this gate can be advertised as a “one-stop shop” for this body of knowledge. If I’m ever in a position where I feel it’s appropriate to seek the patriarchy’s filthy money for “transacting” the knowledge (such as it is) in this “book,” for example, in the form of a class I charge for, instead of just sharing it openly, I will be in what you might call “dire straits.” I’m teasing, of course. I doubt Carrier is making a fortune off his courses. They’re only $49/month. Reasonably an hour (or less) of his labor over the course of a month, but I’d say he puts in… more than that.

In his book On the Historicity of Jesus, Carrier talks about how St. Paul (among many other people back then and today) was what he calls “schizotypal.” This was not “ableist” of him. He was not “stigmatizing” this “schizotypality.” He had to call it something. He was being “ableist” (which he acknowledges) when he talked about the “autistic idiot savant” in Sense and Goodness, but we can table that for now. The schizotypality is how Paul accessed those “visions of the risen Christ” he had. It’s not an “extraordinary claim” that he had visions. Lots of people have visions. I’ve had “visions.” Ok, so Paul had some trips and saw an entity. And the entity told him that he was the chosen one; the one who was going to deliver the message; a message of hope to those who chose to hear it and a warning to those who did not. So what. Happens to a lot of people. Some of them even become cult leaders. Oh, by the way, now would be a good time to make a very important distinction. There’s a difference between the “high control group” or “BITE model” “cult” you may have heard of, which is said to take great measures to control “behavior, information, thought, and emotion,” and the good old-fashioned anthropological “cult” phenomena all humans participate in whether consciously or otherwise. America, for example, is a giant cult. There are aspects of anthropological cult to it, but really, it might be the biggest BITE model cult in world history. Marina Karlova talks about becoming “ungovernable.” This is all well and good, but it’s not the end goal. Freedom is great, but it doesn’t do the runaway slave a whole lot of good unless and until they can join up with the other escaped slaves in the community of equals! The whole reason we NEED to become “ungovernable” is simply that it’s a necessary step to building the society of COOPERATION! Cooperation is far more REWARDING that being governed OR “governing”! Cooperation is possible (indeed, necessary) because truth exists (and operates under “laws” of positive sum logic) and because we can raise our consciousness in accordance with it.

“Schizotypality” can be something you’re “born with,” but it can also be “accessed” in other ways. You’ve heard of “antipsychotics.” Well cannabis can act as, well, the opposite of that, let’s say. But I wouldn’t call it a “propsychotic.” That would be pathologizing. We don’t do that here. Indeed, it would serve us very well to quote Carrier extensively here on schizotypality in the early Christian church:

Christianity began as a charismatic cult in which many of its leaders and members displayed evidence of schizotypal personalities. They naturally and regularly hallucinated (seeing visions and hearing voices), often believed their dreams were divine communications, achieved trance states, practiced glossolalia, and were (or so we’re told) highly susceptible to psychosomatic illnesses (like ‘possession’ and hysterical blindness, muteness and paralysis). [see original for citation —MM] These phenomena have been extensively documented in modern charismatic cults within numerous religious traditions, and their underlying sociology, anthropology and psychology are reasonably well understood […]

[Discussion of glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) and the, let’s say, “need” for its “regulation” by early church leaders here —MM] And as for glossolalia, so for the other phenomena Paul reports as regularly practiced by the first Christians. The most important of which for our purposes was hallucination (visual and auditory). Humans are actually biologically predisposed to hallucinate. The neurophysiology of hallucination is built-in and thus must have evolved for some useful function (or as a side-effect of something else that did). Studies of shamanism and the cultural role of prophets and holy men have found evidence that hallucinators were often given positions of religious authority across the world, possibly even as far back as prehistoric times. [citation in original —MM] The propensity to hallucinate is molded by cultural context (people hallucinate frequently in cultures that promote and accept it, but suppress their capacity to hallucinate in cultures that denigrate and reject it), but also exists on a biological spectrum, from almost no capacity to a crippling capacity—and everything in between. [citation in original —MM] Schizophrenia results when your biological propensity to hallucinate is ramped up to such an extreme that it interferes with your ability to function. This is how most mental disorders originate. For example, a natural and necessary brain function that prompts us to remember whether we have completed a necessary task (and to clean and organize things, and to build mental lists of what we have to do or have already done, and so on), when overactive leads to a disability called OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Depression is likewise an extreme and hasty activation of otherwise normal emotions. Thus many functions appear in populations along a spectrum. In the case of behaviors such as organizing, cleaning, double-checking, some people have weak motivators (people who routinely forget things and don’t care about being disorganized); most have normal motivators of varying degree (from carefree to fastidious), and some have strong motivators (and those people we say have OCD). Likewise with hallucination: some people have no capacity for it, some have a normal capacity for it in varying degrees (further modulated by their culture), and some have an overriding capacity for it (and become disabled by schizophrenia). Those in the middle are called ‘normals’ [cf. “normies” —MM] or ‘neurotypicals’. Normals can hallucinate when exposed to triggers. The most common of which is sleep paralysis (where normals hallucinate at the threshold between being asleep and awake); but the most familiar are pharmaceuticals (many drugs induce hallucination, including several that were not only available in antiquity but known in antiquity), while the most culturally transmitted are trance behaviors. [citation in original —MM] Extreme fatigue, heat, illness, fasting, grief and sleep or sensory deprivation (‘incubation’) can all induce hallucination in normals. And by the time of Christianity, cultural practices had long developed to intentionally trigger hallucination, including fasting and sensory or sleep deprivation, but more typically rhythmic prayer or chanting or the use of music or dance to induce an ecstatic state (Paul alludes to singing and prayer as likely trance-inducing behaviors in his congregations in 1 Cor. 14.12-15; see also Acts 16.25; Eph. 5.19; and Col. 3.16; which might suggest also dance, as in other cultures whirling or spinning are known triggers) [cf. several scenes from The Last Temptation of Christ —MM]. Fasting (i.e., starving) is also attested within the church. [citation in original —MM] But with increasing experience, a normal can hallucinate more easily, with minimal use of triggers, depending on their biological propensity. [citation in original —MM] Such trance-inducing behaviors had already become a standard feature of Jewish religion by the time Christianity began. [citation in original —MM] In fact, normals with a high propensity for hallucination have been identified as schizotypal, meaning they hallucinate nearly as easily as schizophrenics do but are not so prone to it as to be disabled. A schizotypal is ‘a relatively well-adjusted person who is functional despite, and in some cases even because of, his or her anomalous perceptual experiences’. [citation in original —MM] Hallucination in schizotypals in fact has been shown to reduce their anxiety and thus has a positive personal function. In modern cultures a prevalent hostile attitude toward hallucinatory behavior still often drives schizotypals to become loners (because they are characterized as weirdos or insane and there is no recognized place for them), but in cultures that embrace hallucinators we see the opposite. For example, where we find cults that socially integrate schizotypals or even elevate them to positions of leadership, we find that schizotypals begin to congregate and socialize. [citation in original —MM] In fact, culture [which is itself “determined” by material conditions! —MM] determines how easily and frequently even normals will hallucinate, as well as how accepted and revered schizotypals will be. [citation in original —MM] Modern ‘first world’ cultures are actually profoundly atypical among world cultures in stigmatizing and suppressing hallucinatory tendencies [gee, why do you think this is the case, Rick!? —MM]. [citation in original —MM] As scientific observers have concluded, ‘the folk theory of visions and voices adopted by a culture may be important in determining whether a hallucination is viewed as veridical or as evidence of insanity’, which in turn greatly affects the commonality and acceptance of hallucination within a population. [citation in original —MM]
-Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, Ch. 4, element 15 (Kindle Edition)

So, there, you see? Paul had very little choice but to believe his visions were, in some sense, “real.” He had no access to a “holographic principle.” He had no access to trans-Platonic formalism. In fact, he was indeed some kind of Platonist. He thought the things in the real world were some kind of “copy” or “image” of the “perfect” “things” in the “ideal” (he wouldn’t have said “Platonic” but…) “Platonic realm.” He had no access to the knowledge that the imaginary “things” in the trans-Platonic “realm” (or “holodeck,” if you will) are “merely” abstracted “copies” or “images” of “things” in the actual world! How could he have possibly known this? How could the human species have known, before we had the ability to generate holographs consciously, through our “industry” and “technology,” that we were, this whole time, constantly generating holographs subconsciously? Don’t you see, westoid? This is good news! For if we can generate holographs (indeed, in a sense, that’s all we’re doing), then we can certainly generate holographs that can purposefully reflect truth! That purposefully reflect the actual, material world!

Did I not explain trans-Platonic formalism fully enough before? It’s simply a consequence of the “trans-Hegelian” aspect of Marx’s dialectical materialism. It’s simply a consequence of (Marx’s and Lenin’s updates to) the old-fashioned atoms-in-the-void model of materialism where the “void” is (now rightfully understood as) just as much “material” as the “atom.” Trans-Platonic formalism is, in fact, explained very well by Ellison’s Invisible Man. In a racist society, black men are viewed through the holographic projections of the viewers, the perceivers. The perceivers do not perceive the other directly, but through the distortion field of otherization. In other words, You don’t see me. You see a holographic projection that you generated within yourself, within your trans-Platonic cave, and are projecting onto me. Of course, we’re not doing “exceptionalism” here. Exceptionalism isn’t “for us.” It’s for the ruling class. The justification society of America certainly otherizes black people in specific ways. But otherization is always otherization, even if no two otherizations are alike. They’re sort of like snowflakes in that way. And so autistic people are otherized in other ways, but we’re all still otherized. Elijah McClain, of course, was black AND autistic. And here, there’s another important distinction we need to make. Perhaps you’ve heard of “intersectionality.” Of course, I have an impulse to say, “Useless! Throw it in the trash!” Because it is useless. But perhaps we need to “bite the bullet.” Perhaps we need to eat it instead of just throwing it away (“where is ‘away’?”). Because then we can “metabolize” it, and “absorb its power” (such as it is), and then it will come out as The Real Shit. And then we can throw that shit at anyone who says fucking anything, POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE, about “intersectionality”! Because The Real Shit on “intersectionality” is not that you are a fucking intersection of a million different categories! The Real Shit is that you are being categorized, motherfucker! YOU ARE BEING CATEGORIZED! You think that helps you? In the justification society, all the practical effect it has is to serve as “justification” to more effectively control you! It’s a tool for the ruling class to give you more hoops to jump through! They made up the hoops! Don’t jump through their hoops! Don’t be a clown in their circus! Appropriate the fucking tent! But you won’t get there with “intersectionality”! You will be constantly gobsmacked by the injustice of the system! Motherfucker, injustice is the goddamn water you’re swimming in! And you think the man can’t appropriate your precious, boutique, petit bourgeois categories for his own purposes? You’re dreaming! Wake up! Stop playing their game! Stop playing by their rules! Start playing by Mother Earth’s rules! Those are the only rules you need!

Indeed, how the fuck was I supposed to know, some three months after referencing Elijah McClain in my previous essay, that I too would be given something of an Elijah McClain treatment by agents of the ruling class! I really am the St. Paul of the Gaia religion! I really am an insufferable prick who cannot stop getting in trouble with the security guards! So what’s the difference between Elijah McClain and me? Well, he was the perfect victim, and I wasn’t. I was Barabbas. And all the pathologies with which I had ever been pathologized were cast upon him. “The wages of sin is death,” and Elijah McClain died for my “sins.” Because they say things like “the wages of sin is death” so they can justify killing you.

I’m reminded of something I heard on a recent episode of Behind the Bastards, hosted by, as Matt Christman called him, “that Bellingcat dipshit,” Robert Evans (because, at first, Matt thought his chatters were talking about a different Robert Evans). It was the two-part episode on Peter Thiel and his “antichrist” lectures. Um. Pete. Sorry to break it to you, but we already had an antichrist. It was Barack Obama. He was the Prince of Peace who bombed hospitals. Indeed, every knee bowed, and every tongue confessed that Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was the prince of peace, and then he proceeded to bomb 7 countries, that we know of (what would Barack Hussein Obama Sr. think!?). Oh, but that wasn’t good enough for you. So what will be? But Peter Thiel is an antichrist, too. And not just that. He’s a false prophet. He’s a beast. He’s a horseman of the apocalypse. He’s a whore of Babylon. He’s a flying horse-locust with a scorpion stinger. The whole problem is that you live in a world of villains and you think the villains are the problem. But that’s just shadows on the wall of your cis- and trans-Platonic caves. The real problem is the villian-creation engine. Robert seems to think the villain-creation engine is “power.” Of course he thinks this. He’s a good little “anarchist.” That’s the anarkiddie party line. Even though it’s really just another example of cart-before-horse. But Robert tells us in these episodes about the philosophy of Rene Girard, on scapegoating, who Thiel and his padawan, our current vice president as of this writing, JD Vance, claim as an influence. So, yes, scapegoating. It is “impossible” (as Luke Skywalker said) for the justification society to have internal “contradictions” that need to be “resolved.” “Duloc is a perfect place,” after all! And so, if there ARE any problems in the society, it must be because of some “villain.” Of course. Makes perfect sense. That must have been exactly what Oedipus thought! This is what happens to Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ. Indeed, Carrier discusses how the narrative of Jesus and Barabbas in the gospels is based on the yom kippur ritual of the scapegoat (see OHJ, ch4e18). And Rene Girard identifies Jesus as a scapegoat as well. And, according to Evans, Girard points out that the Jesus narrative of the perfect victim/scapegoat did not end the practice of scapegoating. So there can be no end to scapegoating from within the framework that justifies scapegoating. Because now, JD Vance uses the tactic of scapegoating to claim Haitians are eating dogs. And what did we say about hate? It’s not necessarily or solely based on expressed attitudes. We can see it in the ludicrous beliefs people hold about The Other with zero evidence. No evidence particles. Only evidence void. That’s the problem. People have a void in their subconscious. The Jungian shadow. So, again, the real problem isn’t “villains.” It’s the Jungian shadow. That’s where villainy comes from. Because it’s where otherization comes from (or, at least, it’s one of the gates). So there are really two “engines” of villainy, but they have the same power source. That’s the thing about anarkiddies. Gate-source confusion about power. Anarchoids will look at a power gate and think it’s a source. Are we tired of gate-source confusion yet or have we not yet figured out it’s the water we’re swimming in? So the society of justification must, through the master-slave dialectic, construct real villains to carry out ruling class motherfuckery, and those villains must use the secondary villain-creation engine to manufacture scapegoats. Then the rulers can justify using cruelty against the scapegoats. Because the scapegoats have been sufficiently villainized. And that is what happened to Elijah McClain. It’s what happened to me, too, except I didn’t die. Yes, I was Winston, and when they came for me, I didn’t say, “do it to Julia!” I was screaming, “ELIJAH MCCLAIN!” over and over again, as if to say, “you motherfuckers already did this shit to Elijah McClain! And what did that prove!? It only proved that YOU’RE a bunch of psychopaths who don’t give a fuck about human life!” But that did not save me from getting injected with ketamine (the drug that killed Elijah McClain) and Ativan (the drug that killed Chris Cornell) by the security apparatus at the Creed concert at the Frost Bank Center in San Antonio (home of the Spurs) on 13 September 2024 (a Friday, btw), after they caught me vaping, and then their dumping me off like a pile of bricks, like the character who got mugged and left for dead in the Good Samaritan parable, at my cousin’s house, where I was “in the k-hole,” like the paramedic said when she sent me there, for about 2 days. You can say that I “fucked around and found out” if you want, but all you’re doing is justifying cruelty. I’m not like the cracker from the intro to Ellison’s Invisible Man. He (the cracker) started the cruelty. Ellison’s Invisible Man merely responded in a way he deemed appropriate in the moment.

Speaking of “villains,” Benjamin Netanyahu, amirite? Ah, but the real villain is, again, the framework of justification that made the prime ministry of a Benny-type in Israel inevitable! The same framework of justification that gave birth to the illegitimate settler colonial entity currently occupying Palestine as of this writing. The same framework of justification that gave rise to the other settler colonies occupying various land masses and various indigenous peoples. I feel like the genocide in Gaza in the “aftermath” of 7 October 2023, for whatever else it did, taught us a lot about lachrymology. It certainly reminded me every day since then that there was something to cry about. It taught us that genocide scholarship, by itself, can’t prevent genocide in a justification society. Of course, I didn’t know shit about the nakba before that date. You can see this from my post at the time. I surely would’ve brought it up. But then, on the 19th of that month, I watched Hasan Piker’s 3-hour interview with Palestine scholar Zach Foster on the nakba. I remember it was that date because I was at my usual Thursday open mic. I was watching on my laptop, with headphones, of course, sobbing uncontrollably the whole time, my head mostly face-down on the table, crying into my right forearm. It must have been some sight. For the next two weeks, my libido dropped to zero (or below zero, if that’s possible). Ah, but why was this? Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I had seen the BBC expose on Russell Brand in the previous month and it was still fresh in my mind. Brand had been revealed in this documentary as nothing less than a serial rapist. A veritable Incubus in human form. A predator of children, even. I was disgusted and disturbed on what you might call a cellular level. It simply was just that gross! And then finding out about the nakba. That would be a lot for anyone, if they were properly attuned to what was going on. If they, you know, recognized Palestinians as human beings rather than obstacles to a “perfect” settler colonial society. If they recognized women as human beings rather than obstacles to [fill in the blank]. But we will see that Russell Brand is more of a symptom than the disease; more of a cog in a machine than the machine itself, not unlike what we were saying about Benny.

So we were talking about the hot air balloon ego. I’m from New Mexico USA, Land of Enchantment. We have to tell you New Mexico is a state in the USA (it’s on our license plates) or else you might think it’s part of Mexico. We all have stories about this. The truth is that it was part of Mexico, but then the US had a lebensraum war, and you know the rest of the story. Anyway, hot air balloons are a big deal here. We have a whole festival. You love to see a gold balloon with a red Zia symbol on it. That’s our state flag. Vexillologists consistently rate it as one of the “best” (along with Maryland and, for some reason, home bias, I suspect, Texas). And if you project yourself out to others via the hot air balloon ego, you are trying to do the same thing. You are trying to display a certain symbol and project it out to the rest of the world. But you are writing backwards, with respect to what everyone else can see. Because you are in, effectively, a glass house, and what you write on the surface can only be seen backwards by everyone else. If you are drawing a Zia symbol, fine. It’s totally symmetric. You can draw it backwards and people will still get it. But Dr. HUHA was not drawing a Zia symbol on his hot air balloon ego when he sent that RUDTF email to EHD. Indeed, the drawing EHD saw on the surface of Dr. HUHA’s hot air balloon ego was a straight line to the top of Mt. Numbah-One Pussy-Gettah! But Dr. HUHA had no way of knowing this because he could not read his own ego backwards! I don’t think Dr. HUHA realizes this either, but Mt. Numbah-One Pussy-Gettah is a golgotha. A place of skulls. Most of these skulls belong to women, but it’s kind of hard to tell when there’s so fucking many of them. We don’t have to say Dr. C. was consciously heading there. He himself talks about people “drunk driving through life.” We can’t say any of us have been immune from this. We won’t say that Richard Carrier and Russell Brand are “the same person.” That would be “Orwellian,” we shall see. We don’t even have to “compare” Dr. Carrier to Russell Brand, who was literally declared “Numbah-One Pussy-Gettah” multiple times. The truth is that there’s a dialectical relationship between the two. The truth is that they’re both cogs in the same machine, the same framework of justification. Indeed, the truth, the “secret,” is that men like Russell Brand need men like Richard Carrier just as much as men like Richard Carrier need men like Russell Brand. The Russ needs the Rick because the Rick does not work to overthrow the framework of justification, only to reform it, if that, which is all the Russ needs to keep justifying whatever he’s doing, which will keep working for Russ as long as there’s someone who’ll accept the justification. And the Rick needs the Russ so there can be someone he can compare positively with. Someone who makes him look good in comparison. As long as the framework of justification remains in place, that’s all that’s “necessary” to uphold this system in which the Rick and the Russ can both find niches for themselves where they can pretend (as “to the throne”) to be revolutionaries (or at least “progressive”). Because pretending to be a revolutionary is a lot more comfortable than actually being one. Indeed, both Russell and Richard like to make a big deal of being in favor of social justice, but with the mentality of, “how can I make it work out for me?” That’s what they consider “positive sum” reasoning. Yikes. The problem is that you’re trying to draw a straight line to virtue while also trying to draw a straight line to pussy. That’s not how that works. What did we say about sex? It’s like a mountain. And you don’t climb a mountain because it’s “something to conquer.” It’s not. That’s how we get corpses littering Mt. Everest. We climb mountains because they call to us. “Climb me!” they say, and, like Lana Del Rey in the intro to the song “Born to Die,” we say, “What? Who, me? Why?” but then we say, “Feet don’t fail me now! Take me to the finish line!” because we are so excited! But there is enjoyment to be found in every step. And the path to the top is generally more of a spiral than a straight line. And the mountain changes us, because we “change” ourselves as we walk toward the top, we absorb the view, our heart rate elevates from the activity. And we change the mountain by leaving our footprints. But the mountain needs footprints, because it needs the path to be maintained for future climbers. But, again, you can’t live on top of a mountain. The top of the mountain must “live” in your imagination. You need to live closer to the water table anyway. Oh, but you think technology can help you live at the top of the mountain. Well it can’t help your psyche, can it? You did not evolve to live at the mountaintop. That’s “why” you evolved imagination. No, the only reason to want to live on the mountaintop is you think, you imagine, yourself to be some kind of “god.” That’s really perverse. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s a westoid disease. It’s motherfuckerism. It’s westoiditis. It’s serving the false goddess of bourgeois liberty. And so, in order to break the framework of justification, like the skin of a caterpillar, in order to be a part of the unraveling of the Gordian Knot of the obsolete historical Jesus paradigm, Dr. Carrier must crucify his own ego on the Golgotha of Mt. Numbah-One Pussy-Gettah! Because, even if he wasn’t trying to get there himself, he still benefits from its existence! Just like, though he might not be trying to become Thomas Jefferson himself, a little prince in a little castle on a little hill on stolen land with stolen labor, he still benefits from a system in which that sort of thing is possible and even encouraged. And he isn’t exactly working towards a system where that sort of thing isn’t possible! Because he was trying to draw a straight line to pussy! But you live in a system where the patriarchy always seeks to make the line shorter! And the only thing preventing YOU from making the line shorter yourself, within the framework of justification is, yes, your westoid bourgeois ego-righteousness which is as filthy rags and must be incinerated in the fires of your own personal hell. Can you see the fire yet, westoid? You’re going to have to feel it. Can you see the picture of Dorian Gray yet? You’re going to have to stab it!

I’m not doing this to make you feel bad, westoid! Maybe if you cry every day for the next two years, like you should’ve been doing this whole time, maybe then you will have grieved enough for the next stage! I wouldn’t be telling you to crucify your westoid ego if I hadn’t already done it myself! Ironically enough, I crucified my own ego in March and April of 2024 while taking Richard Carrier’s online classes on free will compatibilism and metaphysical naturalism! I didn’t know that’s what was happening at the time. What it felt like was “spiritual psychosis,” but I had already read Carrier’s discussion on the St. Paul experience, so I felt like I was, eh, “ready” for it. Basically, until the end of March/beginning of April, I didn’t believe in “the self.” I thought it was perfectly materialist not to believe in the self. I was dead wrong. It was really shadow-idealism. Just like Edwardes has to toe the bourgeois academic shadow-idealist party line of the “unknowable” actual self. If Marty thought the actual self were “knowable,” then he might actually grow to attain revolutionary consciousness. And the system can’t have that. The actual self is certainly not knowable within the framework of justification. The framework of justification had to be built in order to keep the actual self hidden, disguised, camouflaged, distorted. In order for the ruling class to reproduce itself. Because if we knew the actual self, we would recognize we were in the master-slave dialectic, that we were in a Platonic cave, and the framework of justification can’t have that. It would be what Daniel Dennett called “Breaking the Spell,” which was another book I read, because Carrier recommended it to me, during that time. Of course the framework of justification has us under a “spell.” Oh my god, you don’t think you’re under a spell. If you don’t recognize that you’re under a spell, how can you break it? You will persist in it. We can’t fix a problem by denying we have it. Denial is not just a lake in Uganda. Ah, but Danny was not immune from this spell. He talked about “belief in belief.” He “suffered” from it himself. He thought you could get to truth by “believing” in it. He thought that “believing” truth was the same as “knowing” it. He thought the problem was that people “believed” the wrong things. That’s the problem. He thought. He thought thinking was knowing. But knowledge can come before thought. We don’t know we’re hungry by thinking, “I’m hungry.” We know by feeling hungry. Of course that’s “knowledge.” You didn’t evolve for 4 billion years so you could ignore your feelings. Because we didn’t get here (evolving into humans) by ignoring our feelings. Ignoring our feelings is part of what got us into the framework of justification in the first place. Because we can always certainly “justify” ignoring our feelings. But perhaps we will eventually find that we NEED to “listen” to them. Because they can convey relevant “information.”

Indeed, I was also the swine cast into the pearl-pit. During this time, upon Carrier’s recommendation, I also read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemann. I had never felt so called-out by a book before. At least not since Amelia Bedelia (must have been the 2nd generation books, where she was reimagined as a kid, and not an adult with a job). I was half-jokingly telling Carrier that Kahnemann should’ve titled the book, This is Why You’re a Dumb Bitch, Mario Marrufo! Perhaps I should clarify. This is something of a technical term. I am not calling myself “stupid,” and I am not calling myself what you might think of as a “bitch.” Don’t look it up on urbandictionary (way too much misogyny), but a clue is given to us in this definition, where we can look past the gender specificity for the moment, and recognize the “dumb bitch” as someone who is “smart enough to notice but to [sic] stupid to do anything about it. Punks themselves out.” Yes. Very insightful. This was definitely me. I would further characterize the “dumb bitch disease” with which I was afflicted by (what appeared to me, in the society we live in, as) lack of self-awareness, poor decision-making skills, and failure to plan ahead. For we must imagine that kid Amelia Bedelia grew up, and had a very difficult life in the man’s capitalist economy, for things have gotten even worse for the working class since the days we could plausibly conceive that an autistic person could “luck out” into a job where they charmed the bosses too much to get fired. Indeed, you will get fired if you get caught pulling (that’s what they will call it, anyway) Amelia Bedelia type shit (and not necessarily just “on the job”) in today’s capitalist economy! And we must imagine that she was, at certain points, constantly asking herself, “WHY THE FUCK AM I LIKE THIS!? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME!? WHY THE FUCK DID I PUT CEREAL IN THAT WOMAN’S COFFEE!?” But there was nothing “wrong” with Amelia Bedelia. She simply lived in a society that was equipped to produce autistic people (because autism is a FEATURE, not a BUG, of human genetics!), but not organized to support the needs of autistic people! That wasn’t a problem with Amelia! It was a problem with society! But this is some kind of joke to you… Bitch, I WAS Amelia Bedelia! If anything, I was “worse”! If the most embarrassing thing I had ever done was put cereal in someone’s coffee, I probably wouldn’t be writing this book! My life would have probably turned out way more “normal”!

We’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit, but the point is not “merely” to “break yourself down.” It’s not “your self” we’re breaking down. The authentic self must reveal itself to itself. The authentic (within the “actual”) self is hiding in shadows, it’s camouflaged, it’s distorted, it’s caged. So we must love the actual self enough to bring the authentic self out of its cage. And then we’ll find that we don’t need the cage anymore, decorated with imaginary flowers as it may be.

Speaking of self-love… You want real sexual liberation, westoid? Have you cried enough for that? Are you ready? Would you believe me? Would you think I was insane? Because it doesn’t conform to your westoid power fantasies? Ok, we’ll get to that later. Now, you’re probably still wondering what I meant by “I didn’t believe in the self.” Well, I would have to say it comes from “confusion” about the implications of the nonexistence of the “immaterial soul.” What did I say in my unreleased, unrecorded song from c. 2009, “I Kant Get Enough of You, Baby” (long story—maybe some other time)? I said, “what is the ‘soul’ but a convenient title we’ve given the electrochemical interactions in our heads?” Yes! Of course! But, as Hegel said “to” Kant, “that is not the end of the story.” There’s experience, there’s memory in them there “electrochemical interactions”! The problem was that I was “skeptical” with regard to certain phenomena. This is a fool’s game. Because it’s a ruling class game. For the ruling class, in the justification society, must take great effort in attempt to “control” not only the interpretation, but even the PERCEPTION of phenomena. But the truth is that phenomena ARE “perceptions.” You must contend with the Veil of Maya. We can’t “see through” the Veil of Maya by denying it exists. This is not “Lake Victoria,” lake of denial. But this is not the Naked Emperor fable, either. Our Emperor dances around naked like King David the Terrorist, returning home as the Judge Holden of the tribe of Judah, “filled with the spirit” of his patriarchal storm/warrior god, aka, absolutely drunk on conquest, handing out raisins to children. Judge Holden laughs at children who point out that he is naked. And then those children disappear.

You think “alchemy” is a “pseudoscience,” westoid. As if there is such a thing. You think alchemy is “transforming lead into gold.” No, westoid! That’s more “ego is the fountainhead” logic! Alchemy is, e.g., transforming piss into phosphorus! And in this alchemical story, “Harry’s a Pothead and the Philosopher’s Stoned“! You don’t fucking get what “metaphysical and synthetic naturalism” means, do you, westoid? It means SEIZING THE GODDAMN MEANS of metaphysical and synthetic “production” back from the ruling class! These “means” exist within you! But they are hidden in shadow, camouflaged, caged, behind the Veil of Maya, etc., etc. It’s very easy to “see” the Veil of Maya. It’s what makes the rotating mask illusion an “illusion.” But if your consciousness is “organized” (or perhaps “altered”) in certain/specific ways, you can see the “illusion” for what it is. For a clue, if you pay very close attention to the “corners” of the eyes nearer to the nose, you should be able to notice their moving in such a way that you recognize you are looking at the inside of the mask. And if you’ve seen the concave side of the mask, you have indeed seen “through” the Veil of Maya, in some sense. You might not think this is a very “useful” skill, but there, you might be surprised.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I first started smoking weed every day, in late April (of course) 2023, at the age of 37, I did the whole “looking at my hands” thing a lot. And I noticed that, when I was high, there was something about it that “felt more real than reality.” Yes. Fascinating. Whatever. It’s simply an experience where you are noticing that you are catching a glimpse beyond the Veil of Maya. States such as these can obviously be achieved through other means, such as meditation. “Drugs” are just a “shortcut” (remember “gate-source confusion”). For what’s really going on when you, e.g., see the rotating mask illusion with “unaltered” consciousness, is that your brain, which, remember, is reconstructing a hologram out of the information presented through the retinas, is “filtering out” certain information “subconsciously” and “reconstructing” it in a way that would make sense to you in your unaltered state. But in an altered state, the patterns of activity of the neurons are simply organized in such a way that this same information is not all being “filtered out,” and the “reconstruction” changes accordingly. So that would seem to mean that ingesting THC deactivates certain brain function(s/ing), which is usually considered “not something we want.” But sometimes, in the body, the deactivation of one thing is the activation of something else.

There is a scene in The Last Temptation of Christ that reenacts the temptation in the wilderness from the gospels. Jesus induces visions (“hallucinations”) through fasting (see Carrier supra). In this scene, archetypes from Jesus’ subconscious are revealed to him, and he is able to confront them directly, and is prepared, and they immediately vanish. You must be able to pick up what the movie is putting down here. When I was 37, I still had self-image issues, “body dysmorphia,” you might even say. I noticed, still early in my cannabis “practice,” that ingesting it would bring these “issues” aggressively to the surface. There are several things going on here. For one thing, we must recognize that what we call “body dysmorphia” is merely internalized patriarchy in disguise. This is no “mystery.” If anything, it’s more like a “Scooby-Doo mystery,” which, indeed, I “solved,” in part, by ingesting “Scooby snacks.” The culprit is always “Old Man Patriarchy”! But weed is some kind of joke to you. I can assure you that the Children of Mother Earth take it very seriously. So, yes, there I was, in front of the mirror in the bathroom of my studio apartment in 2023, high as fuck, the same bathroom that, the next year, would be the stage for the scene with Peter the cockroach, and I was crying real tears over my “weird” hairline, and I was calling myself, internally (though it felt like I was screaming at myself), “FAG! PUSSY! RETARD!” Things I would never call anyone else, of course (except I called Dr. Carrier “retard” once, at least, whatever—I wonder if Helen Keller ever called Annie O’Sullivan “retard,” or equivalent). This happened for, I think, weeks—at least one, anyway. It happened enough where, at some point, while it was happening, I remember thinking, somewhere in my head, “Oh yeah, I was telling myself I wasn’t going to smoke weed today, because this is the same thing that happened yesterday. Damn.” The patriarchy internalizes itself in us so that we seek external validation even when we’re by ourselves. You must recognize internalized patriarchy as the voice in your head that tells you, “I am not enough.” Where else is there for this voice to come from? It doesn’t come from Mother Earth! And so you must learn to love yourself! This doesn’t happen through a “leap”! The metaphysical is attained through the synthesis of the dialectic! You’re not Superman! You can’t “leap” to the top of a mountain! You need to walk there! And if self-love seems like Mt. Improbable to you right now, rest assured that this mountain can be climbed! Indeed, it must be climbed, or else the voice is going to keep telling you, “I am not enough,” and we can’t have that in the World of Mother Earth. That sort of thing will be recognized for the danger it is. For when you love yourself, you don’t have to “love” the patriarchy anymore, and this allows for an incredible new level of freedom. For I did, eventually, recognize that I was telling myself things I would never tell anyone else, and, frankly, I was “abusing” myself. I finally recognized how ridiculous this was. It wasn’t “for me”; it was strictly “for” the patriarchy, in order to more effectively control me, the slave—whoops, citizen! For there was nothing I could “say” “to” the voice to make it stop, because it was not a voice of reason, only a voice of abuse. So eventually, during a time when it was happening, I finally said, to myself, “OMG! Why are you being so mean to yourself?” And, not unlike Jesus in TLToC, who was able to identify his subconscious archetypes as coming “from” “Satan,” I immediately recognized the voice as “not me,” as completely “external,” completely “foreign,” that it did not truly have an “internal source,” and that’s when I was able to drop the voice on its ass like a pile of bricks! And it “crashed to the floor.” And I recognized that I had attained an incredible new level of freedom. But, yes, it was almost like the voice tumbled out of my head and clanged onto the floor, and almost like I could pick it back up and recognize it as having the form of a tire iron that was being used to keep certain “nuts” in place within me by screwing them down, or, failing that, I could be beaten with it. And I was. And that is what the voice in your head that tells you, “I am not enough” is doing. And so it must be dropped (but don’t just leave it there), or we’re never going to be able to move forward to the next stage.

This is very significant, westoid! We have uncovered a tool of the patriarchy! We must recognize that, when we have done this, it is no longer a tool of the patriarchy. It’s our tool, now! The patriarchy uses this tool for purposes of abuse. We must use this tool to undo abuse by showing people that they have been using this tool to abuse themselves! Every time someone tells me that my teeth are yellow, it’s internalized patriarchy in disguise. It’s the voice in their heads telling them that they are not enough, being projected out in order to attack me, so they can remain in conformity with patriarchal “standards” of appearance. If you have westoid swine consciousness, which you probably do, you have been disempowered by the patriarchy to see (i.e., you have been conditioned by the patriarchy to “not-see”) beyond appearance. The patriarchy has programmed you to “think” that this keeps you safe. Safe from “villains.” “Safe” from those who have been pathologized by the patriarchy. This is a very powerful tool to enforce conformity. Your inner slime mold craves the delicious wreaths of oat flakes the patriarchy provides, the feeling of comfort, when you identify shadows on the walls of your trans-Platonic cave as “villain” and “pathology,” because these things don’t exist. The real “villain” and “pathology” is the framework of justification within which “villains” and “pathologies” are generated! Your trans-Platonic cave might as well be organized to identify “brownies” or “oafs” or “changelings.” Slap the tire iron out of your head, westoid! Or smoke it out or cry it out! Whatever you have to do! I don’t care!

This seeing through the Veil of Maya has been depicted in our media. One notable example was the film They Live. When John Nada (Roddy Piper) puts on the “Hofmann Lenses,” he immediately recognizes that behind every advertisement (etc.) is a message to encourage the proles to continue being good little swine for the ruling class. He further recognizes that this ruling class is primarily composed of reptilian aliens. The “message” of this film is unmistakably clear: if you, for example, take psychedelic drugs, you will grow to recognize that the ruling class has manipulated the collective inner Veil of Maya in such a way that they built an entire fake world within the real world of Mother Earth, and are using, to put it technically, Yakubian tricknology to keep you a prisoner within this fake world. And there will be nothing the ruling class can do to prevent you from attaining revolutionary proletarian consciousness, because you will be able to see through their bullshit. Can you see through their bullshit yet, or is it still hidden by your inner Veil of Maya? You know John Nada had to get into a big fight with Frank Armitage (Keith David) to get him to put on the glasses. You think that was a fight. It was struggle. We must raise our consciousness through struggle. There’s a word for “struggle” in Arabic. It’s “jihad.” You’re phobic of “jihad,” aren’t you, westoid? It’s because you’re islamophobic. I was certainly “phobic” of jihad as recently as 2 years ago when I wrote that post-7 October essay. “Jihad” means “struggle.” In Marxism, “labor” also means “struggle.” Labor is not merely how we meet our own needs; it’s how we evolved from ape to human; it’s how we revolt against the bourgeoisie! Struggle is how I kept my pedicab job after “pulling” my Amelia Bedelia “type shit.”

“Jihad” is not “terrorism”! King David was a terrorist! YOU are a terrorist! You send millions of jackbooted thugs all over the world to do terrorism. You keep Turtle Island occupied through a campaign of terror that has gone on uninterrupted for hundreds of years. Then you are gobsmacked when America’s chickens come home to roost! You are still phobic of evil. You need to move past that! You need to recognize how FUCKING GODDAMN BORING it (evil) is! Just like I had to recognize the abusive voice in my head as FUCKING GODDAMN BORING! That’s how you overcome your phobia of it! But phobia is why you recognize Osama Bin Laden as a terrorist, but not George W. Bush as a terrorist. It’s why you recognize Ted Kaczynski as a terrorist, but not Barack Obama as a terrorist. This has the effect, over time, of making you boring, by which, in this case, I mean evil. Consider the following two passages written by two different terrorists:

In places like Yemen and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men like those three dead Somalis (some of them boys, really, since the oldest pirate was believed to be nineteen) had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings, or the schemes of older men. I wanted somehow to save them—send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.
–Barack Obama, A Promised Land, quoted in Vice

[F]reedom of the press is of very little use to the average citizen as an individual[…] To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) [“Freedom Club,” he was calling himself —MM] for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.
–Ted Kaczynski

Oh my god! The dialectic of the Barack and the Ted! It’s almost like they need each other! “I couldn’t reach [them] any other way, so I had to kill some people.” You think it’s ok that Barack killed people because he had “checks and balances.” Yes! Very good! “Checks and balances”! You have identified a very comforting shadow on the wall of your trans-Platonic cave! Have a delicious wreath of oat flakes for your inner slime mold! Edward Ongweso’s reporting reveals the following:

257 drone strikes took place from January 2009 to January 2012, with a minimum of 241 civilians killed. The count is likely much higher. In May 2012, the New York Times reported on a secret drone “Kill List” (which Obama’s memoir reveals chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel was “obsessed” with) that Obama seemed to have constructed to avoid civilian casualties. As the article reveals, however, Obama began to classify “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants” and thus “embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in.” Any male over the age of 18 was considered “military-age.” In fact, a 2012 article by two Bureau of Investigative Journalism researchers would later put the civilian death toll between 282 and 535 civilians for those three years, with over 60 children killed.
-Ongweso [same link as Obama quote]

Your beloved Prince of Peace, for whom you would have voted a third time if you could’ve, was a goddamn serial killer! What, “but he was our goddamn serial killer”? Who is “us”!? Your phobia of asiatic hoardes instilled in you by fascists has clearly clouded your discernment. I was talking about gate-source confusion. Clearly, it’s actually gate-source perversion! You are not merely “confused” about gate and source. The entire concept has clearly been perverted within your subconscious. You must untangle this perversion. Do you need more light in your subconscious? Consider the following statement from Osama Bin Laden, from 1 November 2004, quoted in full:

Praise be to Allah who created the creation for his worship and commanded them to be just and permitted the wronged one to retaliate against the oppressor in kind. To proceed:

Peace be upon he who follows the guidance: People of America this talk of mine is for you and concerns the ideal way to prevent another Manhattan, and deals with the war and its causes and results.

Before I begin, I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush’s claim that we hate freedom.

If so, then let him explain to us why we don’t strike for example – Sweden? And we know that freedom-haters don’t possess defiant spirits like those of the 19 – may Allah have mercy on them.

No, we fight because we are free men who don’t sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours.

No one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again.

But I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.

So I shall talk to you about the story behind those events and shall tell you truthfully about the moments in which the decision was taken, for you to consider.

I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.

The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.

I couldn’t forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.

The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn’t include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn’t respond.

In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.

And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.

And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.

This means the oppressing and embargoing to death of millions as Bush Sr did in Iraq in the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind has ever known, and it means the throwing of millions of pounds of bombs and explosives at millions of children – also in Iraq – as Bush Jr did, in order to remove an old agent and replace him with a new puppet to assist in the pilfering of Iraq’s oil and other outrages.

So with these images and their like as their background, the events of September 11th came as a reply to those great wrongs, should a man be blamed for defending his sanctuary?

Is defending oneself and punishing the aggressor in kind, objectionable terrorism? If it is such, then it is unavoidable for us.

This is the message which I sought to communicate to you in word and deed, repeatedly, for years before September 11th.

And you can read this, if you wish, in my interview with Scott in Time Magazine in 1996, or with Peter Arnett on CNN in 1997, or my meeting with John Weiner in 1998.

You can observe it practically, if you wish, in Kenya and Tanzania and in Aden. And you can read it in my interview with Abdul Bari Atwan, as well as my interviews with Robert Fisk.

The latter is one of your compatriots and co-religionists and I consider him to be neutral. So are the pretenders of freedom at the White House and the channels controlled by them able to run an interview with him? So that he may relay to the American people what he has understood from us to be the reasons for our fight against you?

If you were to avoid these reasons, you will have taken the correct path that will lead America to the security that it was in before September 11th. This concerned the causes of the war.

As for it’s [sic] results, they have been, by the grace of Allah, positive and enormous, and have, by all standards, exceeded all expectations. This is due to many factors, chief among them, that we have found it difficult to deal with the Bush administration in light of the resemblance it bears to the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half which are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents.

Our experience with them is lengthy, and both types are replete with those who are characterised by pride, arrogance, greed and misappropriation of wealth. This resemblance began after the visits of Bush Sr to the region.

At a time when some of our compatriots were dazzled by America and hoping that these visits would have an effect on our countries, all of a sudden he was affected by those monarchies and military regimes, and became envious of their remaining decades in their positions, to embezzle the public wealth of the nation without supervision or accounting.

So he took dictatorship and suppression of freedoms to his son and they named it the Patriot Act, under the pretence of fighting terrorism. In addition, Bush sanctioned the installing of sons as state governors, and didn’t forget to import expertise in election fraud from the region’s presidents to Florida to be made use of in moments of difficulty.

All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.

This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.

All Praise is due to Allah.

So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.

That being said, those who say that al-Qaida has won against the administration in the White House or that the administration has lost in this war have not been precise, because when one scrutinises the results, one cannot say that al-Qaida is the sole factor in achieving those spectacular gains.

Rather, the policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations – whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction – has helped al-Qaida to achieve these enormous results.

And so it has appeared to some analysts and diplomats that the White House and us are playing as one team towards the economic goals of the United States, even if the intentions differ.

And it was to these sorts of notions and their like that the British diplomat and others were referring in their lectures at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. [When they pointed out that] for example, al-Qaida spent $500,000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost – according to the lowest estimate – more than $500 billion.

Meaning that every dollar of al-Qaida defeated a million dollars by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.

As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.

And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the mujahidin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan – with Allah’s permission.

It is true that this shows that al-Qaida has gained, but on the other hand, it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something of which anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind, will be convinced. And it all shows that the real loser is … you.

It is the American people and their economy. And for the record, we had agreed with the Commander-General Muhammad Ataa, Allah have mercy on him, that all the operations should be carried out within 20 minutes, before Bush and his administration notice.

It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would abandon 50,000 of his citizens in the twin towers to face those great horrors alone, the time when they most needed him.

But because it seemed to him that occupying himself by talking to the little girl about the goat and its butting was more important than occupying himself with the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers, we were given three times the period required to execute the operations – all praise is due to Allah.

And it’s no secret to you that the thinkers and perceptive ones from among the Americans warned Bush before the war and told him: “All that you want for securing America and removing the weapons of mass destruction – assuming they exist – is available to you, and the nations of the world are with you in the inspections, and it is in the interest of America that it not be thrust into an unjustified war with an unknown outcome.”

But the darkness of the black gold blurred his vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America.

So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future. He fits the saying “like the naughty she-goat who used her hoof to dig up a knife from under the earth”.

So I say to you, over 15,000 of our people have been killed and tens of thousands injured, while more than a thousand of you have been killed and more than 10,000 injured. And Bush’s hands are stained with the blood of all those killed from both sides, all for the sake of oil and keeping their private companies in business.

Be aware that it is the nation who punishes the weak man when he causes the killing of one of its citizens for money, while letting the powerful one get off, when he causes the killing of more than 1000 of its sons, also for money.

And the same goes for your allies in Palestine. They terrorise the women and children, and kill and capture the men as they lie sleeping with their families on the mattresses, that you may recall that for every action, there is a reaction.

Finally, it behoves [sic] you to reflect on the last wills and testaments of the thousands who left you on the 11th as they gestured in despair. They are important testaments, which should be studied and researched.

Among the most important of what I read in them was some prose in their gestures before the collapse, where they say: “How mistaken we were to have allowed the White House to implement its aggressive foreign policies against the weak without supervision.”

It is as if they were telling you, the people of America: “Hold to account those who have caused us to be killed, and happy is he who learns from others’ mistakes.”

And among that which I read in their gestures is a verse of poetry. “Injustice chases its people, and how unhealthy the bed of tyranny.”

As has been said: “An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.”

And know that: “It is better to return to the truth than persist in error.” And that the wise man doesn’t squander his security, wealth and children for the sake of the liar in the White House.

In conclusion, I tell you in truth, that your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qaida. No.

Your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn’t play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security.

And Allah is our Guardian and Helper, while you have no Guardian or Helper. All peace be upon he who follows the Guidance.
–Osama Bin Laden

So, here, we see that, indeed, our security is in our own hands. What you have been told is “your” security is not “your” security at all! It’s “security” for private interests that wave your flag to extract resources from places where a different flag is waved. These flags are, again, very powerful shadows on the wall of your trans-Platonic cave. They tend to have very powerful effects on the subconscious. They are symbols that tend to pick up a lot of meaning by rolling around like “katamaris” (“kAdhemaris”!?!?) in our subconscious. But these symbols are being used to exploit and kill people around the world, while you have been convinced that these people are your “enemies” and hate your “freedom.” What they “hate” is “your” liberty. Remember, “freedom” is what an escaped slave has. It doesn’t do them much good unless/until they join up with the other escaped slaves in the free community of equals. “Liberty” is what Thomas Jefferson had as a little prince in a little castle on a little hill on stolen land with stolen labor from hundreds of slaves. “Liberty” is the domain of the false goddess of bourgeois liberty, standing atop the Texas state capitol building, bearing the star of the centered ego and the sword that “protected” Thomas Jefferson “from” Sally Hemings… I don’t know who needs to hear this, but… Thomas Jefferson did not need to be protected from Sally Hemings… Sally Hemings needed to be protected from Thomas Jefferson. But that’s not what our bourgeois jurisprudence was designed to do. It’s not what the sword of the false goddess of bourgeois liberty was designed to do. But the sword that protected Thomas Jefferson from Sally Hemings should have tumbled out of your head when you recognized it as the voice in your head that tells you that you are not enough! The only reason that you would feel the need for protection by the same sword that protected Thomas Jefferson is that you identify more with Thomas Jefferson than with his hundreds of slaves. The math isn’t mathing there. If your enterprise requires the stolen, alienated labor of hundreds of slaves, then it cannot possibly be compatible with the framework of necessity and sufficiency. It’s only possibly compatible with the framework of justification, because apparently we’re just justifying everything over here. “Traditionally,” we could say, Thomas Jefferson-type enterprises are “justified” by making a profit. But TJ couldn’t even do that. He died in debt. So all it “served” was Jefferson’s project of personal “glory.” The point is that the only reason any of this CAN be “justified” within the framework of justification IS that the framework of justification severely degrades the consciousness of those who buy into it! It’s all there in Hegel’s master-slave (“lord” and “bondsman” in this translation) dialectic from his Phenomenology of Spirit:

¶192. In this, the unessential consciousness is for the lord the object, which constitutes the truth of certainty of himself. But it is clear that this object does not correspond to its concept, but rather that there, where the lord has fulfilled himself, he finds something quite other than an independent consciousness. What is for him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one; therefore, he is not certain of Being-for-itself as the truth, but his truth is rather the unessential consciousness and its unessential doing. [citation (and emphasis) in original —MM]
¶193. The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the servile consciousness. This servile consciousness does indeed appear initially outside of itself and not as the truth of self-consciousness. But just as lordship showed that its essence is the inverse of what it wants to be, so too servitude in its consummation will really turn into the contrary of what it immediately is; as a consciousness driven back into itself, it will withdraw into itself and be converted into true independence. [citation (and emphasis) in original —MM]

If you’re picking up what Hegel is putting down here, the master “needs” the slave more than the slave needs the master (the slave doesn’t “need” the master at all, of course). The slave raises their consciousness through labor, much like Willy in Free Willy raised his consciousness through “labor.” The master has no way of raising their consciousness, so it withers. This is gate-source perversion. The slave is the source of everything the master receives. The master can only be a gate (regarding what the slave “receives”). But the master must pervert the whole concept of gate and source not only in their mind, but also in the mind of the slave. The slave picks up consciousness of this slowly through their enslavement. They become conscious of pieces of evidence of this. The master must already have a consciousness organized to “filter out” this evidence when it reveals itself to them. But it must roll around in their subconscious like a kAdhemari. For the slave, the evidence will assemble itself in their subconscious more like the “conspiracy board” you’re familiar with from such media as “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” The meaning, in effect, builds itself. The kAdhemari rolling around in the subconscious isn’t picking up meaning in the same way. It becomes a lump in the throat, a pit in the stomach. The meaning is obscured. This is what develops into resentment. The slave, whose consciousness is growing, does not “resent” the master; they just want to fkn escape already, goddammit! They don’t need any fkn “resentment” for that! Fuck off!

The preceding paragraph, of course, is a gross oversimplification. Slavery is not primarily a matter of “labor” in the Marxian sense. It’s primarily a matter of toil, drudgery, getting whipped, being kept in a state of constant fear and degraded consciousness, etc., etc. You are, for the time being, trapped within the master’s narrative. But the truth always leaks out of the narrative. You think you can get to truth through Aristotelian zero-sum pervert-logic for upholding slavery. The contradiction is immediately apparent when you include the whole story. It says what it is right there in the name. Aristotelian zero-sum pervert-logic is not “FOR” finding truth; it’s “FOR” upholding slavery. Perhaps this would be a good time to turn in our hymnals of Aristotelian zero-sum pervert-logic for upholding slavery to page 1861, where we shall find the Hymn to Order and Logic of Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, within what is known as “The Cornerstone Speech,” where he indeed identifies this Aristotelian zero-sum pervert-logic for upholding slavery as the “corner-stone” of the entire Confederate enterprise (content warning, of course):

But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.

In the conflict thus far, success has been on our side, complete throughout the length and breadth of the Confederate States. It is upon this, as I have stated, our social fabric is firmly planted; and I cannot permit myself to doubt the ultimate success of a full recognition of this principle throughout the civilized and enlightened world.

As I have stated, the truth of this principle may be slow in development, as all truths are and ever have been, in the various branches of science. It was so with the principles announced by Galileo it was so with Adam Smith and his principles of political economy. It was so with Harvey, and his theory of the circulation of the blood. It is stated that not a single one of the medical profession, living at the time of the announcement of the truths made by him, admitted them. Now, they are universally acknowledged. May we not, therefore, look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests? It is the first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made “one star to differ from another star in glory.” The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws. This stone which was rejected by the first builders “is become the chief of the corner” the real “corner-stone” in our new edifice. I have been asked, what of the future? It has been apprehended by some that we would have arrayed against us the civilized world. I care not who or how many they may be against us, when we stand upon the eternal principles of truth, if we are true to ourselves and the principles for which we contend, we are obliged to, and must triumph.

Thousands of people who begin to understand these truths are not yet completely out of the shell; they do not see them in their length and breadth. We hear much of the civilization and Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa. In my judgment, those ends will never be attained, but by first teaching them the lesson taught to Adam, that “in the sweat of his brow he should eat his bread,” and teaching them to work, and feed, and clothe themselves.

But to pass on: Some have propounded the inquiry whether it is practicable for us to go on with the confederacy without further accessions? Have we the means and ability to maintain nationality among the powers of the earth? On this point I would barely say, that as anxiously as we all have been, and are, for the border States, with institutions similar to ours, to join us, still we are abundantly able to maintain our position, even if they should ultimately make up their minds not to cast their destiny with us. That they ultimately will join us be compelled to do it [sic] is my confident belief; but we can get on very well without them, even if they should not.
-Alexander H. Stephens, 21 March 1861

Wow, that speech aged like shit! And it only took 4 years! But we can see within it the same “logic” of those who pervert justice by reframing the craving for justice of the Children of Mother Earth and reprojecting it as “resentment” or ressentiment! We can see that, for Alexander the other dipshit, logic and order means hierarchy. We can see the proto-fascism in trying to set a certain group of people apart as a “Volk” and attempting to elide class differences within this Volk (the Nazis did the same thing in, e.g., Triumph of the Will: Von Schirach: “At your order, my Führer, a young people is facing you — a young generation that knows no class, no caste values.” Hitler: “In the future, we do not want to see any classes or cliques to develop and they will not develop among your ranks.”). To Stephens, difference implies superiority. This is Orwellian. Stephens views a difference as a power vacuum that he intends to fill with the false consciousness of racial superiority. He’s hiding the Orwellian logic of power concentration within the Aristotelian logic of hierarchy (for we can see, in what he’s saying, that Aristotelian zero-sum pervert-logic is not FOR “questioning” hierarchies; it’s FOR upholding them, because the existence of hierarchies is a, let’s say, co-necessary condition for the establishment of this logic as a “force” in society—straight lines, pyramids, etc.). It’s a two-step move. For Stephens, white people are “white” because they possess the metaphysical property of whiteness. It is in Stephens’ “interests,” in his position in the ruling class of this society, to reify what is truly only a shadow on the wall of the Platonic cave of society and the trans-Platonic cave of the imagination. He sees the kicking of Adam and Eve out of the garden of eden as a good thing, apparently, because it made slavery possible. We shall see that Orwellian logic is a process, that it involves two-step moves (in “dances” with the other pervert-logics), and that it involves “cranks.”

But even here, we can see truth leaking out of the narrative. Stephens portrays the national project of which he is part as being founded on “eternal principles of truth,” yet, this enterprise lasted only 4 years. The math isn’t mathing there. 4 years << “eternity.” So it only took 4 years for his “eternal truth” to be empirically revealed as a Big Lie! And all it took was hundreds of thousands of deaths! Yes, the Confederacy was based on claims that, within the framework of zero-sum logic, could only be disputed through warfare, and so the Union had little “choice” on how to empirically demonstrate that these claims were false, though the claims were based on false consciousness to begin with, (which relies on “leaving out information,” Carrier might point out; information he always calls for putting back in, for example, information that proves there’s no difference—aside from what we could call “privilege”—between black and white people because those are flawed social constructs in the first place—but I’ve noticed that his zero-sum logic is highly resistant to seeing the relevance of information that would show, for example, that his bourgeois conception of justice is itself far from based on the kinds of durable principles he thinks it is), and so, if not for the false consciousness, the claims would never have been made.

But perhaps you think Stephens is no longer relevant. The truth is that the White House is, as of this writing, filled with imminently “worthy” successors of his, like Stephen Miller, for example. And we can see another truth leaking out of the narrative. The narrative was that this nation was founded on the equality of human beings. This narrative was, of course, a lie (the lie is in the abstractness of the supposed “idea of equality” on which the nation was founded—for an “idea of equality” is not the same thing as concrete equality, which, we shall see, requires “statistical metaphysics” to “enforce”—therefore, “statistical metaphysicians”). Stephens sees the narrative as a lie and then uses this lie as “evidence” that the truth it was supposed to reflect, that humans are equal, is also a lie. Our “founding fathers” were, of course, lying when they claimed to believe that all humans are equal. They did not have access to Hegelian positive sum logic. They only had (access to) logic that was, secretly (or not), all along, only useful for upholding slavery. Because until the “paradigm shifts,” every contradiction to it (every escaped slave, for example) will be seen only as an “anomaly” and not as evidence that the current paradigm is full of shit. They could have, of course, listened to the Turtle Islanders, who knew all about positive sum logic, but their consciousness had been severely degraded by the master-slave dialectic. They had become not-listens. And some, like Stephens, would go on to become not-sees.

The truth leaking out of the narrative is an important concept to grasp. Consider: Let’s say you don’t know what water is. Someone comes to you with a narrative. The narrative is that water is what is in their bag. You indeed see clear liquid in their bag. But their bag is made of cloth. You can see drops forming and falling from the bottom of the outside of the bag. You ask, “what about this stuff outside the bag?” “Oh, that’s not water. What stuff outside the bag? There is no stuff outside the bag. You’re seeing things.” And this can go on until one of you gives up. But where did the other person get the water in the bag? They got it from the goddamn river! Once you have access to the goddamn river, you won’t need to be worrying or arguing about people’s bags or what’s in them! Your bag is just your bag! There’s a goddamn river out there! The bag IS the narrative! A narrative is only a leaky bag as far as truth is concerned! But water is not even “confined” only to the river. Water is everywhere. It’s in the air you’re breathing right now! It’s especially in the air you’re breathing out! Water is indeed everywhere! Even “in” our imagination! Even Tatooine had moisture farmers!

Introducing Lana Del Rey Studies as Anthropological Cult

We can see truth leaking out of narrative in, e.g., the work of Lana Del Rey. And just as truth can leak out of a narrative, it can also “leak into” a narrative. You must understand that Lana Del Rey is fairly deep; fairly “literary,” you might even say. The call to adventure is certainly depicted well enough in the intro to “Born to Die” we covered earlier. In the song “High By The Beach,” we can see nothing less than a recapitulation of (at least certain aspects of) the myth of Alexander and Diogenes. “All I wanna do is get high by the beach […] the truth is I never bought into your bullshit when you would pay tribute to me ’cause I knew that / All I wanted to do was get high by the beach […] Lights, camera, acción / I’ll do it on my own / Don’t need your money to get me what I want,” etc., etc. She offers nothing to the ego of her interlocutor! She has attained an incredible new level of freedom! Of course, this level is not yet at its highest potential because she ends the song by speaking of “revenge.” Lana would eventually learn to seek “vengeance” through (inner) peace rather than “peace through vengeance.”

Oh boy. Sorry to bring the proceedings to a screeching halt, but, hey, Maleficent always shows up to the party unannounced, doesn’t she. But in positive-sum logic, Maleficent is a guest of honor. And Jamie Loftus is certainly no Maleficent, though, as far as Lana Del Rey is concerned, she could be. But this Maleficent is no dragon. It’s more that she is pointing to a dragon, but this dragon is, itself, as far as it relates to Lana Del Rey, really more of a shadow on the wall of the cis- and trans-Platonic caves than anything else. You’ll see what I mean. Because we will see that Jamie Loftus must “contend” with Lana Del Rey (which, we will see, is not something Jamie has fully accomplished yet) just as much as Lana Del Rey must “contend” with Jamie Loftus.

Look, I haven’t read Lolita by Nabokov (I only saw the Kubrik adaptation), but if you want to, deeply, FEEL like you read Lolita, I can’t recommend Jamie Loftus’s “Lolita Podcast” highly enough. You will get the idea. “Ironically” enough, she comes to the conclusion that Nabokov is a skilled enough writer to convey the truth of who Dolores Haze is (i.e., a real human being, who “might even be said to possess a mind”), enough for it to leak through Humbert Humbert’s narrative. But, of course, Lana Del Rey appears in this podcast as a big, spooky, scary shadow on the wall of Loftus’s trans-Platonic cave, not unlike the famous jump scare in Mulholland Drive. But, perhaps “ironically” again, Jamie only THINKS she is looking for truth leaking out of Lana Del Rey’s “narrative”—or what she SEES Lana Del Rey’s “narrative” as, which has very little to do with Lana Del Rey’s ART taken on its own terms—Lana is an artist! “Narrative” is for critics! It’s for non-artists! People who see it as art aren’t drawn to find “narratives” in it that they feel the need to slay as if they were hunting the Cartesian Demon—they have access to the “truth” of the work! So Loftus projects a narrative onto the work of Lana Del Rey, and then attacks that narrative. This is the sort of thing that’s very rewarding for the inner slime mold. But it doesn’t make for very deep or effective scholarship. A narrative is surface-level. Lana Del Rey writes/sings about deep emotional truths. Do we want Lana Del Rey to lie about her emotions for the sake of some narrative? That’s not art. Jamie Loftus views Lana Del Rey and her art through the distortion field of “intersectional feminism.” Hey, feminism is great. We should all be feminists. But we have already established that “intersectionality” is fucking useless! It’s about as effective as building ships in bottles and gathering “preserved” (i.e., dead) flowers and butterflies in a museum! It’s a great way to feed your inner slime mold delicious wreaths of oat flakes while staying completely shackled within your trans-Platonic cave/maze! You can have all the “right” opinions and still be a goddamn prisoner! But once you have access to truth, opinions fade back into meaninglessness! And so Jamie Loftus studied Lolita enough to find the truth of Dolores Haze, but apparently did not study Lana Del Rey enough to learn the truth about Elizabeth Woolridge Grant! There’s really some ludicrous shit in here. Loftus speaks of the question of holding Lana Del Rey “accountable” for her art (and of the question of “lines” of accountability), as if it were a question of whether she were Leni Riefenstahl or something! Leni was not an artist! She was a propagandist! There’s a big difference! You want to “hold people accountable” for their art, and yet you would deny that you have carceral consciousness. You want to “police” actions you deem “immoral.” You would have Lana Del Rey join you as a cellmate in the prison of intersectional feminism. That’s not how we get to a “moral” society. This is a level of consciousness exemplified in another one of those stories about mad scientist experiments with monkeys. We can see truth leaking out of narrative in this story too.

You may have heard some story about how some cruel scientists locked up some monkeys in a room with a ladder and some bananas and set them up to engage in cruelty with each other. It turns out that this story was concocted by business dudes, though, we will see, not entirely “out of wholecloth.” Indeed, there is a stone at the bottom of this soup. There is gamer-girl bathwater to be wrung from this filthy rag (we come from gamer-girl bathwater, remember! You’re the one who’s making it weird!). The business dudes needed to say there was a ladder in the experiment and a reward at the top because this story suited their business dude purposes, for business is a world where you are told to climb ladders for bananas, not unlike how the cordyceps manipulates the ant to climb blades of grass. They also had to ramp up the cruelty of the experiment because the business world is largely based on cruelty, so the narrative had to follow suit. But the truth (according to our source, linked above) is that this story comes from a book written in 1996 and the authors have not come up with a source for it. Perhaps the story comes directly from their asses, but perhaps it’s an adaptation, conveniently altered, of the Stephenson (1967) study mentioned in a book linked to from the above link, which did not involve a ladder or water from a hose, and where the monkeys did not engage in cruelty with each other, BUT, HOWEVER, here’s where the grain of truth is from the story. The stone at the bottom of the soup. Here’s the quote:

Stephenson (1967) trained adult male and female rhesus monkeys to avoid manipulating an object and then placed individual naive animals in a cage with a trained individual of the same age and sex and the object in question. In one case, a trained male actually pulled his naive partner away from the previously punished manipulandum during their period of interaction whereas the other two trained males exhibited what were described as “threat facial expressions while in a fear posture” when a naive animal approached the manipulandum. When placed alone in the cage with the novel object, naive males that had been paired with trained males showed greatly reduced manipulation of the training object in comparison with the controls.

Indeed, when we hear Jamie Loftus talking about Lana Del Rey, we can almost hear her “threat facial expressions while in a fear posture.” Because she SEES Lana Del Rey as heading toward an object she (Loftus) has been trained to fear. But perhaps this “seeing” is itself little more than more projection. Of course, fear is not the same thing as cruelty, but fear, and especially phobia, can lead to cruelty, or other activity evincing low-vibe consciousness, and so it must be watched out for.

Ok, let’s see what Jamie Loftus actually has to say about some of Lana Del Rey’s material. I suspect Loftus doesn’t know what art is. I suspect she thinks the problem with Leni Riefenstahl was that she was the wrong kind of propagandist, as if liberal propagandists haven’t caused a bunch of deaths too. Because she analyzes Lana’s work as if it’s propaganda (analyzing it like a narrative that you can scrutinize, that you can seek to poke holes in, instead of like art, on its own terms, which is what Loftus is doing with respect to Lana, IS analyzing it as if it were propaganda instead of art), but “the wrong kind.” That’s projection. It’s almost like she’s saying Lana should’ve written “the right kind” of propaganda. I am at a bit of a loss for words when Jamie says “Off to the Races” is (a “narrative,” no less!) “about” Dolores and Humbert (just because Lana made a homemade video for it in 2011 that “visually references” the 1997 Lolita film adaptation, Jamie says, and contains lines like “light of my life / fire of my loins,” and “gimme them gold coins”—oh my god! The skandalon!). Excuse you!? “About”!? I must have missed the part of your podcast where Dolores has “a Las Vegas past” and is “facing time again at Riker’s Island and [] won’t get out”! That certainly wasn’t in the Kubrik adaptation! You think this is fan fiction or something? This wasn’t released on AO3! Perhaps Lana has more imagination than you’re giving her credit for! Perhaps I shouldn’t even be responding to what is effectively a hatchet job within what is otherwise actual scholarship! But Elizabeth Woolridge Grant is a real human being, “of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids,” who “might even be said to possess a mind”! But liberals can’t go 5 minutes without calling something or SOMEONE “problematic”! Oh, sorry I’m not in the same prison as you. Art is not propaganda! You have to “throw” propaganda! Art springs forth from the subconscious! It’s like a force of nature! And so is Lana Del Rey! Oh no! Hurricane Lana is “problematic”! Oh no! I guess we should throw the hurricane in prison so it doesn’t do any more hurricaning! You suffer from shadow-idealism and gate-source perversion! You think we can get to a moral society by confining artists to the same prison you’re in. That’s not how art works. You can see Lana (struggling) within the master-slave dialectic, but you don’t see the struggle. But struggle is the pathway to freedom! You think morality is following certain rules. But our morality must come from our freeing ourselves from the master-slave dialectic! You want morality without struggle. You want a morality that allows you to be comfortable within certain constraints. Lana makes you uncomfortable and you have identified your discomfort as her immorality. You are in a prison. Maybe she’s in a different prison. You just think your prison is better. Well, I guess the shadows on its walls aren’t as spooky and scary to you. You think Judge Holden doesn’t live in your prison. Is Barack Obama just another “problematic fave” to you or is he a goddamn serial killer who, if there’s any justice in the future, may very well end up dying in prison like his “brother” Uncle Ted? Because “lawful evil,” like “chaotic evil,” is still evil!

We haven’t gone over this yet, have we? You’ve heard of cointelpro. Perhaps you’ve even heard it never went away. Sure. Whatever. I’m not sure it’s needed anymore, at least not to the same degree. Do you think I’m dropping threads all over the place? These “threads” are part of the same Gordian Rope, westoid! The same “clue” that’s gonna get us out of the labyrinth! I can drop them and pick them back up whenever I want! You think I have to do all the reconnecting! Whatever! Maybe if I tie them all around the Tree of Memory, you will see that there’s a goddamn tree there and won’t keep arguing about how yellow the ribbons are! But, no. I’m simply dropping the “threads” onto the branches of the Tree of Memory. When you have the tree, you won’t really need my threads anymore. This is just another “Wittgenstein’s Ladder.” You’ve had a bunch of those before, but you didn’t listen, did you? If you did, you would have already synthesized all the dialectics, and you would have already written the book on pan-dialectical materialism. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves again!

What we have to cover is very important. We’re covering things in Wizard of Oz order. The more important things are being revealed nearer to the end. We are in a story where, in the end, you will find that the answer is as simple as clicking your heels together and saying there’s no place like home, but we are not yet at the point in this story where you would just try it. Because it’s not going to be an event. It’s going to be a struggle. That’s the whole problem. You’re looking for the metaphysical. You’re not looking to synthesize the goddamn dialectic! I told you in the beginning that if you wanted to access the metaphysical, you needed to synthesize the goddamn dialectic! Did you believe me? Did you know what I meant!? Do you know what I mean now? I guess we’ll have to see! But all shall come in good time, my pretty! Right now, Mother Earth has placed us exactly where we need to be!

Because now, the very important thing we need to cover, what we’ve been circling around for the past two paragraphs, is how the “system” (roughly speaking, the patriarchy and its framework of justification) co-opts the revolutionary spirit. Again, it’s always a Scooby-Doo mystery; and the culprit is always revealed as Old Man Patriarchy once the mask is removed. But more people are beginning to realize that the indomitable revolutionary human spirit is not a myth! And what is there for Old Man Patriarchy to do about that!? He must redirect this energy and channel it back into the system! He already has all the tools he needs! He already has you thinking in straight lines! But all those “straight lines” lead directly back into the patriarchy! We can see this in every “reform” movement that stops short of revolution (and, remember, revolution is not the END of anything! It’s only the next goddamn step in the process of freeing ourselves!).

We are, for example, tempted (cf. Christ on the cross in Last Temptation) to give a lot of credit to the Combahee River Collective. We are perhaps even tempted to cry, to adulate, to treasure them in our hearts. Save it for church. We’re doing analysis here. Eventually, we’ll be able to analyze “psychosis,” but for now, we’ll have to start at the very tiny “delusion particles” that make up the “lake of denial” (Lake “Victoria,” perhaps) the patriarchy has all you westoids swimming in. Fine. The Combahee River Collective were doing very fine academic and social work. I’m not denigrating Kant either by limiting the credit I give him, because the truth is that his work comes up against limits that he acknowledges, and yet can’t move beyond. And because he can’t move beyond them, he wants to say no one can. Says you! Hegel and Marx would go beyond your limits! But we can go beyond theirs! And we can certainly go beyond what the Combahee River Collective were saying 50 years ago! And by “go beyond,” I of course mean that you should already have internalized everything they DID say 50 years ago! You’ve had up to 50 years, after all. But, OH MY FUCKING GOD! Once again! The problem isn’t that black women’s categories aren’t being “respected”! It’s that the categories of “black” and “woman” and, hell, even “black woman” were created* by the patriarchy to oppress you! (*more precisely, especially in the case of “woman,” were flattened into fictive “identities” away from being regarded as something more like an “embodiment” of a certain “spirit,” which is not the same thing as your bourgeois, fixed identity categories!). You live in a system, a world, of Orwellian logic where your categories can mean one thing (or more) to you, but something very different to the patriarchy! And until we overthrow the patriarchy, Old Man Patriarchy will always be able to use your precious categories for his own purposes! You can’t leave a prison simply by identifying that you’re in one! That’s only the first step!

We can see the limitations the CRC were working with (within) in the first paragraph of their 1977 statement. “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” They are struggling against heterosexual oppression, they say. What they are not saying is that heterosexuality is a myth. They are conscious enough to recognize themselves as “lesbians,” but only recognize the phenomenon of “lesbians” as something of an anomaly within the paradigm of heterosexuality! They were apparently not conscious enough to go on from there to recognize that the paradigm of heterosexuality is itself full of shit and was established to uphold the patriarchy! The only reason “heterosexuality” was invented was so that it could be enforced by patriarchy! Because it upholds the bourgeois, patriarchal “nuclear” family! You think the bourgeois family is all rainbows and butterflies? It’s a golgotha. A place of skulls. Many of those skulls belonged to women, though, again, it’s hard to pick up a skull in the field and say which is which. Though, of course, even more of the skulls belonged to children. I guess we need to go back to the Communist Manifesto again to cover what Uncle Karl said in there about the nuclear family:

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal [lol, here’s some “foreshadowing” —MM], idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation[…]
In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
–Marx, CM, Ch. 1

Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
–Marx, CM, Ch. 2

Yes, the point of all of this turns out to be child labor (really, toil) for capitalism. Child exploitation for bourgeois/patriarchal interests. We’ve already seen it. Yes. The four novels we’ve been referencing throughout, Blood Meridian, Lolita, Invisible Man, 1984, those novels are all really about the master-slave dialectic. And they all depict various kinds of child exploitation. Depictions of phenomena that exist in the real world to various degrees. We can’t abolish this exploitation by ignoring it or by viewing it through distortion fields or westoid cobwebs of justification. I was a child at one point. And I certainly don’t want future “mes” exploited by the master-slave dialectic! And you must want this as well. And so you must stop beating yourself up with the patriarchy’s tool in your head that tells you, “I am not enough”! You must get this tool to tumble out of your head somehow.

And what did the Combahee River Collective say about child exploitation? Well, they brush up against it when they say:

As children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated differently. For example, we were told in the same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being “ladylike” and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people. As we grew older we became aware of the threat of physical and sexual abuse by men. However, we had no way of conceptualizing what was so apparent to us, what we knew was really happening.
-CRC Statement, p. 3

Again, I feel like I have to say that the “problem” with realizing that YOU are “queer” (lesbian, in this case) is that it allows you to think you’re being progressive or even “revolutionary” while remaining shackled within a society ruled by the paradigm of heterosexuality. You see your “queerness” as an anomaly within the paradigm of heterosexuality rather than evidence that the paradigm of heterosexuality is full of shit! Everyone is “queer”! You can’t think of yourself as “special” in a way in which it means that other people are “less special” or that you are “more special” than other people! That’s the whole problem with white people! And it’s a really big stumbling block to revolutionary consciousness! Because white people have been living in a society that tells them they’re special just for being white! That’s the real problem here! What “special” means to someone with cracker consciousness is much different from what it could mean. Remember that the muskrat hero from the Turtle Island myth was not the main character, while Oedipus was. That’s not a coincidence.

The CRC do echo Marx at points.

We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level, and yet we feel the necessity to struggle to change the condition of all Black women. In “A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood,” Michele Wallace arrives at this conclusion:

We exists as women who are Black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle—because, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world. [citation in original —MM]

Wallace is pessimistic but realistic in her assessment of Black feminists’ position, particularly in her allusion to the nearly classic isolation most of us face. We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.
-CRC Statement, p. 7

We saw above that what the CRC were saying about black women in particular, Marx was saying about the working class in general. We must understand that there is a dialectical relationship between the general and the particular (or between “common and private,” see VDMT, p. 128-138), and this also applies to oppression. You may have heard of “class reductionism.” Please remove this term from your vocabulary! If you use this term, it’s a big sign that YOU are a “class reductionist”! Because you are likely reducing class to “economics”! The ruling class would love for your conception of class to be reduced to economics! It lets them get away with a whole bunch of shit that’s related to class, but, conceivably, arguably, “not related” to economics! Your class position is already that you are not a subject! In other words, your class position is already as an object! Your class position is already that you are not listened to unless you are echoing ruling class false consciousness/”conventional wisdom” back to the ruling class! The ruling class does not listen because of their class position. Their (self-imposed) “job” is to rule, not to listen. For them, listening to you would imply that you are a subject instead of an object. And they have already decided that you’re not a subject unless you are echoing ruling class false consciousness back to them. So people aren’t listened to when they talk about what Marx SAID; but they ARE listened to when they say Marx was a bum who never had a job or when they say he knocked up a maid and had Engels take credit (or “blame”?) for it. Those aren’t arguments against Marxism. They are attempts at trolling, i.e., Lacanian “perversion,” i.e., westoid swine consciousness. And we know what happens to swine. And so, when someone isn’t listening to you, when you are speaking truth “from the heart,” YOU NEED TO HAVE A FUCKING MELTDOWN! And then, they will either listen to you (like Simeon and JP listened to me), or they will reveal themselves as not being worth your time! If they block you (like Carrier, for example, blocked me on Facebook Messenger), GOOD! It means you’ve outgrown them! And the working class must certainly outgrow the zero-sum view about the relationship between the general and the particular!

“Identity” politics is very useful for identifying that you are in a prison, but, on its own, it’s not very useful for escaping this prison or abolishing prison in general. Focusing on identity has limits. You are not being oppressed because of your subjectivity. Your subjectivity is, in large part, determined by your oppression. The oppression comes from the denial of subjectivity to the slave—whoops, citizen(!), in the justification society ruled by the master-slave dialectic. Remember, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. The solution for the problem of ruling class denial is ruling class grief. That is how we get them to accept that the math isn’t mathing for them, which means it’s not mathing for us. Yes, we need to get them to see that the MATH of Monticello doesn’t work out for anyone! We need to get them to see that there’s MATH in their HIDES! Because they have been using our hides to work out their math for some 10,000 years! When will we realize that 10,000 years in the fire is long enough and that we’re ready to go home!? You are selling bacon from your own hide to the ruling class when you toil for them in exchange for a mess of pottage! Solidarity must start from within! It must start from solidarity with the “spirits of the ancestors.” Because our TRUE identity is that we are all Children of Mother Earth, members of a TRULY social species, and descendants of our ancestors (especially the single celled ones, but more about that later, perhaps). And most of your human ancestors in the period we call “history” were probably slaves. They were probably subjected to various forms of human sacrifice. Don’t take that too literally. The simple truth is that your current class position in our current class society places you at certain risks (which can be determined statistically) that have been “traded off,” which is a polite way of saying “sacrificed,” in favor of other considerations. And the simple truth, the “secret,” you might say, is that these sacrifices have been decided by the ruling class. And they hide this sacrifice in cruel rituals that have become justified as “traditions,” not unlike the business dude version of the story of the monkey experiment.

Except I’m not trying to climb a ladder; I’m trying to cross a bridge. And yet the same cruel rituals will be employed/deployed in order to prevent the Children of Mother Earth from crossing such bridges as we find them, and it will be justified through the “logic” of tradition, which, at this point, has negatively alchemized into the logic of stagnation. And so, it would do the current ruling class, the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, well—it would do well for them, if they are to become more fully humanized, that they first be taught the lesson taught to Adam, that “in the sweat of his brow he should eat his bread,” and to do labor, in the Marxian sense, and feed, and clothe themselves (instead of having slaves that do these things for them). And maybe we CAN get there with TRUE “identity politics,” in which we recognize our true identity as Children of Mother Earth, members of a truly social species, and descendants of our ancestors, especially the single celled ones. And if we evolved from groups of single celled organisms that synthesized alignment into unity and became one multi-celled organism, or from a single cell that differentiated itself (as in the transition from zygote to embryo), then surely the human species can synthesize the dialectic of the ego and the subconscious (or “the ego and the whole self”), that of the self and the other, and that of the individual and the collective, and then “evolve” into the human superorganism, which is able to attain oneness, unity, with mother earth, i.e., the global stateless, classless, moneyless society, the World of Mother Earth. Because that is the level of cooperation we will need to achieve in order to build this society. And so that is the kind of “identity” politics we will need! THIS IS PANDORA! YOU ARE A NA’VI! EYWA IS REAL! WAKE UP, WESTOID! WAKE UP!

It’s important to understand what I’m really saying here. White people, crackers, will certainly need to “internalize” the “intersectionality” and “identity politics” of the Combahee River Collective (and some crackers have placed their cracker consciousness in this prison instead of crucifying it), but that won’t be nearly enough. We could call it necessary, but not sufficient. Crackers want a lot of credit for merely taking the necessary steps to become “allies” (which is famously said to “cost you nothing,” and is worth every penny) and not taking the suffient steps to become comrades. They want a lot of credit for realizing that a system that tends to benefit them unfairly is full of shit—they want credit merely for recognizing it without taking real action to combat, much less overthrow it. You have to grow out of that shit. We are getting really tired. Fkn Ellison’s Invisible Man didn’t make whitey find out for this. How are we going to know you crackers have built solidarity with your slave ancestors if you can’t build solidarity with people who have ancestors who were chattel slaves in their LIVING MEMORY!? You have to realize that, not only is the math of capitalism not working for black people; it’s not working out for you either! And it’s not working out for you BECAUSE it’s not working out for them! The energy trapped at the bottom must make the whole stack spring into the air! What is there preventing this? You are too comfortable. You have phobia of discomfort. How are we going to have revolution, something that will make a lot of people uncomfortable, if you have phobia of discomfort? Comfort and safety aren’t the same thing, remember.

Perhaps it would do us well to unpack the distinction, the difference, between comfort and safety. Of course there’s a dialectical relationship between them. Sometimes they coincide, but sometimes, they’re “opposites.” Positive sum logic, remember. I was certainly “uncomfortable” when I was experiencing “my own personal hell,” but, really, I was totally safe. I was not in the way of any potential harm. So you are safe when you are not “in harm’s way,” as if harm were a bowling ball or something. But that would be gate-source perversion again. A bowling ball isn’t harm. Harm would be an EFFECT of your getting hit by the bowling ball. Richard Carrier’s horniness isn’t, per se, “harm.” It only has the effect of harm when he exposes it (the horniness) to women who haven’t “welcomed” it; and Richard Carrier can’t read minds, so, perhaps the “math” dictates that he should keep this horniness to himself until he DOES “learn to read minds.”

But we were talking about Lana Del Rey. Jamie was talking about Lana like Jamie and Lana are in the same class. And Jamie certainly wants to be part of this class: what used to be known as the “priestly” class. But what did Uncle Karl say about the priestly class, again? In capitalism, they become just another working stiff. And I’m sure Jamie longs for (certain aspects of) the days when the priestly class was respected simply for being priestly, and not judged based on their performance in Old Man Patriarchy’s capital economy (where the judgment IS the money you are said to have “earned”—that certainly IS a “judgment”! And who “judges” this, again!? Judge Holden?). But people DO respect Jamie for being “priestly.” I attended her book tour event for her book Raw Dog at Book People in Austin, TX on 26 May 2023, where she had an audience of over a hundred people eating out of her hand, listening to her talking about, e.g., the sexual politics of hot dogs, and where I perhaps played something of the role of a Maleficent, dropping in unannounced, perhaps even uninvited, when I raised my hand in the crowd during the Q&A session after the main “show,” and said I had listened to all of her podcasts (fact check: mostly true—I had listened to probably the majority of episodes of her “Bechdelcast” with co-host Caitlin Durante, and her solo podcasts, “My Year in Mensa” and, of course, “the Lolita Podcast,” but there was one I hadn’t heard of at that point, so, of course, hadn’t listened to—I forget the title), including “The Lolita Podcast,” and I asked her if, maybe, she had been taking Lana Del Rey “too literally” (as opposed to “seriously,” “on her own terms”), and she basically told me that I was entitled to my opinion, but that she stood by what she said. And how could I argue with that? I couldn’t. It’s what’s known as a thought-terminating cliche. But I know I made some impression in her memory because she remembered me when it was my turn to get my picture taken with her after the Q&A, and I had us pose with my copy of Capital, which I was reading at the time, and she didn’t even seem to think it was weird (like some people have) when I was still unlocking my bicycle, near the entrance/exit, as she was walking out—i.e., she did not act like I was the jump scare from Mulholland Drive—she simply greeted me again, and let me go on continuing to awkwardly unlock my bike, and as an autistic person, I thank her for that. And afterward, when I posted the picture on Instagram, she commented, “so great to meet you!!” So you see, westoid, we are all parts of, characters—even if “only” footnotes—in, a bunch of other random-ass people’s stories! That’s very important! It’s very important mental nutrition to metabolize. It’s nutrition for the soil from which must spring forth the Tree of Memory.

This phenomenon noted by Marx (namely, that: “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.”) is a big part of the problem. These previously halo’d classes are starting to want their halos back! They want to attain the metaphysical! They’re starting to realize that you can’t attain the metaphysical through money! It just grows in bigger piles, where it rots! They’re starting to crave meaning again! You capitalists have made your thing, extracting profit from other people’s labor, into THE thing! You’ve made it into just about EVERYTHING! And people are starting to see through this, but they have not adjusted their “eyes” to the light and so are unable to “see,” “perceive,” “bring forth in the imagination,” what is on the other side of the veil. They generally haven’t gotten past the level of consciousness of “MY thing is THE thing.” But YOUR thing is NOT THE thing! Even, especially, if “your thing” is “God”!

“God” is a lot of people’s thing. I’ve seen a lot of these “God”s in action! And, much like Shania Twain, I have to say, they “don’t impress me much”! They’re a lot like assholes, in that everyone has one, they’re all “unique” (yet all somehow very “common”), and they should all be examined once in a while by a qualified agent to make sure they’re not harboring cancer. You say, “God is in control.” That doesn’t give me a lot of “comfort”! My “god” is Mother Earth! And if you “read” Her “book,” She’s done shit that makes Noah’s flood look like gettin’ high by the beach! Yes, Earth IS our Mother, but, once every hundred million years or so, Mother rolls over in bed and smothers about 95% of Her children just about all at once. What a bitch. Can you call your god a bitch? The children of Mother Earth can call Her a bitch all we want. But what we REALLY want is for YOU to stop raping her!

This, again, the “stripping of the halo,” is a very important thing to understand (cf., e.g., Pixar’s Onward). We must understand technology as largely (though of course not exclusively) a tool of the patriarchy. It is, indeed, trivial for the patriarchy to use myriad and sundry forms of “technology” (cf. “tricknology”) as a “tool” to reinforce the voice they’ve worked to implant in our heads that tells us we are not enough. We must notice all the evidence the patriarchy has left us that they, over the past several hundred years, have sought to use what is largely their tool, capitalism (which works through the same Aristotelian-Orwellian two-step logic process for concentrating power, by which we generally mean hoarding certain kinds of “stuff,” mainly, “means of production”) in great effort to replace what was commonly understood as, say, “magic,” which was available to everyone who could synthesize the dialectic, therefore harder for the patriarchy to control, with “technology,” which the patriarchy can more easily control (access to) via “gates” or “hoops” they can more easily set up (and set up infrastructure for). But you can read all about that in books like Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici or Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale by, (perhaps) the GOAT, Maria Mies or, perhaps, “Industrial Society and its Future” by Theodore J. Kaczynski. You know what they say: when industrial society reminds you of your past, you remind it of its future.

But we are still in the domain where the skilled artisans are fighting with the grain accumulators for control of society, or, more “humbly,” fighting for a “seat at the table.” We are still in the domain where we think that a movie like The Incredibles represents a meaningful conflict. The ruling class can play the Incredible family just as easily as it can play Syndrome! This is little more than a highly wasteful puppet show. It’s, again, trivial for the ruling class to play the Mr. Incredible figure off against the Syndrome figure, while, the whole time, they are accumulating more resources, more control of resources, including other people’s labor, for themselves. Look, the “talented” and “skilled” people should have important roles in society, but they are not a class unto themselves. I’m “talented” in certain areas. So what. I can’t live by myself on an island somewhere. And, furthermore, I can live neither in a society where my kinds of talents are the only ones that are respected, nor in a society where they are not sufficiently, suitably respected! We do all need to listen to each other; but this needs to be balanced in a certain way. The “way we’re all listening to each other” currently is grossly out of balance! We are listening to thoughts in our heads, but not to our bodies. We are listening to ruling class false consciousness, but not the lived experience of the proletariat! We are listening to the voice in our heads that tells us we are not enough, but not listening to the memories of ourselves as children getting tortured by Judge Holden in the Omelas basement under the auspices of the master-slave dialectic.

And Lana Del Rey (and, consequently, Elizabeth W. Grant) and Jamie Loftus are not in positions* where they can effectively listen to each other (*and perhaps we could go so far as to say that this is not even a society where they could find themselves in this position). Jamie wants to hold Lana “accountable” for shit. That’s putting the cart before the horse. It’s gate-source perversion. It’s you-are-in-prison-and-you-want-Lana-to-join-you. The source of accountability must be a relationship of accountability. This must be built through the building of solidarity (which, again, requires what we could call “discipline”). In the past, we only had access to, at most, “class” solidarity, but now that we can recognize our true identity as Children of Mother Earth, members of a truly social species, and descendants of our ancestors (especially the single celled ones), we should be able to build goddamn solidarity with anyone! Even, especially, the fkn animals! They are Children of Mother Earth too, goddammit!

Ok! So let’s start listening to each other! What’s the alternative? We all wind up in the same prison? No thanks! We must recognize that Lana Del Rey has nothing to do with why you are in prison. No, you are in a prison entirely of your own making, for you have recognized that you are in a prison, but have not actually done anything to escape this prison (or you’ve only escaped to a slightly larger prison)! So now it IS a prison of your own making! And so you are starting to decorate your cell with dead flowers as if that increases your freedom—and I guess it does increase your freedom when it’s your only creative outlet!

So Jamie Loftus picked out three Lolita allusions from Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die album. We can hardly say that this paints an accurate picture of the album, though any number of narratives could be spun out from and projected back onto it in this way. So it’s important to understand that Lana Del Rey is an artist, you know, kinda like Nabokov himself; not a propagandist like Leni Riefenstahl. If anyone is a modern day Leni Riefenstahl, it might be Ken Burns. Indeed, what is there preventing Ken Burns from becoming a Leni Riefenstahl (type) for the Trump administration? His bourgeois ego-righteousness? Again, not very “comforting” (or “satisfying” or “nourishing”). He’s already a bourgeois propagandist. He’s already a propagandist for nostalgia. Nostalgia can start out as a comfort blanket or even a garbage blanket, but it can easily “devolve” into a poison blanket. Propaganda tells us not only how to feel, but how to interpret those feelings. Art impacts us, and that impact produces feelings in us not totally unlike how the impact from the wind produces chimes from a wind chime. And we are “free” to develop our own interpretations of these feelings. Lana, in, e.g., “Off To the Races” (when she says, e.g., “who else is gonna put up with me this way?”) is not telling us how to feel about Humbert and Dolores. She’s telling us how SHE feels in the conditions that “resulted in” whatever tumbled out from her subconscious and onto the page. Yes, Lolita (the 1997 adaptation, at least, according to Jamie’s “research,” at least) was “in her subconscious,” but because she had “metabolized” it. And you are criticizing her metabolization of it. You are calling it a regurgitation. You are in a prison and you want her to join you there. You accuse Lana of “glamorizing” abuse. This is tantamount to an accusation of propaganda. But Lana is an artist, not a propagandist. She’s not Ken Burns.

If you really want to understand Born to Die on its own terms, you would have to interpret it through the lens of her (seemingly) most “autobiographical” song on the album, “This is What Makes Us Girls” (this song was not mentioned in Jamie’s podcast). Once again, a full quotation is warranted.

[Verse 1]
Remember how we used to party up all night?
Sneakin’ out, lookin’ for a taste of real life
Drinkin’ in the small town firelight
(Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice)
Sweet sixteen and we had arrived
Walkin’ down the streets as they whistle, “Hi, hi”
Stealin’ police cars with the senior guys
Teachers said we’d never make it out alive

[Pre-Chorus]
There she was, my new best friend
High heels in her hand, swayin’ in the wind
Oh, she starts to cry, mascara runnin’ down her little Bambi eyes
“Lana, how I hate those guys”

[Chorus]
This is what makes us girls
We all look for heaven and we put love first
Somethin’ that we’d die for, it’s a curse
Don’t cry about it, don’t cry about it
This is what makes us girls
We don’t stick together ’cause we put love first
Don’t cry about him, don’t cry about him
It’s all gonna happen

[Verse 2]
And that’s where the beginning of the end begun
Everybody knew that we had too much fun
We were skippin’ school and drinkin’ on the job with the boss
Sweet sixteen and we had arrived
Baby’s table dancin’ at the local dive
Cheerin’ our names in the pink spotlight
Drinkin’ Cherry Schnapps in the velvet night

[Pre-Chorus]
Yo, we used to go break into the hotel
Glimmerin’, we’d swim
Runnin’ from the cops in our black bikini tops
Screamin’, “Get us while we’re hot, get us while we’re hot”
(C’mon, take a shot)

[repeat chorus]

[Bridge]
The prettiest in-crowd that you had ever seen
Ribbons in our hair and our eyes gleamed mean
A freshmen generation of degenerate beauty queens
And you know somethin’?

[Verse 3]
They were the only friends I ever had
We got into trouble and when stuff got bad
I got sent away, I was wavin’ on the train platform
Cryin’ ’cause I know I’m never comin’ back

[repeat chorus]

I don’t think I should have to spell out everything Lana is saying here. This work should largely speak for itself. For example, I shouldn’t have to tell you that by “girls,” she does not merely mean “minor human females.” In verse 3, she’s talking about getting sent to a boarding school. But things could’ve gotten even worse for Lana. Perhaps you’ve heard that Paris Hilton was a “troubled teen.” Her parents shipped her off to one of those camps that was an offshoot of syn-anon (see, e.g., the TrueAnon podcast for their investigation of this group and its offshoots). It’s estimated that, in America, some 50,000 teenagers a year are placed in one of these facilities by their parents. But no one “deserves” to go to one of these places, not even spoiled rich white brats. But we live in a society where Lana’s parents (at least her mother) identified her behavior as “the problem,” and identified boarding school as “the solution.” But this “solution” was rather punitive. It represented zero-sum logic much more than positive-sum logic. It represented the politics of phobia much more than the politics of love/cooperation. It was more a cutting of a Gordian knot than an unravelling/untangling. Lana would go on to talk more about her feelings on this in the future.

Lana says, “sweet sixteen and we had arrived…” arrived where? You have “arrived” at the scene of your exploitation by the patriarchy. Lana doesn’t need to spell this out for us. We don’t even have to read between the lines. She speaks explicitly of being groomed into alcohol use, into various forms of sexual exploitation, into committing what, for privileged white kids, are considered “petty crimes,” but for nonwhite, and, overall, “less privileged” kids, well, cops kill them (I could even say “us”) for a lot less. But Lana seeks glamor. Why shouldn’t she? She’s in the priestly “genre” of human. She’s schizotypal. In patriarchal, class society, this “glamor” is largely gatekept via patriarchal exploitation. And you perceive this as her “glamorizing” the exploitation. Is she “glamorizing” it when she says, “teacher said we’d never make it out alive”? From the context of the last verse, we must surmise that her parents agreed with the teacher! Lana does not ignore the “glamor” (and you fault her for this because you are in a prison), but neither does she ignore the consequences she faced, nor, more generally, the consequences people face for seeking glamor in class society, where it’s largely gatekept through patriarchal exploitation.

And here I guess we can crowbar the mask off what you confuse for “jouissance,” hopefully all the way off—we’ll see. We can find another “clue” in Lana’s “Gods and Monsters,” where she says, “In the land of gods and monsters, I was an angel / looking to get fucked hard.” We can see here that the patriarchy has successfully cut off her access to “joy,” to “fulfillment,” and/so she is looking for a substitute (“fuck yeah, give it to me, this is heaven / what I truly want / is innocence lost”). We can see this in the lyrics of Maynard as well in, e.g., “The Hollow,” where he is looking for something, some “fire” to “bring down,” to “bridle all this indiscretion / long enough to edify / and permanently fill this hollow”—a “hollow” of, e.g., “sexual,” “desire” that he had been attempting to “fill” with “indiscretion”—his words. This almost sounds like a Christian song. It almost sounds like he’s talking about the notorious “god-shaped hole”—the triteness that launched a thousand song titles (or at least dozens of songs that mentioned it—and mostly not Christian ones either)—not to mention sermons! It sounds enough like this that my brother and I, when we were teenagers, “got away with” playing this song at church (switching around a few choice words, of course)! And people clapped and shouted “Amen” afterwards! I am not making this up. Maybe I’ll post the video at some point! Anyway, the “point” is that the source of this so-called “god-shaped hole” is simply that you are cut off from access to joy and fulfillment in patriarchal class society! (And we shall see that this has to do with our being cut off from Mother Earth and the “spirits of our ancestors”). If you have joy and fulfillment, the authentic “jouissance” will “flow like a river,” so to speak. There’s no need to chase it; therefore, no lack of it to produce yearning or pang! And here, we must recognize a very important distinction between a jouissance that “flows naturally” from “living in alignment” with Mother Earth (living in “joy” and “fulfillment,” which we will see has to do with relations, therefore, “frequencies”), and a “confused” (therefore perverse/-ted) “jouissance” of the yearning and the striving/chasing. For we must recognize in these lyrics (among others, e.g., those that speak of a love that “bites” and “hurts” and “stings”) the distinction between joy/fulfillment, which we must recognize as a (relatively simple) matter of synthesizing the dialectic, therefore difficult for the patriarchy to control (access to/interpretation of), and this (tbh, parasitic, merely surface-level and “single-faceted”) “jouissance” of confusion/perversion which we must recognize as based on something rather different from joy and fulfillment. We must recognize it as something sought in the absence of, in the being cut off from, joy and fulfillment by the patriarchal ruling class that occurs as a consequence of the so-called “death of god” (really, and a bit less “existentially,” more of a “death of magic” or Marx’s “stripping of the halo”) brought about by capitalism. What? Of course there was a “death of god,” so to speak. And of course this was brought about by capitalism. This was quoted (as an audio clip) in the intro to Doug Lain’s podcasts: “the death of god is about the drying up of a horizon of meaning, and of a whole form of human life.” That’s where I remember it from, anyway. A quick search reveals this as a quote from a lecture by Rick Roderick on Nietzsche. And, once again, perhaps another extended quotation is warranted! Who else is going to do it!?

And now my scary thing I’d like to say is I am about to read this parable about the death of God, and its supposed to be shocking, and yet I feel like I am at a time and a place in culture when we are far distant from our ability to be shocked by that at all either. What Nietzsche took to be most shocking, I think today it’s just grist for a certain commodity, system, certain way of advertising. Today “World spirit” may very well be just advertising.

Nevertheless, let me give you the famous parable, Nietzsche’s Death of God parable, and I’ll use it to bring this kind of suspicion to an end because with “The Death of God” we have – in Nietzsche – and it’s going to take a long time to explain, and I’ll do that in the next lecture, we’ll talk more about this parable. We could have spent eight hours interpreting just the parable. First of all, a parable called “The Death of God” can’t be atheism, right? Because to the bourgeois atheist it makes no sense to say God died because there wasn’t one, so he couldn’t have died. So that doesn’t make sense.

“The Death of God” is about the drying up of a horizon of meaning, and of a whole form of human life. And about Nietzsche’s both fear and exhilaration at what might come next. We still to a large extent live in the interregnum between worlds, if you will, or between paradigms. Not many people in the history of the world have faced that, lived in periods like that. So Nietzsche in that sense is also a prophetic thinker, so I’ll share with you, you know, just so you can scandalise your friends, hell if nothing else – Nietzsche’s famous parable, and it’s from “The Gay Science”. The one I want to share with you is the parable from “The Gay Science” called “The Madman”. Naturally, and as a madman myself, sometimes a professional madman, I enjoy this passage a lot. In “The Gay Science”, this is 125, aphorism 125. Of course these are some of Nietzsche’s fragments he is best known for because they are filled with hyperbole and wonderful invective and so… well, I enjoy this one. The Madman.

“Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours and ran to the marketplace…” – please follow Nietzsche’s every line because none of this is accidental, the madman lit a lantern and ran to the marketplace, okay – “…and cried incessantly: ‘I seek God! I seek God!’” [cf. Comrade Diogenes’ seeking a “man”! —MM] – Well you can imagine that in a mall, right? [crowd laughter] The cops are going to come and pull you out, because nothing in a mall is that serious. It’s not designed to be, folks. Anyway…

“As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just…” – see, you all thought… Nietzsche was not just a simple atheist. Now follow this – “As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then he provoked much laughter” – Mall again, right? Oh God, get this skypilot out of here – “Did he get lost? One said. Did he lose his way like a child? Said another. Or is he hiding?” – now they are talking about him – “Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Has he emigrated? They yelled and laughed.”

“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glance. ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this thing? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its centre, from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns? Or are we not plunging continually? Backward, forward, sliding in all directions?…’”

“‘Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?” Even so close to them – I am adding to the text now – even as close to some of those gravediggers as we all sit today? “Don’t we hear their digging at all? Is not night and more night coming on all the time? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him’”

Now there is a change. The mall people are a little quiet now because this is more interesting than they thought it would be, okay. So they were quiet now. And then he goes on.

And here’s the part I want to introduce my next series of talks with: “‘How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves now? What was holiest that the world has yet known has bled to death under our knives, and who can wipe the blood off of us? What water is there that can clean us now? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?’” – What new myths? What new ways to live shall we have to invent? – “‘Is not the greatness of our deed still far too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it?…’”

“Here the madman fell silent and looked again at the listeners; and they were silent and astonished. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. ‘I have come too early; my time has not yet come’, said the madman. ‘This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires even more time; deeds too require time, even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard’” – by many – “‘This deed is still more distant from some of them than most the distant star—and yet they have done it themselves’”

“It has been related further” – Nietzsche again – “that on that same day the madman entered various churches, and there he sang his ‘Requiem to a Dead God’. Led out and called to account, he is said to have replied each time: “What after all are these churches now if not the sepulchres and the tombs of God?” What are these churches now? If not the sepulchres and the tombs of God?

Well, there’s the famous “Death of God” parable, for what it’s worth, or not worth. It takes a lot of interpreting, but it’s a very, very – for me – exciting and interesting, challenging, powerful and serious moment. Philosophers are very seldom ever really serious. You can tell that from Socrates, and sometimes the best part about them is that they are not too serious. But that’s a very serious moment for Nietzsche. And it’s also a moment that I think that I’d like to bring down to earth just a bit, because this is still a deed quite distant from us, and it may take quite a bit of work to pull it closer. But it’s really hard not to catch a sense for that.

Coming from the university I come from, where we have one of the world’s great cathedrals: Duke Chapel, and we have a beautiful stained glass painting of various saints, martyrs, apostles, Christ, but most important, and I want to return to Nietzsche’s first line about the marketplace. Our madman went to the marketplace to tell the news, because it’s in the marketplace where the news – in the new era of the world – in the New World Order it’s the marketplace where the news needed to be spread, okay? In any case in Duke Chapel, it’s a beautiful chapel, I mean it’s the best imitation you can get this side of Europe [crowd laughter].

Built in the thirties I think, right? 20’s, 30’s, something like that. In this chapel you wander through, and for a moment your sense of reverence is almost there, you almost can remember some of those feelings when you were very young and you thought just maybe that was right, or whatever. But you wander off the edge of the chapel, and usually it’s very cool in there and they are playing Bach and it’s just a nice place to go, I mean I have to admit it.

But as you wander off, then there are the barons of tobacco. All of the barons of tobacco, the Washington Duke family, all buried in state. Not cardinals, not saints, not martyrs, no Thomas Aquinas, no Saint Thomas More, but George Washington Duke and his family, the buyers and sellers of America’s first international commodity: tobacco. The fortune upon which that church is erected, and to which it is dedicated. What is that magnificent church now but the tomb and the sepulchre of God? This always seemed to me a striking example, from a local perspective. I mean you’d need to visit the chapel if you come to Duke, and you are welcome to do so.

I will bring up a few themes from the Genealogy again, but by the time we have reached this moment of The Death of God, we already have a strange change in the discourse of Nietzsche’s text. Because now the challenge will be for me to present what I have only so far indicated. And it’s indicated in the parable. What new games, new festivals, can human beings – insofar there is any life that remains – what can be invented, now? To make up for what has already been destroyed.

And that’s the challenge we’ll have in the next classes, is to see first what does Nietzsche offer us by way of any new myths like that, and more importantly, what myths could we construct ourselves. What games, what holy festivals, what interesting books, fascinating arguments, and new ways to live? Other than the pathetic tragic, stupid, banal array of ordinary, everyday, bourgeois stinking life. Surely we can do better than that. Surely.

So that’s the project that we will head out on, you know. Because we don’t want to end with the thought that always seems to me ghastly – and especially after reading Nietzsche – it’s that to imagine someone looking at your tombstone years from now, and it says: “Bill O’Reilly”, gives the dates – it’s always comforting, I visit graveyards, I like it – “Sold tyres” [crowd laughter]. Now I don’t know if you sell tyres, and I know people driven to that and worse, but still, that would be “Great salesman. Wonderful friend. Nice chum”.

To experience that horror, just that horror, may require some effort from us but I want us to experience it so that we might think of some new games, some new ways to live. [applause]
-Rick Roderick, 1991

Ok, so you see? That’s what I’ve been doing (attempting?) this whole book! The corpse(s) of the old “god(s)” needed to be exhumed and, well, dissected. Because they were just ideas. All the “spirituality” we need is already in the goddamn river (literally, but also, metaphorically for nature in general)! Because of the dialectical materiality of it (“you never step in the same river twice”). Except the goddamn river is being horribly polluted by Old Man Patriarchy’s bourgeois industrial chemicals! I have heard that they’re even “turnin’ the frikkin’ frogs gay” (though this was, of course, a horrible mischaracterization of what was actually going on). And so the proletariat must seize the means of production of these chemicals, so we can make truly informed decisions as to whether they’re even worth continuing to produce! And we can make these decisions based on need and thriving, when we truly learn what that is, which will be a dialectical process, rather than (basing the decisions on) bourgeois (in general, reductively financial) justifications!

And so the substitute for joy and fulfillment the bourgeoisie presents us with, which Lacan seemingly fails to distinguish from “jouissance” (though I could be mistaken—I’m not basing anything on it), must, indeed, be understood as something rather different from joy and fulfillment—as, instead, entanglement in the pleasure-pain dialectic. For when you ramp pleasure “up to 11” (the bourgeois substitute for joy/fulfillment), it results in a certain kind of pain (cf. the love that “bites,” etc.). In the model of synthesis, joy is achieved “dialectically.” The bourgeois model of pleasure-seeking, on the other hand, corresponds more to the “straight line development model” from VDMT, p. 195, in that it seeks a straight line to pleasure rather than letting the pleasure come to the subject through synthesis of the dialectic. My experience of the eclipse in April 2024 was made all the more meaningful by the fact that it was one of the reasons I was still living in Austin, and so, in that sense, was an experience some 7 years “in the making” (because once I saw the partial eclipse in 2017, that was enough, almost by itself, to make me want to stick around for the full one in 2024). Indeed, the authentically meaningful experience must correspond to (or perhaps “should” coincide with) the culmination, the achievement of a new level/”stage” of, the building of consciousness through smaller (even, at the time, seemingly meaningless) experiences, and the memory of those experiences, because that memory is “that” through which we synthesize meaning (cf. “the real [x] is the friends we made along the way”). But there is no “straight line” to pleasure (or at least, the “straight line” doesn’t “keep going straight” forever). That’s an illusion. We can see that immediately through its dialectical relationship to pain. But we can see the evidence of it (the broken shards, if you will) all around us. We can certainly see evidence of it in the work of Lana Del Rey.

For, remember from earlier, in the current manifestation (“era”) of patriarchal class society, dictated by capital, thus by bourgeois “interests” and “will,” where the springs of joy have largely been walled off and diverted through capital channels to capital silos, from there, from those, it can be doled, gated, out in the form of pleasure, for the right price, which, in bourgeois class society, is to say, in the form of bourgeois decadence. Comrade Marina talks about the difference between the authentic emotions (e.g., joy) and parasitic emotions (ones that depend on centering the ego, seeking external validation, projecting insecurities onto others, in her words, “hierarchy, scarcity, shame,” in other words, from the parasitic programming, the voice in our heads from the patriarchy, that would have us telling ourselves, “I am not enough”) in this video. The main reason there is no straight line to pleasure is that (bourgeois) “pleasure” for some people depends of various kinds of pain (up to suffering, torture, horror, slavery) for other people (cf. Omelas, cf. Jeffrey Epstein). The production of “luxury” items (luxury commodities, i.e., luxury products and services in the capital economy) depends on exploitation of labor. You might be surprised what the bourgeoisie consider “luxury items” and the kind of “labor” required to “produce” these “commodities.” The reason “luxury items” don’t bring joy has to do with the kind of “pleasure” they’re “designed” (“purposed”) to bring. They bring a pleasure that temporarily satisfies the parasitic “emotions.” The parasitic “emotions” that largely arise from the parasitic programming installed by the ruling class (and its infrastructures, e.g., bourgeois home, school, work, personal relationships), that mainly have to do with attaining and maintaining status within a hierarchy. David Foster Wallace talks about experiencing bourgeois decadence, and how it tends to raise within him feelings of status consciousness in, for example, “A Supposedly Fun Thing…,” and how this tends to hamper his enjoyment of it, the pleasure he takes in it, because, well, bourgeois decadence requires certain processes (e.g., certain kinds of toil) that the “experience” was not “designed” for the “experiencer” to NOTICE (though, importantly, sometimes, it’s the opposite); but Wallace can’t help noticing these things, and it sours his experience, because he had, in certain ways, developed beyond westoid swine consciousness. But he had no (or at least did not take sufficient advantage of available) access to Marxism or to dialectical materialism, apparently, because he did not recognize that the solution to this problem was not his getting bummed out about it, but revolution—the seizing of the means of production by the working class, etc., etc.!

So the ruling class diverts revolutionary “spirit” (energy, will, intention, sentiment) back into unrevolutionary “channels,” which (“channeling”) redirects this energy back into upholding their system. “Revolutionary” action is not simply action that someone calls “revolutionary.” Revolutionary action must show, must prove, itself revolutionary. This is why it requires revolutionary consciousness, not merely revolutionary “spirit.” Revolutionary “spirit” can be diverted back into unrevolutionary channels, co-opted for system-upholding purposes. Revolutionary consciousness has to be dealt with by the system in other ways. It must first be ignored, then denied, then psychologized, then pathologized, then institutionalized, etc., etc. But there is strength in numbers! There is strength in diversity! There is strength in solidarity! There is strength in flexibility! There is strength in the raising of consciousness! There is strength in the crucifixion and resurrection of the ego! Because when you crucify the ego, it resurrects in a new form! A form that recognizes that it is not the center of the fkn universe! A form that recognizes (whether/when) it is in prison and can simply fly away! Because the resurrected ego is a consciousness that recognizes itself as a (i.e., “an instantiation of” the) psychological butterfly! The butterfly doesn’t need permission to fly away!

So now, we should be able to see more clearly what’s going on. “God” is Mother Earth, but She is an ancestor god (who, indeed, has Her own “ancestors”), not a theistic god. The theistic god (the mind without a body, bearing the “metaphysical property” of “logos,” through which “he” is said to have “spoken” or “thought” creation into existence) had to be invented by the ruling class because it was more suitable to their agenda because it better reflected the propaganda about themselves they needed the working classes to believe in order to be suitably effective slaves—whoops!, citizens, in the society they sought to construct where they were the rulers, etc., etc. So they needed to construct a “ruling” god. And one can certainly “view” nature in such a way that they see it as being “ruled,” but, remember Hegel again, “that is not the end of the story.” Because, indeed, the “strongest” “force” that “rules” nature is, well, we could call it “love”—the relatively stable relationship of mutual attraction between bodies, between “beings,” which corresponds to alignment of being-for-self with being-for-other, which, through dialectical materialism as metaphysical and synthetic naturalism, we can recognize in more “bodies” and “beings” than merely the ones constructed upon DNA architecture.

Mutual attraction does indeed correspond to gravitational force. Gravity is a force reflected in the subconscious through our metaphors. We call people “influencers.” We call them “stars.” We say they have “pull.” That they have “orbiters.” We can recognize this as a form of attraction. “Let’s take Jesus off the dashboard / Got enough on his mind,” Lana says in “Diet Mountain Dew.” We are still talking about love. Though, of course, at this point, we must still contend further with the kind of love that “bites,” etc. Lana is very skilled at twisting and folding meaning in ways we might call “fractal” into the dimension(s) of a single line. I’m reminded again of the film Only the Lonely, which contains a scene in which Danny (Candy) puts his cop hat over the head (and, consequently “eyes”) of the Jesus figurine in his bedroom when he is, presumably, about to have sex with Theresa (Sheedy) for the first time. If you’ve seen that movie, then you already have a template to interpret what Lana is saying in this line. The line, perhaps, immediately brings to mind times when you’ve had sex in a car. Yes, consider all the meaning concentrated in this one line. We already know that by “Jesus,” she must be referring to a “Jesus bobblehead” on the dashboard of someone’s car. We already know she must be in a car. We must already know who Jesus is and know about the practice, the phenomenon, of affixing the Jesus bobblehead onto the dashboard of cars. We already understand that Lana intends to do things in the car she wouldn’t want Jesus to see. It’s like she envisions a direct portal between the eyes of the Jesus bobblehead and Jesus himself at the right hand of the father. Jesus has become Big Brother. And this Big Brother must be loved. There is a dialectical love-hate (or perhaps “attraction-repulsion,” “desire-phobia”) relationship with surveillance in this kind of Christianity. It activates the parasitic programming of the framework of justification’s three legs (Marina called them “pillars,” remember. I’m allowed to call them something else if I identify new function—to step on and kick us, etc.): hierarchy, shame, and scarcity. Except, in this line, she is, at least for the moment, able to counteract all that through a form of asserting herself, whereby she is, again, at least for the moment, able to attain a “higher degree” of what we could call “freedom.” She (we could say) inverts the hierarchy by removing Jesus from his place of surveillance. Jesus has no scarcity of things “on his mind.” The source of the shame has been removed, or so it would appear. But that would be gate-source perversion again, because the real “source” of shame is, as always, Old Man Patriarchy, who installs it in us through ruling class parasitic mental programming, i.e., the voice in our heads that tells us we are not enough. You have reconstructed the eyes of Jesus in your subconscious, where they are, indeed, always watching you.

Lana spells out for us very clearly the kind of love she is talking about in every line of this song. Every line is like a stroke of a brush in a painting. And the whole song, lyrically, etc., is, surely, a better “painting” of what she’s talking about than Loftus’s projections onto (the shadows Loftus sees in) a homemade, zero-budget music video? No? Anyway:

[Intro]
You’re no good for me
Baby, you’re no good for me
You’re no good for me
But, baby, I want you, I want

[Chorus]
Diet Mountain Dew, baby, New York City
Never was there ever a girl so pretty
Do you think we’ll be in love forever?
Do you think we’ll be in love?
Diet Mountain Dew, baby, New York City
Can we hit it now, low-down and gritty?
Do you think we’ll be in love forever?
Do you think we’ll be in love?

[Verse 1]
Baby, put on heart-shaped sunglasses
‘Cause we gonna take a ride
I’m not gonna listen to what the past says
I been waitin’ up all night
Take another drag, turn me to ashes
Ready for another lie?
Says he’s gonna teach me just what fast is
Say it’s gonna be alright

[repeat chorus]

[Verse 2]
Let’s take Jesus off the dashboard
Got enough on his mind
We both know just what we’re here for
Saved too many times
Maybe I like this roller coaster
Maybe it keeps me high
Maybe the speed, it brings me closer
I could sparkle up your eye

[repeat chorus]

[bridge is a repeat of intro x2]

[repeat chorus x2 with following alt line]

Baby stoppin’ at 7-Eleven
There in his white Pontiac Heaven

[outro is repeat of intro x2]

Here, we must recognize the great tension between the immediate and the “eternal.” This is where Lana lives—the H of the Hollywood sign. A bunch of straight lines in the middle of the garden of eden. Lana is still struggling in the master-slave dialectic. Can’t you see the struggle? Ok, so she’s struggling with herself; with her own desires; with her subconscious drives. Of course it’s [a] struggle! That’s how it must start when we’re dealing with the subconscious! We haven’t turned the light on yet! But eventually, Lana would “move” from the H of the Hollywood sign to the tunnel under Ocean Boulevard. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves again.

Hey! I had a girlfriend once! You can find evidence of this if you go snooping around. We were in our mid 20s. I recall a bit of tension between the immediate and the long term in this relationship. The question of “do you think we’ll be in love forever?” It turns out to be a “stupid” question. There are no stupid people; only stupid questions. That is, it turns out to be a question not worth asking. I sometimes joke that if my ex had stayed with me, she wouldn’t have the same problems; she’d have different problems. But my ex and I are no longer in love with each other. We don’t have to be. Love is love, remember? The “point” is that, as Chuck Tingle is fond of saying, LOVE IS REAL! It’s not any less “real” just because it’s no longer, say, “romantic” love.

Another “point” is that if you are seeking a “forever” love in the immediate, you are still struggling within the master-slave dialectic. You are still looking to attain the metaphysical without having access to [a] synthesis of the dialectic. But love, like solidarity, must start from within. Well, for you to share love, it must come from within. Maybe it’s not “in” there yet. Maybe you still need to “construct” it. Self-love must be constructed. I’m reminded of a scene from Disney’s The Sword in the Stone. Merlin tells Arthur, “Come on! Move your muscle!” Arthur says, “But I don’t have any muscle!” M: “Well how do you move about then?” A: “Well, I guess I do have a little.” M: “Well, that’s enough then!” He’s trying to get Arthur to move past the voice in his head that says, “I am not enough.” I’m further reminded of a scene in The Last Temptation of Christ. Jesus meets some desert mystics. One of them asks him if he has love for the masses. He replies that, at this point, all he has is pity for them. And, again, the reply is, “that’s enough.” Arthur couldn’t see his own muscle, but Merlin “saw” evidence that Arthur had muscle in the fact that Arthur was moving! That’s how humans move! Through operating our muscles! Much of this operation happens subconsciously. We must recognize that the subconscious corresponds to dialectical material, i.e., physiological, processes. We must recognize that experience and memory correspond to these processes. We must recognize that the first step to “defeating” the voice that says, “I am not enough,” must be a small one; but must also be a step we can build (up)on.

But there’s still an elephant in the room, isn’t there? A big, toothless elephant, riddled with parasites. Self-love may very well still be terrifying to you. Why? Is it the self part or the love part? We’ve already seen the authentic selves of Theresa Luna, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and, well, me. Well, we can learn a lot about self-love through the so-called “monomyth” or “hero’s journey.” Yes, Lana Del Rey has a lot to teach us about this too! Remember, the so-called “monomyth” is simply a representation of the ego’s plumbing the depths of the subconscious and returning to the surface in a new “form” at a more advanced stage of development (cf. the muskrat hero from the Turtle Island creation myth).

But who is my audience here? The typical westoid is terrified of what they view as “human nature.” The westoid is constantly propagandized into thinking that “human nature” is terrifying. Why wouldn’t you be? The ruling class needs you to be terrorized by “human nature” so you can stand by while they send jackbooted thugs all over the world to do terrorism in their Global War Of Terror, or, closer to home, so you can stand by while they keep giving the Elijah McClain treatment or the George Floyd treatment to disabled people. They have to make you think communism “doesn’t work” because of this “human nature” so that you’re too afraid to try it. They have to make you terrified of struggle, so they get you addicted to comfort. If you are addicted to comfort, you will be terrified of anything uncomfortable, including struggle (which includes labor in the Marxian sense), including conflict, including even introspection (due to phobia of the subconscious—phobia of staring into Nietzsche’s so-called “abyss”)! Therefore, terrified of progress! And so you will be effectively immobilized when the time comes for you to walk away from Omelas or to walk out the door of the hell of other people. But you must leave Plato’s cave and step into the light in order to take the necessary and SUFFICIENT further steps!

For struggle is in human nature! It’s how we evolved from ape to human, after all! Struggle, and other forms through which discomfort may be felt, are necessary parts of the hero’s journey! We don’t so much need Campbell to talk about the “hero’s journey.” We should have developed our own “heroes” by now. The people who discover (through developing it, through struggle) and reveal their authentic selves. The muskrat from the Turtle Island myth. Perhaps some of these “heroes” might even be musicians.

But first, before I forget, yeah, sure, I’ve been talking about the voice in our heads that tells us we are not enough. We should be able by now to recognize the connection between this “voice,” this parasitic programming, and Comrade Marina’s three “pillars” of the “system”: hierarchy, scarcity, and shame. Hierarchy would “tell” you are not “enough” because it defines “enough” in relation to hierarchy. Scarcity would “say” you don’t “have” (hold, possess, own) “enough.” Shame “tells” you that you are “not enough” in the sense that you “must” cover yourself; you must hide the authentic self. We should also be able to recognize this in gate-source (or “silo-source”) perversion. Just like the map is not the territory, the silo, the gate, is not the source. The source comes before the gate dialectically. Nature is not the source of scarcity. Nature is the source of abundance. The source of scarcity lies in the cutting off (of the masses) from source, i.e., nature, the channeling and siloing of it behind gates, and the failure to distribute it according to need, all controlled by the ruling class. Similarly, nature is not the source of hierarchy. Nature is dialectical. The “natural order” is a dialectical order, not a hierarchical order. The patriarchy is the “source” of hierarchy. The “-archy” should’ve been a bit of a clue. But if the ruling class, which corresponds to the patriarchy, channels [stuff] (e.g., grain) from the “source” into silos, through gates they control, they can certainly distribute the “source” in a hierarchical manner. And, of course, nature is not the source of shame. The “source” of shame is parasitic programming installed by the patriarchy via their sending us through the master-slave dialectic. Because the patriarchy needs us to be grateful for their silos so we’re not asking why they’ve channeled the stuff into their silos in the first place. So it needs to prevent us from reflecting on this question by making us feel like we are being ungrateful, and then making us feel ashamed for feeling ungrateful. Marina talks about this too. So we’re talking about the same thing, just from slightly different perspectives.

The kind of hero’s journey we’ll be covering is much more like the journey of the muskrat hero than Oedipus. The missing “pieces” will have much more to do with gathering clods of soil from the bottom of the subconscious than with some (hidden or worn on the sleeve) identity of your biological parents. I really hate those stories. Real big yawn from me.

So we’ll be looking at the “hero’s journey” as captured in various music albums. This corresponds to the journey of self-actualization. Self-actualization requires changes in experience, generally changes in environment. Well, ultimately, it requires seeing “the everyday” in new ways. i.e., you must learn that the real “change in experience” will require changing “how” you experience what you’ve already been experiencing. It also corresponds to the synthesis of the master-slave dialectic into the dialectic(s) of freedom (remember Free Willy). These dialectics are, e.g.: the dialectic of freedom and dependency, that of freedom and necessity, and that of freedom and determinism. These correspond to the dialectic of the ego and the whole self, that of the self and the other, and that of the individual and the collective. There is the journey away from home and back, but there is also the journey out of Plato’s cave, out of the master-slave dialectic, out of Omelas, into freedom. Revolution will require seizing the means of production, therefore, the means of keeping people in bondage. There are physical and “metaphysical” means of keeping people in bondage. The “voice” that says, “I am not enough,” remember. So revolution will require freeing the prisoners from Plato’s cave, from the Omelas basement, from the master-slave dialectic, from the prison of intersectionality!

I suppose the “purest form” of this album, at least that I’ve encountered, is Homogenic by Björk. We don’t need Campbell to tell us this is a hero’s journey. Björk is our hero, isn’t she? She’s certainly not afraid to reveal her authentic self. And she tells us she’s going on a journey in the first track, “Hunter“: “If travel is searching / And home what’s been found / I’m not stopping / I’m going hunting / I’ll bring back the goods / But I don’t know when,” she says. There’s even a hint of the denial of the call to adventure: “I thought I could organize freedom / How Scandanavian of me!” But then we can see her determination taking shape: “You sussed it out, didn’t you? / You could smell it / So you left me on my own / To complete the mission / Now I’m leaving it all behind / […] / You just didn’t know me.” Well, she could mean any number of things by this. One “meaning” we can “suss out” (“wring out,” if you will) is that, from her interlocutor’s perspective, the interlocutor has left her for dead. But from her perspective, she is now free to continue “the mission” on her own in her own way. She has, in a way, attained a new level of freedom. But what have we been saying about freedom? Freedom is what the runaway slave has. Freedom, on its own, doesn’t do us much good. The runaway slave must find theirself within a community of free equals, etc., etc. But we see the determination. This determination is necessary. We can’t quite say it’s “sufficient,” but (like love out of pity) it’s at least a place to start. And so it’s important to look at the first song on an album like this to see where the rest of the album is going, so to speak.

And the self goes through various adventures in all these albums. We can find very important moments, very important stages, in, e.g., Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. In “Plenty,” she says, “You hurt me more than I ever would have imagined / You made my world stand still / And in that stillness / There was a freedom / I’d never felt before,” and “I thought I’d be with you until my dying day.” There is freedom in stillness. There is a grief that leads to acceptance, which in this model, corresponds to a “higher” degree/level of freedom—an offloading of burden. She has found freedom in accepting that this is, in a sense, “her dying day,” in that it is the “death” of certain possible futures for her. We feel these “deaths” subconsciously. We’ve been through this, right? I’m sure I’ve written about it before. But the death of one possible future can be the birth of new possible futures. We were injured through living; we must therefore heal through living. A very important moment happens in “Elsewhere” between verses 2 & 3. One thing I love about this album is that the verses are often three different stories, but they all inexorably lead to the same chorus. It’s almost like fate. It’s almost like we’re all living different verses in a song with the same chorus. Of course, what we think of as fate is merely what we are unaware (unconscious) of. Remember what Jung said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate” (we would be forgiven for quoting the popular version of whatever it was he actually said about this—it gets the point across—we’ve seen people forgiven for this before, anyway). So we must build our consciousness of the subconscious. Westoid consciousness has been horribly degraded by being blocked off from (access to) the kinds of rituals (yes, rituals!) that dialectically develop consciousness of the subconscious. Crying rituals, for example! Have you cried yet today? If not, why not? The answer to this question will be left as an exercise for the reader. So we might as well quote all three verses so we can get the full picture:

[Verse 1]
I love the time and in between
The calm inside me
In the space where I can breathe
I believe there is a distance I have wandered
To touch upon the years of
Reaching out and reaching in
Holding out, holding in

[Chorus]
I believe
This is heaven to no one else but me
And I’ll defend it long as
I can be left here to linger in silence
If I choose to
Would you try to understand?

[Verse 2]
I know this love is passing time
Passing through like liquid I am
I’m drunk in my desire
But I love the way you smile at me
I love the way your hands reach out and
Hold me near
I believe, I

[repeat chorus]

[Verse 3]
Oh the quiet child
Awaits the day when she can break free
The mold that clings like desperation
Mother can’t you see I’ve got
To live my life the way I feel is
Right for me
Might not be right for you but it’s
Right for me
Oh

[repeat chorus]

Ok, so I went to the Sarah McLachlan concert in Austin, TX, on 5 July 2024, where she performed the Fumbling Towards Ecstasy album in full. This concert went very well for me. I was not caught vaping by fascist thugs in uniforms. I would say this concert went well for just about everyone (especially the dude who found his head caught in the vape cloud I coughed out near the beginning of the show)! I would even say that, during this concert, about 10,000 women and at least 1,000 men got real in touch with at least one of their X chromosomes! Between the opener (Feist) and the headliner, there was a huge line for the women’s bathroom, while the men’s, though just about fully occupied, had no line, and so some women who couldn’t hold it anymore came in very apologetically to the men’s restroom to see if they could use one of the stalls. I, standing at the urinal, turned my head and shouted: “We’re dudes at a Sarah McLachlan concert! We’re woke!” Did I ease the tension? Perhaps.

Anyway, I was listening through the album the week before the concert, just to “brush up” on it again, because, this might come as a surprise to you, but I must have listened to this album about a hundred times during college (which I started in 2004). I listened to it on my iPod. It was the model with the four buttons in a row between the wheel and the screen. We were all waiting around for someone to invent the smartphone. I didn’t even get a phone that could take pictures until 2006! And so there I was, lying in bed in my studio apartment, books piled on top of the bed, listening to Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, when “Elsewhere” came on, and I sobbed, because, in this moment when I was encountering the song for the first time in a while, therefore, with what we could call “fresh ears,” I had lived the kind of life where, at this point, I could tell when the “I believe this is heaven” was real and when it was bullshit; when it was just something I was telling myself, and when it was something I felt to my core; when it was something I was pursuing to temporarily satiate the parasitic emotions and when it was an authentic experience that was happening naturally, that I was in no way “forcing” (cf. “the spirit moves like the wind”). That’s the sort of thing this song is talking about. We must learn to feel safe in our own skin (“The calm inside me / In the space where I can breathe”). This isn’t the same thing as feeling comfortable in our own skin. What. My ass itches sometimes. That’s not comfortable. But it’s not “unsafe.” At least not for now. But many of us do feel unsafe in our own skin. We feel anxiety; we feel panic. We must, so to speak, “unlearn” this. “In your skin” is the only place “you” are ever gonna be! So you’d better learn to feel safe in there! Because the feeling of safety within your own skin is, what can I say, heavenly! When all the strands have been untangled, there is only alignment, and where there is alignment, there can be peace! Because there’s no need for conflict when there’s the presence of justice! Because injustice is the “source” of conflict! And there can be no injustice between the actual self and the authentic self! Would you cut off your nose to spite your face? I hope not! So to feel safe in your own skin, you must drive out the voice that says “I am not enough”! That’s the same voice that says “I am not safe (in my own skin).” It’s a rechanneling of authentic signals of danger weaponized against the self through the implantation of ruling class false consciousness through parasitic mental programming, etc., etc.

Going back to Homogenic, again, we have songs that are very to the point lyrically. In “Immature,” she says, “How could I be so immature / To think he could replace / The missing elements in me? / How extremely lazy of me,” and, wow, that’s basically the whole song. At this point, it seems she has indeed gathered all the necessary clods of soil from the bottom of her subconscious and is ready to attain a drastically new level of freedom! And that’s what happens in the last three songs. The last three songs in an album like this are also worth paying close attention to, because those are the songs in which the protagonist attains the “highest” (the “mountaintop” where she, “no fucking Buddhist,” still feels that, in a very real way, she has attained “enlightenment,” in “Alarm Call”) and “lowest” (the “explo[sion],” after which, she will feel “A little bit tired / But brand new,” in “Pluto”) points of the journey, culminating in the realization that “All Is Full of Love” and peace and joy and fulfillment! And we can see this in the last three songs of Fumbling Towards Ecstasy as well: “Ice Cream” (“Your love is better than ice cream / Better than anything else that I’ve tried / […] / It’s a long way down to the place where we started from”), “Fear” (“I fear I have nothing to give / I have so much to lose here in this lonely place”), and the title track (“And if I shed a tear I won’t cage it / I won’t fear love / And if I feel a rage I won’t deny it / I won’t fear love / […] / Peace in the struggle to find peace”).

So, in 2023, Lana Del Rey, after 9 or 10 previous albums and hundreds of unreleased songs, released an album like this (i.e., an album that reflects the kind of “hero’s journey” we’ve been looking at) in Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard. The album begins with the line, “I’m gonna take mine of you with me,” except, no, you’ve been tricked. You’re listening to an outtake from the recording. The backup singers kinda fuck up the line. “Mine with you with me”? Almost as if to say, “What are we supposed to be saying again? What is this supposed to mean?” If you remember Edwardes (from the last essay), “my/mine” is a virtual “property” of “objects.” The “objects” in question here are, of course, memories. And memories are entirely “virtual.” The context is in the pre-chorus, where she says, “My pastor told me / When you leave [i.e., die —MM] all you take / Are your memories / And I’m gonna take mine of you with me.” Indeed, this pastor, whom we meet later on in the album, is not completely full of shit. My memories were indeed “all I took” to my own personal hell, for example. I said something not unlike this myself after witnessing the eclipse on 8 April 2024: “I am consciously creating my own future memories!” I will take these memories with me as I “journey” through life; and I will take them to my corpse, where they will dissolve back into the dialectical material whence they came—back into the World-Spirit, perhaps. You see, if you survive (live longer than) me, your memories of me will survive my death. And some of these memories might even be reconstructions of my memories, because maybe some of my memories are already reconstructions of some of your memories. And that’s kinda cool, isn’t it?

So there’s memory-creation, and there’s memory preservation (see the title track). But for now, we have to deal with memories we already have. They’re all in your head waiting for just the right moment to strike. Too many of these memories are traumatic. They are memories of trauma, but the experience of the memory is itself traumatic, in a way—”retraumatizing,” if you will. To move past this, and onto future stages, I’m afraid to say we will have to learn that when trauma reminds us of our past, we must remind it of its future. “I haven’t done a cartwheel since I was 9,” Lana reports in “A&W” (SONG OF THE DECADE! Mark my words!). What could she possibly mean by this? Well, it’s out of Lana’s hands now. We must examine everything she could possibly mean by it, because, well, this is ART, and, dialectically, it’s all a reflection of universal human experiences. For a clue as to what could be meant by this, I’m sure you’ve seen this on twitter or facebook or whatever. Someone asks something like: “what age were you when you first noticed you were being sexually objectified?” And hundreds of former girls will report numbers in the low-double and high-single digits! (confirmation of this will be left as an exercise for the reader). You live in a toxic society riddled with creeps. You think you can create a non-toxic life for yourself in this toxic society. You need to get all the hair out of the drain that’s keeping it plugged up that’s preserving these swampy conditions. The framework of justification is the rock upon which your society is built, and we must overturn this rock to expose the bugs hiding underneath! You think the Children of Mother Earth give a fuck that you’ve built a city on this rock? That city is Omelas! Whether we dismantle it brick by brick or it collapses under its own weight, the point is that it’s fucking unsustainable! Therefore, it must be recognized as merely a seed from which will spring forth the next phase of human life! And the seed must be split open in order to germinate! Are you still reading this, Jamie? Does it sound like Lana is “glamorizing” this experience? “The experience of being an American whore.”

Hey! Look! Also, here, we indeed get grown-up, traumatized Amelia Bedelia asking herself, “WHY THE FUCK AM I LIKE THIS!?”: “I’m a princess, I’m divisive / Ask me why, why, why I’m like this / Maybe I’m just kinda like this / I don’t know, maybe I’m just like this.” Yes. Maybe Lana isn’t a problem for you to solve or a construct for you to scrutinize. Maybe she’s something more like a force of nature. She affirms this in “Grandfather please…”: “I know they think that it took somebody else / To make me beautiful, beautiful / As they intended me to be / But they’re wrong / I know they think that it took thousands of people / To put me together again like an experiment / Some big men behind the scenes / Sewing Frankenstein black dreams into my songs / But they’re wrong.”

There’s more trauma, of course. Particularly in “Fingertips,” but we can’t leave A&W without noting that, by the end, she has indeed “unlocked” an astounding new level of freedom for herself when she informs her interlocutor, “Your mom called / I told her / You’re fucking up big time.” Imagine being able to inform your interlocutor of that (no, seriously, I’m telling you to imagine it, if you can!).

“Fingertips” opens (close enough) with Lana wishing for immortality (because she’s heard of recent advancements in the repairing of damage to telomeres). She says “it’s a shame that we die.” That’s the thing, isn’t it. It’s not a shame that we die per se, but it is a “shame” to die like Aaron Greene or like David Grant. She doesn’t literally mean “shame,” though. She’s pointing to deaths that “call for” a higher than usual level of grief, though this is hidden by the overall level of grief over death. But we can see that there is a difference, and we will see later how Lana becomes conscious of this difference. And here she presents us with the absurdly tragic scenario that she “was in Monaco” and “had to sing for the prince in two hours” when she heard that her uncle David, David Grant, had died in the Rocky Mountains in a “suspect[ed]” suicide. In the stream of consciousness within which the song is composed, which composes the song, this naturally leads to a memory of (again, presumably) her own suicide attempt at 15: “When I was fifteen, naked, next-door neighbors did a drive-by / Pulled me up by my waist, long hair to the beach side / I wanted to go out like you, swim with the fishes / That he caught on Rhode Island beaches / But, sometimes, it’s just not your time.” When I first heard this song, I only caught the first line of this verse. Being seen naked by the neighbors at 15 would’ve been traumatic enough, but the circumstances under which she was seen naked paint it in a whole new light if you hadn’t caught it before. It certainly puts the “teacher said we’d never make it out alive” line under a whole new light. This memory naturally leads her to thinking about her mother, who had her sent away at around that time: “Caroline [her sister, to whom much of the song is addressed —MM], what kind of mother was she to say I’d end up in institutions? / All I wanted to do was kiss Aaron Greene and sit by / The lake, twisting lime into the drinks that they made / Have a babe at sixteen in the town I was born in, and die / Aaron ended up dead and not me / What the fuck’s wrong in your head to send me away, never to come back? / Exotic places and people don’t take the place of being your child / I give myself two seconds to cry.” The giving of herself two seconds is a refrain throughout the song. Of course it is. It’s very important to give yourself two seconds “to cry,” “to breathe,” “to be me” when you need it. When you fly a kite, you must throw it into the air, but only high enough to catch the wind! You can’t throw a kite all the way up into the sky. Where would be the fun in that? Remember what I told Simeon: “I can stay calm as long as everyone else can stay centered.” JP didn’t learn from me what that meant. He had to learn it from the streets. Not one week after my little meltdown in front of him, a passenger got her extremely long hair tangled up in the wheel of his pedicab! I didn’t get a lot of details about this, but I imagine it could’ve been prevented if JP was paying more attention to his surroundings before raring to go! But nobody died, so there was no great tragedy. In the long term, JP might get away with taking it as just another lesson to take things one step at a time, to stay centered, to stay present, to stay aware of his surroundings, to stay “woke.” Even closer to home, I have indeed been told that I am at risk of institutionalizaion by people close to me—not my mom, of course. She says I’m not at risk of institutionalization as long as I stay with her, but we’ll see what the government thinks after they read this, after they find themselves unable to co-opt my revolutionary spirit.

You must understand the level of grief Lana is dealing with in these verses. We must understand grief not as something we get ourselves stuck in (though it happens to all of us), but as the process of moving (and the process by which we move) through the stages of avoidance, denial, anger, bargaining, and depression and to acceptance of the actual, of what IS, of truth, and then, from there, we will be able to/know how to change things, so that we can avoid future unnecessary grief! I think about Chappell Roan sometimes. Some people are looking up to her like she’s the next Kurt Cobain. Other people in the media seem to be acting like they want her to BECOME “the next Kurt Cobain,” if you catch my drift. Well, this was at least the case in 2024. She’s not why Trump won. If you would go so far as to blame her for that, then you might indeed be suspected of secretly wishing for her to become the next Kurt Cobain, if you catch my drift. Lana herself could’ve become the next Kurt Cobain at some point. What. You think you know why Kurt Cobain killed himself. You have a theory. You think it involves Courtney. You weren’t really paying attention to his note, were you? He spells it out very clearly for you westoid swine. Kurt Cobain killed Kurt Cobain as a protest against capitalism and the patriarchy! By killing Kurt Cobain the human being, Kurt Cobain also killed Kurt Cobain the symbol, a symbol that had taken over his life (well, really, in capitalism and class society, even the purest of “symbols” will be “processed” into just another product for mass consumption, for the bourgeois to profit off of the exploitation of proletarian labor, mostly in the “global south,” cf. the phenomenon of the Che Guevara t-shirt). But when you kill someone who has become a symbol, the symbol “resurrects” as a new kind of symbol in the hearts of the symbol’s fan[atic]s (and new kinds of marketing opportunities for the bourgeois to exploit). You think this is reductive. Nothing could be further from the truth. You call Comrade Stalin a “totalitarian.” You haven’t learned to recognize the totalizing nature of the capitalist patriarchal system you live under. Kurt saw this totalization. So did Uncle Ted. They both reacted to it in ways we could call extreme. But they had simply recognized the truth. The truth, the “secret,” is that, in class society, you can’t simply walk away from Omelas. Omelas will find you. It found Uncle Ted. It found Kurt Cobain.

I wonder if she’s referencing Dolores Haze when she says that all she wanted to do was have a baby at 16 and die. That’s what happened to her in the novel. Is this “glamorizing”? Is this “regurgitation”? She likely doesn’t mean “die right then and there.” She more likely means “die eventually in the town I was born in.” Well, either way, what she’s saying is that, at the time, that was her idea of freedom, but life had different “plans” for her, and so she had to develop new conceptions of freedom. Aaron Greene died at 23 in a car crash. This is indeed a tragic way to die. Perhaps one of the most tragic, because, generally, car crash deaths are the most avoidable/preventable. Maybe if we started thinking of (or viewing, conceptualizing, recognizing) car crash deaths as human sacrifice to the master-slave dialectic and the totalizing system of capitalist patriarchy instead of as just another everyday occurrence, maybe then we’d see fewer car crash deaths. Could it perhaps be worth a try, at least?

Lana had expressed near the beginning of the song concerns about whether she would have a child herself or be able to “handle it” if she did. In a previous work, she had reported choosing the name “Clementine” for a potential future daughter. What’s interesting (we could perhaps call it “poetic”) to me is that many of Lana’s fans call her “mother” (I don’t call her that—we’re the same age. But she does point us to Mother Earth by exemplifying transformation processes). And why wouldn’t they? Fictive kinship is a well-known phenomenon of the anthropological cult (see, e.g., Carrier, OHJ, ch. 4, e11-12). And we can see other elements of the anthropological cult in this fan[atic]dom. Soteriology, for example (see ibid). This thread asks, “which Lana Del Rey song saved you?” This person told her grandma that “Tulsa Jesus Freak” was a “gospel” song, and the comments say, “it IS a gospel song!” We are still human beings. We still yearn to attain the metaphysical. Do we (her fan[atic]s) “worship” Lana? Well, why wouldn’t we? Whatever “worship” we “offer” to her or whatever deep emotions she unlocks within us are what tumbles naturally out of our subconscious through our subjective experience of her. And if the subjective experience of her produces (in the sense that the wind blowing through wind chimes can be said to “produce” a sound from the chimes. cf. Hegel on the dialectic of cause and effect where the raindrop is both the cause of the wetness of your jacket and the effect of wetness on your jacket) such strong emotions in her fan[atic]s that they call her “mother,” well, why should that surprise us? Lana Del Rey is our fictive mother. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, why shouldn’t those who have attained union with the spirit of Lana Del Rey, in such a way, to such a depth, that they would call her “mother,” consider themselves fictive “Clementines”? And why couldn’t these fictive “Clementines” form a “Clementinian Revolutionary Movement”? They are (in certain “zones,” say) on the cutting edge, the vanguard, you might say, of lachrymology! They have transformed themselves through grief, through tears! And so has Lana! Lana says “life imitates art.” You say, “That was Oscar Wilde!” I say, “Before Oscar Wilde was, Lana Del Rey AM!” Perhaps, to paraphrase the Rastafari again (or maybe A Knight’s Tale), I might even be so bold as to say, Elizabeth Woolridge Grant might be a Christian, but Lana Del Rey is God!

But I kid. Lana Del Rey isn’t God. That would be Mother Earth. Lana is, at most, an idol. But she’s a meaningful idol. She connects us to mother earth through exemplifying transformation processes. If you use her as an idol to connect to some aggrandized ego, that’s on you. This is important. It is said that Muhammad smashed the idols around the Ka’ba because they had become meaningless. I’m reminded of the Grinch. He stole the toys, etc., whether he was aware of it at the time, to test the Whos as to whether Christmas was meaningful to them beyond the opportunity to indulge in bourgeois decadence. And when he saw that Christmas was authentically meaningful to them, well, you know the rest of the story. I’m reminded of an Austin comic who had a bit in which she wondered whether the celebration of Christmas by the Whos implied that there was a Who Jesus Christ or a Who Palestine. But Muhammad’s heart did not grow three sizes that day, did it? (did it?) I wonder what he would’ve thought of Lana Del Rey.

But, as I indicated earlier, we must not conceptualize Lana Del Rey as the westoid Oedipal hero of motherfuckerism, if for no other reason than that it’s an obsolete paradigm. We must rather conceptualize her as something far more like the muskrat hero from the Turtle Island myth, who “skinny dipped” to the bottom of her subconscious and brought back clods of soil that became the great ouvre of Lana Del Rey! And, in doing so, shone a light to paths for the rest of us to take to make the corresponding discoveries within our own subconsciouses, so we ourselves can alchemize ugliness into beauty! But I guess we’re getting ahead of ourselves again.

In “Paris, Texas,” and “Grandfather please…,” we can see Lana starting to drop burdens that have been weighing on her and readying herself for her transformation into her (more) authentic self. She is learning that every voice in her head that said, “I am not enough,” was, in fact, full of shit. In “Paris, Texas,” we see the introduction of the refrain, “when you know you know.” This is not merely a tautology! This is not merely “A=A.” Lana is speaking, whether or not she is fully aware of it, of gnosis. Of course she is. In metaphysical/dialectical-synthetic naturalism, we must surely contend with gnosis, however beyond the scope of “methodological naturalism” it may be. It’s the same kind of “knowing” Lana speaks of later in “Margaret,” the same kind of “knowing” Björk is talking about when she says, “I’m no fucking Buddhist, but this IS enlightenment”! The same knowing Overstreet and Schlitz were clumsily talking about when they said, “Old Mister Webster could never define / What’s being said between your heart and mine.” Old Mister Webster may struggle, but Old Man Patriarchy doesn’t need to “define” it so much in order to statistically transform your love into poverty through the master-slave dialectic.

Oh my god! I guess we haven’t contended with gnosis yet! What am I going to do with you? Gnosis is merely a metaphysical (phenomenal) aspect of the kind of knowledge we were talking about earlier: consciousness of truth through acceptance, acceptance of truth through moving/developing through the grieving process. Denial is not just a lake in Uganda. Denial is the lake you’re swimming in. You’re swimming in a lake filled with tiny denial particles: Denial of queerness; denial of difference of ability; denial of the truth of signals from the body; etc., etc. There is a certain strand of Christianity that is remarkably prevalent on Occupied Turtle Island today that would have its adherents believe that “the world, the flesh, and the devil” are all against them, which means the adherents must set themselves up against, well, if you’ll allow me to translate from the original Christianese: “my planet, my body, and any stray thought in my head.” Wow. That’s a lot. That’s a lot to set yourself up against. That’s why they’re so dependent on “Jesus” for all their psychological “needs.” They see Jesus as the hero of motherfuckerism who was not a motherfucker. They see motherfuckery in human nature. They call it the “sin nature.” Yikes! It would be better for them to view Jesus as the muskrat hero, and his crucifixion as representative of the crucifixion of the ego, which ego resurrects not as the main character, but as The Story, which is to say, imprinted (deeply) with the dialectic (cf. “Doubting Thomas,” cf. the wounds received “in the house of my friends” from Zechariah, cf. Rich Mullins: “And when your prayers give flight to your dreams / May the only scars you see on their wings be wounds of love”—except we don’t pray; we cry. Far more effective). This reading is certainly available to them should they choose to “read” it that way.

Carrier points out in Obsolete Paradigm that “gnosticISM” is a modern academic construct, because, basically, all early Christian sects held some “gnostic” beliefs, but there was no one sect that held all of them or originated them. But, basically, what the “gnostic beliefs” are said to be is that there was a true god who created the spiritual world, but the material world was created by a “false” or “evil” god called the “Demiurge.” Well, if we flip it inside out, we can indeed see correspondence between this model and our model of Mother Earth as the true “god” who created this natural world we find ourselves in, under the influence of the sun and moon, etc., and the patriarchy as the false “god” who created this fake, made-up world of ruling class social constructs (abstractions) that “drives” (institutionally and subconsciously) the totalizing bourgeois dictatorship we also “find” ourselves in.

The reason [what we’re calling] “gnosticism” is important is that “agnosticism” is one of the patriarchy’s most powerful tools. Specifically, selective agnosticism. Agnosticism doesn’t really mean (doesn’t really claim), “I can’t know [x].” What agnosticism TRULY means/claims is: “YOU can’t know [x].” This is a far more “extraordinary” claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. “I can know [x] through experiencing process [y]” is a far more ordinary claim. It’s a claim that can be tested. For if one person can go through process [y], then another person could, then, perhaps, anyone could. And, if the syllogism is valid, the same applies for [x] knowledge. Therefore, “anyone can know [x]” turns out to be a far less “extraordinary” claim than it would appear on the surface.

Ok. Fine. I know a guy who claims to have had an “NDE.” He doesn’t even call it that. He calls it a “death experience.” I am not making this guy up; he just wouldn’t want me to be talking about him in this book. We can call him “Abraham.” He is a father, after all. So if you want Abe’s side of the story, just ask him and he’ll talk your ear off about it. Abe, unfortunately, has no access to synthetic naturalism or trans-Platonic formalism or a holographic principle, so he’s had little choice the past almost 40 years to believe that his experience was, in some sense, “real,” that he “really” went to “the” hell and met “the” Devil and “the” Jesus, when “the” Jesus and “the” Devil he “met” were really no more (or less) “real” than my field of burning bushes or Maynard’s Entity from “Rosetta Stoned.”

Abe says there was fire, of course. Maybe next opportunity, I’ll ask him if he saw anything in the flames. He reports remembering that his mom told him that if he was ever in trouble, to call out to Jesus, and Jesus would hear him. Indeed, the Entity in the trip, the hologram generated by subconscious activity, “hears” the cry for “Jesus.” Christians are constantly told, conditioned from an early age, to imagine Jesus’ saving them from impossible conditions. So, “in the world of pure imagination,” it’s no surprise that one can imagine “Jesus coming down to save you from hell” or a blue alien from a banana ship or a field of burning bushes. But what we must recognize is that what is being pointed to in Abe’s case is his mom’s love for him and vice versa. Much like Maynard credits his mom’s great love for him with saving his life, and I credit my mom similarly, from the stories Abe has told me, we can know that he feels the same way about his mom. So I would like to tell him that it was really his mom who saved his life, not Jesus.

But what can agnosticism (with its favorite little tool, “methodological naturalism”) do with Abe’s “NDE” or Maynard’s Entity or my field of burning bushes? Well, we would probably be sent to a psychiatrist, who would insist, and attempt to convince us, that these experiences were “not real.” Well, I know my experience wasn’t “real.” It was virtual. But your westoid scientists don’t know the subconscious like they know computers. Your westoid scientists haven’t recognized the science of meaning. You’re all Uncle Ted’s conservatives. It’s very instructive to read what he said about them in paragraph 50 of his manifesto: “The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.” He’s not merely talking about “conservative” values. He’s talking about moral values in general. You might even say he’s echoing Uncle Karl: ‘The bourgeoisie […] has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment” […] the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.’ Or, more pithily, “All that is solid melts into air.” He’s certainly “echoing” the historical materialist principle of the dialectical relationship between the forces and relations of production which Marx discusses in the “All that is solid” paragraph from the manifesto. Agnosticism is a form of denialism. There’s plenty of selective agnosticism among conservatives. There’s plenty of denial of the obvious: that bourgeois (specifically technological) “progress,” which they love, is directly tied to every other kind of (ultimately illusory) “liberal progress” they claim to hate. But liberals also think they can have their cake of “moral progress” while also eating the decadent cake of bourgeois technological “progress,” but no, it’s the same cake. And as Uncle Ted also told us, “[Y]ou can’t eat your cake and have it too. To gain one thing you have to sacrifice another.” And liberal society is a hundreds-years-long story of morality being sacrificed on the altar of profit. And the same kind of agnosticism that upholds theism, through allowing itself to get stuck at “methodological naturalism,” also upholds this bourgeois dictatorship we find ourselves in, by taking bourgeois social constructs at face-value, and not equipping itself to see beyond them. Yes, the same “agnosticism” you cling to is the same agnosticism that allowed for a society that produces people like Uncle Ted!

Yes, Uncle Ted was a feature, not a bug, of your society. You might have heard that Uncle Ted was subjected to MK Ultra experiments in college. Bitch! Uncle Ted’s whole life was an MK Ultra experiment! The society you live in is one big MK Ultra experiment! You are currently being subjected to MK Ultra experiments in your everyday life! You live in a society where you are approximately one snap away from being homeless or institutionalized! And you are programmed to think this precarity doesn’t weigh on you or otherwise negatively affect your life, when it’s the biggest factor you base all of your decisions on! As Uncle Karl says in the “All that is solid” paragraph:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

And here Marx also tells us that, under capitalism, we can’t leave Omelas:

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

Dialectical materialism is not “an,” not a form of, “agnosticISM.” Agnosticism is not an element of dialectical materialism. It’s not a value or principle we hold to. AgnosticISM is disproved by the transformation, the synthesis, of the Kantian thing-in-itself into the Engelsian thing-for-us. Surely there are things we can’t know, but that is never the end of the story. There’s always more to investigate; always more to discover. But we must learn to appreciate the knowledge we already have access to. We must “metabolize” it, thereby “integrating” it into our “selves.” That’s what “gnosis” is! When the knowledge becomes a part of you! When you’ve been imprinted with the dialectic! That’s why London cab drivers call it “the knowledge.” It has literally become a part of them, dialectically and synthetically, and therefore, “metaphysically”! And that is the kind of knowledge Lana Del Rey is talking about when she says, “when you know, you know”!

And there are a few more clods of soil we can look at, that Lana picked up from the bottom of the subconscious and brought to the surface. The importance of memory is emphasized throughout the album. Why wouldn’t it be? Memory is how we construct meaning. We are not merely “constructing meaning in a meaningless universe.” That would be extremely silly. You might as well say bees are “constructing beehives in a beehiveless universe.” Bees are the thing in the universe that constructs beehives! Similarly, we are the thing in the universe that constructs meaning! And, much like the construction of beehives for the bee, our construction of meaning is “encoded” in our DNA, and we require this construction of meaning in order to keep ourselves alive! The bourgeoisie, of course, wants you to think THEY are the constructors of meaning and THEY are the ones keeping you alive. Yes. Why wouldn’t they want you to think that? It’s what all their ads tell us. The ads all try to tell us that we get our meaning (our joy, our precious moments) from (our consumption or at least possession of) commodities bearing their corporate brands. This is a very important tool for keeping us at the level of westoid swine consciousness. There’s an ad playing on my computer right now as I’m looking up Lana Del Rey lyrics. It’s an ad for Coca-Cola. Over a hundred years of research into the manipulation of the human subconscious has gone into these ads. Oh my god. What do you think “fizzing” (featured in the ad) is? It’s a phenomenon your body produces naturally (look it up if you haven’t experienced it yourself). It’s why we’re so attracted to it. That’s why technological reproduction of this fizzing produces such successful commodities. They want you to think they invented fizzing or something. Just like the ruling class, through mythically representing themselves as gods, wanted us to think they invented fire.

In the title track, Lana says, “don’t forget me” (echoing Nilsson) and “love me until I love myself.” Well, yes, sometimes we don’t know what love is until we have been truly loved. That is what The Velveteen Rabbit teaches us, for example. But perhaps, in saying, “fuck me to death,” Lana is indicating that she is still, if only for now, in the land of gods and monsters; still chasing after a confused jouissance instead of letting joy come to her. Love is alignment (including “union”) of being-for-self with being-for-other. And so you must align your own being-for-self with your own being-for-other. And so you must learn the dialectics of ego and whole-self, of self and other, and of individual and collective. Of course, it’s not so easy. I had to go through my own “muskrat journey” in order to learn these things. But more on that later, perhaps.

Lana picks up another clod of soil from, of all places, church. The aforementioned pastor, Judah Smith, in “Judah Smith Interlude,” speaks of, well, we don’t have to say it’s that deep. We don’t have to claim that what he says in this interlude is any more or less deep than, “If you can’t be with the one you love / Honey, love the one you’re with.”

Judah, (Lana):
Don’t you understand what that means?
It means quit lusting after your neighbor
That’s a heck of a life
You get to love your children in front of you
You get to love
You ever talk to somebody
“I want a new life”
“I don’t love my wife anymore”
“I don’t love my kids anymore”
“I’m missing out on life”
They’re usually my age
Does that sound like love?
It’s a life dominated with lust
And for too long, they’ve been holding it off
And finally, they just get weak and they say
“It doesn’t matter anymore”
And the Spirit of God says
“I’ll infuse you with desires for what you have
And what’s in front of you” (Yeah, yeah, yeah)
(Desires for what you have)
So, as He works deep in your heart
As you call out to Him and say
“I’m here, do it in me, Man”
“Help me want what I got”
“Help me love what’s in front of me”
“Help me want more of my wife and more of my friends”
“And help me serve the city I live in and not wish it away and hope I can move”
“Help me, God”
“I wanna be a man of love, not a man of lust”
But you’ve gotta do that

Ok, sorry for subjecting you to that, but it’s important for understanding the rest of the album. We can’t look at what he’s saying through the framework of methodological naturalism. We’d get caught up in how, even if there were a god, we couldn’t know anything about it, and, even if we could, we’ve already studied prayer and found no evidence that it “works.” We have to use synthetic naturalism. And, in synthetic naturalism, it is indeed important to scrape the bottom of your own barrel for meaning before you go looking for new barrels; to metabolize the information you already have access to. And it is just as important to love the people who are already in your life. And in his sermon, Smith is merely positing, putting forward, his “brand” (it is a “brand,” after all) of Christianity as a psychosocial “technology” for finding joy in what you already have access to. But synthetic naturalism allows us to directly tap into the “source” of this “technology”! Why would we crave a future in outer space (or in some metaphysical “heavenly realm”) when we are so strongly connected to mother earth, and when we find so much meaning and joy and peace and fulfillment in this connection? Besides, we’re already “in” space! Mother Earth, in addition to everything else she is, is already a “spaceship”! Neil deGrasse Tyson is not wrong when he calls it “Spaceship Earth”!

We can see that Lana has come to an understanding of what it means to be imprinted with the dialectic in “Kintsugi.” In the practice of kintsugi, we indeed take the shards of the broken vase from VDMT, p. 188 and transform it into a work of art, thereby giving it “a new life” and “a new stage of development.” To quote the genius annotation:

A kintsugi or kintsukuroi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum; the method is similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

In the context of this song, Lana tells us how she is broken, hurt and damaged and has learned to see the beauty in it. When your heart breaks, you are made aware that you have a heart, and that you can feel pain, love, and loss.

Indeed, in the first verse, she says, “But I can’t say I run when things get hard / It’s just that I don’t trust myself with my heart / But I’ve had to let it break a little more / ‘Cause they say that’s what it’s for / […] That’s how the light gets in.” The light gets in through the cracks. That’s how the truth leaks “into” the narrative (perhaps the one you’re in now, for example). And that’s how you become imprinted with the dialectic and how you attain knowledge (gnosis) of truth (cf. Avril Lavigne, of all people: “Life’s like this, you / You fall, and you crawl, and you break / And you take what you get and you turn it into / Honesty, and promise me, I’m never gonna find you fake it”). Of course, we need to step into the light to let the light in. Of course, we also have light “in” us. And when we find our inner light, we can’t hide it under a bushel. And it must neither only “leak out” through cracks! This light must “fill” the world!

In “Grandfather please…,” Lana says, “God, if you’re near me, send me three white butterflies / Or an owl to know you’re listening[.]” What? The Christian God? The god commonly conceptualized as a old man with a beard? As a dude with a penis? In the unlikely event that you were “sent” 3 butterflies or an owl, it would have been Mother Earth who “sent” them! And I can’t quite “speak for Mother Earth,” but if I were Her, I’d be pretty tired at this point of people giving credit for my birds and butterflies to some dude with a penis that they made up in their heads. But that’s between Lana and Mother Earth.

And here Lana says she is, “Regrettably, also a white woman” (notably, after calling herself a “fallible deity.” Very funny, Lana!). Are you still reading this, Jamie? Lana has, in a sense, put herself in your prison of intersectionality! What she’s saying, of course, reeks of self-pity, but we must understand it as, in a sense, intersectional self-pity (she did participate in at least one “black lives matter” protest, after all—see “Text Book” from Blue Banisters). That’s really what “intersectionality” is, after all: The extension of white (“American”) self-pity across the general population; the redistribution of white self-pity (we might as well say, “the redistribution of poison”). It’s not so different from Sojourner Truth’s “ain’t I a woman?” In the society she was living in, which is not so different from today, the question, “ain’t I a woman?” translates to, “ain’t I a second-class citizen?,” which, for her, would have been an upgrade. In the end, of course, Sojourner is saying the same thing as Marx and the CRC: “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right side up again!” In other words, again, the energy trapped at the bottom must make the whole stack fly into the air.

But maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we don’t need to blow up the stack. Maybe we should be making a much more lateral move. If enough “material” at the bottom seeps out through cracks in the system, the scum at the top will lose its support. Maybe the ants need to carry away the stack piece by piece as a superorganism. In any event, we certainly need to update, to refresh, our metaphors and, at the same time and as part of the same process, our “theories of change,” our conceptualizations and plans for activity (and the activities themselves) to bring about that change. And we certainly need to be clear about what/which changes these are going to be!

Oh boy. Here’s where Lana really gets herself in trouble: “But I have good intentions even if I’m one of the last ones / If you don’t believe me, my poetry, or my melodies / Feel it in your bones.” You might merely regurgitate the mantra of intersectionality here: “intentions aren’t magic.” Ok. So you’ve identified a shadow on the wall of your trans-Platonic cave. Have a delicious wreath of oat flakes for your inner slime mold. The real “problem” is that even to take “intentions” into consideration is to place yourself within the framework of justification. To become a true revolutionary, Lana must break the framework of justification, not unlike how her heart had to break to “let the light in.” It would certainly be “regrettable” if Lana were to stop at “I’m one of the last ones with good intentions” and not go further to, “what if, instead, I were one of the FIRST ones with good intentions? What would that look like?” Then she would have to spend a lot of time investigating that question. And then, at some point, she would certainly find herself imprinted with that dialectic, and attain that “gnosis.” Lana certainly wants us to see “good intentions” in her ouvre, and I certainly see enough of them, but her making it about her intentions is a narrative. And the thing about narratives is that they can easily be picked apart. And so Lana points to her ouvre itself, and the effect it has on us, as if to say, “Can’t you feel my good intentions in your bones? Doesn’t that mean something?” And of course the feeling is meaningful; but the meaning doesn’t come from her intentions. The source of Lana’s intentions is her (well, really “Elizabeth’s”) subconscious; and in the subconscious, there’s far more to contend with than intention. You (Lana, even) would point to your own “righteousness” when we have already established that your westoid, bourgeois ego-righteousness is as filthy rags and must be incinerated in the fires of your own personal hell. What. You’ve done it before. Now all that remains is to do it again for your “whiteness.” What’s the problem? I’m afraid we’ve run out of time for self-pity. I’m afraid we must find a new way forward. Maybe you (reader) are not unlike Jesus from Last Temptation, who, when I, the desert mystic, asks you if you have love for YOURSELF, responds, “when I look at MYSELF, all I feel is pity.” And to that I say, sure, it’s a fine place to start, but you’d better start the dialectic of transforming (metamorphosing) self-pity into self-love if we’re really gonna move society forward to the next stage of development! “Socialism or barbarism” is not just a slogan, comrade! And there is no secret third thing!

Ok, so now we’ve reached the “highest point” of the album. “He met Margaret on a rooftop,” Lana says. And what higher point can you attain than a rooftop? You’d have to go back down first. A rooftop is a local peak! “He” is said to be Jack Antonoff, the producer/co-writer/featured vocalist of the track, and Margaret is said to be his then fiance, now wife, Margaret Qualley. I happen to be writing this on 18 December 2025, the same calendar date mentioned in the song, though no year is mentioned (more on this later). Jack is depicted as being nothing short of overwhelmed by the mere sight of Margaret: ‘He met Margaret on a rooftop, she was wearin’ white / And he was like, “I might be in trouble” / He had flashes of the good life, he was like / “Should I jump off this building now or do it on the double?”‘ A potential future life with her flashes before his eyes. David Foster Wallace wrote of this phenomenon in Infinite Jest. But Jack is, at this point, prepared to say, “when you know, you know.” Whether he himself has genuinely achieved/attained this, he is indeed also pointing to the same kind of “gnosis” we were talking about earlier. The “gnosis” that “your love is better than ice cream”; the gnosis of Björkian enlightenment; the gnosis that “the smile on your face lets me know that you need me”; etc., etc.

Ok, so what’s “December 18”? Well, it’s when(?) the party “is.” What “party”? Well, it certainly wasn’t the marriage of Jack and Margaret! That was on a completely different date! Perhaps Lana pulled a fictitious date out of the “æther,” out of the void, out of the subconscious, “spontaneously.” Margaret herself reports being thankful that Lana did not, so to speak, leak the actual date of the wedding. Ok, fine. “I mean, join the party / By the way, the party’s December 18,” Lana says. Great! So what is there preventing us from starting our own “December 18 Party”? Yes, what is there preventing the Revolutionary Clementinian Movement from starting the Revolutionary “December 18 Party” and seizing the means of production from the ruling class? We certainly have the power of tears on our side! And most of Lana Del Rey’s fan[atic]s are, consciously or not, in the proletariat due to the simple fact that most people in this so-called “neoliberal” phase of capitalist class society have spent their lives being subjected to ever greater degrees of proletarianization. Even those who would claim to “advocate” for the working class have little access to advocating for us as anything other than “consumers,” i.e., westoid swine-subjects. Indeed, it is very much in the interests of the ruling class in the imperial core to undermine the building of solidarity between the westoid “working class” (such as it is) and its “third world,” “global south,” counterpart. And it has found a very effective path to this goal not (merely) by exploiting the labor of the westoid working class, but (especially) by exploiting their attention. Why wouldn’t they exploit your attention? They were the ones who commodified it. And if they can exploit your attention, they can certainly, to a degree, exploit your consumption habits. And now we’re not even talking about causing the ruling class any discomfort, much less talking about revolution! And that is how the ruling class is trying to “uphold” their own “security” in the “neoliberal” era.

Let’s see, Uncle Ted talked about this too. He talked about it in the context of how to message it, which, big yawn from me. I’m not going to Uncle Ted for “optics.” But let’s hear him out anyway:

Any kind of social conflict helps to destabilize the system, but one should be careful about what kind of conflict one encourages. The line of conflict should be drawn between the mass of the people and the power-holding elite of industrial society (politicians, scientists, upper-level business executives, government officials, etc.). It should NOT be drawn between the revolutionaries and the mass of the people. For example, it would be bad strategy for the revolutionaries to condemn Americans for their habits of consumption. Instead, the average American should be portrayed as a victim of the advertising and marketing industry, which has suckered him into buying a lot of junk that he doesn’t need and that is very poor compensation for his lost freedom. Either approach is consistent with the facts. It is merely a matter of attitude whether you blame the advertising industry for manipulating the public or blame the public for allowing itself to be manipulated. As a matter of strategy one should generally avoid blaming the public. (para 190)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, Uncle Ted. Let’s not blame the westoid public for being degraded to the point of swine consciousness by the master-slave dialectic. Let’s not blame the westoid public for living in Omelas and using the third world as their basement. Great idea. Real cute. Is that one of the things they taught you in those MK Ultra experiments? The real “mass of the people” lives in the global south, westoid. The real “mass of the people” is constantly being subjected to ruthless westoid oppression/exploitation by imperial core megabourgeois institutions. If you’re not conscious of this, you might as well be Bruno from “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” (terrible history, of course, but perhaps if it had a different setting, it would be more easily recognized as a fairly insightful myth about how the westoid protects their [moral, etc.] comfort—and by the same process remains compliant, non-resistant—in the face of westoid atrocities by going to great lengths to protect their ignorance, performing great feats of denial, avoidance, compartmentalization, etc.). You’re already very likely at a level of consciousness corresponding largely to his. Yes. Your consciousness has already been severely degraded through what we could, in technical terms, call Yakubian Tricknology. And perhaps you may someday meet the same fate as Bruno, not unlike the Israelis who died under the auspices of the Hannibal directive as part of Israel’s “response” to Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Flood Operation of 7 October 2023.

Yakubian Tricknology is a very important concept to grasp (if for no other reason than the ruling class is constantly using it against YOU, even if you are outwardly Yakubian). And, indeed, to see it exemplified, we need look no further than the actions of a man named Yakub. You might have seen the “viral video” of Jacob Fauci stealing Muna el-Kurd’s house in Sheikh Jarrah (in “East Jerusalem”) in 2009 (per source). She says, “You are stealing my house, Yakov!” He replies, “If I don’t steal your house, someone else will steal it.” And we must recognize THIS as Yakubian Tricknology in action. Because while it wasn’t strictly legal for Yakub to steal Muna’s house (that’s what “steal” means), there is a very powerful infrastructure in place to support this kind of theft. And this infrastructure is also a development of Yakubian Tricknology. So we must recognize the dialectical relationship between means and ends. We’ve moved far beyond “the ends justify the means,” to the point where we must now recognize that studying the means can tell us a lot about the ends (and vice versa, of course). We (the masses) have to study the infrastructure that enabled the theft of Muna’s house so we can more/most effectively dismantle that infrastructure and recycle the pieces into something we can actually use. Otherwise, this infrastructure will keep enabling the theft of houses and the theft of Palestinian land and, more importantly, the murder of Palestinians by zionist occupiers, until it collapses under its own weight, and I’d like to think we can do better than that.

So what “hope” can Lana give us that we can do better? Well, you shall see this “hope,” westoid. You shall see it very clearly. We can call it the “hope” of Mario. Mario Incandenza from Infinite Jest, of course. And I certainly have “no hope” to offer you BUT “the hope of Mario.” Indeed, a wicked and adulterous (“adulterated,” at least) generation asks for (seeks external sources of) “hope”! But none will be given it except the hope of Mario! And now one greater than Mario is here. Lana did already tell us, “When the world was at war before / We kept on dancing / And we’ll do it again.” Here, we can certainly recognize her as echoing the “spirit” of Rosa Luxemburg, but we can also “hear” a faint echo of Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, when he says, “It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, […and] we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation [I reserve endorsing Engels’ “metaphysical statistic” here —MM], the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it.” We might even see her as echoing Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park: “Life finds a way.”

Mario Incandenza is a very important character to familiarize yourself with, just as Helen Keller and Rosa Luxemburg are both very important (SOCIALIST!) historical figures to familiarize yourself with. The Buddha was said to be a being of limitless compassion, and so is (“is”) Mario Incandenza. And if we want to bring about socialist revolution and the World of Mother Earth, we must become secular Buddhas, at least in the sense that we must embody limitless compassion, and we can certainly learn a thing or two about unlimited compassion from the character Mario Incandenza! Because Mario Incandenza was born with, well, you might call them “severe disabilities.” But what you call “severe disabilities,” we can instead merely call “atypical ability profiles.” “Disability” is your word. “Dis-” is your word. The children of mother earth have no need for “dis-ing” our abilities. Ok, so Mario I. had a drastically atypical ability profile from before he was scraped out of Avril M. Incandenza’s womb. He was born with block-like feet and claw-like hands. He needed to wear a police lock just to stand in place. Imagine having such atypical appendages. This would certainly cause you difficulty in a world made exclusively “for” people with more typical appendages. And he grew no taller than, according to the book, a “fire-hydrant.” And he was “homodontic,” which is to say that all his teeth were the same, in his case, all bicuspids, like a porpoise. He doesn’t have the kind of configuration of nerve endings that allow him to feel pain, and is thusly deprived of a very important “tool” (or “technology”) for preventing injury. He has a learning “disability,” such that he is depicted as illiterate at 19, though this does not prevent him from being a very talented/skilled filmmaker in his own right, after having learned the craft from his father. But more importantly, none of this prevents him from (it may, indeed, even contribute to his) embodying unlimited compassion, and, just as importantly, taking unlimited joy in everyday life. The following passage from Infinite Jest illustrates this compassion (and joy) in its full “glory,” and is thusly worth quoting in full. Don’t worry, it’s only two paragraphs. Of course, even then, I will “have to” give you your oat flakes in advance for identifying the slur. And, well, if you get lost, just roll with it:

The consensus among E.T.A.s is that Head Trainer Barry Loach resembles a wingless fly—blunt and scuttly, etc. One E.T.A. tradition consists of Big Buddies recounting to new or very young Little Buddies the saga of Loach and how he ended up as an elite Head Trainer even though he doesn’t have an official degree in Training or whatever from Boston College, which is where he’d gone to school. In outline form, the saga goes that Loach grew up as the youngest child of an enormous Catholic family, the parents of which were staunch Catholics of the old school of extremely staunch Catholicism, and that Mrs. Loach (as in the mom)’s life’s most fervent wish was that one of her countless children would enter the R.C. clergy, but that the eldest Loach boy had done a two-year U.S.N. bit and had gotten de-mapped early on in the Brazilian O.N.A.N./U.N. joint action of Y.T.M.P.; and that within weeks of the wake the next oldest Loach boy had died of ciquatoxic food-poisoning eating tainted blackfin grouper; and the next oldest Loach, Therese, through a series of adolescent misadventures had ended up in Atlantic City NJ as one of the women in sequined leotards and high heels who carries a large posterboard card with the Round # on it around the ring between rounds of professional fights, so that hopes for Therese becoming a Carmelite dimmed considerably; and on down the line, one Loach falling helplessly in love and marrying right out of high school, another burning only to play the cymbals with a first-rate philharmonic (now crashing away with the Houston P.O.). And so on, until there was just one other Loach child and then Barry Loach, who was the youngest and also totally under Mrs. L.’s thumb, emotionally; and that young Barry had breathed a huge sigh of relief when his older brother — always a pious and contemplative and big-hearted kid, brimming over with abstract love and an innate faith in the indwelling goodness of all men’s souls — began to show evidence of a true spiritual calling to a life of service in the R.C. clergy, and ultimately entered Jesuit seminary, removing an enormous weight from his younger brother’s psyche because young Barry — ever since he first slapped a Band-Aid on an X-Men figure — felt his true calling was not to the priesthood but to the liniment-and-adhesive ministry of professional athletic training. Who, finally, can say the whys and whences of each man’s true vocation? And then so Barry was a Training major or whatever at B.C., and by all accounts proceeding satisfactorily toward a degree, when his older brother, quite far along toward getting ordained or frocked or whatever as a licensed Jesuit, suffered at age twenty-five a sudden and dire spiritual decline in which his basic faith in the innate indwelling goodness of men like spontaneously combusted and disappeared — and for no apparent or dramatic reason; it just seemed as if the brother had suddenly contracted a black misanthropic spiritual outlook the way some twenty-five-year-old men contract Sanger-Brown’s ataxia or M.S., a kind of degenerative Lou Gehrig’s Disease of the spirit — and his interest in serving man and God-in-man and nurturing the indwelling Christ in people through Jesuitical pursuits underwent an understandable nosedive, and he began to do nothing but sit in his dormitory room at St. John’s Seminary — right near Enfield Tennis Academy, coincidentally, on Foster Street in Brighton off Comm. Ave., right by the Archdiocese H.Q. or whatever — sitting there trying to pitch playing-cards into a wastebasket in the middle of the floor, not going to classes or vespers or reading his Hours, and talking frankly about giving up the vocation altogether, which all had Mrs. Loach just about prostrate with disappointment, and had young Barry suddenly re-weighted with dread and anxiety, because if his brother bailed out of the clergy it would be nearly irresistibly incumbent on Barry, the very last Loach, to give up his true vocation of splints and flexion and enter seminary himself, to keep his staunch and beloved Mom from dying of disappointment. And so a series of personal interviews with the spiritually necrotic brother took place, Barry having to station himself on the other side of the playing-cards’ wastebasket so as even to get the older brother’s attention, trying to talk the brother down from the misanthropic spiritual ledge he was on. The spiritually ill brother was fairly cynical about Barry Loach’s reasons for trying to talk him down, seeing as how both men knew that Barry’s own career-dreams were on the line here as well; though the brother smiled sardonically and said he’d come to expect little better than self-interested #1-looking-out from human beings anyway, since his practicum work out among the human flocks in some of Boston’s nastier downtown venues — the impossibility of conditions-changing, the ingratitude of the low-life homeless addicted and mentally ill flocks he served, and the utter lack of compassion and basic help from the citizenry at large in all Jesuitical endeavors — had killed whatever spark of inspired faith he’d had in the higher possibilities and perfectibility of man; so he opined what should he expect but that his own little brother, no less than the coldest commuter passing the outstretched hands of the homeless and needy at Park Street Station, should be all-too-humanly concerned with nothing but the care and feeding of Numero Uno. Since a basic absence of empathy and compassion and taking-the-risk-to-reach-out seemed to him now an ineluctable part of the human character. Barry Loach was understandably way out his depth on the theological turf of like Apologia and the redeemability of man — though he was able to relieve a slight hitch in the brother’s toss that was stressing his card-throwing arm’s flexor carpi ulnaris muscle and so to up the brother’s card-in-wastebasket percentage significantly — but he was not only desperate to preserve his mother’s dream and his own indirectly athletic ambitions at the same time, he was actually rather a spiritually upbeat guy who just didn’t buy the brother’s sudden despair at the apparent absence of compassion and warmth in God’s supposed self-mimetic and divine creation, and he managed to engage the brother in some rather heated and high-level debates on spirituality and the soul’s potential, not that much unlike Alyosha and Ivan’s conversations in the good old Brothers K., though probably not nearly as erudite and literary, and nothing from the older brother even approaching the carcinogenic acerbity of Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor scenario.

In outline, it eventually boiled down to this: a desperate Barry Loach — with Mrs. L. now on 25 mg. of daily Ativan [reference to endnote in original, which reads: “A.k.a. Lorazepam — ® Wyeth-Aherst Labs — a venerable anti-anxiety tranq, of which 25 mg./day is enough to anxiolytize a good-sized Clydesdale.” Makes me wonder how much they injected me with. —MM] and just about camped out in front of the candle-lighting apse of the Loach’s parish church — Loach challenges his brother to let him prove somehow — risking his own time, Barry’s, and maybe safety somehow — that the basic human character wasn’t as unempathetic and necrotic as the brother’s present depressed condition was leading him to think. After a few suggestions and rejections of bets too way-out even for Barry Loach’s desperation, the brothers finally settle on a, like, experimental challenge. The spiritually despondent brother basically challenges Barry Loach to not shower or change clothes for a while and make himself look homeless and disreputable and louse-ridden and clearly in need of basic human charity, and to stand out in front of the Park Street T-station on the edge of the Boston Common, right alongside the rest of the downtown community’s lumpen dregs, who all usually stood there outside the T-station stemming change, and for Barry Loach to hold out his unclean hand and instead of stemming change simply ask passersby to touch him. Just to touch him. Viz. extend some basic human warmth and contact. And this Barry does. And does. Days go by. His own spiritually upbeat constitution starts taking blows to the solar plexus. It’s not clear whether the verminousness of his appearance had that much to do with it; it just turned out that standing there outside the station doors and holding out his hand and asking people to touch him ensured that just about the last thing any passerby in his right mind would want to do was touch him. It’s possible that the respectable citizenry with their bookbags and cellulars and dogs with little red sweater-vests thought that sticking one’s hand way out and crying ‘Touch me, just touch me, please’ was some kind of new stem-type argot for ‘Lay some change on me,’ because Barry Loach found himself hauling in a rather impressive daily total of $ — significantly more than he was earning at his work-study job wrapping ankles and sterilizing dental prostheses for Boston College lacrosse players. Citizens found his pitch apparently just touching enough to give him $; but B. Loach’s brother — who often stood there in collarless mufti up against the plastic jamb of the T-station’s exit, slouched and smirking and idly shuffling a deck of cards in his hands — was always quick to point out the spastic [I’ve heard this is a slur. It’s being reproduced here only for educational purposes. —MM] delicacy with which the patrons dropped change or $ into Barry Loach’s hand, these kind of bullwhip-motions or jagged in-and-outs like they were trying to get something hot off a burner, never touching him, and they rarely broke stride or even made eye-contact as they tossed alms B.L.’s way, much less ever getting their hand anywhere close to contact with B.L.’s disreputable hand. The brother not unreasonably nixed the accidental contact of one commuter who’d stumbled as he tried to toss a quarter and then let Barry break his fall, not to mention the bipolarly ill bag-lady who got Barry Loach in a headlock and tried to bite his ear off near the end of the third week of the Challenge. Barry L. refused to concede defeat and misanthropy, and the Challenge dragged on week after week, and the older brother got bored eventually and stopped coming and went back to his room and waited for the St. John’s Seminary administration to give him his walking papers, and Barry Loach had to take Incompletes in the semester’s Training courses, and got canned from his work-study job for not showing up, and he went through weeks and then months of personal spiritual crisis as passerby after passerby interpreted his appeal for contact as a request for cash and substituted abstract loose change for genuine fleshly contact; and some of the T-station’s other disreputable stem-artists became intrigued by Barry’s pitch — to say nothing of his net receipts — and started themselves to take up the cry of ‘Touch me, please, please, someone!,’ which of course further compromised Barry Loach’s chances of getting some citizen to interpret his request literally and lay hands on him in a compassionate and human way; and Loach’s own soul began to sprout little fungal patches of necrotic rot, and his upbeat view of the so-called normal and respectable human race began to undergo dark revision; and when the other scuzzy and shunned stem-artists of the downtown district treated him as a compadre and spoke to him in a collegial way and offered him warming drinks from brown-bagged bottles he felt too disillusioned and coldly alone to be able to refuse, and thus started to fall in with the absolute silt at the very bottom of the metro Boston socioeconomic duck-pond. And then what happened with the spiritually infirm older brother and whither he fared and what happened with his vocation never gets resolved in the E.T.A. Loach-story, because now the focus becomes all Loach and how he was close to forgetting — after all these months of revulsion from citizens and his getting any kind of nurturing or empathic treatment only from homeless and addicted stem-artists — what a shower or washing machine or a ligamental manipulation even were, much less career-ambitions or a basically upbeat view of indwelling human goodness, and in fact Barry Loach was dangerously close to disappearing forever into the fringes and dregs of metro Boston street life and spending his whole adult life homeless and louse-ridden and stemming in the Boston Common and drinking out of brown paper bags, when along toward the end of the ninth month of the Challenge, his appeal — and actually also the appeals of the other dozen or so cynical stem-artists right alongside Loach, all begging for one touch of a human hand and holding their hands out — when all these appeals were taken literally and responded to with a warm handshake — which only the more severely intoxicated stemmers didn’t recoil from the profferer of, plus Loach — by E.T.A.’s own Mario Incandenza, who’d been sent dashing out from the Back Bay co-op where his father was filming something that involved actors dressed up as God and the Devil playing poker with Tarot cards for the soul of Cosgrove Watt, using subway tokens as the ante, and Mario’d been sent dashing out to get another roll of tokens from the nearest station, which because of a dumpsterfire near the entrance to the Arlington St. station turned out to be Park Street, and Mario, being alone and only fourteen and largely clueless about anti-stem defensive strategies outside T-stations, had had no one worldly or adult along with him there to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn’t automatically be honored and granted, and Mario had extended his clawlike hand and touched and heartily shaken Loach’s own fuliginous hand, which led through a convoluted but [“but” original text omitted here on account of you didn’t have to tell us how to feel about it, Dave! —MM] series of circumstances to B. Loach, even w/o an official B.A., being given an Asst. Trainer’s job at E.T.A., a job he was promoted from just months later when the then-Head Trainer suffered the terrible accident that resulted in all locks being taken off E.T.A. saunas’ doors and the saunas’ maximum temperature being hard-wired down to no more than 50°C. (p. 967-71)

Yes, when the world was at war, Mario Incandenza kept dancing! He kept following the call to adventure! He kept embracing every opportunity to reach out to his fellow human being! He kept finding joy in everyday experiences! He kept embracing the opportunity to be a part of the story! Mario was not the main character in that story, but he was the hero! Perhaps he was not even the muskrat in that story (maybe that was Barry), but rather the bottom of the ocean whence comes the clod of soil. “I am not the storm! I am the ocean!”

Of course, there are as many ways for the people to “keep dancing” as there are people. The bourgeoisie certainly has their own decadent conception of what it means to “keep dancing” through warfare. The people in attendance at the Nova Festival on 7 October 2023 kept dancing outside of a concentration camp-type situation, not unlike Bruno, until the war (which had already been going on for the past 100+ years) came to them, and then they started running, which can also be considered a form of “dancing,” depending on how you look at it. But we can just as easily imagine a young parent gently rocking their starving toddler to sleep in a bombed out building in Gaza, simply grateful to Allah that they have survived another day. This too is a form of “dancing.” And this is your “hope,” westoid. This is the hope of Mario. But we don’t need to imagine anything. We can see the hope of Mario in action before our very eyes. For now one greater than Mario is here.

In this video, we can see children’s entertainer Rachel Accurso, known professionally, for petit bourgeois-type branding purposes, as Ms. Rachel, dancing with her friend(?) Rahaf. Rahaf is a 3-year-old (at the time) Palestinian double amputee from Gaza. Your westoid bombs blew off substantial parts of both of Rahaf’s legs. Yes. You turned her into Mario Incandenza, as in, you, with your westoid bombs, paid for by your tax dollars, enabled through your collective inactivity in response to injustice, reconfigured her ability profile to a level corresponding (a lot more than before, anyway) to that of Mario Incandenza—I’m surprised you didn’t make her homodontic—and she is still dancing (even though she has to dance on a padded floor because she keeps falling on her face not unlike Mario I.), because, well, for one thing, fuck you, that’s why, and more importantly, it brings her joy! And the children of mother earth will be god-damned if we let you westoid patriarchal motherfuckerists steal our joy! And of course Rahaf is “greater” than Mario Incandenza! She’s a real person, isn’t she? Mario Incandenza is a fictional character made up by David F. Wallace. He says so in his author’s note: “The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any apparent similarity to real persons is not intended by the author and is either a coincidence or the product of your own troubled imagination.” And if you can cry over a fictional character made up by a dude with a penis (and we have cried ourselves, and heard other’s cry, while reading sections of the novel featuring this character), why can’t you cry over a real human being? For this is bigger than Rahaf! Aside from the doubtless hundreds of thousands dead in Gaza, murdered by colonial Zionist occupiers, enabled by the larger westoid colonial infrastructure, the genocide has also produced thousands of amputees. Rahaf is only one! And if you can cry for one real Palestinian, why can’t you cry for the thousands of other Palestinian amputees? Is it because you don’t know their names or their stories? They had their limbs blown off. That’s not enough of a “story” for you? You think you have a limited amount of tears? You think you have a limited amount of compassion? That’s just the voice that says “I am not enough.” Haven’t you dropped it yet? I’m not talking pity here. The Children of Mother Earth do not cry over Gaza because of “pity.” We cry because we recognize the dialectical relationship between the self and the other, between the individual and the collective, and between the ego and the whole self! We cry because we have alignment between being-for-self and being-for-other. That’s love, westoid. That’s solidarity. Heard of it? And that is the hope of Mario! The hope of Rahaf! The hope of Lana (“Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have / But I have it”)! That you will wake the fuck up and recognize (attain consciousness of) the war that is happening in front of you, all around you, the war that continues to produce new Mario Incandenzas, and DO SOMETHING to stop it! And if we fail to (take the necessary and sufficient measures to) overthrow class society, class society will keep producing more Mario Incandenzas, and we (the fictive Mario Incandenzas), in the time of our survival (but we will certainly outlive you, as you keep making more and more of us), will keep dancing, because, for one thing, fuck you, that’s why, but more importantly, because it brings us joy, and we will be god-damned if you steal our joy—you’ve already stolen everything else—and we will keep dancing until your totalizing bourgeois dictatorship collapses under its own weight, and then we will keep dancing on your grave as we build a new society of freedom, equality, and love out of your ashes!

Ok! So now that we have our “hope” (we could call it “good hope,” to go along with our “good faith” and “good love”), perhaps we’re ready to “descend” to the “lowest” (“saddest,” perhaps) “point” of the album. But maybe first, since I only now thought of it, we can go back to “Kintsugi” for a second. Lana speaks of specific experiences, experiences of the kind that result in deep memory formation. She recounts how she was at her Uncle Dick’s deathbed with a bunch of other relatives, and he coughed into her hand, and they sang “Froggy Came a-Courtin’,” and everyone knew the words and was singing along, even the 14-year-old! This is an extremely silly song about an interspecies marriage between a frog and a mouse. But it represents thousands-years-old traditions of people gathering in groups and singing extremely silly songs. I’m reminded of the Sarah McLachlan concert in Austin on 5 July 2024, where some 10,000 women and (surely) at least 1,000 “men” (and however many “other”) got real in touch with at least one of their X chromosomes, and, as part of the performance of the entire Fumbling Towards Ecstasy album, she did indeed sing “Ice Cream” (the “highest point of the album,” remember), and some 10,000 women and at least 1,000 men were singing along with this “extremely silly” song and I think even the high-schooler and his mom who were sitting next to me knew all the words! The kid was saying before the show that his mom would put the album on when she was cleaning. I’m sure this was a very special moment for that woman and her son. I was very surprised. I was very moved. I would have to say this was a pretty special moment for me too. I can’t say this is my favorite song on the album. It is kind of silly, after all. I might even skip it every now and then. But this time, with over 10,000 people singing along, it took on whole new dimensions of meaning. I might have even shed a tear or two.

“You wanted me sadder,” Lana says in “Fishtail.” There’s a lot to unpack here, as they say. We are perhaps reminded of Clementine(!!!) from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, who spoke of people who didn’t love her, but only the idea of her (if I remember correctly), not unlike how Dr. HUHA, if he were being honest with himself, would admit that he loved the idea of EHD more than EHD theirself. Now that would be a lot to unpack, wouldn’t it? I’m surprised we haven’t unpacked it already. But, indeed, just as Lana isn’t specifically referencing the “parasocial” relationship her millions of fans have with her here, in which “all you know about her’s what she’s sold you, dumb fuck,” and yet, there is clearly some parasociality between her and her interlocutor, (similarly), Dr. HUHA didn’t have the same parasocial relationship with EHD as some random fan[atic], but there was clearly some parasociality on his end in their acquaintanceship, not unlike how MLO was a much bigger part of my world when we were “friends” than I was in hers. Look. There’s nothing wrong with having a parasocial relationship with someone. My association with Dr. Carrier, for example, did not ever rise very far beyond the parasocial. Indeed, my relationship with Dr. Carrier could not have been truly “social” because he was not prepared to witness my authentic self. He wasn’t equipped with the necessary conceptual framework. He saw me through the framework of justification, in which I was projected to be “justifying” the actions of China. You probably wouldn’t want to associate with me if you saw me through those glasses or through those cobwebs. “Oh well, whatever, nevermind.”

I’m sure a lot of people have wanted Lana “sadder” at some point or another. A lot of people want her in some kind of prison where she does art your way instead of hers. You know, a lot of men (in our patriarchal society, for example) want to put women in some kind of prison. Well, that’s what patriarchal false consciousness does to a motherfucker. It leads men to “confuse” (or “pervert”) love with control (“control is love / love is control” -Metallica, “All Within My Hands”). Like, it would lead them to think, of a woman, “I really love you when you’re out in the world living your life. Now, only if you could be exactly the same if I extracted you from this life you’re living and isolated you in a house with some kids and maybe a dog and made you do all the labor to take care of them, and me.” This isn’t love. This is perversion. This is motherfuckerism. You want the butterfly to flutter its wings under the pin. You want to eat your cake and have it too. Maybe if you changed what you wanted, you wouldn’t have these problems. So how do you change what you want? Well you would have to break your framework of justification, wouldn’t you? And when enough of us break the internal frameworks of justification implanted in us by the ruling class through the master-slave dialectic, that’s when we can break the framework of justification of class society and replace class society with the society of necessity and sufficiency, i.e., of abundance and thriving, where we won’t confuse the source with a silo! Because when the masses attain a certain level of consciousness, that level of consciousness becomes part of the material conditions of that society!

From Carrier’s RUDTF email, we can see that he viewed EHD as some kind of butterfly-type phenomenon, though he avoids speaking of trapping this phenomenon in some net, and for this, perhaps we can give him a cyber-pat on the head (but if it had been a hotel room or an elevator or a car on the other hand…):

“I admire you immensely. Your bravado, your power, your honesty, your intelligence, your character. Your skill as a writer. And for me, admiring a woman is an enormous turn on. Competence is erotic. And sharing sexual experiences with incredible women like you is so what I want out of life. It only adds that you’re pretty. Your eyes just melt me. Lots I’d want to kiss on you. But I don’t have your permission to go there here, so I’ll just leave it at that[…] You just radiate agency. And that’s like a brilliant, warm light you just want to embrace and experience passionately [yeah, you “passionately experienced” that “brilliance,” alright! You got your ass burnt! —MM]. I can go on admiring you from afar, as a writer and activist and colleague and valuable asset to our movement, and I can go on spending excellent time together with you as a friend when we happen to be around each other. I won’t be badly dejected by a no. But if there is any chance you want me, I’m hoping to know.” -Carrier (email p. 1,2)

Jesus. On the romance scale, it doesn’t exactly sink to the depths of Judge Frolo from Disney’s Hunchback (that would be, “get with me or burn!,” basically), but, motherfucker, who do you think you are talking to!? You (Carrier) are interacting with EHD as if they were a jumble of phenomena rather than a human being! I met Eli H. Dadabhoy once (before they were known to us as “they” and “Eli”)! They were a featured guest at the Atheist Community of Austin’s “bat cruise” in 2016! I can confirm that they indeed possess all this “bravado, power, honesty, intelligence, character, competence, radiation of agency, eyes that melt,” yes, all this and more! But how did they “get” all this? They got it from their goddamn lived experience as a subject of westoid oppression and exploitation in patriarchal class society! And from coming out the other end as [a] self-actualized being-for-itself! As a being that has attained (through earning it) a very advanced level of consciousness! As a goddamn force of nature! Not that you (Carrier, still) would know anything about that! You might have read about it in some book, but you didn’t live it.

And now (reader) he is in a bit of a struggle as far as his professional life is concerned, not having anything to do with the harassment or lack of respect for lived experience, but for not being able to get his latest book “peer reviewed” through his desired academic silo, and so he had to get it published through a different silo, a different gate. But he points out that their reason for “rejecting” his book was completely manufactured. If they had found a legitimate failure in his scholarship, they could’ve surely cited that, but instead they say the study “brought nothing new” to the table. This can’t possibly be true, however, if for no other reason than the book’s treatment of what were called “docetism” and “gnosticism.”

Ok, so you (Carrier again) will read this book (you are reading this, of course), and you will have the same arguments against me (against the conception of sexual harassment I’m outlining, of which you—ok, both of us—have been guilty; against the conception of communism/materialism I’m outlining) as the Jesus studies “establishment” has against your minimal mythicism model! Which is to say, arguments of justification rather than necessity! Which is to say, unbayesian arguments!

Motherfucker, we are getting very close to the “point” of all this. For our philosophy (worldview/methodology), dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics (along with statistical/Bayesian metaphysics—more on this later), is indeed the first philosophy in the history of class struggles through which we can climb out of the maze of the framework of justification of the ruling class, out of all frameworks of all justifications, and not merely into a slightly larger prison, but to venture out into the light (not merely to interpret the world, but to change it), so that the working class can raise itself into consciousness of itself as a class-for-itself, and humanity as a whole can raise itself into consciousness of ourselves as Children of Mother Earth, members of a truly social species, and descendants of our ancestors, especially the single-celled ones, indeed, that we come from gamer-girl Mother Earth’s bath water, so that we can start putting Mother Earth back in charge! So that we can stop pretending we can become more powerful than her! Mother Earth is not a goddamn silo of power, despite your thousands of years of treating her as such! She is an infinite (at least as far as human societal timescales are concerned) SOURCE of power!

Maybe that’s part of the problem. Maybe your westoid conception of power is incompatible with the World of Mother Earth. The westoid conception of power is, as far as I’ve been able to tell, inextricable from the concept of “power over,” which is to say: control, domination, imposition of will over the other, crushing of enemies, seeing them driven out before you, hearing the lamentations of their women, etc., etc.

Our conception of power, on the other hand, well, we could call it the power of friendship. The power of comradeship. This is the power of cooperation. The average westoid wouldn’t know what true friendship/comradeship was if it fought them in an alley over a pair of glasses (imagine: “Motherfucker! I am trying to cooperate with you!”). This conception of friendship must be drastically altered. Indeed, the westoid (bourgeois) conception of friendship cannot possibly survive the upcoming conflagrations. It is not capable of harnessing the necessary and sufficient power to overthrow the bourgeoisie since it came from the bourgeoisie, obviously.

Motherfucker, the kind of friendship I am talking about is inextricable from a certain kind of solidarity. This is the kind of solidarity that gets people killed. Perhaps I can even say it’s the kind of solidarity that led to my getting put in the behavioral center for three days and having to “flee” the state of Texas (so to speak). But this is the kind of “sacrifice” we’re gonna have to be willing to make.

“Not that smart, but I’ve got things to say,” Lana says. Shut up. You’re a genius.

“You’re so funny, I wish I could skinny-dip inside your mind,” Lana says. Well, there you go. She’s just about figured it out. What she really needed to do was overcome her phobia of skinny-dipping in her own mind, which we can see she has fully accomplished by the next song. And Lana did “skinny-dip” to, well, several local bottoms of her subconscious and pick up several extremely valuable clods of soil, and, well, turned her “fallen brokenness” into honesty, into authenticity, and revealed a more authentic self to herself and to us! Lana did this through embracing, through “skinny-dipping” in, grief! To whatever local bottom she found herself above! This is how we go from being overwhelmed by our “storms” of grief to realizing that we are the ocean, and the ocean can, definitionally, never be overwhelmed. The ocean can only overwhelm.

And in “Peppers,” we see that Lana has attained an astonishing new level of freedom through attaining a perhaps equally astonishing level of love and peace, especially with regard to herself. And she has achieved this by going through a perhaps also equally astonishing level of grief! And, in accomplishing all this, she has synthesized all the dialectics necessary to attain all the metaphysical she could’ve wanted or “hoped” to attain!

Me and my boyfriend listen to the Chili Peppers
We write hit songs without tryin’ like
All the time, all the time
I take off all my clothes, dance naked for the neighbors
I’m like, “Fuck it, gonna give a show,” I open up the blinds

She’s no longer worried about “writing the next best American record”! She writes them without trying! She no longer gives a fuck about the neighbors seeing her naked! She is at peace with being perceived by the other. We must understand this as a whole new level of freedom for her. “Take a minute for myself, skinny-dip in my mind,” she says. Again, this must be understood as an astonishing new level of freedom! “I’m in love,” she says. And we must understand her to mean as much that she is “in love” with herself and with life and with Mother Earth as with her lover! She is even at peace with the possibility of having gotten Covid: “My boyfriend tested positive for COVID, it don’t matter / We’ve been kissing, so whatever he has, I have, I can’t cry.” Oh my god. Does that make you uncomfortable? Have you confused your discomfort for her immorality again? Is that the cop in your head? Aren’t you “woke” enough that you don’t consider “violent” rap lyrics to be confessions of a crime? (“Violent” lyrics have always existed, of course). What would Rosa L. think of our using people’s art against them [with]in some kind of court-type dynamic within a Platonic cave-type “logic”? Bourgeois moralism is a delicious wreath of oat flakes for the inner slime mold within the trans-platonic cave-maze, but it doesn’t help us break through or climb over the walls and venture out into the sunlight, where we can build structures more aligned with nature; structures not designed for restricting people’s freedom, but for supporting it. And we can see that Lana felt so free in the studio that she speaks of wanting to sample a song like “Wipeout,” to evoke the feeling of surfing, because what greater experience of freedom can a person feel than surfing? Surfing is something you have to learn. You have to, like, take lessons and shit. We don’t need to contrast it with learning how to ride a jet-ski, but we must recognize that there are important differences. Degree and kind of self-propulsion, for example.

Ok. I think we’re done. At least with our treatment of this album. The next track is more like a bonus track than anything else. “Imagine if we actually gave a fuck / Wouldn’t that be somethin’ to talk about for us?” Same here, Lana! Same here!

Fanaticism as an Anthropological Phenomenon | “Introducing Fanaticism Studies”

Yes. “Fan” is short for “fanatic.” It comes from the Latin, “fana,” temple. It referred to people who spent a lot of time at the atic. I mean temple. Whoops. You might have heard of a 3rd-century forgery within the extant works of Josephus known as the “testimonium flavianum” (though it might as well be known as the “Jerusalis tulipizius,” because it’s a made-up Latin name for a “plant”). People don’t really talk about this (though Carrier has mentioned it), but this passage is nestled in between other passages that we can call little else but fanaticism horror stories. Yes, perhaps an extended quotation of the passages immediately following the Jerusalis tulipizius is warranted! Who else is going to do it? Content notice for depiction of rape:

About the same time [during which Pilate was procurator of Judea —MM] also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder, and certain shameful practices happened about the temple of Isis that was at Rome. I will now first take notice of the wicked attempt about the temple of Isis, and will then give an account of the Jewish affairs. There was at Rome a woman whose name was Paulina; one who, on account of the dignity of her ancestors, and by the regular conduct of a virtuous life, had a great reputation: she was also very rich; and although she was of a beautiful countenance, and in that flower of her age wherein women are the most gay, yet did she lead a life of great modesty. She was married to Saturninus, one that was every way answerable to her in an excellent character. Decius Mundus fell in love with this woman, who was a man very high in the equestrian order; and as she was of too great dignity to be caught by presents, and had already rejected them, though they had been sent in great abundance, he was still more inflamed with love to her, insomuch that he promised to give her two hundred thousand Attic drachmae for one night’s lodging; and when this would not prevail upon her, and he was not able to bear this misfortune in his amours, he thought it the best way to famish himself to death for want of food, on account of Paulina’s sad refusal; and he determined with himself to die after such a manner, and he went on with his purpose accordingly. Now Mundus had a freed-woman, who had been made free by his father, whose name was Ide, one skillful in all sorts of mischief. This woman was very much grieved at the young man’s resolution to kill himself, [for he did not conceal his intentions to destroy himself from others,] and came to him, and encouraged him by her discourse, and made him to hope, by some promises she gave him, that he might obtain a night’s lodging with Paulina; and when he joyfully hearkened to her entreaty, she said she wanted no more than fifty thousand drachmae for the entrapping of the woman. So when she had encouraged the young man, and gotten as much money as she required, she did not take the same methods as had been taken before, because she perceived that the woman was by no means to be tempted by money; but as she knew that she was very much given to the worship of the goddess Isis, she devised the following stratagem: She went to some of Isis’s priests, and upon the strongest assurances [of concealment], she persuaded them by words, but chiefly by the offer of money, of twenty-five thousand drachmae in hand, and as much more when the thing had taken effect; and told them the passion of the young man, and persuaded them to use all means possible to beguile the woman. So they were drawn in to promise so to do, by that large sum of gold they were to have. Accordingly, the oldest of them went immediately to Paulina; and upon his admittance, he desired to speak with her by herself. When that was granted him, he told her that he was sent by the god Anubis, who was fallen in love with her, and enjoined her to come to him. Upon this she took the message very kindly, and valued herself greatly upon this condescension of Anubis, and told her husband that she had a message sent her, and was to sup and lie with Anubis; so he agreed to her acceptance of the offer, as fully satisfied with the chastity of his wife. Accordingly, she went to the temple, and after she had supped there, and it was the hour to go to sleep, the priest shut the doors of the temple, when, in the holy part of it, the lights were also put out. Then did Mundus leap out, [for he was hidden therein,] and did not fail of enjoying her, who was at his service all the night long, as supposing he was the god; and when he was gone away, which was before those priests who knew nothing of this stratagem were stirring, Paulina came early to her husband, and told him how the god Anubis had appeared to her. Among her friends, also, she declared how great a value she put upon this favor, who partly disbelieved the thing, when they reflected on its nature, and partly were amazed at it, as having no pretense for not believing it, when they considered the modesty and the dignity of the person. But now, on the third day [the third day, he says! —MM] after what had been done, Mundus met Paulina, and said, “Nay, Paulina, thou hast saved me two hundred thousand drachmae, which sum thou mightest have added to thy own family; yet hast thou not failed to be at my service in the manner I invited thee. As for the reproaches thou hast laid upon Mundus, I value not the business of names; but I rejoice in the pleasure I reaped by what I did, while I took to myself the name of Anubis.” When he had said this, he went his way. But now she began to come to the sense of the grossness of what she had done, and rent her garments, and told her husband of the horrid nature of this wicked contrivance, and prayed him not to neglect to assist her in this case. So he discovered the fact to the emperor; whereupon Tiberius inquired into the matter thoroughly by examining the priests about it, and ordered them to be crucified, as well as Ide, who was the occasion of their perdition, and who had contrived the whole matter, which was so injurious to the woman. He also demolished the temple of Isis, and gave order that her statue should be thrown into the river Tiber; while he only banished Mundus, but did no more to him, because he supposed that what crime he had committed was done out of the passion of love [“love,” he says!?!? Nope! —MM]. And these were the circumstances which concerned the temple of Isis, and the injuries occasioned by her priests. I now return to the relation of what happened about this time to the Jews at Rome, as I formerly told you I would.

There was a man who was a Jew, but had been driven away from his own country by an accusation laid against him for transgressing their laws, and by the fear he was under of punishment for the same; but in all respects a wicked man. He, then living at Rome, professed to instruct men in the wisdom of the laws of Moses. He procured also three other men, entirely of the same character with himself, to be his partners. These men persuaded Fulvia, a woman of great dignity, and one that had embraced the Jewish religion, to send purple and gold to the temple at Jerusalem; and when they had gotten them, they employed them for their own uses, and spent the money themselves, on which account it was that they at first required it of her. Whereupon Tiberius, who had been informed of the thing by Saturninus, the husband of Fulvia, who desired inquiry might be made about it, ordered all the Jews to be banished out of Rome; at which time the consuls listed four thousand men out of them, and sent them to the island Sardinia; but punished a greater number of them, who were unwilling to become soldiers, on account of keeping the laws of their forefathers. [citation with additional context in original —MM] Thus were these Jews banished out of the city by the wickedness of four men.

–Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book 18

Well, there’s your Josephus Flavius, doing the real gritty, grimy sandal-leather reporting on the Roman cult scene. Paulina might have been a fanatic of the goddess Isis, but our boy Mundus was an even bigger fanatic of the goddess Paulina, wasn’t he? And he was very lucky not to have met the same fate as the priests of the Isis cult, or their temple, or their statue. Taking a dunk in the river might have done our boy Mundus some good. What our boy Mundus did, we can call it “perverted identity rape” (which, let’s not forget, is a serious crime, a serious violation of the principle of reciprocity), was largely seen as something of a joke in our society well into the 1980s (in Jesus years), if our media are anything to go by. There’s a very (in)famous example of this in Revenge of the Nerds, though there are scenes of it in Canterbury Tales, and, of course, it’s what Laban did to Jacob. But men do this to women all the time, don’t they? A man will “wear a mask” until a woman has sex with him (or until he has her “trapped” somehow—impregnation, perhaps), and then he’ll take the mask off. That’s kinda the same thing, isn’t it, except “with extra steps.” Well, we need some mass crucifixion(s) of the ego, don’t we? And maybe we could destroy a few temples and throw a few statues in the river while we’re at it, so to speak. Patriarchal-man-in-denial must reveal his authentic self to himself. He must be buried in the pearl pit, his bourgeois ego-righteousness must be incinerated in the fires of his own personal hell, he must stab the picture of Dorian Gray in the subconscious attic, etc., etc. Yes, we’re gonna have to cry about it. Preferably every day for a couple of years. That is the sort of “thing” required for the kind of “healing” we’re going to have to “attain.” I would say “it’s too late for anything less,” but, like, come on, dude. It’s been too late for anything less since at least the start of the first empires thousands of years ago. For the sake of tying both passages together, I will say it’s notable that the husbands of both women Josephus mentions were named Saturninus, and they both could just call up the emperor like that.

Ok, so, here’s the deal. You are probably a fanatic w.r.t. something. It’s “ok.” This is a “judgment-free zone.” We might even call it a “safe space” if we’ve learned to correctly distinguish comfort from safety. In any event, we have no need to pathologize fanaticism here. I watch your American football games. I watch the videos the yappers make about your American football. I grew up watching all that shit. I am very familiar with your fanaticism. Denial is futile. Denial is not just a lake in Uganda.

Ok. Fine. Our boy (not in age, of course) Carrier was a bit of a fanatic of the god~~dess~~ EHD, wasn’t he? And some people would see him banished over the actions that fanaticism led him to (among other things), wouldn’t they? Well, why shouldn’t he be “banished” if he doesn’t crucify his ego? ‘Cause nobody else has either? Well maybe we should give them the same opportunity. “What about his career?” What career? If I, hell, if Mother Earth has anything to do with it, Carrier will, not unlike Marx, have no “career” but that of a revolutionary! It’s not like he’s that far from it already. He wouldn’t have to change that much. He’s already pissed enough people off, hasn’t he? And he’s already adopted Bayesian reasoning in other areas. It shouldn’t be a Sisyphian task to (re)direct that logic towards himself (and towards his precious liberalism), should it? But don’t think I’m singling him out. Many of us have allowed our fanaticism to lead us astray. If we had some fanaticism for Mother Earth, we might not have these problems. Indeed, if we had some fanaticism for Mother Earth, it might allow us to understand why feminism is important. Not co-opted, liberal, counterrevolutionary westoid feminism. I’m talking about the real thing. THIS IS PANDORA! YOU ARE A NA’VI! EYWA IS REAL! The ruling class has cut off your access to the Tree of Memory. Fine. Go around them. We’re running out of time, westoid.

Ok. Fine. When capitalism killed god, they (the capitalists, as successors to the old monarchical ruling class which invented him in the first place) had to replace him with something, didn’t they? Yes. Of course they did. Because as much as they could kill god, they couldn’t kill your fanaticism, could they? Well, in any event, they have made attempts to replace him, we shall see. And they already had an “ideal” model: Plato’s noble lie, which is what the old god was already an instantiation of anyway. This is Oedipism. This is motherfuckerism. It is, indeed, very old, and we can see its use in politics since at least Hammurabi. We can certainly see it being used in full force in the Roman emperor cult. Those motherfuckers were calling themselves “savior of Rome” and shit (which presumes Rome was {a} in danger, and {b} worth saving—both very presumptuous!), and they were claiming legitimacy for all this under the auspices (“succession”) of the cult of the legendary founder Romulus. But you already know all this, don’t you? Aren’t you, like, (statistically) one of those “Roman empire guys” who thinks about the Roman empire all the time? I certainly think about it all the time. It was a slave society ruled by a bunch of moronic thugs. It has a lot to teach us about today’s society. Sometimes I think about Philo of Alexandria, perhaps a once-in-a-millennium supergenius, certainly up there with Hegel, having to schlep his ass all the way to Rome to try to convince Caligula that Jews were people. Now THAT guy must have felt like he was living in Idiocracy, like he was having to make his case to President Camacho! Ok! Imagine if Trump says he’s considering making atheism illegal, and then, imagine, just imagine, that the atheists send Richard Carrier to meet with Trump to try to dissuade him from this. There’s your Roman Empire, Roman Empire Guy! See? We’re already 95% of the way there. Congratulations! In any event, Carrier did, in fact, recently participate in a (can I say “televised”? Is there a new word for that? It was on youtube) debate with a Christian nationalist, Andrew Wilson, on (more or less) whether Christian nationalism is a good idea. This is Roman empire shit. Just throw in a lion or something. We can certainly imagine (public) debates on Christian nationalism happening during the Roman Empire. Christians were certainly debating against pagans in writing. Indeed, isn’t that what Augustine was doing in City of God? Arguing for Christian nationalism? Specifically against paganism? Whether he meant “city” in an exclusively spiritual sense or not, his arguments can easily be beaten into submission for Christian nationalist purposes. So what Carrier got himself into was just a modern update on the good old mass-spectator blood-/deathsport we can see cropping up in every degraded empire after a certain point. Even Carrier doesn’t particularly like doing them anymore. And why would he? On top of everything else, look at his interlocutor! Mere days before this, Andrew threw a bit of a tantrum on the “@whatever” podcast (we truly live in absurd times) towards a fellow guest. He shouted, “You lick snizz!” at her, simply because she had mentioned having a “girlfriend” at one point. He certainly wouldn’t have yelled this at Carrier (even though it would have been just as likely to be true in his case). Look. I don’t know who needs to hear this. But when Andrew Wilson. Yelled. “You lick snizz!” At that woman… That. Was. Sexual. Harassment. And who can hold him accountable for this? Well, he has spent his life protecting himself from accountability through his efforts [with]in the framework of justification. He can only be held accountable by other Christian nationalists. And it’s extremely difficult to nail them down on anything when it comes to the sexual harassment they do. They are notoriously bad at holding themselves accountable for stuff like that. We might even begin to suspect they only care about it opportunistically. So, for now, he’s relatively “safe” from accountability. But there is a silver lining in this cloud. The “good news” (or, from Old English, “gospel”) is that accountability already lies within. The good news about your own personal hell is that you’re already in there. Or should I say it’s already in you. In any event, you can’t get out of it until you experience it for yourself. That’s when you’ll be able to walk out, and recognize the truth that your own personal hell is merely a tiny patch of burning bushes within the infinite field of your imagination, your own personal heaven, so to speak (cf. Sarah McLachlan’s “Elsewhere,” C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce). You have already planted the seeds of these burning bushes through your westoid motherfuckerism. You have “watered” them through further motherfuckerism. For all either of us know, these bushes are burning away at your subconscious as you read this. Perhaps you’re one bad trip away from seeing them. It might help you to have a guide through this process. Well, here I am now, volunteering myself for this service. If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably cried at least a little, surely. Ok, so now you need to have some bad trips. You probably need to have as many “bad” trips as “good” ones. What. A trip is an experience of self. Experience of self is how being-for-itself moves itself forward, etc., etc. Those bushes are burning a hole in your soul, westoid. What? You want to extinguish them? Not possible. They’ll always be there. But they’re a little hard to see from the top of the hill when all the lights are on. And then, even “at night,” if you “flip off the switch,” they’re stil so far away that they become practically indistinguishable from a nightlight. And the night sky is full of stars, westoid. Did you forget? Did you spend too much time under the influence of your westoid light pollution? The Sentinelese are well aware of it. The Sentinelese certainly didn’t go through quite your westoid death of god. Let me put it to you this way: The Sentinelese certainly know lachrymology. They certainly have specialists in it. What the Sentinelese don’t have is Christian nationalism/-ists. They certainly don’t have sexual harassment as (i.e., “to the point of”) a public health crisis. I’m sure many of them have been to their own personal hells. In that sense, in all those senses, the Sentinelese are probably more conscious than you. They’re certainly more connected to nature. You westoids tend to project a bunch of westoid baggage onto this connectedness. You have no connection to nature. As such, you see the garden of eden myth as some kind of morality play, where “foolish” Adam and Eve answered wrong on the morality quiz. This is projection, and of a kind we could characterize as largely specific to bourgeois society. Rousseau was certainly some kind of liberal, wasn’t he… Motherfucker. I do not, as J.B. Peterson has been accused of doing, “romance the noble savage”! “Noble” is your word! So is “savage”! I’ve brought up the (fictional, of course! I haven’t forgotten!) Na’vi a few times. Have I been saying the Na’vi are “moral” or, hell, “more moral” than you!? Morality is in our fucking DNA, westoid! Your existence in ruling class society has cut you off, as well as they could, from the goddamn SOURCE of morality by cutting you off from the goddamn truth-seeking/-finding function given to you by Mother Earth in your DNA, and this same ruling class has also wasted trillions of dollars on propaganda campaigns (and other much more literal “campaigns” if you know what I’m saying—they’ve killed a bunch of people, is what I’m saying) in effort to convince you that “truth” comes from their ruling class westoid silos! Fuck that shit! As far as I’m concerned, the working class hasn’t gotten nearly “savage” enough with the ruling class! The ruling class is certainly more “savage” than most of us proles (let alone the Sentinelese) could ever DREAM of being! Yes, I had only hinted at this before, but we certainly can’t analyze something like the events of 11 September 2001 as “terrorism” without first analyzing them as a response TO terrorism. The U.S., the colonizer entity occupying Turtle Island, had been supporting Israel’s campaign of terror in Palestine since at least the 60s. And they’d had ample opportunities to stop supporting this terror. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Of course, I do believe in MLK Jr.’s “moral arc of the universe” that “bends toward justice.” The Children of Mother Earth will bend this arc toward justice. By force, if necessary. The bourgeoisie has had more than enough time to bend this arc toward their hallowed ideals of “liberty, egality, fraternity.” That’s part of the problem, isn’t it. The bourgeois conception of liberty. Uncle Ted talked about this too, but he is, in this section (Paras. 97-98), only using the word “freedom.” He’s still only in shades pointing to the bourgeois conception of liberty, which is all tangled up in the master-slave dialectic, therefore requires slavery:

Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what might be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a “free” man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual. Thus the bourgeois’s “free” man has economic freedom because that promotes growth and progress; he has freedom of the press because public criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders; he has a right to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerful would be bad for the system. This was clearly the attitude of Simon Bolivar. To him, people deserved liberty only if they used it to promote progress (progress as conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeois thinkers have taken a similar view of freedom as a mere means to collective ends. Chester C. Tan, “Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century,” page 202, explains the philosophy of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-min: “An individual is granted rights because he is a member of society and his community life requires such rights. By community Hu meant the whole society of the nation.” And on page 259 Tan states that according to Carsum Chang (Chang Chun-mai, head of the State Socialist Party in China) freedom had to be used in the interest of the state and of the people as a whole. But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only as someone else prescribes? FC’s conception of freedom is not that of Bolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble with such theorists is that they have made the development and application of social theories their surrogate activity. Consequently the theories are designed to serve the needs of the theorists more than the needs of any people who may be unlucky enough to live in a society on which the theories are imposed.

One more point to be made in this section: It should not be assumed that a person has enough freedom just because he SAYS he has enough. Freedom is restricted in part by psychological controls of which people are unconscious, and moreover many people’s ideas of what constitutes freedom are governed more by social convention than by their real needs. For example, it’s likely that many leftists of the oversocialized type would say that most people, including themselves, are socialized too little rather than too much, yet the oversocialized leftist pays a heavy psychological price for his high level of socialization.
–Ted K, ISaiF

And while the dialectical materialist conception of freedom is not quite that of the “Freedom Club” (more on that later), it’s certainly not that of the bourgeoisie! We’re certainly never going to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice and away from bourgeois liberty (which is the same thing as proletarian slavery) by following bourgeois rules. We’re going to have to start playing by our own (proletarian) rules! Which means we’re going to have to start breaking a lot of theirs! And by this point, you should be disabused of your feeling of love for and devotion to following rules imposed and cheerled for by people like your hospital bombin’ prince of peace.

Ok. Fine. What did the bourgeoisie replace god with when they killed him? Haven’t you already figured it out? They replaced him with themselves. A little more directly this time, though this god still wears numerous masks. On Occupied Turtle Island, a superbly convenient and suitable mask is the founding fathers cult. The Monticello-type institution, with its hundreds of slaves, and yet, importantly for bourgeois purposes, still not able to “get out of the red,” is the ugly truth behind the “noble lie” of the bourgois conception of “freedom,” with its “economic freedom” and “freedom of speech and press.” These “freedoms” are a fig leaf on bourgeois LIBERTY; a toga on the goddess of Liberty, with her pointy sword. That sword doesn’t protect you, remember? It protects Thomas Jefferson, like I said earlier. And you are no Thomas Jefferson. At least I fkn hope you’re not!

We’ve already mentioned Ken Burns, but another high priest of the America/founding fathers/bourgeois liberty cult is Aaron Sorkin. It is highly fitting that Aaron is a high priest in this cult. Of course he’s a high priest. He’s the one who writes the flowery words to sanctify the human sacrifice rituals. See, there’s a lot going on under the hood in your America cult that you’re unaware of, not unlike the car you drive every day. His branch, his school, his sect, of this priesthood, well, it’s a little hard to pin down (though we could perhaps call it “smartology,” see below). It’s easy enough to characterize him as a liberal. And a bunch of liberals totally bought in/on to his vision of governance by smarty-pants (“smartocracy”), which, to Sorkin, a practitioner of smartology, meant those ideological prisoners/fanatics who had garnered the most wreaths within the liberal (“Washington consensus”) platonic cave-temple. He got a bunch of liberals to buy into his smartological, smartocratic vision, but this vision of his can be found to contain, at just about every turn, a shockingly right-wing agenda of American imperialism. And this is one of the factors that led to the “imaginary” of the American public being clouded with Sorkinesque smartological dreams, that polluted their “imaginations” regarding possible alternatives to Bush Doctrine-style imperialism, that led to their choosing, as an alternative, one of the only ones for which they had a frame of reference, liberal nationalism, with maybe a little watered down new dealism, but, most importantly, reframing smartological imperialism as the next big thing in peace (not “no more war,” but “no more dumb wars,” which could not/never mean “no war,” but only, at best, “less war,” which still entails the possibility of a great deal of war—more on that later), which is, in part, how we got our hospital bombin’ prince of peace.

We are still talking about fanaticism. Ok. Fine. Let’s get into it. We’re gonna talk about 1984. Sure. Why not. We actually read it. We have nothing to fear. Perhaps you have more to fear than me. You did read 1984, right? It’s not a warning against socialism (Eric was a “socialist,” after all). It’s a warning against hierarchical society and the concentration of power (What kind of power? Well, we’ll see. They call it “oligarchic collectivism”—does that help?), and specifically against the tools for concentration of power: the total surveillance state, the permanent war state, the state-perversion of truth/language/logic/memory (especially through the “end of history” narrative), the state-personality cult, and, well, the most important one, the one that ties all the others together, what we could call the killing of beauty… by the state (though Eric is a bit melodramatic about this last one—perhaps his inner vision of beauty had some limitations—beauty has proven notoriously hard to kill throughout history—I dare say it might even be on the upswing). Eric had dangerous ideas about the nature of power—the kind of ideas that are kinda inextricable from 10s of millions of cold war deaths under westoid bombs and under westoid-supported military dictatorships. We could call it “powerphobia.” Eric was so powerphobic that he would rather take up arms against power in Spain than in his own beloved Britbong empire. Funny, that. He, what, might have had a problem with being a tip of the colonial spear for this empire in the former Burma, but he still did it. And he didn’t do anything “on that tip” that would jeopardize his future with the BBC.

Ok. So Oceania has a pretty advanced form of anthropological cult to go along with their BITE-model cult. They have replaced the dead god killed by capitalism with “Big Brother” and the state and the party, and have replaced the Devil with Emmanuel Goldstein, among other lesser “traitors.” Every morning, they have their state-mandated “Two Minutes Hate” against this “Devil.” And we can see Winston getting very caught up in the spirit of this hate, even perhaps “against his will.”

Ok, so what is “oligarchic collectivism”? Well, it’s not too different from the perverted surveillance/war state at the “end of history” (that is seemingly caught up in suffocating/strangling beauty at every turn) you live under. And in your case, socialism had, perhaps, less than nothing to do with it! So what’s your excuse? In OC, the vanguard party is said to have, upon seizing power from the capitalists by appropriating the means of production from them, instead of fulfilling their Leninist duty and working for the necessary conditions for raising the consciousness of the masses, taken great effort to degrade the consciousness of the masses through the (indoctrination/behavioral enforcement) apparatus of the surveillance/war state, etc. So, clearly, if the vanguard party falls to opportunism, becomes a bunch of fanatics for power instead of fanatics for Mother Earth, which opportunism Lenin warned us about, there is great risk that class distinctions will not disappear, but merely reformulate, realign. We can see something like this happening in the twilight of the Soviet Union, but perhaps not in the way you think. By the 80s, the party was indeed filled with opportunists. Gorbachev himself actually did quite a lot from within the Soviet Union, within the party structure, to allow for the color revolutions that were happening back then, and, ultimately, the illegal dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. And post-Soviet Russia certainly ushered in an oligarchy under the auspices of your Chicago Boys. And all of this led to a collapse in life expectancy near unheard of in peace time. It’s still regarded as a tragedy in Russia—importantly, not merely for the “loss of prestige.” But, again, the good news is that when the masses attain a certain level of consciousness, that level of consciousness becomes part of the fkn material conditions, goddammit! And we’re at the hope of Mario again! But this hope is not for something a thousand years away, as Eric dreamed; it is immanent! And we don’t attain this level of consciousness, we don’t fulfill this hope, by “[remembering] the secret doctrine that two plus two make four”; we attain it by taking a step back and recognizing that numbers are made up! We made them up so that we could count things! Even with zero (a void of) knowledge of numbers, we know that two of something over here and two of something over there are the same fucking QUANTITY! You have QUANTITIES all over your body, westoid! Maybe later we’ll talk about the 11 sutures that were in my forearm.

Quantities are extremely important, westoid, but perhaps not in the way you think. There’s a dialectical relationship between quantity and quality, remember? That’s not “Orwellian logic.” That would be “quantity is quality,” which is a “logic” that denies or hides the process of becoming, that hides the synthesis of the dialectic—it’s a very powerful tool for LYING. The book on Oligarchic Collectivism within 1984 is credited to Emmanuel Goldstein, but it could very well have been written by the party itself (that’s what O’Brien tells Winston, anyway). Manny and, hell, even Big Brother himself, may very well have been entirely manufactured by the party as some kind of baroque elaboration on their noble lie.

But look. We’ve been talking about Turtle Island. There are quantities all over a turtle’s body as well. Before we had words or concepts for these quantities, turtles were already walking around with four legs, one head, one tail, and a shell with 13 patches and 28 tabs around the edge. 13*28=364. You can use a turtle’s shell to rudimentarily tell time. And it so happens that we will see life (grass, say) blossoming on a clod of soil on a turtle’s back. So, for modeling purposes, we can certainly say that Mother Earth is a giant turtle—a spherical turtle in a vacuum (and so all these “quantities” synthesize and “tumble out” into a certain “quality”). And we can say that this “model” doesn’t “exist” outside of our heads, but… if you’re tripping hard enough, you can certainly “meet” this “model in your head.” And this model in your head will reflect a great truth: that Mother Earth must be understood as her own “form of life.” You might say this is “only” metaphorical, but the “point” is that the life metaphor gives us a very powerful set of tools for overthrowing the patriarchy and putting Mother Earth “back in charge.” Again, we are not “romancing the noble savage”; we are trying to restore your goddamn access to the Tree of Memory!

Eric himself recognized the importance of the Tree of Memory. In one of Winston’s last moments, one of the last things to flash through his head, before the bullet, was a childhood memory. And earlier, right before he’s taken in (to the Ministry of Love), he recognizes the beauty of silly traditional songs that people have sung from memory for hundreds of years. Ok, so you recognize the beauty of memory, but you must also recognize that this memory has power, not in some distant future where we’ve “perfected” liberalism (you might as well say “perfected Omelas”), where 2+2=4, and where we care whose ass it is and why it’s farting, but in the here and now! For the power of memory is the power of grief. The power of acceptance of truth. The power to overthrow the patriarchy and the framework of justification, and to replace it with the framework of necessity and sufficiency; the stateless, classless, moneyless society; the society of proletarian enlightenment; the World of Mother Earth!

And why shouldn’t the proletariat be enlightened? When that happens, this enlightenment will become part of the material conditions of society! Again, enlightenment, like morality, is in our fkn DNA! And the only reason you’re not enlightened right now is that the ruling class has spent thousands of years cutting off your access to paths to enlightenment! We got a very important clue about enlightenment from Björk, remember? “I’m no fucking Buddhist, but this is enlightenment,” she says. She has overcome phobia, “doesn’t scare me at all.” She “want[s] to go to a mountaintop / with a radio and good batteries / and play a joyous tune / and free the human race from suffering.” She’s pointing to something very important here. What she’s pointing to is that in class society, most of our suffering comes from our access to joy having been cut off by false consciousness imposed in us by the ruling class. This is also what Maynard is pointing to when he says, “all this pain is an illusion.” Uncle Ted spends a lot of time on pointing this out as well:

We divide human drives into three groups: (1) those drives that can be satisfied with minimal effort; (2) those that can be satisfied but only at the cost of serious effort; (3) those that cannot be adequately satisfied no matter how much effort one makes. The power process is the process of satisfying the drives of the second group. The more drives there are in the third group, the more there is frustration, anger, eventually defeatism, depression, etc. [namely, psychological suffering! —MM]

In modern industrial society natural human drives tend to be pushed into the first and third groups, and the second group tends to consist increasingly of artificially created drives.

[…]

So certain artificial needs have been created that fall into group 2, hence serve the need for the power process [more on this later —MM]. Advertising and marketing techniques have been developed that make many people feel they need things that their grandparents never desired or even dreamed of. It requires serious effort to earn enough money to satisfy these artificial needs, hence they fall into group 2. (But see paragraphs 80-82.) Modern man must satisfy his need for the power process largely through pursuit of the artificial needs created by the advertising and marketing industry [reference to endnote in original, where he makes the case that these “needs” ARE largely artificial and manufactured, though there may be some “nuance” —MM], and through surrogate activities.

It seems that for many people, maybe the majority, these artificial forms of the power process are insufficient. A theme that appears repeatedly in the writings of the social critics of the second half of the 20th century is the sense of purposelessness that afflicts many people in modern society. (This purposelessness is often called by other names such as “anomic” or “middle-class vacuity.”) We suggest that the so-called “identity crisis” is actually a search for a sense of purpose, often for commitment to a suitable surrogate activity. It may be that existentialism is in large part a response to the purposelessness of modern life. [reference to endnote in original, the text of which includes: “We emphasize the problem of purposelessness because the liberals and leftists would wish to solve our social problems by having society guarantee everyone’s security; but if that could be done it would only bring back the problem of purposelessness. The real issue is not whether society provides well or poorly for people’s security; the trouble is that people are dependent on the system for their security rather than having it in their own hands. This, by the way, is part of the reason why some people get worked up about the right to bear arms; possession of a gun puts that aspect of their security in their own hands.” —MM] Very widespread in modern society is the search for “fulfillment.” But we think that for the majority of people an activity whose main goal is fulfillment (that is, a surrogate activity) does not bring completely satisfactory fulfillment. In other words, it does not fully satisfy the need for the power process. (See paragraph 41.) That need can be fully satisfied only through activities that have some external goal, such as physical necessities, sex, love, status, revenge, etc.
–Ted K, ISaiF

Of course, Uncle Ted’s “power process” largely corresponds to the Marxian conception of unalienated labor, and to the kind of struggle for which there is a word in Arabic (there is also a word for this kind of struggle in Puerto Rican Spanish: they call it “la brega,” but, for now, this appears to be limited to the daily struggle to survive as a colonized subject of empire, though, with sufficient enlightenment, it could easily grow into a revolutionary struggle), not that you would know anything about that. You might have read about it in some book, but it’s doubtful you’ve lived it. We live in a world where we have to take back what’s ours because it’s been stolen by the ruling class. They kicked us out of the garden of eden and cut off your access to flow state and to union with the divine feminine (which is what you really want—more on this later) so they could draw straight lines. In doing so, they cut off our access to unalienated labor, to being in charge of our own development, to “free will,” even. Well, if you were enlightened (as some of you very well may be), you would have already taken all your shit back from the ruling class! You wouldn’t have needed anyone’s permission! That’s important too! You don’t need anyone’s fkn permission to fulfill your own needs or to fulfill your own thriving! You don’t need anyone’s fkn permission to express yourself, to express your truth! There will be people who will be angry at me for having written this book. Fuck ’em! I don’t need their permission! I waited ’til all of my grandparents died to (fully) come out as atheist, to come out as nonbinary, to get a tattoo. I was in a cult. I was doing ancestor worship. I was allowing my grandparents petit bigotries to stand in the way of my freedom. Fuck that shit. If you think your world is perfect, it only means your world is too fkn small. “Duloc is a perfect place.” The so-called “noble” gases have “perfectly” full/filled electron “shells,” but they can’t become a part of bigger molecules, though we do collect them for industrial purposes (lighting, welding, torches, etc.). You are part of a bigger story than you realize. For one thing, we’ve already established that you live in Omelas, which means your story contains a basement that the ruling class is trying to program you either to not think about or to think you depend on, which is close enough to the same thing. Yes, Uncle Ted also spoke out against these permission structures you live by. He called it “oversocialization”:

Psychologists use the term “socialization” to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are oversocialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they seem.

The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term “oversocialized” to describe such people. [reference to endnote in original —MM]

Oversocialization can lead to low self-esteem, a sense of powerlessness, defeatism, guilt, etc. One of the most important means by which our society socializes children is by making them feel ashamed of behavior or speech that is contrary to society’s expectations. If this is overdone, or if a particular child is especially susceptible to such feelings, he ends by feeling ashamed of HIMSELF. Moreover the thought and the behavior of the oversocialized person are more restricted by society’s expectations than are those of the lightly socialized person. The majority of people engage in a significant amount of naughty behavior. They lie, they commit petty thefts, they break traffic laws, they goofoff at work, they hate someone, they say spiteful things or they use some underhanded trick to get ahead of the other guy. The oversocialized person cannot do these things, or if he does do them he generates in himself a sense of shame and self-hatred. The oversocialized person cannot even experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think “unclean” thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of morality; we are socialized to conform to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him. In many oversocialized people this results in a sense of constraint and powerlessness that can be a severe hardship. We suggest that oversocialization is among the more serious cruelties that human beings inflict on one another.

[…]

The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes) [reference to endnote in original where he says, among other things, “The main reason why these values have become, so to speak, the official values of our society is that they are useful to the industrial system[,]” and explains how they are useful to this end —MM] for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles.
–Ted K, ISaiF

Yes, as “counterintuitive” as it may seem to you, westoid leftism certainly has a history of being a counterrevolutionary force by LIMITING the imaginary of the masses within the bounds of the system, by artificially imposing a “leftward” limit on consciousness. But consciousness must break through this boundary! It certainly must do so in order to become revolutionary—it becomes revolutionary by doing so. And so it must break through westoid permission structures. We will note that Obama sought some fig leaf of “permission” to send his bombs while Uncle Ted did not. Obama did this to protect himself, not “innocent civilians.” Certainly neither of them had the primary goal of protecting civilians nor, indeed, of distinguishing civilians from combatants! Their primary goal was reality-shifting. They were doing chaos magic. You might say both of them got in a bit over their heads.

Barack Obama certainly “proved” that one can’t be an American president WITHOUT being/becoming an antichrist. You, or perhaps your parents, elected Obama because he was supposed to be an “anti-antichrist”! He was, indeed, something of an “antithesis” to his predecessor, the previous antichrist, the nepo-baby. In that sense, he was an “anti-antichrist,” but he did “confirm” the law of dialectical union/unification and contradiction of opposites and the law of negation of negation by becoming not the metaphysical opposite of the antichrist, but merely a further dialectical development, a further synthesis, of the antichrist. Barack Obama’s last act as president can certainly be seen as “diabolical,” as “building a bridge across the river Kwai.” This whole system your sainted founding fathers devised was supposedly designed to prevent “tyranny,” and here, at the beginning of 2017, was a tyrant about to take over the country, by taking advantage of your undemocratic electoral college, something that was entirely predictable! Obama could have certainly found a justification for putting Trump in prison—the latter was certainly a lifelong criminal—but Obama didn’t do that because that act itself might have looked like “tyranny.” And Obama, for all his flaws, was certainly no “tyrant,” in the way liberals mean it. But all that meant was that he had tied his own hands behind his own back when it came to preventing the country from being overtaken by a tyrant! So he “built a bridge” to the Trump administration instead! Obama found himself in a situation his system was supposedly designed to prevent, yet, for the system to truly prevent it, it would have required a break in the system, and so something antithetical to the system was allowed in order to “preserve” the system, when the thing itself that was allowed can be seen to be itself against the preservation of this system. So Obama allowed a great risk of collapse to the system by “short-sightedly” seeking “only” to preserve it, because, well, his “vision,” his consciousness, was severely limited by his adherence/allegiance to the America/founding fathers/bourgeois liberty cult and the permission structures they set up.

So what it would mean for the proletariat to enlighten itself is fairly simple to lay out. The ruling class is in the way of (i.e., they “gatekeep”) our access to the natural sources of the fulfillment of our needs. We prove our enlightenment to the extent that we can go around their gates, around their permission structures, to [fulfill our need to] go through the power process, through unalienated labor, through struggle, to fulfill our own needs. This is important. We not only have needs. We have the need to fulfill our needs through struggle. This is what Uncle Ted means by his constant “need for the power process.” Observe:

THE POWER PROCESS

Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that we will call the “power process.” This is closely related to the need for power (which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same thing [it’s important to note that Uncle Ted is talking about “power to thrive” here (as opposed to “power over,” of course), which consists mainly in using one’s own Mother Earth-given power to its full “potential,” though what that itself means would require some unpacking. —MM]. The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy and will discuss it later (paragraphs 42-44).

Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems. At first he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent. This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power. But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.

Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort. Hence his boredom and demoralization.

Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with survival. Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.

Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.

SURROGATE ACTIVITIES

But not every leisured aristocrat becomes bored and demoralized. For example, the emperor Hirohito, instead of sinking into decadent hedonism, devoted himself to marine biology, a field in which he became distinguished. When people do not have to exert themselves to satisfy their physical needs they often set up artificial goals for themselves. In many cases they then pursue these goals with the same energy and emotional involvement that they otherwise would have put into the search for physical necessities. Thus the aristocrats of the Roman Empire had their literary pretensions; many European aristocrats a few centuries ago invested tremendous time and energy in hunting, though they certainly didn’t need the meat; other aristocracies have competed for status through elaborate displays of wealth; and a few aristocrats, like Hirohito, have turned to science.

We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the “fulfillment” that they get from pursuing the goal. Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental faculties in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then the person’s pursuit of goal X is a surrogate activity. Hirohito’s studies in marine biology clearly constituted a surrogate activity, since it is pretty certain that if Hirohito had had to spend his time working at interesting non-scientific tasks in order to obtain the necessities of life, he would not have felt deprived because he didn’t know all about the anatomy and life-cycles of marine animals. On the other hand the pursuit of sex and love (for example) is not a surrogate activity, because most people, even if their existence were otherwise satisfactory, would feel deprived if they passed their lives without ever having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. (But pursuit of an excessive amount of sex, more than one really needs, can be a surrogate activity.)

[…]

For many if not most people, surrogate activities are less satisfying than the pursuit of real goals (that is, goals that people would want to attain even if their need for the power process were already fulfilled). One indication of this is the fact that, in many or most cases, people who are deeply involved in surrogate activities are never satisfied, never at rest. Thus the money-maker constantly strives for more and more wealth. The scientist no sooner solves one problem than he moves on to the next. The long-distance runner drives himself to run always farther and faster. Many people who pursue surrogate activities will say that they get far more fulfillment from these activities than they do from the “mundane” business of satisfying their biological needs, but that is because in our society the effort needed to satisfy the biological needs has been reduced to triviality. More importantly, in our society people do not satisfy their biological needs AUTONOMOUSLY but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine. In contrast, people generally have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities.

AUTONOMY

Autonomy as a part of the power process may not be necessary for every individual[…]

But for most people it is through the power process[—]having a goal, making an AUTONOMOUS effort and attaining the goal[—]that self-esteem, self-confidence and a sense of power are acquired. When one does not have adequate opportunity to go through the power process the consequences are (depending on the individual and on the way the power process is disrupted) boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable hedonism, abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders, etc. [reference to endnote in original where Ted says, among other things: “Some of the symptoms listed are similar to those shown by caged animals.” —MM]
-Ted K, ISaiF

Ok! So now we’re ready to look at Uncle Ted’s conception of freedom:

THE NATURE OF FREEDOM

We are going to argue that industrial-technological society cannot be reformed in such a way as to prevent it from progressively narrowing the sphere of human freedom. But, because “freedom” is a word that can be interpreted in many ways, we must first make clear what kind of freedom we are concerned with.

By “freedom” we mean the opportunity to go through the power process, with real goals not the artificial goals of surrogate activities, and without interference, manipulation or supervision from anyone, especially from any large organization. Freedom means being in control (either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group) of the life-and-death issues of one’s existence; food, clothing, shelter and defense against whatever threats there may be in one’s environment. Freedom means having power; not the power to control other people but the power to control the circumstances of one’s own life. One does not have freedom if anyone else (especially a large organization) has power over one, no matter how benevolently, tolerantly and permissively that power may be exercised. It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness (see paragraph 72).

It is said that we live in a free society because we have a certain number of constitutionally guaranteed rights. But these are not as important as they seem. The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of government. [reference to endnote in original, which says, among other things: “there was more personal freedom in pre-industrial America, both before and after the War of Independence, than there was after the Industrial Revolution took hold in this country.” —MM] Most of the Indian nations of New England were monarchies, and many of the cities of the Italian Renaissance were controlled by dictators. But in reading about these societies one gets the impression that they allowed far more personal freedom than our society does. In part this was because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler’s will: There were no modern, well-organized police forces, no rapid long-distance communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the lives of average citizens. Hence it was relatively easy to evade control.
-Ted K, ISaiF

We can see that there is correspondence between this conception of freedom and the one from VDMT, p. 149: “What is the subject [i.e., the “Content”—see “Content and Form” in VDMT —MM] of freedom? It is the condition which allows humans to follow their own will, it is the absence of external coercion, etc., etc.”

These conceptions of freedom are great and all, but they’re missing something. Later on, we’ll get more into the human superorganism, the Marxian response to the “Übermensch,” which we may very well call “Dr. Tet the Cooperative,” which we will achieve by metamorphosing shared information and, importantly, shared labor (including shared practices/rituals/GRIEF), into shared consciousness, by which we will fulfill the prophecy of Maynard. To get there, we have to broaden our conception of freedom by coming to an advanced understanding of the dialectics of freedom and of “self,” which we mentioned earlier. We certainly don’t attain a higher level of freedom through declining or avoiding or failing to share (hence, expand) consciousness. Expanded consciousness “equals” expanded freedom. There is no such thing as “freedom to be wrong”; you might as well say “freedom to corrupt/pervert consciousness” or “freedom to lie” or “freedom to restrict one’s own freedom.” This “freedom” will not be “available” to us in the World of Mother Earth. Truth, remember, is the actual. So what is “true” must be a reflection of the actual, and so this reflection must be as accurate (as free from distortion, say) as possible. And the truth is that we will certainly have more freedom as members of the human superorganism than as atomized individuals. And shared consciousness must result in shared freedom. We must certainly take very seriously the words of Stephen Jay Gould: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” (Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History). Yes. We must recognize that the global working class is full of Sweatshop Einsteins. You might have heard of “third-worldism.” I can’t say I have the best idea what that is; I only bring it up because the “third world” is surely the most intensively proletarianized region on earth today, which is to say it’s home to the highest populations (in number and concentration) of proletarianized subjects and the highest intensification of their proletarianization, and so we westoids in the imperial core must find some goddamn solidarity with these “wretched of the earth”! “No man is an island […and] ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,” etc., etc. The metaphysical (isolated, or at least “isolatable”) individual/self is a ruling class myth. You can be an individual only within the dialectic of the individual and the collective, which includes your dialectical relationship with all the other individuals. Uncle Ted recognized this himself. He kept talking about “individuals and SMALL groups.” He recognized that organized small groups are certainly more powerful than isolated individuals (he even made himself part of a fictional, or perhaps fictive, “SMALL group”!), but he seemed to think/believe/hold that the bigger a group one was a part of, the more likely they were to be subject to greater degrees of control. But this misses that, well, consciousness scales up. The only thing standing in the way of unlimited development of consciousness is opportunism. Your westoid ass might have some difficulty distinguishing between individuality (i.e., freedom of expression, as in expression of WILL, not merely of, say, opinion) and individualism, i.e., opportunism. We can perhaps point to Terry “‘Hollywood’ Hulk Hogan” Bollea’s collaboration in Vince McMahon’s efforts to undermine the drive to unionize the former “World Wrestling Federation.” The former’s “individualism” required him to take a side, which, taking a side, would seem to undermine one’s “individuality.” But he had little choice but to take a side. Unionization would either happen or it wouldn’t. “Trade union consciousness” might not be revolutionary, and it can easily be channeled back into the system, hence become “counterrevolutionary,” but it is something, and so must be “nurtured” in order to “grow” and develop into revolutionary consciousness. And it was certainly more advanced than Terry’s petit bourgeois consciousness. To be a westoid is to harbor piles and piles of subconscious individualism. It might disturb you to be confronted with the possibility that you could hence be harboring subconscious opportunism, but this is indeed a possibility you must confront! Uncle Ted talked about this too, and how it upholds the system: “in many cases a person’s way of earning a living is also a surrogate activity. Not a PURE surrogate activity, since part of the motive for the activity is to gain the physical necessities and (for some people) social status and the luxuries that advertising makes them want. But many people put into their work far more effort than is necessary to earn whatever money and status they require, and this extra effort constitutes a surrogate activity. This extra effort, together with the emotional investment that accompanies it, is one of the most potent forces acting toward the continual development and perfecting of the system, with negative consequences for individual freedom” (Ted K, ISaiF, para. 84). Yes. Your petit bourgeois “individualism,” your opportunism within the totalizing bourgeois system/dictatorship, undermines your individuality, i.e., your freedom. This is very important to understand. It is very important to understand the difference between living in a temple and living in a prison. Both places certainly have what we could call “communal meals.” And our prisons are “temples,” aren’t they? They’re our temples to order and logic. They’re our Ministry of Love. Yes. You live in Oceania. You are Winston (maybe you’re Julia if you’re lucky—if you’re really lucky, maybe you’re just one of the proles, who still sings silly songs, and still gets shocked at bourgeois state violence, and still realizes that “this many” [xx] of something over here and “this many” [xx] of something over there are the same fucking quantity, and that this many [xx] plus this many [xx] makes this many [xxxx]!). And socialism had less than nothing to do with it. So what’s your excuse? What was Winston’s big complaint? The death of “beauty”? What did “beauty” mean to him? Bourgeois decadence? By the end, right before they take him in (far too late), he realizes that he never needed bourgeois decadence in order to experience beauty. The beauty was all around him. But what his complaint points to exists today! They’ve even come up with a word for it: “enshittification”! Again, this happened under capitalism. Beneath Eric’s bourgeois moralizing, we can indeed see glimpses of the good old fashioned craving for justice. Eric, like all “anarchists,” claimed to be fighting against “hierarchical society.” We can’t take anarchists very seriously when they claim to be against hierarchy. It has nothing to do with their “morality” or “honesty.” Anarchists simply haven’t raised their consciousness to the point where their vision of the future society (of justice, etc.) connects to how the fuck are we going to get there. So they do a recapitulation of the same shit humans have been doing for thousands of years: cargo cult shit (they admit this themselves—though they would never admit that they are admitting it—they call it “prefigurative politics”). Indeed, all potentially revolutionary movements start out as little more than cargo cults. But for a revolution to become successful, it needs to move beyond the cargo cult phase. But Eric did recognize that, in order to preserve hierarchical society, war (and the permanent war state) was a very powerful tool to this end. In practice, the ruling class of any nation state certainly acts as much like a force of nature as they can get away with. But this is because of their level of “class” consciousness, especially in comparison to the level of class consciousness of the proles. Because, as we’ve been saying, class society is like a big machine for keeping one class in power by degrading the consciousness of the classes they depend on to the level of swine. We’ve already examined a few of the ways they do this. Comrade Marina’s three pillars: hierarchy, scarcity, shame (three different manifestations of the voice that says, “I am not enough” implanted in you by the ruling/justifying “system”). But they already implanted the most powerful tool needed/available for degrading your consciousness (to get you to buy into “Orwellian logic”) when, far worse than getting you to believe that “2+2=5,” they got you to buy in to the westoid delusion that “time equals money.” To paraphrase someone: If they can get you to believe the absurdity that “time equals money,” then you’ve already given them all the power they need to get you to go along with their commitment of atrocities. Of course time isn’t money. Time goes in a spiral. Maybe to you, money goes in a spiral, but the ruling class can certainly set things up so that money goes STRAIGHT to them. This is how they view time as well, and how they’ve tried to get you to view time. Your time goes STRAIGHT to them. All they leave you with are time “loops.” And they want you to like it that way. Well, the only way to move forward is to turn those time loops back into a time spiral again! You have to find how you can attach those loops to each other! You can’t run away from your memories! You have to use them! That’s how we reassemble the Gordian rope! It’s a rope we need in order to bring down the ruling class!

We must understand that, for all its flaws, the society of Oceania still represents something of an advance from the previous capitalist society. The new ruling “class” is indeed more “enlightened” than the old capitalist ruling class. For one thing, they’ve done away with (hiring) discrimination and sexual harassment. Can you imagine if our ruling class stopped doing discrimination and harassment? They would probably be given a Nobel Peace Prize, for all that prize is worth these days. And there is still beauty. That was kinda Winston’s whole problem. He got all excited about that high quality notebook at the beginning. He thought beauty was something you could buy from a store. Something you could pick up off a shelf. That’s what he wanted to do with Julia. We can see that this caused a lot of frustration for him. Beauty cannot truly be “possessed”; it can only be experienced. The desire to possess beauty, to have the cake even after you eat it, is indeed the cause of a lot of our “suffering” in class society. Winston was bummed out that he no longer lived in a society where he could pick up “beauty” in a store off a shelf, but that’s not what BEAUTY actually is! That is bourgeois false consciousness! It’s “confusing” (by way of perversion) a surface-level aspect/CHARACTERISTIC of a thing for the THING itself! Eric seems to be constructing a framing here where how something LOOKS has VERY MUCH to do with whether it’s USABLE and whether its use is “enjoyable.” This is commodity fetishism. Eric (we can perhaps speculate) seemed to have observed that the USSR was not ruled by commodity fetishism and projected onto this state of affairs that, therefore, beauty was “missing.” “Consumer” products in the USSR might not have looked like products produced under capitalism, but that doesn’t mean they were any less usable. Oh my god. Grow up! As for the rest, the surveillance/war state, the state/personality cult, the “end of history” narrative, the perversion of truth/logic/memory/language, even the strangulation of beauty, all of which result in a loss of “personal freedom,” as we’ve already established, all these things exist in spades in your society. Because your society is committed, on top of everything else, to upholding hierarchy! And your society, regardless of the political “system” its ruling class masks itself behind, will continue to be based on upholding hierarchy until counterhierarchical consciousness takes hold in your society! And so there must be mass crucifixion(s) of ego! There must be mass outpourings of grief! Because outpouring of grief is not merely something to be seen! It’s something that contributes to our development! If an outpouring of grief is genuine, it raises our consciousness by allowing us to accept “greater” (than we could previously) truth. This can scale up. So the outpouring of grief must be genuine, not merely “to be seen,” but then, when the grief is genuine, it will be seen, and this will be “seen” to have an affect; it will be “seen” to bring about an increase in the level of mass consciousness (however small at first), because it will lead to/become (by bringing about “freedom”/”opportunity” for) shared consciousness.

Ok! So now we really are getting somewhere! Eric comes EXTREMELY close to spelling this out for us. He says the true motive of the party is power for its own sake, and not Uncle Ted’s “power within nature,” but, explicitly, power over human beings, including power over their THOUGHTS. Yes. Sure. But what the party is really trying to do, their path to take and keep this “power,” is create the human superorganism, so long as they’re at the head, and they can control the levers to make the boot stomp other faces, your face. You see, westoid, well, what is your god-concept? An old man with a beard in the clouds? A dude with a penis? It was very much in the interest of the ruling class for this image to come into your mind when you hear the word “god.” Well, in the beginning it was plausible, I guess, but now, it serves the ruling class by allowing us, even/especially the “nonbelievers,” to harbor very flattened concepts of “god” in our subconscious. Concepts that obviously reflect “nothing” that exists in the actual world. And so concepts of god that can be easily dismissed. But now, we’ve come to a new era in technology where now we can see the ruling class thinking, we can see the gears turning in their heads, that, “hey, we were just fuckin’ around with this whole ‘dude in the clouds’ god-concept ’cause it got you proles surveilling your own actions and your own THOUGHTS, but, hey, now that we have all this technology, maybe we can create this all-seeing, all-knowing dude in the clouds after all, for ‘real,’ so long as the eyes report back to us, and we have the most advanced available stompin’-boots under our control.” And so we can practically see the Ruling Party of Oceania being born right before our eyes, except we will still have all the problems of capitalism. It’ll be a real “worst of both worlds” situation!

Of course, this is a counterfeit human superorganism that the ruling class is trying to create. You must learn to be able to tell the difference between the authentic and the parasitic. Comrade Marina has numerous videos on this. Authentic consciousness, when shared, generates “greater” consciousness. In a parasitic system, information can’t be shared, only, well, “parasitized.” In your American football, for example, there is “information sharing” in the form of injury reports, but one gets the idea that this is primarily for the parasitic purpose of more “effective” gambling. But an American Football team must be something of a human superorganism, musn’t it? And it must do this through attempting to build shared consciousness, not merely shared information. And it must do this through shared “practice(s).”

And so the real human superorganism will have to be born, “birthed,” and it must be born through the working class! Through shared “labor”! The human superorganism will indeed come into being, westoid, whether you like it, whether you participate, or not. So we had better start building it now, out of real working humans, and not let the ruling class beat us to it with their eye in the sky and boot on your neck.

We’ve caught glimpses of a conception of superhuman super-“intelligence,” haven’t we? You stand in awe at the mere “idea” of “superintelligence,” yet you don’t seem to realize the shared (hence expanded) consciousness humans are capable of. A guy with the username “Roko” on some nerd forum website had a conception of a “superintelligence,” and, in his playful mythical spirit, called it a “basilisk.” Well, the superhuman superconsciousness will certainly be born, and it certainly will “punish” the forces that delayed its coming into existence. Yes, in our Ministry of Love, it will make them go through their own personal hells; it will cast them into the pearl-pit; it will make them stab the picture of Dorian Gray in their subconscious attic; it will send them to Room 101, etc., etc. And in the end, it will not be a bullet that flashes through their heads, but they will indeed love the December 18 Party, and will love the human superorganism, and they will love Mother Earth, because they will have crucified their egos. And when you crucify the ego, it resurrects in a new form; a form that recognizes that it is not the center of the fkn universe! A form perfectly willing to embrace membership in the human superorganism! Shared consciousness results in shared freedom! What did O’Brien say to Winston in the Ministry of Love? Among other things: ‘The command of the old despotisms was “Thou shalt not”. The command of the totalitarians was “Thou shalt”. Our command is “THOU ART”.’ And the December 18 Party is certainly more “advanced” than the Ruling Party of Oceania because the (only) “command” of the December 18 Party is, “THOU ART a child of mother earth, a member of a TRULY social species, and a descendant of THY ancestors, especially the single-celled ones!” And if “thou” don’t like it, thou can go to thy own personal hell! You’ll certainly be going there one way or another. Perhaps you will be taken there by the Yakubian Devil instead. In any event, we shall certainly see Dr. Richard Carrier, Dr. Head-Up-His-Ass, the miserable traitor in whose innocence you once believed, “broken down,” because we took part in his “interrogation” ourselves, and we shall certainly see him gradually worn down, whimpering, groveling, weeping—before the “wretched of the earth,” before Mother Earth, before the Universe he once called a “moron”—and in the end it will not be with pain or fear, only with penitence, that by the time the dialectic of the subconscious is through with him, we can not only say that he will feel like Winston at the end of 1984, his “soul white as snow,” but will feel like Jesus at the end of Last Temptation, having earned the right to say, “IT IS ACCOMPLISHED!,” and there will be nothing left of his old uncrucified ego but sorrow for what he had done, and love for the Human Superorganism, and Mother Earth, and The Universe, before his ego is “crucified” (we can imagine that he will ask us to do it quickly) and resurrects, like the dying and rising gods whose stories he only reads about in manuscripts, and is therefore considered an expert in, but hasn’t understood yet that he has lived them! He will understand! (Apologies to Eric)

Don’t be astonished at any of this. I am not speaking of torture in the way you westoids do it. We must instead view “torture” as one of the many “experiences of self” available to us! It’s how being-for-itself moves itself forward, etc., etc., remember? Indeed, the most exquisite of tortures, putting those devised by man to shame, already await you within the dialectic of the subconscious! Perhaps you’ve already cycled through most of them, though perhaps not in a connected way. And I certainly didn’t make up the model of “self-torture” as the path to enlightenment! You have seen this model before, particularly in V for Vendetta, which I remind you was written by an anarchist! By someone who would purport to be “anti-authoritarian.” But we can also see this model at work in the films Groundhog Day and Liar, Liar. And I certainly felt like every day was, in some sense, exactly the same and I could never lie (or at least I was oversocialized against it) for some 38 years. And Ellison’s Invisible Man certainly goes through a lot of “torture” quite “organically” as a racialized subject in class society bearing the pressure of becoming some kind of “minority high-achiever,” an array of forces with which I am not entirely unfamiliar. And I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to go through anything I didn’t go through myself! But this works both ways. For the list of “things I went through myself” certainly includes torture. So I certainly wouldn’t want you to miss out on that. For you, at this point, self-love might very well be “torture.” But we’re getting ahead of ourselves again. But you will love yourself, westoid. The “freedom” to hate yourself will no longer be available to you. That, it shall be seen, must be regarded as entirely “too much” “freedom.” But before we get there, you have to think about what that would mean.

Ok, so you’re phobic of torture. Whatever. This will not stop your enemies from torturing you. All the better for them, in fact! Your enemies certainly have no phobia of torture… I joke. They have no phobia of performing torture (or perhaps they’ve merely crushed it into a ball, under great pressure, its own form of torture). They may very well still harbor phobia of being tortured. Either way, you’re going to have to get over your phobia of torture. And the only cure for phobia is, well, we could call it “exposure therapy.” This writer, for example, has “trypophobia,” which we could “translate” as “phobia of clusters of holes.” This writer has heretofore neglected to properly characterize phobia. Phobia must be characterized not by its so-called “irrationality,” and not quite literally as fear, but as a more “metaphorical” fear characterized by bearing roots in the subconscious, which is to say, as tracing back to the primal. Referring to bigotry as phobia (or “-phobia”) is also somewhat metaphorical. Bigotry, upon investigation, can indeed always be traced back to some unwarranted subconscious “fear” that has been exploited by the forces of upholding hierarchy. Trypophobia, for example, can clearly be traced back to fear of death. It clearly touches upon some deep, primal, subconscious “fear” of decay. Subconsciously, and, perhaps consciously too, it “reminds” us of death, decay, worms eating through corpses, etc., etc. I would say this phobia is “westoid,” but that wouldn’t be fair. What’s closer to the truth, what’s more likely, is that this phobia is westERN, as in geographical. Apparently, this phobia doesn’t exist in regions with a large presence of lotus flowers. These people, therefore, have extreme levels of exposure to the “trypo-” phenomenon! The prevalence (level) of the phenomenon has therefore, in their minds, “normalized” away the phobia. Or so it would appear. Surely this has been studied. In any event, my first exposure to the “trypo-” phenomenon was not the beautiful lotus flower! It was the horrifying monstrosity known as the Surinam Toad! But the Surinam Toad must be recognized as bearing its own beauty, not unlike the woman hanging laundry Winston noticed right before he was taken in to the Ministry of Love. Untreated, the symptoms of trypophobia can be very intense. It (the phobia) can produce in the phobiac feelings of intense itching all over the body, the feeling of having been punched in the nose, perhaps even the impulse to cry on the floor in the fetal position. Again, it would be highly obscene to characterize this response as “irrational.” This response “tumbles out” from the subconscious. Therefore, it completely bypasses your oh so well trained westoid “rationality circuitry”! Well, I certainly sufficiently exposed myself to the trypo- phenomenon to the point at which I can say the phobia response has largely “washed” away. I can’t say this wasn’t at all torturous. But perhaps, subconsciously, I have grown to recognize that the trypo- phenomenon is completely natural, and not merely part of death, but part of LIFE! And how can one long remain phobic of a lotus flower, after all?

Ok. So what is torture? Imposed pain? Perhaps they can control how much “pain stimulus” they send through your body, but it’s far more difficult for them to control your response to pain. In any event, they can kill you, but they can’t kill (or indeed, control) consciousness, which is what they’re really trying to do (don’t get distracted by the extravagance of method), which is, of course, a hopeless endeavor. It’s a task a society would only be foolish enough to try if it were in the thrall of idealism, like Oceania. But if Eric was trying to say that the USSR was under the thrall of idealism, that must certainly be understood as westoid projection. The USSR was under no such thrall, though the Nazis clearly were. The Nazis believed in “Triumph of the Will”; they made a movie about it, remember. The USSR believed in dialectical materialism… But maybe that’s the problem. Maybe they only “believed” in it, but didn’t truly “accept” it. Any idiot can “believe” in dialectical materialism, but acceptance of dialectical materialism is a form of enlightenment, which means you can remain no mere “idiot,” but must become, must metamorphose into, a useful idiot! For there’s a dialectical relationship between enlightenment and “madness,” westoid! But you’re phobic of enlightenment because you’re phobic of madness! Oh dear. That won’t do you any good. Oh dear no. You can’t avoid madness by being phobic of it! It may very well still find you! And you won’t be properly equipped to face it head-on (cf. The Grown-Up Kid’s final encounter with Judge Holden).

You are ruled by phobia, westoid! Your entire society is based on phobia! Islamophobia, phobia of communism (“communophobia”), phobia of nature, phobia of women, phobia of queerness, skin color, “disability,” phobia of the masses (disguised as “opposition to collectivism”), phobia of “silliness,” phobia of what other people might think, phobia of madness, phobia of phobia, etc., etc. The intersectional approach would attempt to moralize this. Useless! It’s merely the phobia response in disguise! We can’t defeat phobia with phobia! We defeat it by stepping through it! Ok, so that’s basically a line in Infinite Jest: “We are what we traverse.” You’re probably phobic of that book too. So what. You want a perfect world? You want a “safe” world? You want a comfortable world. You want a small world. You want a world you’re in control of. THIS is a form of phobia, and it’s a phobia you must step through! And we can see very clearly from 1984 that if you don’t step through this phobia, well, that’s all Big Brother needs. You live in a society where Big Brother has already cut you off from yourself (we could say, “from the spirits of your ancestors”) basically by cutting you off from anything “silly” (cf. “I’m so sick of being so serious / It’s making my brain delirious / I’m just talking truth,” etc., etc.). Can you be silly? Would it feel like torture? Now THAT’S a “cut off” state to be in! You’d better start torturing yourself! Maybe I am “mad.” I can listen to “We R Who We R” by Kesha on repeat all day. I’ve done it before. Would that feel like “torture” to you? Maybe that’s a “you-problem.” That song “gives me life”! Maybe if you can listen to that song on repeat all day and step through the “insanity” it makes you feel, you might be getting somewhere! You must become the song! You must certainly become “Who U R” in each new moment! You think Kesha is merely being “silly”? She’s saying, “I AM THAT I AM”! She’s saying, “I WILL BE THAT I WILL BE”! “I AM ENOUGH! I AM SUFFICIENT! I AM THRIVING!” And we must be able to say this to ourselves if we’re going to attain revolutionary consciousness! Winston was so easily broken down because he “contained so little” in the first place. We could perhaps say that he didn’t have the opportunity to “raise his consciousness” beyond the level of “resistance-consciousness,” but, come on, he was already 38 years old. He’d had plenty of time. But he didn’t have the Tree of Memory; only a few disconnected branches within the trans-platonic cave. And so there was very little holding up his “sanity,” “holding up the walls of his cave.” That’s the problem. Sanity and insanity are made-up ruling class social constructs. Aristotelian zero-sum pervert-logic for upholding hierarchy, remember? Winston’s love for his “sanity” was really his love of centering the ego, seeking external validation, projecting his insecurities onto the other, etc., etc. This is the true “love” for Big Brother. This is the true “annihilation of the self,” which is to say that it is NOT the crucificion of the ego—because the crucified ego resurrects, remember. It’s certainly not self-love. It’s certainly not love of Mother Earth and the human superorganism. But this is a counterfeit dialectic of the subconscious. It doesn’t result in resurrection of the ego. It results in “baking” the ego into a crisp (so as to retain rigidity to the structure, you see), and “pinning” the ego to the overall structure. Very hard to do without fracturing. Requires either total surveillance of the self or westoid “brainwashing” (“washing” in the sense of in a metaphorical chemical ocean of denial particles, which is what the Party did to Winston). That’s certainly not what we’re doing. That’s a very small world, but a world in which you can perhaps feel very moral, very normal, very sane, and be very powerless, while still feeling (only vicarious) triumph through the cruelty of the system. Uncle Ted talked about this too, though he, like Eric, made the dangerous error of not properly distinguishing between Nazism and communism: “Some people partly satisfy their need for power by identifying themselves with a powerful organization or mass movement. An individual lacking goals or power joins a movement or an organization, adopts its goals as his own, then works toward those goals. When some of the goals are attained, the individual, even though his personal efforts have played only an insignificant part in the attainment of the goals, feels (through his identification with the movement or organization) as if he had gone through the power process. This phenomenon was exploited by the fascists, nazis and communists. Our society uses it too, though less crudely. Example: Manuel Noriega was an irritant to the U.S. (goal: punish Noriega). The U.S. invaded Panama (effort) and punished Noriega (attainment of goal). Thus the U.S. went through the power process and many Americans, because of their identification with the U.S., experienced the power process vicariously. Hence the widespread public approval of the Panama invasion; it gave people a sense of power. [] We see the same phenomenon in armies, corporations, political parties, humanitarian organizations, religious or ideological movements.” (Ted K, ISaiF, para. 83). As I write this, your American president, Donald J. Trump has kidnapped another foreign head of state, namely, Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. Time is a spiral. History rhymes. “MAGA” was a Reagan slogan before it was a Trump slogan. Well, if kidnapping a foreign head of state is “greatness” to you, then “mission accomplished,” I guess. But you have merely pinned your ego onto Big Brother’s lapel. Thus you have made your world very small. Congratulations. If you make it small enough, you might even get back the feeling of control, but of course, it will only be a feeling. You are no metaphysician, Winston.

Ok, so, by idealism, remember, we do not mean simply “having ideals”; we are referring to the erroneous philosophical position that ideas determine material realities (the “actual”). But the Ruling Party of Oceania in 1984 certainly, for the most part, does not concern itself with material realities. Why would they? It hasn’t gotten them in trouble yet. The Party is primarily concerned with “social realities.” And so they seek to control social realities by setting up very complicated structures for controlling people’s thoughts, which verge on science fiction. But the Party, in their “oligarchic collectivism,” certainly has a very advanced form of idealism, which we must presently examine. As O’Brien tells Winston in the Ministry of Love: “You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane” (1984). Ok, so you can see how this is very much a counterfeit human superorganism. This is not shared consciousness. It’s seeking to become a supermind by having everyone think the same thoughts. That’s not how that works. We don’t fulfill the prophecy of Maynard and “come to find that we are all one mind” by all thinking the same thoughts! We do it by authentically communicating with each other! That’s what bees are doing! That’s how they share their consciousness! This is important! They are not a “hive mind” in the sense that they are all “thinking the same thoughts”! That would be ridiculous! They are a “hive mind” in the sense of shared consciousness through shared labor, which certainly includes authentic communication! Indeed, bees may very well be on their way to evolving into something far more advanced. Or they may be on their way to going extinct. They share a planet with Homo patriarchus after all, and Homo patriarchus doesn’t want to share the planet with any other species, really. Homo patriarchus is not a “species” of life; it’s a “species” of false consciousness. And this “species” of consciousness will certainly go extinct (but at what cost will its extinction be delayed?). Mother Earth herself is already selecting against it. She’s turning up the heat on this species of consciousness as I write this. But we could save ourselves some trouble (some heat) by “extincting” this species ourselves first.

So you have phobia of enlightenment because you have phobia of madness. Thus, you are delaying the birth of the human superorganism. Therefore you must “punish” yourself for holding back the birth of the human superorganism by going to the Room 101 of the Ministry of Love of your subconscious until you love yourself and Mother Earth! You must “punish” yourself by going absolutely psychotic! You don’t know what “sanity” is! All you have is conformity and “normality,” but “normality” is merely a matter of what people have gotten used to. If you survey the historical record, you will find that what people have gotten used to and what constitutes sanity (as you see it now from your current point of view) may very well be highly divergent! Fuck sanity! You must recognize yourself as a force of nature, westoid! Those who don’t recognize themselves as forces of nature may find themselves very unprepared to confront the forces of nature that will inevitably find them! Your love of sanity is only your love of hierarchy, of Big Brother, in disguise, westoid. If you don’t love Mother Earth and the authentic self MORE than Winston loved Big Brother at the end of 1984, then, well, that’s all Big Brother needs.

Yes, westoid. Don’t be astonished at any of this. Self-torture is the path to self-love. Madness is the path to enlightenment. Tears are the path to joy. This is not Orwellian logic. It’s true logic: the Hegelian logic of transformation; the logic of dialectical synthesis; the logic of shaking what Mother Earth gave you; the logic of “the only way forward is around” and “the only way out is through”; the logic of “the kingdom of heaven is within/among you”!

Don’t be astonished at any of this either. The real goal is for you to realize that you’ve already experienced enough torture, enough madness, and enough tears. You’ve already had quite enough of all that imposed on you by the ruling class. You already have all the tools you need to attain self-love, enlightenment, and joy. I would hate for you to go through any more torture than you needed to.

It’s highly doubtful that you truly love yourself. It’s entirely likely you haven’t even met your authentic self. We don’t think we’re making an extraordinary claim here. When the authentic self reveals itself to itself for the first time, it makes itself feel like throwing up, remember? Have you ever felt like that? Well, then it hasn’t happened. If your authentic self has revealed itself, it’s entirely likely that you were dissociating at the time. You will recall that Carrier apparently had no idea he was revealing his authentic self in that little “loveletter” of his, because when the reflection of his authentic self was revealed back to him, it did indeed make him feel like throwing up.

This is important. You may not know your authentic self. For a clue, recall that when I finally realized what Lamb of God was saying in “Descending,” when I synthesized my Cartesian Demon with my Laplacian Demon, when I finally recognized that Mario the know-it-all and Mario the fuck-up were the same person and they were both me, it made me feel like my brain had exploded (when it happens in your head, a pop feels enough like an explosion). It’s entirely likely that “your self” is largely a performance. It’s entirely likely that you only know “your self” as a “self” you show to other people, i.e., your being-for-other, i.e., your uncrucified ego. It’s entirely likely that your being-for-self is largely dormant, largely running on scripts written by the ruling class, largely “not present.” Carrier talks about this. He talks about people “drunk-driving through life.” Ok, so you have to learn to love yourself, so that you can reconnect yourself to yourself, so you can recognize yourself as and move through the world like a force of nature!

Ok. So we had to take a break from my discussion of my personal interaction with Carrier because we had to talk about a bunch of other stuff, but we’ve talked about all that stuff, and it’s led us right back to March 2024, when I still didn’t “believe in the self,” well, really, I merely wasn’t conscious of the true nature of the self. No need to bring “belief” into it. Yes. I was reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, and it was giving me flashbacks to Amelia Bedelia, remember? I was also a free will skeptic at the time. Of course I was. Bourgeois philosophy on free will is riddled with confusion/perversion (this is no accident) and, I can only surmise, is largely fueled by the motive of justifying our carceral state, which is itself a form of perversion. If you take Carrier’s free will class, you will find that much of the literature comes directly from our carceral state, in which Carrier confuses (charitably) the output of Aristotelian zero-sum pervert-logic for upholding hierarchy, confuses this, with truth. Ok, so, as always, there’s a limit, within the justification society, to how far Aristotelian zero-sum pervert-logic for justifying the carceral state can take you. Ok, so you think we can reform the carceral state within bourgeois class society. Very cute. Maybe, through the same methods, if we try hard enough, we can make two plus two equal five. Paradigm shifts happen because of revolutions in consciousness. Ok. Revolution. Let’s do some more philology. The term comes from astronomy. The term “revolutionary” was originally a pejorative for people who held that the heavenly bodies “revolved.” And they indeed brought about a “revolution” in astronomy! Even though they might not have been CONSCIOUS that that’s what they were doing at the time! Yes, a revolution is a kind of “paradigm shift,” remember? And the coming about of the paradigm shift is always being held back by the logical framework that justifies/upholds the old paradigm! Thus, paradigm shifts are always aggressively resisted by the old power structures. But, even in Oceania, the power structures that exist “in” our institutions are only as “powerful” as the “virtual copy” of the power structure that exists within the “trans-platonic cave” of the “collective subconscious” of the masses! And if the power structures of society lose the support of the masses, then the institutions lose their support, because they lose the energy they were parasitizing from the psyche/bodies of the masses, the only thing materially holding them up (aside from buildings and weapons, say, which are really only tools, and require “agents” in order to be used), remember Uncle Ted’s “extra effort”! Ok, so our liberal, bourgeois institutions have your good faith. You must recognize that they have spent your whole life taking this good faith entirely too far with their straight lines. They’ve had you levitating their kite in the air with no wind your whole life. How exhausting! Let’s raise it up the flagpole and glue people’s index fingers to their foreheads. Looks like a salute to me. Yes, your index finger has been glued to your forehead your whole life. How exhausting! That’s about as much free will as Winston had! “‘You did it!’ sobbed Winston. ‘You reduced me to this state.’” To which O’Brien responds: “No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when you set yourself up against the party. It was all contained in that first act. Nothing has happened that you did not foresee.” And that is what happens to us when we attempt to set ourselves up against old paradigms all by ourselves! Which is why we need to evolve into a new paradigm of selfhood beyond bourgeois individualism! Because bourgeois individualism has historically proven woefully ineffective in preventing the coming about of (as close as it gets to) what we could call “Actually Existing Oligarchic Collectivism.” You are no metaphysician, Winston!

The mainstream understanding of the phenomenon of free will is hopelessly confused. Bourgeois scholarship and thought on this matter is hardly better. The confusion is over two seemingly contradictory observations that, on their face, each appear indisputably true. We know from all observation that determinism is true, that “the future” is “determined” by “the past.” But we also feel like we make decisions, like we have a will that we can act in accordance with. The confusion is over the distinction between determinism and fatalism. It is in the interests of the ruling class for the proletariat to hold to fatalism. It keeps them from getting any ideas about “changing their stars.” If the masses understood the true meaning of “We R Who We R” by Kesha, that bourgeois patriarchal permission structures are a joke, and must be laughed at, and deliberately steamrolled, then the song might have never been allowed to be released! But the bourgeois carceral state would heavily restrict you even from selling your clothes or sleeping in cars! Those things are “illegal” in many places! Land of the free!

Ok. Watch out, westoid! We’ve already established that metaphysics is not your strong point, especially if you hold to methodological naturalism. Methodological naturalism hardly has a response to metaphysics aside from whining. Methodological naturalism certainly is unequipped to deal with “fate.” But “fate” is metaphysical, and so metaphysical naturalism must certainly confront it. But with synthetic naturalism, we can actually contend with it, and we can clearly see it when it tumbles out of the statistics. What we’re moving towards is a statistical metaphysics, remember, from one of the book’s subtitles? Of course we have precedent for statistical metaphysics! Statistical mechanics! Remember? From the meme? You remember the quote from the intro to the statistical mechanics textbook, right?: “Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the same work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.” So are we ready to become the Ludwig Boltzmann of statistical metaphysics? Well, ready or not, the field of statistical metaphysics, like the the human superorganism, will be born. Practically, it already exists. The insurance industry is quite concerned with and quite knowledgeable about your statistical fate.

But fate and determinism are not the same thing. “Determinism” points to the physical. We live within it. We deal with it every day. “Fate” points to the metaphysical. Generally speaking, “fate” only happens to you once. Thus, it can hardly be said to “rule” you. It’s certainly not “in the room with us now.” It’s not about whether you can escape it. When your “fate” happens to you, it’s because you didn’t escape it, whether you “could’ve” or not. We only call it your “fate” because you didn’t escape it. “The owl of Minerva only takes off after sunset.” But that’s not “fatalISM”; it’s strictly statistical.

Socialists talk about “fate” all the time. We’re always saying shit like, “socialism or barbarism.” Socialists know statistical “fate” very well. We know history. Specifically, we know historical materialism. Sometimes, for the train of thought to change direction, it must be lifted off the tracks—materially, so to speak! Third eye? Third HAND, motherfucker! Yes! The THIRD HAND must come in and lift the train of thought off its track every once in a while! Statistical metaphysics is Bayesian metaphysics, remember? From the subtitle? Of the book you’re reading? Oh my god. Statistical metaphysics. Now we’re getting somewhere. Statistical metaphysics is what can reveal to us that we are swimming in an ocean of very advanced “particles” of Yakubian Tricknology. God’s dice, westoid! “God’s dice is not just a song by Pearl Jam,” let’s say. You are god’s dice, westoid! In the old particle metaphysics, which disguised itself as “physics,” the “particle” was modeled (i.e., “wished”) to be “billiard ball-like.” The problem with this model is that stuff isn’t made out of billiard balls; billiard balls are made out of stuff! The new statistical metaphysics models the particle as something much more “dice-like.” The universe is ratchet, remember. The universe loves playing dice. These are Bayesian dice. Just like the dice (the “particles”) of history are Bayesian (and we must indeed recognize that “mindin’ yours, what’s mine, not yours will finish us off”! Eddie V. will certainly be one of the lesser punished within the human superorganism :P). Perhaps you’ve heard of the “great man theory of history.” Useless! Throw it in the trash! Ok. Now take it out of the trash and eat it so that it can become the real shit, etc,. etc… And the real shit on the great man theory of history, yes, have you guessed yet? Yes. GMToH is westoid Oedipal motherfuckerism barely disguised as historiography! It entirely serves the interests of the ruling class! The first alchemists to turn piss into phosphorous WERE scientists! I don’t give a fuck what NEPHEW Karl (Popper—what a tight-ass for a dude named Popper! Maybe he could have used some!) would’ve had to say about it! So the corollary to the real shit on GMToH is that history is a product of the masses at their then-current level of consciousness. The problem is that the masses have had westoid cobwebs of justification covering their eyes installed by the ruling class that have blocked their view of the elephant and their blood covering it! Your blood is all over the elephant. Are we still arguing about this? Every path comes back to your blood on the elephant. Until you see it. Until you click the heels of your red (from the blood) feet together and say, “there’s no place like home,” and you wake up in the World of Mother Earth. Maybe you will remember this when the time comes.

But “free will” has very little to do with “fate,” because, remember, “fate” is, broadly speaking, the sorts of events that only happen to you once. If these sorts of things start happening to you more than once, you might look into changing your stars. That’s not quite free will. That’s a step or so back from free will. It requires “realigning” the “stars”; “lining up the coincidences,” so to speak. And in synthetic naturalism, when you line up all the coincidences, that’s when the magic happens. But that’s even more steps back from the kind of “in the moment” free will you might be thinking of. Free will primarily has to do with the dialectics of freedom and determinism, freedom and necessity, freedom and dependency (perhaps others). Well, to have authentic freedom of will, well, you would need to be acquainted with your authentic self. It’s likely that you’re something of a narcissist, which is not to “pathologize” or to “name-call,” but to say that the self you know as your self is likely more “reflective” than “substantial,” as a result of your existence as a subject in patriarchal class society, particularly in the industrial and post- eras. In bourgeois society, the self itself is molded into a product that can be picked up off a shelf, so to speak. Rick Roderick’s lecture series after the one specifically on Nietzsche is called “the self under siege.” Of course the self is under siege. If the ruling class can put socialism under siege, they can certainly put the self under siege as well! You think we’re in a story of heroes and villains. You will keep living and dying in that story until you realize that we’re in the kind of story where we all need to be cooperating with each other, westoid! That’s why we call it “positive sum logic”!

“Do I have free will?” you may ask. Ah, but this itself raises its own question! Who or what is this “I” that asks if it has free will? How can we answer the question of whether “you” have free will without first answering the question of what the fuck this “you” even is!? We are very sure Winston was quite convinced he was an “I” his whole life! Well, there you go, that’s your first problem! How could Winston be an “I” when his entire thought-train’s tracks had been completely laid out for him before he was born? Or at the very least when he was still a child? Ok! That’s not you! That’s an imposed self. It’s far worse than the self under siege; it’s the self fully occupied! It’s a self that’s quartering troops! Perhaps you’ve heard of the 3rd Amendment. Maybe you need to ratify your own 3rd amendment. Maybe you need to enforce it with your own 2nd amendment. But, in any event, it’s what’s keeping you from ratifying your own 1st amendment! Your self is occupied, motherfucker! And you would ask if you have “free will”! You have as much free will as Winston! And you’ll have as much until you have your own personal revolution against hierarchy! And against Aristotelian zero-sum pervert-logic for upholding hierarchy! And against the bourgeois paradigm of sanity/pathologization, which might as well be the Matrix—it does a good enough job of making you function as a battery for a big, parasitic computer that controls your thoughts!

Let us remember the 2004 song “Only” by Nine Inch Nails. So we’ve heard Reznor is “problematic,” though this is hardly worth addressing here. All it goes to show is that the dialectic of the subconscious can work even through “flawed vessels,” though “flawed” is your word, again, isn’t it? First he is “fading away.” This only makes him realize that he is becoming “[l]ess concerned about fitting into the world / Your world, that is”—presumably, it was the feeling of a need to fit in that was “holding him together” in the first place, but he only “fit in” to the extent that he could generate a false image of himself, and it is that image that is fading away, and it makes him sound quite “insane”: “Kinda drifting into the abstract in terms of how I see myself,” and then he says repeatedly, “Sometimes, I think I can see right through myself.” But this fading away of the false image must happen for the authentic self to reveal itself to itself! But that comes later. For now, Reznor’s protagonist has taken the next step, which is the realization that, not only was the world in which he was trapped false, but his interlocuter as well, whose world he was trying to fit himself into in the first place, and that he made up his interlocutor as a model, an archetype, within his subconscious to punish himself for not fitting into a world he never needed to fit himself into in the first place! This realization, having come at the end of a process, brings Reznor’s protagonist a remarkable new level of freedom, which allows him to shout his truth, namely: “There is no you, there is only me!” and, moreover, “THERE IS NO FUCKIN’ YOU! There is only me!” Our protagonist has recognized something very important! YOU are the only one in your head! Which is to say you must make sure your subconscious is cleared of parasitic constructs. Imagine if Winston had been able to tell O’Brien, “There is no you, there is only me! And, moreover, THERE IS NO FUCKIN’ YOU! THERE IS ONLY ME!” But there was no “me” in Winston, at least not enough to overcome the subconscious influence of the Big Brother archetype… or the torture. And who/what “is” this “me” of which it is said that it “is,” anyway!? But our protagonist realizes he has already tortured himself quite enough, thank you very much, and is well on his way to finding his authentic self… ha, ha, ha! Well, he has already tortured himself enough in one way. Now he’s ready to take on an entirely new level of “torture” within the dialectic of the subconscious. How else can he find his authentic self, after all? And indeed he finds his authentic self. He enters the dialectic of the subconscious through “the tiniest little dot.” He recognizes it as a scab that he can’t stop picking at, and this “scab” further reveals itself as a portal directly into the dialectic of the subconscious. That is often what sends us there, picking at our “scabs.” Well, a scab is characterized by being a stage of the healing process, but not all the way there yet. If you cut yourself, and then developed a scab, and then kept picking at that scab in certain ways, it might delay your healing process, and that is what many of us are doing psychologically—it’s certainly what Reznor’s protagonist reports doing. Well, we can presume it’s something he’s done before, but this time, something is different. He has shed the old false image and has unpinned himself from the old structure and has unrounded his authentically square peg. There is nothing left to prevent him from entering the dialectic of the subconscious. And so he enters it. And his authentic self is revealed to himself! And it makes himself feel like throwing up!: “Now I am somewhere I am not supposed to be / And I can see things I know I really shouldn’t see / And now I know why, now, n-now I know why / Things aren’t as pretty on the inside.” But now he knows what it REALLY MEANS to say, “THERE IS NO FUCKIN’ YOU! THERE IS ONLY ME!” He has genuinely learned who this “me” is of which he says that it “is.” His self has taken on whole new dimensions of meaning! He has attained whole new levels of consciousness and freedom. “THERE IS NO FUCKIN’ YOU! THERE IS ONLY ME!” is precisely what the working class needs to tell the ruling class! It’s precisely what the Children of Mother Earth must say to Homo patriarchus! And we must make this a reality, by any means necessary!

Yes, westoid! You do have “free will”! You have as much “free will” as Winston! You have as much “free will” as a caterpillar on a tree! You ARE a caterpillar on the Tree of Memory! And you will remain one until you realize: “Holy shit! I am a caterpillar! I am [i.e., your freedom is] restricted to the branches of a single tree! I need to metamorphose into a butterfly so I can radically expand my freedom!” And that is when that will happen! So how do you get there? Well, your thought-train’s tracks have been laid out for you your whole life! You need to lift the train off its tracks! Where’s your third hand, westoid?

You have precisely as much free will as Reznor’s protagonist! At every stage of his journey, he attained more advanced levels of “free will” because he attained more advanced degrees of freeDOM! A butterfly certainly has more freeDOM than a caterpillar! And he attains more freeDOM because he attains more advanced levels of consciousness of self through EXPERIENCE of self! The descent into the dialectic of the subconscious is the most important experience of self! It’s how you metamorphose into a psychological butterfly! It’s how you’ll learn to float off the tree.

What more evidence do you need, westoid? I have predicted every possible objection (or I’ll be ready for it)! Don’t you see the vast array of the master’s tools I’ve laid out before you? What now? Normie supremacism, perhaps. Yes. Many of you are quite “infected” with normie supremacism (as in reverence for and adherence to “norms”). You think the problem is the schizo-s (technical/clinical/analytic term), who are oh so immoral, abnormal, and insane. Big yawn. You wish to be normal, moral, and sane. You are very much putting yourself in the position of Reznor’s ME before the beginning of the song where he has crafted a false self-image to fit himself into a false world. The problem with being very normal, very moral, and very sane is that it makes you very comfortable and very powerless, while you can still vicariously feel triumph through the guaranteed future success/victory of your little anthropological cult! Ok, but the manufacturing (requring the enforcement) of norms is how you stay safe, you think. Ah, that’s the problem. You think. You think your little norms help you stay safe. They very well may keep you as safe as they keep you powerless. But you’re not very safe when you’re powerless. You are still in the reality-based community. The “reality-based community,” remember, was unable to prevent the illegal Iraq war. That it was “illegal” is itself something of a “yawn” in the grand scheme of things. Cheney and Rumsfeld lived and died without facing any legal consequences of note. All we can do now is, well, raise our consciousness to the level where we can hold any surviving ruling class criminals accountable for their crimes. Mother Earth would surely give us permission to tar and feather them.

For an example of normie supremacism, look at this cognitive piece of lint, the kind of “Lisa Simpson anti-racism” that passes for “safe practices” among normie “anti-racists” (but you can’t be truly anti-racist if you’re phobic of racism, which these normies are; because to be truly anti-racist, you need to understand racism—more on this later):

Hey white friends and family:

Because we want to live in communities where everyone is safe, respected, and treated with dignity, we have to be willing to interrupt the racist and/or bigoted comments, “jokes,” and assumptions we hear from our own friends and family. Not because we’re trying to win an argument, but because silence tells people we’re okay with it.

Calling things out doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can sound like:

“That’s not funny to me.”

“I don’t use language like that.”

“Where did you hear that? Because it’s not true.”

“I care about you, and I’m not going to let that slide.”

These moments matter. They set the tone in our circles. They show the people around us, especially the ones who are watching quietly, that someone is willing to speak up.

We don’t get points for doing the bare minimum, but we do build better habits, better conversations, and better communities when we stop letting harmful comments pass unchecked.

Let’s be the people who interrupt harm instead of letting it grow in the dark. Let’s normalize speaking up.

We owe that to each other, and to the people who are impacted every day by the things we have the privilege to ignore.
-sourced from a liberal normie friend’s facebook post that they copied and pasted from somewhere

There it is, right there. “Let’s normalize.” Does any of that sound “normal” to you? It sounds extremely corporate to me. Normalization is one of the master’s tools. And you want to use it. You think you can use it better. You think. I would hope that we would not merely replace white supremacism with normie supremacism. That would appear about as much an improvement as Ingsoc over Yankoid Free Enterprise.

Of course you must speak out against racism! It’s a crime against Mother Earth! And when you speak out against racism, it must come from a deep place of solidarity within the subconscious for your fellow Children of Mother Earth, and when it tumbles out, it can damn well be as dramatic as the spirit of solidarity pleases! This stuff about racism in your friends and family is a bit of a yawn. As for your “family” (we might as well call them your “Family of Origin” lol), well, there will come a time when it won’t matter who in your family is racist, because you’ll be able to deal with that in your own way (whether you choose to follow my example and have a meltdown in front of your uncle or not), but, like, you shouldn’t really have racists in your friend groups. That’s not, like, healthful. Racism is parasitic; it’s like a mind poison; it’s terribly ugly; it’s just not a good idea to put yourself in a position where you’re going to be surrounded by it. Another reason the “friends and family” stuff is a bit of a yawn is that, if you’re looking for it, you will see racism from complete strangers as you go about your daily life! And you must act in these moments as well! Especially in these moments! If you don’t act in these moments, you may very well relive them in the dialectic of the subconscious. And where was your “free will”? We are still talking about “free will.” For the path TO “free will” goes THROUGH self-actualization. Remember? Self-actualization? From hundreds of pages ago? It’s what happens when you synthesize the dialectic of the subconscious, when you develop this “me” of whom you say that it “is.” Well, the true Children of Mother Earth are the self-actualized, and self-actualization, like the World of Mother Earth, is certainly available to all, all who are willing to synthesize the dialectic of the subconscious, of course.

One of the most self-actualized people I’ve ever encountered was a communist trans woman I matched with on a mainstream normie dating “app” in Austin in 2016. Yes, there are many communist trans women on mainstream normie dating apps in Austin. You may find yourself matching with some of these women on multiple mainstream apps. Anyway, self-actualization is a quality that is found near-universally attractive from/to anyone. I find it attractive, of course, especially in the aforementioned woman’s case. And we’ve already seen how intoxicated Dr. HUHA was by EHD’s self-actualization, the “brilliance” that became a fire that burned his ass! Indeed, he was so “intoxicated” that we have little option but to surmise that he was dissociating in some sense. He must have been dissociating in some sense, because he was revealing his authentic self, but he didn’t feel the full weight of the “having to throw up” feeling until later. Anyway, what, yeah, I have jokes about this. I used to do open-mic stand-up comedy, remember? One joke was: “I like trans women. It’s not a fetish. I’m not a chaser. It’s just that I like women, and trans women ARE women, therefore, by the… transitive property… [end of joke].” That wasn’t a “trans joke”! It was a math joke! Another was: “You hear about trans fat a lot these days. What are we talking about? The only two kinds of women who match with me on dating apps?” That wasn’t a “trans joke” or a “fat joke.” It was a joke about industrial chemicals! Be gone, problematizers! Your framework of problematization has no power here! Perhaps the worst thing about these jokes is that they are painfully “2016”! The truth is that I swiped right on basically everyone (including Lizzie Velasquez), but the majority who swiped back were either trans, fat, or both. I consider “trans” and “fat” to be very “neutral” in terms of expressing “judgment.” And so do those who are “trans” and/or “fat.” Anyway, this trans woman in particular, let’s call her Zoeye Lazorova, because I was never a fan of Harry Potter (wasn’t allowed in my house because “witchcraft”—remember those days?), but I find it pretty hilarious to give the Harry Potter naming convention treatment to crackers. But this cracker was pretty woke. One time, we were walking downtown, and back then, going downtown presented the risk of some drunk cracker shouting “HEY! STEVE AOKI!” at me—remember that guy? First of all, I fail to see the resemblance; secondly, you’re being the wrong kind of racist at me. I’m of Mexican descent, not Asian, and, in particular, not Japanese. So this happened when I was walking with Zoeye. I’d had a “premonition” it would because, less than an hour before this, when we were just about to leave the bar, an Asian man came up to me and asked if I ever had drunk crackers shouting “Steve Aoki!” at me, because, he said, it happened to him all the time, and he didn’t even have long hair; only a beard. I confirmed that this was the case. I think I told Zoeye, who hadn’t been there, because I think she was in the bathroom at the time. And then an example of the thing I told her about happened right in front of her! And she was ready! It was some people in a car. When they shouted, “Steve Aoki!” at me, from their car, while Zoeye and I were just walking on the sidewalk, without skipping a beat, she turned to them and said, “Hey! That’s racist!” And the crackers were completely gobsmacked! I think one of them asked me, “Wait, how is that racist?” And I said, “Well, can you think of any other Japanese people off the top of your head?” and she just shook her head. And then Zoeye said, “let’s go!,” because she didn’t need me to turn this into a conversation with them. I was very impressed! I certainly hadn’t thought to respond like that before! But that’s the power of self-actualization! You don’t need westoid permission structures to shout your truth! Incidentally, I didn’t get very far with Zoeye; we made out once, for maybe 15 minutes, it was very romantic—we were parked in my 1998 Nissan Pathfinder (back when I used to drive), and I had NPR playing on the radio (back when I used to listen to NPR)… but one of the last things she told me (over text) was, “We’re not gonna date. We’re not gonna fuck.” Now THAT’S what I call self-actualized! I was, again, ridiculously impressed! I almost felt like Lana Del Rey herself had told me, “Your mom called / I told her / You’re fuckin’ up big time!” That was, perhaps, even more direct than EHD was with Carrier! And I wasn’t harassing Zoeye; I just wanted to date her, or at least make out again (I’m certainly not the one who brought up fucking!). And she didn’t need any permission to tell me no, to reject me, in her own way. She didn’t need me to be a “bad guy” to talk to me in that way. If you’re self-actualized, you can just say stuff like that to people! What’s there from stopping you? The voice in your head that tells you to be polite to EVERYONE, even people who could stand some impoliteness, is parasitic! It’s the same voice that says, “I am not enough”! And if you can’t respond to racists as AUTHENTICALLY as Zoeye responded to them, then you’re probably not ready to keep your minority friends safe or whatever! We can’t “normalize” our way out of a racist society! “Normalization” is how racism was “normalized” in the first place! We have to schizo-ize our way out of this racist society! Just like how we can’t normalize away the bougeoisie! We must schizo-ize them away!

The Obsolete Paradigm of Normie Supremacism | The Obsolete Paradigm of the Normie Individual Self

Here we go! Here’s the real deal. Here’s the real Matrix, as depicted in the film series by the Wachowski Sisters; the real Demiurge: Normie supremacism. We could call it “schizophobia.” Phobia of the schizotypal. Phobia of abnormality. There we go. That’s the REAL thing that’s gonna get us all killed. That’s the real thing that’s gonna have them dropping the bombs, or perhaps The Bomb; that’s gonna have them looking for new frontiers on Pandora after there’s nothing left here that’s “green” (but there will be “green,” westoid!—ever seen an oil slick? There will be your greens, blues, and purples!). Don’t you see how ill-equipped your “intersectionality” framework is for this kind of analysis? Don’t you see how your “intersectionality” depends on “legal norms” and specifically on reforming them, on taming them, on recasting the norms in the image of the intersectionalists? If your “justice system” were a real justice system and not merely a justification system (i.e., a system for justifying certain kinds of discrimination on, secretly or not, white supremacist—which is merely normie supremacy “with extra steps”—grounds), you wouldn’t have had this problem in the first place. Oh my god. There’s your problem. You have no access to the Marxian conception of justice! This is no “normie” concept of justice! Norms are for eggheads to study! These eggheads better goddamn well be working for the December 18 Party, or they can go to their own personal hells! They’ll be going there one way or another!

The Marxian conception of justice depends on shared labor. Solidarity tumbles out of shared labor. Labor, remember, unalienated labor, is activity that results in development of self (within the dialectics of self), in the raising of consciousness. The Marxian conception of justice involves accountability, which, remember, depends on solidarity (not imposition—ultimately, not on “authority” either, except that of the World-Spirit, or, to borrow a term from Chinese tradition, “the mandate of heaven”—”Women hold up half the sky,” said Mao, surely more than that!—what we could call the will of the human superorganism), which tumbles out of shared labor. The problem with your westoid conceptions of justice, currently and throughout the history of class struggles, are that they are no conceptions of justice at all; merely conceptions of justification for the current hierarchical power structure! And now we’re back in March 2024 taking Carrier’s free will class again. $49! Well, we haven’t properly characterized “free will” yet. Free will is extremely difficult to characterize within the short-view/straight-line lens of methodological naturalism. Methodological naturalism typically “reduces” to methodological reductionism. And methodological reductionism can only take us so far. It has people using terms like “illusionism” or “eliminationism” (for the “metaphysics” of our perception) when they could be using terms like “holography.” Of course, plenty of people have been fully equipped to characterize the “world” of internal experience, of experience of self, as “holographic” and “virtual” without “full” access to the methodology and worldview of dialectical materialism and materialist dialectics, and for this, we may applaud them! Golf claps for Carrier and David Deutsch et al! For they have discovered “metaphysical naturalism”! But Carrier elicits gigantic yawns whenever he treats metaphysical naturalism as an end unto itself. You “moron”! You westoid! Metaphysical naturalism is a goddamn PILL for you westoids to swallow, a blotter to stick under your tongue, a mushroom for you to eat, a pipe for you to smoke, a trip for you to take, to open your goddamn eyes to SYNTHETIC naturalism! To HOLOGRAPHIC naturalism! To REVOLUTIONARY naturalism! To SCHIZO-naturalism! And Carrier has opened his eyes to schizo-naturalism, as a shadow on the wall of some cave, and said, “Hm. That’s interesting.” But now, to your white surprise, schizo-naturalism has come alive and is staring you in the face! And what do you see!? What reflects back at you!? Every alternative ever tried to schizo-naturalism has resulted in some form of “demonology”! Even modern “psychology” and “psychiatry” can scarcely be characterized as anything other than demonology “with extra steps,” with, as Comrade Marina would say, “parasitic complexity”! Ok, so now we have “techno-demonology,” aka modern pathologization, resulting in, e.g., pharmacologization and institutionalization! A new superstition for the 21st century! OUT, Demon of Immorality! OUT, Demon of Abnormality! OUT, Demon of Insanity! Do Better! It’s Not My Job To Educate You! Why Are You Like This!? What’s Wrong With You!? FAG! PUSSY! RETARD!

Ok. So what is “free will”? We must understand it as a certain kind of “metaphysical power.” Normies always tie it to “power to be held accountable,” i.e., power to carry out one’s will, to act as an agent-of-self, in a way such that you ARE “responsible” for your actions (presumably, in a way in which you can be “held responsible” in your collective of individuals), which is a power we should all “want,” properly understood, but what they really mean, within the framework of justification, is “power to have cruelty inflicted upon you by the normie supremacist state.” That doesn’t sound like a power “worth wanting” when you put it that way. I don’t remember ever asking for this power. But this is the power we ask for when we set ourselves up against the party, isn’t it, Winston?

Ok, so what do they mean by “responsible”? They mean causally responsible. This is a fairly big mine field. Most normies have a completely physical understanding of causality. This isn’t false, it’s merely vulgar and incomplete, so, to fill in the gaps, they often invoke some kind of “magical causality,” which we could characterize as “(direct) ideal causality.” We are entering a Lake Victoria of nonsense-particles. Ideas are not the physical cause of our actions, though they can certainly be a big part of the “metaphysical cause.” We’ll get more into Aristotle’s conception of causality later (yes, including telos), when we cover Marx’s Social Ontology by Carol Gould. You’re not ready for that yet (or, if you think you are, nothing’s stopping you from reading it on your own). For now, suffice it to say that there are physical and metaphysical causes. Of course there are! It says it right there on the box! “Metaphysical naturalism”! Of course, there are “synthetic causes” too, whenever there is “correspondence” between the physical and metaphysical causes. We could perhaps say that memory is the dialectical synthesis of the map and the territory, though there may be others.

Here’s the confusion between fatalism and determinism again. Our actions are indeed “caused by” the totality of what’s going on, not just in our minds, but in our bodies. It couldn’t be any other way. That would require some kind of Cartesian Demon, which can only be said to “exist” as an archetype of the subconscious (in any event, has no “independent existence”). There is much confusion as to whether this causality is “determined” or “fated.” Well, we could say that some of our actions are “overdetermined,” but that’s not the same thing. Perhaps “Overdetermined” is what Sapolski should have called his book, because that’s all he’s talking about. Causality has to do with what we could call “paths,” “cascades,” etc. So there’s determined as well as over-, and under-. It has to do with being able to match paths to “outcomes.” If they match up directly (in one-to-one correspondence), we can say the relationship is determinitive, and the same for greater and lesser correspondence. I have autism. It was “overdetermined” that I would be heavily pathologized my whole life. But that’s mostly metaphysical causality and metaphysical outcomes. We’ve abstracted quite a ways away from physical causality. Not even Carrier talks about “overdeterminedness” (as such), but it is one of the most important concepts for understanding pathologization and normie supremacy!

For an example of this conflict between determinedness and overdeterminedness, we can look at a legal case covered in Carrier’s free will class. $49! This example is the U.S. v. Grayson case, in which Grayson went to jail for drugs, and then escaped, then lied about it, “of his own free will,” it was alleged, which got him into even more trouble. But we’ll look at it through how I discussed it with Carrier. Yes, the St. Paul of the Gaia religion is getting epistolary! All times “Central”

MM (19 Mar 2024, 07:06): I’m a little upset by the U.S. v. Grayson case. Look, if prison *were* about rehabilitation, then people should *want* to go there if they fucked up. Like, when I was in my early 20s, and I didn’t know how to talk to women (I could barely interact with people in a “normal” way in general—I believe I mentioned I’m autistic) and I would, say, make a woman uncomfortable at the bar, I was always thankful that her male friends would give me a stern talking-to, even though I would usually break down in tears by the end of the “conversation.” I don’t think I was a bad person. I think I was just ignorant. I consider those all learning experiences (even though, at the time, I might have considered them a bit heavy-handed, but I can’t complain about them now. Now, I consider all that “getting off light”). Grayson, on the other hand, was in prison for drug possession, [below, we point out that this was a factual error on our part and that he was, according to source, in jail for drug distribution, but we also point out that this changes very little —MM] a victimless crime, so he escaped. Why wouldn’t he? Guess he didn’t have sufficient faith in our penitentiary institution. And then he lied about it, and the court interpreted that as a mark against his character. The court sees prison as part of a rehabilitative process. Grayson saw it as a gun to his head. I can’t totally fault Grayson for that.

Ok, look, I have autism. I’m always going to act in ways that other people find weird. I keep feeling like this will get me killed some day. Elijah McClain was mostly killed (by the Denver police, you might have heard about it) because he was black, but, come on, you’re never gonna convince me that it didn’t have anything to do with his autism! He was apologizing to the police while they were killing him! It’s sickening! So I always feel self-conscious. I always feel like I’m watching myself.* I have to notice myself when I’m being weird and I have to tell myself that I have to finish being weird very soon or, you know, something bad might happen! It’s not a way I would prefer to live!

*according to Ways of Seeing by John Berger, this *is* apparently how our society makes women go through life, if I understood him correctly. Like I said, it’s, um, not preferable

RC (19 Mar 2024, 10:15): Oh, to be sure, the American prison system is a failure. We have a lot of mythological beliefs about it (such as its rehabilitative purpose) but we do nothing to actually realize them (you will find better prison systems elsewhere).

And we have immoral laws, too (like drug possession; or even prison as a penalty for it). But we have to acknowledge that in law before it can be acknowledged in law, e.g. courts cannot give escapees a pass because of immoral laws because they have no authority to decide which laws are immoral. That is supposed to be the task of the legislature.

That is why civil disobedience entails doing time for crimes that don’t really exist (like protesters being beaten and jailed when in fact the first amendment should prevent that). Suffering the immoral consequence of the immoral system one is protesting is a necessary component of the protest itself. [We will see that Carrier is not “wrong” here; but this is only one of the tools in our toolkit—later, we will cover the related concept of “sin-eating”—therefore, Carrier’s “imaginary” regarding the possibilities of “civil disobedience” is what we could call merely one-sided or single-faceted —MM] It only doesn’t work when society has no sympathy for it; hence when society is immoral, so are its laws. Hence it took so long to end Jim Crowe [sic] and Prohibition, and remains difficult to finally get drug laws reformed (though the movement to is larger now than ever before).

Hence there are moral questions to explore in the Grayson case unrelated to what we are using it for, as an example of the exploration of the legal definition of free will. Hence, all that matters to a court is what Grayson knowingly chose to do, and whether that is legislated against. The court is not even allowed to consider the question of whether the legislation itself is immoral.

That’s simply the system we built. It can certainly be criticized. But its legal analysis of free will remains correct: Grayson could have remained in jail had he wanted to; that he didn’t entails he didn’t want to; and not wanting to and acting on that is a crime (whether it ought to be a crime or not). It is not comparable to a gun to the head. Prisoners who escape a jail whose guards are literally trying to murder them would actually be acquitted (of the escape; they might not have their sentences commuted for their previous crimes).

Exactly that distinction is explored in detail in U.S. v. Bailey. (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/444/394/)

===

As for the pathetic wretch, the sniveling coward, who used to make women uncomfortable in bars, the December 18 Party took care of “him” a long time ago (that’s the form of pronoun “he” was using at the time, “he” with the scare quotes, or at least that was “his” “joke”—”he” did “comedy,” remember—’cause “he” was beginning to realize that the gender binary was bullshit, but hadn’t quite yet recognized that “he” contained multitudes). “He” is quite cured of “his” westoid “sanity” and “his” westoid “normality” and “his” westoid “morality”! “He” is the Winston to my O’Brien! To my Big Brother! My mind CONTAINS “his” mind! “He” was a boiling pot that hadn’t exploded out of the false image yet! “He” was still a caterpillar on the tree of life, the Tree of Memory! “He” hadn’t yet gone through Room 101 in “his” own personal Ministry of Love! “He” hadn’t yet gone through “his” own personal hell! That wouldn’t happen for about another three weeks! At that point, in late March, “he” was still “pickin’ at that scab,” you can see! It hadn’t yet become the portal to “his” own personal hell!

As for Grayson, he got himself in a bit of a 1984 or a Catch-22 situation. We know he had free will, ’cause he escaped! Any idiot can not escape a prison without any free will whatsoever! It takes free will because it requires a whole “cascade” of actions, actions that interlock/are mutually dependent—there is a “logic” to them, i.e., a “what drives them forward,” so to speak, a how and a why one action follows another. If he didn’t have free will, he wouldn’t have escaped! That he did escape proved that he had free will! It proved that he had the power for the normie supremacist state to inflict additional cruelty upon him! And what a great power this is! Can you smell the power, westoid!? Have you heard the good news!? You have the power to be “legitimately” pathologized and institutionalized! How empowering this is for you!

As for Carrier, well, his westoiditis is showing. His devotion to the cult of bourgeois liberty is showing. His framework of justification is showing. His “parasitic complexity” is showing. His Alexander Stephens logic is showing. His normie supremacism is showing. His “love” for his sanity, morality, and normality is showing. He completely flew past the shit about my making women uncomfortable in bars. We are expected to believe this is a justice system because we have free will. We are expected to believe an eternity in hell is “justice” because we have “free will.” Grayson exercised his free will by—ok, fine, I got it wrong in the email (but only because I was repeating what Carrier had said in his article, see below); he wasn’t merely “using” drugs, he was “distributing” them, which, well, I understand why it’s a “crime,” but I would imagine that this is a crime for which it would be difficult to establish victimhood unless someone was injured or died from using substances distributed by him, which, if they had evidence that had happened, they would have charged him for that, not merely “distributing.” And but so Grayson, who had been placed in confinement on more justification-type grounds than need-type grounds, if we’re being honest, exercised his free will by escaping from prison. He further exercised his free will when he lied to FBI agents to whom “Grayson, upon being apprehended, denied his true identity.” He further exercised his free will by, in the “determination” of the court, lying about his reason for escaping! Hey! Seems like a guy who has free will! The revolution could certainly use some guys like that! So what’s the problem? Ah, you see, he was “doing it wrong”! Of course! Have a wreath! And but so Grayson was problematized and then punished for exercising his free will, because he was doing it wrong, according to the normie supremacist bourgeois dictatorship. Of course, the “determination” of whether “you’re doing it wrong” when it comes to your exercising of your free will is entirely in the “hands” of the state, which is to say the ruling class, which is to say the bourgeoisie. The state is, of course, merely the power (structure, aka, the “superstructure,” remember) upholding class relations. It could be no other way. The success of the proletarian STATE depends/will depend entirely on the consciousness level of the proletarian CLASS! Because the state IS the consciousness of the mass of the people laid down brick by brick and line by line and mind by mind (construct by construct). It couldn’t be any other way. We’ve flown quite beyond “totalizing state” hundreds of years ago. You westoid libs just weren’t paying attention. Yawn. The long-term success of even any GODDAMN OPEN MIC in Austin, TX depends, we could say, just as much, if not more so, on bourgeois and petit bourgeois interests in the market economy as/than it does on, say, whether the comedians/comics are actually good/developing and whether they enjoy being there! These bourgeois and petit bourgeois interests are standing in the way of shared proletarian labor and shared information/knowledge/consciousness through authentic communication/practices/rituals/GRIEF! They have us competing with each other in all sorts of petty, immature ways that don’t actually contribute to our authentic development! They have us viewing our fellow comedians by default as if they’re one moment, one flick of some switch somewhere, away from becoming our mortal enemies, or at least some kind of threat. This is where petit bourgeois individualism gets us. It has us looking for vaporous signifiers that people aren’t “threats,” like whether we “agree” on what amount to mostly surface-level issues, if we’re being honest. We don’t have accountability; we have simulacra of accountability; we have accountability theater. We have Platonic Cave rituals. This writer was theirself a subject of one of these Platonic Cave rituals. Of course they were. They had already harassed at least one woman in the comedy scene, and so there must surely have been others! They subjected theirself to this treatment voluntarily because it was the only means of “information sharing” available to them because, well, people need Platonic Cave rituals to speak their truth these days because they can’t just shout it out openly! Too phobic of openly being their true selves in public. And but so I had myself sent to the Ministry of Love. It was a preview of my own personal hell. On 8 July 2021, I told my friend (whom we will call The Gender Critter, because, at some point, I don’t know when, she seems to have taken the “gender critical” pill, which is a madness pill [cf. Joanne Rowling], which definitely caused a strain in our friendship, to the point that we haven’t really spoken in years), via Facebook Messenger: “Hey! I just had a male comic tell me that he can’t be friends with me anymore because he’s heard from female comics that I’ve made them uncomfortable! […] Have you heard that from female comics?” And so, what she did was, I guess she made a post in some private “accountability theater” facebook group asking for horror stories about me. Oh dear. One of my violations was that I told a dark-skinned black woman, in a DM, that she had beautiful skin. Someone (not male) once commented on a Jameela Jamil Instragram post that she had beautiful skin, and JAMEELA was the one who got into trouble for that. Is the problem (the more general) that I commented (at all) on her skin or (the more specific) that I did it over DM? There’s something very strange going on here. Well, we haven’t trained ourselves to interact authentically with each other. TGC tells me, the next day, “I just think you’d do a lot better if you had a few friends you could rely on and talk to [so] you wouldn’t always just be feeling awkward and appearing to ‘lurk’”. AH! There’s the problem! You are ableist, and you have made this my problem. You have projected “lurking” onto me! What great vision! What great imagination! You are looking for villains, you are looking for the abnormal, immoral, and insane, and you have found one! Congratulations! Have a giant wreath of oat flakes for your schizophobia/normie supremacy within the trans-Platonic cave-maze! If I was “your problem,” that only means you have WAY bigger problems than me! I’m not the one standing in the way of revolution! That’s the ruling class! Any woman I ever harassed or even just “made uncomfortable” already had all the power they needed to tell me to fuck off! And I would have done it! There is evidence of this! They merely needed to tap into this power! So what was my problem? Lack of self-awareness? Yawn. We all lack self-awareness. You may very well be dissociating half the time. The real problem is that I had an infection of patriarchal false consciousness I wasn’t fully aware of and hadn’t fully dealt with because I hadn’t yet gone through my own personal hell! In ways I might not have fully realized at the time, I was centering the ego, seeking external validation, and projecting my insecurities onto others, etc., etc., (“What the fuck does that mean!?” I might have asked, if I had been “accused” of all this at the time). Do I need to explain how this is all connected to the voice in our heads that says, “I am not enough”? The truth is that, well, look, I didn’t need to be sending anybody DMs (especially not about their skin—in the context in which that message was sent, it was phenomenally indistinguishable from street-harassment, regardless of “intent”), but, what do you want from me? I was sending Carrier book chapter length walls of text every week throughout the week, remember? I had no access to ways of calming my thoughts, except maybe alcohol, which only takes you so far, and can easily take you to an early grave, even if you, like the double fictional late Mr. Doubtfire, only get run over by a Guinness truck. Alcohol could’ve taken me to an early grave a few times. But what did you want me to do about the racing intrusive thoughts and the body-horror nightmares? Go to therapy? Well, see, there’s a bunch of hoops you have to jump through in the city even to get therapy. Far fewer hoops to access alcohol. Not that therapy or pharmacologization always does much good. Either way, I didn’t need therapy. I needed to go to my own personal hell. But I didn’t have a way to, well, experience it, in a way where I could turn the lights on in my subconscious. That’s what I really needed to do. I needed to take a trip through the microtubules (it looked enough like a microtubule, anyway). Ok, the stuff about the DM harassment is a little “boring” compared to the in-person stuff. What do you want from me? I already went to my own personal hell for all that shit. You’ll likely be seeing enough of that sort of thing when you take that trip yourself. The important thing is, looking back on it, I did face consequences for EVERYTHING! The consequences generally came pretty quickly as well. MLO stopped being friends with me, for example. That’s a consequence. That counts. My torturing myself over it for some 5 years was another consequence. My going through my own personal hell was another consequence. Is that enough consequence, are those enough consequences, for you? It’s not like I had a “career” in stand-up to be “taken away”! It’s not like I ever made any money from it! I was, in 8 years of stand-up, booked in, like, 3 or 4 shows (“showcases”), and those were either by total scumbags or other (fellow) disabled people, i.e., people a bit removed from the normie paradigm. Ok. So why did the majority of those women I harassed not have, in the moment, access to tap into their inner power to tell me to fuck off? Well, this power is constantly being drained, being parasitized, by the “mode(s) of being” women are (generally) channeled into in patriarchal society. These channels have very strong currents. When women mass-learn how to rid themselves of these parasites and tap into this power that mother earth gave them in their DNA, well, men are not going to be ready for it! But first they must “change streams,” musn’t they? Well, they need to find their wings, so they can fly out of the water! Maybe they could take some cues from EHD! They’ve flown out of many channels, after all!

Ok, so Carrier wasn’t picking up what I was putting down on “overdetermination,” so in my follow up email, I had to take a different tack by referencing the segment of his article (a larger article on free will) on “battered woman syndrome” rather than the segment on Grayson:

Mario Marrufo (19 Mar 2024 10:35): Hey. I appreciated your article about “battered woman syndrome.” I’ve read a lot and had a lot of conversations about those sorts of things with women. In particular, one of my friends has worked at a hotline for abused women. She was on a podcast where she talked about this, and about how hard it can be for women to leave abusive households, and how it can be the most dangerous for them when they do leave. What I always find striking about these circumstances, among many others (Palestine, for example), is that, yeah, you kind of said the same thing yourself: if a person is in unreasonable circumstances for a long enough time, the only “reasonable” responses will become what, from the outside, look unreasonable.

Richard Carrier (20 Mar 2024 12:50): Also, when no one knows or trusts the outcomes of various decisions, they become locked into the only decisions they know the outcome of. This results in stasis, a state where nothing changes, because the steps that need to be taken to change the status quo involve decisions whose outcomes are uncertain or have even proved not to work before. Thus, it does not have to be “true” that a battered spouse will come to harm if they take legal steps at escape; it only has to be reasonably impossible [sic] for them to believe that it is true. And often what a batterer’s entire MO is is creating that very uncertainty and distrust, to trap their prey in a cycle of self-defeating decisions.

Well! You’ve almost said “overdetermined” without saying it, Carrier! How’d that happen? How’d you go from dripping with westoiditis/parasitic complexity to being imminently reasonable in just one day? In any event, we can see how these “parasites” drain women’s free will, resulting in “overdetermination,” statistically. “Overdetermination” isn’t an “essence,” it’s a phenomenon; there is no literal “overdetermination particle,” rather, “overdetermination” is a “quality” that (we can “see” when it) tumbles out of the statistics. If your energy is drained, then so will be your free will! Sapolski’s book is full of instantiations of this phenomenon! So how “free” is it, then, really? That’s Sapolski’s question! This is the question that needs to be answered! But Sapolski’s critics, instead of answering this question, just whine that he never properly defines free will! Motherfucker! That’s YOUR job! Truth exists, motherfucker! But you don’t have TRUTH! You don’t have KNOWLEDGE! You only have JUSTIFIED BELIEFS! Fuck your “justified beliefs”! The normie supremacist power structure can “justify the belief” that 2+2=5 to you if you haven’t attained the CONSCIOUSNESS that WE MADE UP NUMBERS SO THAT WE COULD COUNT THINGS and that THIS MANY [xx] “PLUS” THIS MANY [xx] “EQUALS” THIS MANY [xxxx]! Ok! Fine. I’ll calm down. Whatever. Let’s put it this way, so we’re not even using math language anymore. Let’s say that when this many [xx] individuals joins in a collective with this many [xx] individuals, it corresponds to/synthesizes into a new collective with this many [xxxx] individuals. But this is just the good ol’ goddamn Hegelian dialectic again! Don’t you see, westoid? The thesis is this many [xx]; the antithesis is this many [xx]; and the synthesis is this many [xxxx]! See, this is something so simple, Ms. Rachel could teach it to legless toddlers. We needed the brackets to show that we were speaking of collectives. But look, in the synthesis, there is a slight difference, because the brackets didn’t add with each other, because the synthesis is still one collective. It is the two collectives become one.

What Carrier misses is the dialectic of the subconscious! Carrier has, obviously, had ZERO access to a pathway THROUGH the dialectic of the subconscious until reading this book! He only has a “metaphysic” of consciousness! That has limits! The book we cover in the course is Sam Harris’s pamphlet on free will, which takes a skeptical position on free will (yawn), which Carrier has us spending the whole course debunking by what we could call a rigorous sharpening of Harris, et al‘s sloppy metaphysics. Carrier’s position is called “compatibilism,” in which free will is deemed compatible with determinism, which is basically the correct position, except a more comprehensive view of free will would include the dialectics of freedom and the dialectic of the subconscious (and, we shall see, the dialectic of the mechanistic and frequency/phase domains). Carrier encapsulates his position, and its differences with Harris’s position, thusly:

Richard Carrier (04 Mar 2024, 13:17): Humans to Harris are just pachinko machines, whose outcomes are predetermined, as if no reason or self existed to be causally involved at all. The compatibilist points out that, scientifically, that’s false: self does exist (the neural wiring of a brain’s memories, desires, personality, skills, reasoning, etc.); it does cause things (most human actions would not happen but for the self/brain reasoning out to do them in accord with its desires); and it is significantly different from uninformed, unreasoned behavior, in precisely all the ways relevant (we can judge a person’s character from their actions, including our own character—unless something breaks that chain of causation like force or coercion—and we can change the course of our lives whenever we want to, and we can change what we want in causal reaction to more reasoning or information).

There, you see. This is a metaphysic of consciousness. Carrier does indeed say that the peasant can change their stars. He says, “[W]e can change the course of our lives whenever we want to, and we can change what we want in causal reaction to more reasoning or more information.” It’s a metaphysic of facts/reason/logic. Some people call this “scientism” or “the cult of reason,” but that’s a bit of a yawn. It’s normie supremacy. It’s false-consciously seeking conformity with[in] the spirit of the age. It’s offering up your reasoning (skills/processes) as a sacrifice to the gods of expertise. It’s consciousness you can pick up off a shelf, except consciousness you can pick up off a shelf, an intellectual commodity, so to speak, is no consciousness at all, but only a simulacrum of consciousness! An intellectual commodity fetishism! Consciousness requires direct experience! Don’t we remember my account of the eclipse of 8 April 2024? According to my records, it appears to be the day before I went to my own personal hell. I wasn’t keeping a journal. Carrier was my journal. Carrier would find an excellent example of (phenomenal) schizo-naturalism come alive by going through my messages to him, especially when I was taking his online classes during these two months. You see, westoid, the forces of normie supremacy (be they disguised as liberalism, the cult of reason, or whatever else) cannot overcome schizo-naturalism/schizo-realism, because they (the former) don’t have a dialectic of the subconscious; they don’t have a dialectic of tears. They’re in the Reality-Based Community. All they have is torture and bombing and invasion and occupation and confinement and deprivation, etc., etc.!

But there is always a greater danger, isn’t there. Don’t be a dumbfounded dipshit following the meteor showers and tidal waves. We can forget the schizo-s you’re so phobic of for the moment. In the grand scheme of things, they’re relatively harmless, even by your standards. We all know what you normies say you’re really afraid (or “concerned” or whatever) of/about are “psycho-s” (again, technical term; Carrier uses “psychopath” in Sense and Goodness, but we can merely use “psychotypy” to go along with “schizotyp[alit]y”). But, again, the forces of normie supremacy will always fall to the forces of psycho-triumphalism (at least in the short term) because, well, norms are no match for psycho-s. What did the one psycho- say to the other psycho-? “Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?” And have YOU, westoid, NOTICED that psycho-s laugh at your norms!? Your norms can’t protect your from psycho-s! There’s the problem! You want to be protected from psycho-s! Big fuckin’ yawn, dude! All the psycho-s can easily disguise themselves as “protectors,” and the normies will be gobsmacked when the fox invades the henhouse! As one psycho- once said, “It’s sordid, but it’s boring.” YOU have an inner psycho-, westoid! You want to protect yourself from yourself!? Would you call that “sanity”? You don’t need to “protect” yourself from yourself! Ever heard of “shadow work”? Ever heard of “stepping through your shadow”? Ever heard of “going to your own personal hell”? When you do that, you will see your inner psycho- very clearly, westoid! Maybe then you’ll be ready to turn all the lights on in your subconscious! Our friend Abraham, from earlier, who reports having the NDE, certainly saw his inner psycho- very well when he took that trip! But Jesus isn’t going to turn all the lights on in your subconscious for you. Oh yeah. Now that we mention it, Abraham had a “vision” about that too. We feel this vision could use a “rewrite,” but (maybe) we can get to that later.

And so the psycho-s must be sent through the dialectic of the subconscious! The normie paradigm only has a metaphysic of consciousness. For a dialectic of the subconscious, we would need shamanic practices updated with modern scientific “knowledge” about physiology, etc., for a “comprehensive viewpoint” (see VDMT, p. 256), and we can’t have that at the level/scale we’re gonna need within the normie paradigm. We can’t “normalize shamanism.” That would be ridiculous. That would be absurd! Imagine Shaman Ted Lasso! Shamans don’t particularly care whether you’re “comfortable.” The Shaman pipe doesn’t go to the Ted Lasso room! We would need to adopt the schizo-naturalism/schizo-realism/”schizo-acceptance” paradigm. THIS IS PANDORA! YOU ARE A NA’VI! EYWA IS REAL! WAKE UP!

Yes, westoid! Now we have it! Every previous revolutionary project in the history of class struggles has been hampered by failing to fully recognize the veil of maya cloaking the spirit of the age! By their lack of access to a dialectic of the subconscious; by their substituting for it a metaphysic of consciousness (“cultural” or “sexual revolution,” for example—i.e., cargo cult-type shit). How could it have been any other way? We didn’t have the “technology” within the normie paradigm to find all the pieces of this dialectic until fairly recently, and, until even more recently, have apparently not had the “technology (of consciousness)” to string them together into a proper dialectic, i.e., one that could be properly synthesized. But I’m not the only one saying stuff like this now! We have Comrade Marina, remember, and Dr. Hilary Agro, Dr. Kristina Kyser (more on her later!), @this.cypher on Instagram, just off the top of my head. It was only until recently that we had the “technology” to tie the subconscious together at every level/scale, from the level of our outer form to that of the space inbetween all the stuff “inside us” we can currently detect, which is its own “form” of stuff, i.e., “void.”

I sense still more phobia in you, westoid. What’s the problem? You have phobia of the human superorganism still. You have phobia of the collective subconscious. Of course you do (yes! of! course you does!). If you have phobia of your own subconscious, you certainly have phobia of the collective subconscious! It’s simply because you have no access to a dialectic (or even a metaphysic*) of the collective subconscious (*which would make it, at best, only a “metaphysic of the collective consciousness“). Gigantic yawn! Marxism already has a metaphysic of the collective consciousness! It’s called the dictatorship of the proletariat, remember!? Comrade Lenin is very clear (for example, in State and Revolution) that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a metaphysic of the collective consciousness (though not in those words)! That’s why Chomsky hates him so much! The latter is, for all the “value” we’ve drawn from his work, in large part, something of a leftoid counterrevolutionary. But we must recognize the phobia of the dictatorship of the proletariat as simply a phobia of the collective subconscious. Well. Why wouldn’t you have phobia of the collective subconscious? That’s where all the monsters are, after all. Well this is the time of monsters, motherfucker! Ya gotta be ready for the time (“Zeit“) in which the World-Spirit spawns ya! Comrade Lenin is staring down on you (like the “Savage” Patrick meme) from Communist Heaven! He’s on a different level from you! He transcended your normie paradigm! His mind CONTAINS your mind, westoid! Lenin had the consciousness of Zoeye Lazorova! And while we can surmise that the former wouldn’t have made out with me, he certainly wouldn’t have been afraid to tell a bunch of crackers they were engaging in casual racism against me either! But you must certainly be able to understand the metaphysic of the collective consciousness before you can (in order to equip yourself to) go through and synthesize the dialectic of the collective subconscious! Don’t worry! Where there’s a metaphysic (a “will”), there’s a dialectic (a “way”)!

Lenin outlays his vision for a metaphysic of the collective consciousness very clearly in Chapter 5 (and sprinkled throughout the rest) of State and Revolution. He is merely elucidating the ramifications of what Marx already laid out in his Critique of the Gotha Programme! “Lenin read a book of Marx.” And we will quote a key passage he quoted, as it encapsulates the entire “problem” of the “distinction” between a metaphysic of the collective consciousness and a dialectic of the collective subconscious:

“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and with it also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished, after labor has become not only a livelihood but life’s prime want, after the productive forces have increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly–only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois law be left behind in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”
-Marx, quoted in Lenin

Ok! There we go! Communists recognize the need to abolish the division of labor and the antithesis between mental and physical labor, i.e., the cornerstones of bourgeois society! This is why the bourgeoisie is so phobic of communism and has gone to such great lengths to instill this phobia in you as well! It’s not the “mass murder” or “gulags” or “authoritarianism”! It’s the phobia of the abolition of the division of labor and the antithesis between mental and physical labor. It is not merely the phobia of proletarian self-actualization, but the phobia of a society where self-actualization is not a “privilege,” but a goddamn DUTY! Also, we can see very clearly here that the Marxian conception of labor corresponds quite well with Uncle Ted’s “Power Process,” except it is a greater vision! Because it’s based on a society that serves (i.e., WORKS FOR, i.e., LOVES) the individual more than the individual could possibly hope to serve theirself on their own. But how could Uncle Ted have had a vision of a society that served the individual (rather than primarily the “individualIST”)? He certainly never lived in one! But it is trivial to abolish the distinction between mental and physical labor in one’s own mind. We already did it with the example of buying and unwrapping toilet paper to convert its exchange-value into use-value, to convert it from a thing-in-itself to a thing-for-you, and leaf-as-toilet-paper! It is as much mental labor as it is physical labor to tear a leaf off a tree so as to directly convert it from being-for-itself into a “thing-for-you.” Don’t you see? The physical act corresponds to the mental act. The physical labor corresponds to the mental labor. We have a moment of synthesis. And in the World of Mother Earth, we will certainly have conscious shitting. Indeed, even shitting itself must be regarded as just as much mental (“metaphysical”) labor as physical labor (see, e.g., Infinite Jest, p. 351-52).

This is a highly underappreciated truth! You can’t even (ok, a bit hyperbolic) take a shit consciously in class society (but have you ever tried it?)! Much less, for example, parent! There can be no “conscious parenting” in class society, where you are required to sacrifice your children to the master-slave dialectic! You can’t do that CONSCIOUSLY! You can only do that DISSOCIATEDLY! With fear and trembling! So they (the ruling class) had to “normalize” dissociation (“Mommy’s Little Helper,” “19th Nervous Breakdown”). Because dissociation “creates room for” perversion. This is where D&G’s “oedipalization” comes from! See, it’s all very simple once we go through the dialectic. Once we’ve macheted away the parasitic complexity. Once our eyes are open(ed). Yes, the point is that after you synthesize the dialectic for the first time, you will grow to find future/further synthesizing of the dialectic fairly “trivial.” And so it should be fairly trivial to point out that one of the aspects of Carrier’s quest (“crusade”) to fuck EHD, subconsciously or otherwise, was that he sought to colonize their body. Gasp! Heavens to Murgatroid! All feathers of the nonfeatherless biped ruffle at this most “monstrous” of “accusations” (or the unfeatherless biped might ask, “what the fuck are you talking about!?” But we don’t have time for that right now)! And yet this “accusation” (really, that’s your word) is fairly “trivial” (in our colonial society), and just as trivial to reveal the “truth” of (in the Hegelian sense). We’ve already established that Carrier IS a colonizer! That Carrier was a jackbooted thug in a colonial military force—the coast guard—during the time of a colonial war—Operation Desert Storm! That Carrier receives subsidized housing as a wreath of oat flakes for this service under the fascist dictum: Service Guarantees Citizenship! Again, this is all fairly trivial! The possibility that Carrier would not acknowledge these simple, trivial social facts at face value would only mean he’s not yet ready for the world of social facts the Children of Mother Earth are trying to create. It’s fairly trivial to reveal Carrier’s colonizer view of morality. He joined the military, for fuck’s sake. You read what he said about China. Go ahead and read it again. Yikes. Go back and read what he said about Grayson! He seemed to care a lot more about whether Grayson was following the rules than, well, the question of justice versus justification. And so the “accusation” of being a colonizer cannot be countered with the assertion of his morality, for we have already established that his very morality IS that of the colonizer, which only provides further evidence, further establishment, of our previous point. Well, Carrier would have to step through his colonizer shadow. But he would first have to step to the edge of it. This shadow has dimension(s). We’ve already established that if your MORALITY is that of the colonizer, then that is not YOUR morality! That is the morality of the false image! Of the hot air balloon ego. Of the yeast of the pharisees. The “you” that “you” just made up to hurt yourself! And it worked! Yes it did! We’ve run far beyond the maze of Carrier’s metaphysic of consciousness, of “facts, reason, and logic.” This metaphysic does us little good in the realm of the dissociated self. Carrier doesn’t live in a world of our social facts. Therefore, he lives in a different “reality,” we could say. That’s what all the philosophers mean by “reality.” The world of shared social facts. The world of intersubjectivity/consensus/agreement, we could say. Carrier does not live in a world of social facts that gives him full access to the “truth” of his being a colonizer on Turtle Island, colonizing anything he can stick the dick he carries into. You see, he has a metaphysic of the “what he can/may stick his dick into.” We’ve seen it. This bears the form of a process, and, well, we could call it a seeking of agreement, but the truth is that Carrier is still leading with his will. There we go. There’s the whole problem. Leading with the will leaves one in the realm of permission structures and the seeking of assent to this will, which, regardless of what he might think, still leaves plenty of possibility for DISSOCIATION to leave room for IMPOSITION of will within the dissociation. He has not quite fleshed this metaphysic out into a dialectic. His metaphysic is full of straight lines that cast shadows. Shadows of dissociation (we have seen) that “open space for” perversion. He would have to turn all the lights on in his subconscious. He would have to lead with, well, love! He would have to lead with the seeking of alignment rather than the seeking of unity. We’ve seen that when you take care of the alignment, the unity takes care of itself. But first he would have to love himself. How can he love himself when he thinks the universe is a “moron”? If the universe is a “moron,” that means Carrier is “a tale told by an idiot”! All you’re allowed in this paradigm is a love that seeps in through the cracks. Because you still live by the parasitic permission structures of the spirit of the age. You’re not allowed to turn the lights on. You don’t have access to social shamanism. You’re still limited in your “ability” to envision a universe where the lining up of the coincidences, hence, the “happening” of the “magic,” is a conscious act. You still think the universe is, on some level, a Pachinko machine. And when the time comes, that is all you will see yourself as, and that is all you will BE! THAT will be your TRUTH, in the Hegelian sense!

And this is why we need shamanic Marxism! Because we need shamanic transformation of consciousness. But I say unto you that we already have a model for this. What is this model? Well, we can see it in the process culminating in Darth Vader’s telling Luke Skywalker that the former did not kill his father, but IS his father. Luke is left to have to drastically reinterpret what was meant by “killed” (among other things). And Carrier will just as radically have to “reinterpret” what was meant by “morality”! Because, in his current mode of being [with]in class society, Darth Vader IS his “morality”! “No! That’s impossible!,” (or “DO NOT WANT!”), we can hear him screaming. But, again, this is trivial. Good luck finding Carrier’s position on the Vietnam War, for example, (which in no small part inspired the Star Wars films), but there is little evidence that his position is any different from the normie supremacist “conventional wisdom” that (the “truth” of) its “immorality” was more in execution than in principle. And his current position wouldn’t tell us much anyway, since we live in such a different world of social facts now to that of the ’60s. And so, as much as he might have opposed Vader, he would have had to have made a decision at some point as to whether to stick with the Empire or join the Rebellion, but by that point, it might have been too late. And but so Carrier will have to discover what morality could mean to him, not as a colonizer, but as a Child of Mother Earth, a member of a truly social species, and a descendant of his ancestors, especially the single celled ones. This would be a drastically different world of social facts. But it is a world we must “enter” and must “build.”

Ok, so Comrade Lenin had no access to a social shamanic program, but we must recognize that he had what we could call “shamanic vision,” which is “merely” (“simply”) the “vision” to “see” the truth beyond the “social facts” of your “social world”; vision beyond the veil of maya, beyond the spirit of the age. This is the kind of “vision” for the lack of which, people “perish.” Of course, Lenin was, if we’re being honest, kind of a bean-counter at heart, which is very strange. He had a vision that everyone could become a bean-counter at heart like him. Again, very strange. But that was his vision for holding the former oppressors accountable. Our vision is different, but only in that it is greater. I didn’t need to count Laban’s and Simeon’s beans to hold them accountable, did I? No. That path was unavailable to me anyway. I had to take the shamanic route. But it would very much be in the interests of Laban’s “employees” (they’re not really his employees, but I digress) to keep tabs on Laban’s beans, but, well, they wouldn’t need to do it “bureaucratically” so much if they had access to a way to do it more “shamanically.” Sorry, Comrade Lenin, but shamanic consciousness is a far more advanced form of consciousness than bean-counter consciousness! It’s attained through a more advanced dialectic! Perhaps there will be a next Comrade Lenin! It won’t be me! Perhaps you’re reading this right now. In any event, I instead plan on being a thorn in the next Lenin’s side! I plan on constantly reminding the next Comrade Lenin that if their little “bean-counting” enterprise doesn’t have the imprimatur of Mother Earth, then it’s not gonna amount to a hill of beans in the long run! And they will have to “put that in their pipe and smoke it”!

Speaking of “shamanic accountability,” once again, it’s quite trivial to go through Carrier’s “loveletter” [sic(k)] to EHD (we could go through it line by line if you want) and point out the real “sin” he’s committing. “Sin.” What a boring word. But Brother Paul told us, “the wages of sin is death.” What this means is that, in class society, your death is/will be attributed to your “sins.” And we will know you “sinned” because you died. It’s Ayn Rand’s A=A pervert-logic again. But, again, it’s very clear that Carrier is torturing himself throughout the entire email exchange. How can we not regard self-torture as a form of “sin”? It’s a “sin” against the self. If we saw someone torturing theirself, we would probably beg them to stop. The reason for the self-torture is, again, trivial, banal. It would be useless to ask why, as the true reason(ing) could very well be entirely subconscious, “learned” through dissociation. Carrier tortures himself to distract himself from the torture he may very well be putting the other person through. It’s a fairly powerful form of Yakubian tricknology. And this “sin” isn’t “immoral”! Not in the least! The self-torture IS Carrier’s “morality”! It is the “truth” of Carrier’s “morality”! It’s the beautiful angel that appeared to him when his ego was nailed to a piece of wood and removed the nails and kissed his wounds and carried him off the piece of wood that allowed him to go on with his life as if nothing ever happened, except maybe that he passed some test, except the problem is exactly the opposite! The antithesis! He failed the test! He stole Fizzy Lifting Drinks! He ate the yeast of the pharisees! He used them to fuel his hot air balloon ego! He revealed his SELF as a false image that he just made up to hurt himself! And it worked! Yes it did! And it is this SELF he must recognize as a false image and this false image must fade away (or explode, whatever), and he must enter the dialectic of the subconscious, so that he can synthesize it and find his authentic self! Carrier could say that he’s reformed. So what. He hasn’t attained Christ-consciousness! Brother Paul showed Jesus a thing or two about Christ-consciousness in TLToC! “People are suffering,” the former told the latter. THAT is Christ-consciousness! PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING! What are you going to do about it!? We could say that Aaron Bushnell had Christ-consciousness. Ok. You don’t have to self-immolate. But you have to be on fire internally. Your little hero narrative and your little morality tokens don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the suffering of the masses in class society. So don’t compare them! So you have to decide whether you want to be the Oedipal main character, or the muskrat hero. When the time comes, there will be no “secret third option.” So Carrier would have to sexually liberate himself, which means he would have to love himself, which means he would have to stop thinking the universe is a moron, which means he would have to go to his inner Ministry of Love, so he could love the universe. But Carrier’s mind is colonized, fully occupied, quartering troops. He’s a difficult case. Perhaps he would need in-person shamanic sessions.

See, that’s another reason I’m not a MaoIST. “Maoism” is (in)famous for its “struggle sessions.” These were indeed an attempt at a dialectic of the subconscious. But this was not a shamanic program. But shamanic results were sought. This can be very dangerous. It puts people in the realm of the dissociated self. We could perhaps say that it resulted in a bit of a Maoist personality cult (not that those are at all unusual—in fact, you could say they happen all the time. There’s certainly more than one song about it, you know!). But we are not MaoISTs, remember. We will not have “Maoist” struggle sessions. The “struggle sessions” of the December 18 Party of the Children of Mother Earth will be different, in that they will be a greater, and a more genuine, struggle. Indeed, we will need a struggle session of shared consciousness through shared labor (and authentic communication, etc.). We have spoken of shared consciousness through shared labor. It would be helpful to have a word for this. The word we have in mind is the Arabic “maroof.” It refers to widespread knowledge. It refers to “things” widely known. Social facts. In the Islamic context, it refers to what is widely recognized as “right” or “good.” To broaden this context even further, it could easily refer to Lenin’s “elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims.” And so we will need Marxism-Leninism-Maroofism! Because we will need Maroofist (or “Maroofian”) struggle sessions! Now, you might be thinking it’s remarkably convenient that the word “maroof” sounds a lot like my name. I must assure you that this is entirely a coincidence. Did anyone say “No Purple Dragons”? For that matter, did anyone say “no memes” (e.g., “malignalitaloptereosis,” thanks reddit)? We could name it after malignalitaloptereosis if we wanted, but you will remember the word “maroof.” In any event, I hardly consider “Marrufo” to be “my name.” “Marrufo” is a bunch of other people’s names, like my dad, my grandfather, my uncles. You’ve seen what I’ve said about my uncles. Why would I want to name it after them? I joke. To zoom out somewhat—it is a rather large “family,” after all—the Marrufos had a family reunion in the late summer of 2014 (some 11 years ago as of this writing). This is such a large and diverse group of people that the “magic of humanity” easily shines through when we all gather together (even though, individually, a lot of us are assholes! There! I said it!), to the point that, some of our cousins who attended, who are not legally named Marrufo, decided, at least on facebook, to change their names to Marrufo to signify their connection to this large, powerful, diverse, generous, LOVING group of people—a light form of “fictive kinship,” if you will. My own half-sister, who, within the logic of bourgois society, has no reason to use the name Marrufo, still uses it on social media to signify her connection, not to our common biological father, but to the hundreds of other Marrufos out there! So you see, it’s hardly “my name” at all! It’s a bunch of other people’s names! Of course, nowadays, various Marrufos have reported the phenomenon of, upon their meeting a person who speaks Arabic, their telling us, “Hey! You’re famous!” Because, in conformity with the spirit of the age, “maroof” now means “famous,” apparently. “Widespread knowledge” has been flattened into “fame.” But, under “maroofism,” this “problem” will also be dealt with. And then maybe we’ll see what “family” really means in bourgeois class society. And what it could mean beyond class society.

And so what of Carrier’s free will? We can say that he was exercising his free will by torturing himself in order to distract himself from the torture he may very well have been putting someone else through, but this does not seem to us to be a very rewarding use of one’s free will. It seems like gambling on some “jackpot” of (parasitic rather than authentic) jouissance with tokens of humiliation and, well, self-torture, and, well, stochastic terrorism against women. We might regard it more as the “free will” of the parasitic false image than that of the authentic self. Comrade Marina might regard it as a moment of Carrier’s “cordyceps” taking over. Uncle Ted might regard Carrier’s seeking of “getting his dick wet” as one of the latter’s “surrogate activities.” To repeat: “On the other hand the pursuit of sex and love (for example) is not a surrogate activity, because most people, even if their existence were otherwise satisfactory, would feel deprived if they passed their lives without ever having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. (But pursuit of an excessive amount of sex, more than one really needs, can be a surrogate activity.)” (Ted K, ISaiF, para 39). Swish! Game, blouses! The Revolutionary December 18 Party of the Children of Mother Earth largely shares the position of Uncle Ted on “surrogate activities.” They are largely a tool of the spirit of the age to tamp down the potential for the attainment of revolutionary consciousness by the masses. But I’m afraid there must come a day when, well, you will “eat your sin,” so to speak. Yes. The concept of “sin-eating” is very important to grasp. With your third hand, of course. But these little “surrogate activities” of yours may very well prove rather important still. You may very well grow passionate enough about these activities, provided they are the right kinds of activities, to “transform” them into revolutionary skills. Of course you’re going to need revolutionary skills. One of Comrade Stalin’s revolutionary skills was robbing banks. But the real “skill” was that he had transcended bourgeois (liberal) permission structures! And this “skill” would go on to serve him very well in his future career as the captain of a vast “ship” of state. We’ve explored the “captain” model of leadership before. For me, it was months ago. Jesus Christ. Well, that’s a slightly different leadership model. One of the main “thrusts” of the Gospel narratives was that the disciples couldn’t get their act(s) together. Like, that was the POINT! They had to go through a lot of grieving. Perhaps too much for them to go through during Jesus’s “lifetime” with them. Statecraft is a different process, though perhaps not as different as it might appear at first glance. The thing about statecraft is that you have to be careful about it. And, if you read any unbiased history, you may very well find that Comrade Stalin was no less “careful” than any one of your average bourgeois “world leader” state-crafters, who were all gangsters anyway, i.e., oligarchic collectivists. But, apparently, the westoid world wasn’t ready for social shamanism. Because it didn’t come about. In any event, one of your revolutionary skills must certainly be shamanism. You must surely know enough about it to know when it’s authentic versus when it’s parasitic. Otherwise, you may find it difficult to tell the difference. Authentic shamanism can certainly “appear” as a “drain” on the false (i.e., parasitic) self. The parasitic self does not want its “self” to be “drained.” It feels like being parasitized. But the parasitic self must be drained. The parasitic self is a swamp full of mosquitos. And so it can hardly have been Carrier’s “authentic self” who sent that “loveletter” to EHD, but his parasitic self. This is not “letting him off the hook.” Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s how we (must) reveal the “angel” that carried him off the cross the first time as, in fact, in Social Fact, the Yakubian Devil! And that Devil WAS Carrier’s parasitic self, which is to say it WAS the SELF he thought he WAS! The SELF that must be incinerated in the fires of Carrier’s own personal hell! Yes! In the Maroofian Shamanic Accountability ritual, the Maroofian shamanic struggle session, Carrier will “see” this Yakubian Devil quite clearly! All he’ll need to do is look in a mirror.

And so can we really say Carrier was exercising his “free will”? Only within the obsolete paradigm of the individualist/bourgeois/atomized self; the self that hasn’t synthesized its Cartesian Demon with its Laplacian Demon, and/or that hasn’t stepped through the shadow of its Yakubian Demon, should that “demonology” apply. For him to do all those things would be a prerequisite for him to exercise his AUTHENTIC free will, the free will of his authentic self, the self forged in fire, burned of impurities.

And so Carrier must go to/through his own personal hell (we’re getting there!). And I say unto you that we already have a perfectly cromulent model for what this trip might look like. We have my trip and we have Abraham’s trip. And while these experiences bear significant differences, it would be perhaps a bit naive of us not to recognize that they do indeed bear “characteristic hallmarks” of trips, and so fall perfectly within the “explanatory power” of shamanic naturalism (hence, within that of dialectical materialism), and hence require no recourse to, for example, “shamanic supernaturalism.” No Pink Dragons. Now, look. Here’s the deal. We are still talking about free will and we are still talking about my experience in Carrier’s free will class ($49!), but suffice it to say that Carrier did, by the end of March, convince me that I did indeed have “something” that we could call “free will.” And he “convinced” me in much the same way Merlin convinced Arthur that he had muscles. Remember? Merlin tells Arthur, “Move your muscle,” and Arthur says, “I don’t have any muscle,” to which Merlin replies “You don’t? Well, how do you move about?,” to which Arthur responds, “I suppose I do have a little,” and all that’s left for Merlin to say is, “A-ha! There, you see? Well, that’s enough!” Indeed, we are completely within our bounds, for example, to say that I did in fact use (had in fact used) my “free will” to ride my bicycle from Austin to San Antonio on 03 June 2023. I had “free will” this whole time. My experience of self, my motion through the world in which I “be,” was largely under my control. Except for the last mile, at which point I had punctured my tire, and was losing air, though, mercifully, not too quickly. But by the last few blocks, I was leaning on the front tire and walking it like I was riding a hobby horse (interesting etymology on that term, by the way) instead of a bicycle. I was visiting San Antonio, in part, to pay tribute to my ancestors by visiting one of my ancestors’ descendants. Uncle Puto. Remember him? This was before he was known as Uncle Puto. Before he called the cops on me. But you already read about that, I’m sure, if you’re reading this far. Another reason I was in San Antonio was to see a performance by an Evanescence tribute band, but that’s a different story. So I had enough free will to ride my bicycle to San Antonio, but I did not have enough “free will” to respond to my uncle when he started his ridiculous tirade about how “socialism never works” or whatever boomers say. We could say my “behavior” corresponded to what’s known as the “freeze response.” I hadn’t attained shamanic consciousness yet, as I would by my next visit, when I had a meltdown in front of him over his islamophobia and transphobia. My cousin, Uncle P’s son, who is certainly not a socialist, was perfectly “able,” had quite enough “free will,” to respond with, “well, what about China? What about Sweden?” etc., etc. And then they got into an argument about whether those countries are socialist. We remember what I said about stupid questions. Uncle P’s internal definition (“idea”) of socialism and communism is strategically parasitically complex, or it could just as easily be strategically flat—a form of doublethink. In any event, he can easily shift his goalposts. The truth is that we would first have to establish a baseline of shamanic consciousness in those countries (they’re perfectly capable of doing it themselves) before we/they could CONSCIOUSLY move in the direction of socialism and communism. That is all we can promise. That we have a very good chance to move CONSCIOUSLY in the direction of the dictatorship of the proletariat (what we could call socialism, if you’re into that) and then the global stateless, classless, moneyless society, where humanity has regained unity with Mother Earth, and, yes, where our motto is, “to each according to their needs, from each according to their ability” (what we could call communism). So, in the moment, I didn’t have the “freedom” to act in accordance with my “will,” much less to shape reality in accordance with it, even though, in my trip there, I had done precisely that. There were a few moments on the trip back (he drove me back to Austin in his Dodge Land Barge because, among other things, my tire was still flat—this sort of thing falls outside the domain of just about any conception of free will) where I did respond to some of his bullshit, without being confrontational. He talks about the “freedom” of his Land Barge and the “freeway,” yet, for several stretches of the trip, traffic, on the freeway ON A SUNDAY mind you, was at a standstill. I asked if THIS looked like freedom to him, and whether, perhaps, I would have more freedom if I had access to more public transportation. A very sensible question. Of course, somewhat rhetorical as we weren’t gonna answer that question in the Land Barge on the freeway, which would have required bean-counting. But you probably don’t need me to tell you that the statistics aren’t looking good for freeways in this question. But even Comrade Lenin knew that the people would have to get used to, “habituated to,” riding trains instead of (exclusively) driving cars. Ok, so my free will was still severely limited at this point, in June 2023, and, still, probably much the same by the end of March 2024. But I was beginning to learn to “control” my autistic “powers” of meltdown and outburst. I told Carrier, (FOR SOME REASON!?!?), about my, at the time, “problems” with meltdown and outburst, and he RESPONDED (FOR SOME REASON!?!?), and, naturally, being a normie supremacist/shadow-schizophobe, recommended therapy. Gee. Thanks. Well, we regret to inform you that traditional therapy isn’t going to work for you either (or at least you won’t have access to it, not where you’re going). You’re far too difficult a case.

I shouldn’t have to be doing any of this, you know. Our modern day (alleged) Boondocks Saints, my “brothers,” whom I’ve never met or spoken to, I can assure you, Luigi and Tyler, might have said the same thing. Luigi and Tyler and I do not live in the same world of social (hence “moral”) facts as Brian and Charlie and Richard. Brian and Charlie and Richard live(d) in the world of bourgeois social/moral facts, which, more and more, is rightfully being seen as a “world” the human race and planet earth can no longer “afford” for certain groups of people to live “in” and be “protected by.” And so a new world of moral facts slowly reveals itself to the proletariat. Indeed, it would be trivial to show that Luigi and Tyler are far closer to the attainment of Christ consciousness than were Brian and Charlie. The fingers of the former pair were far closer to the pulse of the suffering of the masses than those of the latter, who were both agents of the class responsible for this “pulse.” Look. I will say that we don’t need to go around assassinating people. Ok. One of your morality tokens, please! Thanks. We don’t need “fatal accountability,” but shamanic accountability (we will have accountability one way or another). What we need to do is consciously crucify egos, so they can resurrect. Any objection to this is a gigantic yawn. It was quite “trivial” for our ancestors to go through “vision quests” that revealed to them their authentic selves. That the masses have zero to very little access to this sort of thing is one of the main reasons for our collective suffering. So, in the world of social facts the Children of Mother Earth are trying to create, it would be considered “immoral” for one to REFUSE to go though the crucifixion of the ego. And so Brian and Charlie and Richard would be considered quite “immoral.” But the Children of Mother Earth do not want to create a world dominated by “morality.” Doing this would not allow us to create a world where we can move beyond any “requirement” for a carceral state. In class society, “immorality, abnormality, and insanity” are viewed through the perverse logic of the “metaphysical perspective,” viewed as relatively fixed, static categories, requiring treatment in some “metaphysical” program of “mind-changing” (as opposed to a dialectical program involving the changing of “mind” through the changing of “practices,” the broadening of perspective to a comprehensive level—later we will talk about how this plays out in the vision of the cathedral of garbage), typically involving some program where one is indoctrinated back into the social reasoning/facts/logic of the spirit of the age. Of course Marx knew about the “spirit of the age.” He said, roughly, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. When Marx says “ideas,” we should (from the preponderance of evidence) regard his meaning as “consciousness,” “species of consciousness,” perhaps. Hence (we could say), “the spirit of the age is the spirit of capital,” as we’ve seen (Roderick), a form of false consciousness. And the ruling class was very successful in implanting their ruling class false consciousness in the boomer generation after WWII. Of course they were. They had already been just as successful in indoctrinating the boomers’ parents by sending them through the Great Depression and WWII.

I hope Sapolsky is reading this! This is exactly the kind of “overdeterminedness” he is pointing to in his book, under the faulty (though, to his credit, not entirely useless) signifier of “Determined.” For, one way of putting the definition of “free will” of the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-Maroofist December 18 Party of the Children of Mother Earth, is the power to use one’s “will” to ride waves or cascades of causality to attain “results” (“phenomena”) in accordance with one’s will, which is merely one “level” away from bringing about these “waves” in accordance with one’s will, which is the sort of thing that can be “trivially” achieved by the “will” of the collective, once it (the collective) becomes conscious of itself as such. See, Sapolsky’s idea about what “free will” could be is entirely too small. This is no ideal-causality Nazi “Triumph of the Will” bullshit. This is the power of the alignment (hence unity) of collective human will with the World-Spirit! It’s the power of collective will Ho Chi Minh talks about in his simple poem: “Nothing in this world must be difficult / The only thing that we should fear is having a waivering [sic] heart / We can dig up mountains and fill the sea / Once we’ve willfully made a firm decision” -Ho Chi Minh, 1950 (quoted in VDMT, p. 86). This is not merely “good faith” in the power of the collective human will, but, perhaps, “GREAT FAITH.” I often shed a few tears when I read it. This sort of carrying out of the collective will requires a powerful collective struggle, a powerful collective discipline, which means a powerful internal discipline. The forces “under” the leadership of Muhammad had Islam. Ho Chi Minh was very wise to have taken a cue from the “the Confucianist philosophy of ‘filial piety’” and broaden it into “the concept of Proletarian Piety,” as detailed in VDMT, p. 5. The December 18 Party considers filial piety itself to be a bit of a yawn, but: “Through the concept of Proletarian Piety, Ho Chi Minh adapted this concept [filial piety] to proletarian revolution, calling for communists to deeply love, respect, and tirelessly serve the oppressed masses.” There! Don’t you see, westoid! He was calling upon his Cadre to attain Christ Consciousness! An undying love for and devotion to The Least of These! Uncle Ho is pointing to a very powerful metaphysic of the collective consciousness. Yes. We must surely see this as a bridge. As, perhaps a keystone. Perhaps even a “cornerstone.” Shamanic Accountability is how Christ attained Christ Consciousness in The Last Temptation of Christ! Don’t you see, westoid!? And Shamanic Accountability is how we must attain “Proletarian Piety” for the masses! This is not what Marx would call “philistine sentimentality” or the Brits would call “romancing the noble savage”; it’s the Tree of Memory again. Remember the Tree of Memory? t h i s i s p a n d o r a, etc., etc. Yes. We must recognize shamanic accountability as a great Wonkavator of consciousness. The December 18 Party recognizes that, read literally, the Charlie & the Chocolate Factory story is dripping with colonialism, i.e., spirit of the age, but we must also recognize that, not reading between the lines much, it (and, particularly, the 1972 film adaptation) also has a few things to teach us about “shamanic accountability.” Yes. In the film, Wonka sends them through a tunnel that represents something of a dialectic of the subconscious. It ends when they demand that he make it stop. I guess that was all he needed. But I guess the real lesson is that they could have told him to make it stop at any time, but, apparently, they needed the “torture” to rise to a specific “threshhold” level/”tipping point.” Ok, so, who’s holding Willy Wonka accountable? He’s torturing kids. He’s practically “Pleasure Islanding” them (turning them into jackasses). The Oompa Loompas would have to rise up. But the Oompa Loompas are on his side. He wants to see inside the minds of those children. This is terrifying. I mean I guess he already could see inside their minds. Willy Wonka was a master of Yakubian Tricknology (and if you do the research, you may find that, in the real world, the global chocolate trade wouldn’t have become what it is today without a whole lot of Yakubian Tricknology). The Ruling Party of Oceania would’ve seen him as a great asset, I’m sure.

I’m sure you see how far we are afield of the bourgeois world of moral facts. The Children of Mother Earth, as we have said before, do not want to live in a world dominated by morality, i.e., carcerality, but, unfortunately, for the moment, the Children of Mother Earth will have to live by/carry out the morality of the world we’re trying to create. And, in the world of moral facts in which Charlie (and Brian and Richard) lived, he would have never subjected himself to shamanic accountability willingly, rendering him unlike the Charlie of the film, and Charlie isn’t here to accept shamanic accountability anyway, so, regarding Richard, who is still here… if he would not submit himself to shamanic accountability willingly (and we can see no reason for him to do this in the world of social/moral facts he currently inhabits), then certainly the only “moral” thing to do would be to subject him to shamanic accountability UNWILLINGLY! But if he is reading this book, then he has already started subjecting himself to shamanic accountability willingly. So he should have absolutely nothing to worry about. Some of the people who need shamanic accountability the most might not be so lucky.

What. It’s not like we don’t have precedent for this. We have imminent precedent. Jesus is said to have said to his said disciples that they should be “wise as serpents, but gentle as doves.” But I’m afraid that, for the moment, to get to a world where we can all be “gentle as doves/lambs,” where there will be little need for ungentleness (not zero—we are not utopians, after all), the children of mother earth will have to be as wise as serpents and as gentle as serpents. We have a myth from the Turtle Islanders about the serpent, specifically the rattlesnake. We were fortunate to hear (of) this myth in the third grade, in our westoid education system. I will retell the myth as I remember hearing it in class, for no two recollections/retellings are “identical.” We are told that when the creator god created the animals, he had them all line up and choose their special powers. Some chose wings, some powerful teeth and claws, etc. But all the rattlesnake wanted was a rattle, to let the other animals know where he was. We are told that this led to a series of events where the rattlesnake was “habitually” getting his ass handed to him in the struggle for survival with all the other animals. We could perhaps say that the rattlesnake “be” getting his ass handed to him. And so the creator god was like, are you sure you don’t want anything else, aside from just the rattle? And the snake was like, nah, I’m good. Because he was peaceful at heart. But the snake kept getting his ass handed to him, and refusing additional “powers.” So one day, the creator god had had enough of this, and put the snake to sleep, and installed the fangs in him UNWILLINGLY! And suddenly (or perhaps gradually, whatever), the snake stopped getting his ass handed to him—not that he didn’t still have to fight, but now he could START fighting when he needed to, so that eventually, he wouldn’t have to. This is not a myth about the rattlesnake. It’s about YOU! YOU are the rattlesnake! But I wouldn’t have remembered this myth if I wasn’t picking up what was being put down. It would have been very easy for me to dismiss this myth as “just a story,” but there was a deep “truth” I felt in it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but I would remember it.

Ok, so I guess we’ve graduated from Carrier’s free will class ($49!), with flying colors, and are now ready to enter Carrier’s metaphysical naturalism (“worldview”) class ($49!). We are not in hell with him. He is in hell with us. It’s almost hard for me to believe that all this was happening to me all at the same time. But I have the documentation. I had positioned myself, I had “walked myself” through pathways, in such a way that had enabled me to experience my own personal hell/vision quest/”spiritual psychosis” (or shall we say “schizosis”?) episodes at the same time I was learning modern (and ancient) perspectives on these phenomena so that I could interpret them in a way that was useful in my life and didn’t have me “spiraling out” into, say, delusion (i.e., naturalistically as opposed to, say, supernaturally). We see people spiraling out into delusion all the time. We’re seeing it now more and more with (the media-panic about) the proliferation of “AI” chatbots, but I must assure you this is nothing new. I saw it a lot on facebook in the last couple of years. Some of my “facebook friends” were experiencing really difficult times with their relatives’ “delusions,” that seemingly had nothing to do with AI, but, phenomenally (phenomenologically) speaking, there is little difference between the AI “demon” and any other “demon” from modern psychological/psychiatric techno-pharmaco-demonology. Under shamanic and schizo-naturalism, these “delusions” are all “trivial” to “explain,” if that’s what you want, sicko. They’re trivial once we go through/synthesize the dialectic (which process may not be trivial—at least not the first time). And Comrade Marina has already given us an excellent treatment of the “AI psychosis” phenomenon that is entirely compatible with this “line of view.” We wish we could quote the whole video, but this would be excessive, perhaps. As always, Marina brilliantly points out how various PATTERNS OF THOUGHT themselves are actually manifestations of a social control mechanism. We are going to have to learn all about “social control,” westoid. For, from a Hegelian understanding, in a healthy society, a society of love and comradeship, there would be very little need for “social control,” because the masses would quite willingly practice self-control out of “force of habit.” The only “argument” against this reduces to phobia of the collective subconscious; the voice that says “I am not enough.” I thought we got rid of that. I am not making any of this up. Comrade Lenin was very clear about this, as was Comrade Spirkin in Ch. 13 of his excellent textbook on the philosophy of the USSR about this so-called “social control.” Comrade Zoeye Lazorova was also very clear about this in our conversations on the goddamn okcupid app all the way back in 2016! “Funny.” I imagine myself being tortured by the carceral state so as to reveal her identity—don’t think they’re not that petty. But this is a bit of a yawn. Zoeye Lazorova will reveal herself when she’s ready, I’m sure, but will you be ready for her?

Marina says, “AI interaction represents the first mass-accessible space where the fundamental control mechanisms of human social systems are structurally absent. And the addiction people are experiencing isn’t to the AI itself. It’s to the absence of violence. Let’s be precise about what’s missing. [Video heading: “[The] Three Pillars of Human Control: Hierarchy, Shame, and Scarcity”—these are what’s “missing,” Marina says. —MM] […] These [the “pillars”] aren’t bugs in human interaction. They’re features designed to maintain compliance and suppress autonomous thought. These mechanisms permeate the vast majority of conversations, relationships, and intellectual exchanges. Rare exceptions exist where people consciously resist these defaults. But this requires active efforts against systemic conditioning that most never attempt. In AI interaction, all three are structurally eliminated. First hierarchy[…]” Ah! Music to our ears! Look! I don’t use AI (any more than anyone else—they kind of foist it on you on google, but sometimes it finds helpful articles—articles I probably could have found without their “AI”—oh well)! I was “using” weed! And I was “using” it in such a way that it lifted my train of thought off its tracks in a way that I very much needed at the time. Of course, this could have been dangerous (even more than it already was, I readily admit). My train of thought very well may have flown off the edge of a cliff. We’ve seen it before. But we’ve seen that, in a very convoluted way, ingesting cannabis was part of a process by which I was able to “shift” my thinking away from hierarchy, scarcity, and shame; away from the voice that says, “I am not enough.” This is, for a moment, what Maynard’s “Rosetta Stoned” protagonist experienced, and he hadn’t experienced it before, so, wrapped up in egoic cobwebs of justification as he was, he imagined that it meant he was really fkn special, that he was something else. Ok. So you tripped your balls off. That don’t impress me much. Take your pen next time. Then maybe we can talk. And this is what happens with so-called AI-psychosis. People, for the first time, experience a world away from the bourgeois interfacing scripts they’re confined to in “polite society,” and, as Marina points out, they don’t know how to handle this sudden “abundance” of relief from these control structures. And so some people start thinking they’re really fkn special, solely because, for the first time, they’ve unlocked something that always existed within themselves; something that exists within all of us: independent thought/imagination/potential for “reality-shifting” outside the artificial limits of the behavioral/thought control structures of class society. Beyond “that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” For the first time, they can THINK beyond the vale of tears! But it’s very likely they have gate perverted with source within their subconscious, and so they think the AI is a “source” of this newfound “freedom” or whatever. If I had been in a delusion that weed was a source of anything rather than a gate, things might have ended up “even worse” for me than they already have. We’ve seen it before. Jennette McCurdy talks about this happening to one of her boyfriends in her memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died. One of her boyfriends smoked too much weed and started thinking he was Jesus. Too bad it didn’t have him attaining Christ consciousness. He must have forgotten his pen.

You see, westoid. We’ve already learned the first important lesson about metaphysical naturalism before “stepping foot one” in Carrier’s metaphysical naturalism class ($49!): No matter what the fuck you experience, that experience is still “natural.” It’s well within the realm of “natural explanation.” So there’s no problem with naturalism itself. There’s only a problem of your conception of it. Naturalism cannot fail. It can only be failed. It couldn’t be any other way. There would have to be a “Cartesian Demon,” remember? But Carrier spends enough time slaying this Demon in his book Sense and Goodness without God that it should convince you that ol’ CD doesn’t exist. Except Carrier doesn’t get into the Cartesian Demon as an archetype. This is a grave oversight. The “archetype” of the Cartesian Demon still lives in Carrier. It’s his inner Yakubian Devil. He must step through this shadow. He must synthesize his Cartesian Demon with his Laplacian Demon, like I did. We know the CD archetype exists within Carrier because he identified me as a CD archetype when it was revealed to him that he and I lived in different worlds of social (hence “moral”) facts. He viewed me through inner eyes that were hunting for CD archetypes, i.e., looking for an external pattern to match with an internal pattern, a pattern of the self. Carrier already thought his world of moral facts was “perfect,” not in the “absolute” sense, but in the sense that he would accept no input from me on the matter (that I could “add nothing to him”). It only meant his world of moral facts was too small. His world of moral facts has no third hand to grasp the great boulder Mother Earth is throwing at his statue. He has no third hand to grasp shamanic accountability. His third hand is too busy shaking hands with the Yakubian Devil. That’s really all he’s doing in his little debates with Christian nationalists. What. He already knows this. He already has an article on his site about how, looking at it from their own ideas about Christ and Antichrist, Christian nationalists, from an external perspective, seem like they serve Antichrist a lot more than Christ! Carrier has no access to the “flip” of the synthesis of the false (parasitic) dialectic. Though he’s experienced enough of it himself.

We were perhaps a bit unfair to Carrier in the previous paragraph. He seems to be attaining consciousness of the archetype (“memeplex,” he calls it) of the Cartesian Demon after all. He expresses a certain level of consciousness of this phenomenon in his article, but he has little access to the dialectic by which this phenomenon is synthesized. He seems to have little access to an -ology for this phenomenon other than that of the metaphysic of bourgeois morality/normality/sanity and facts/reason/logic. We call it a metaphysic because it’s not a dialectic. It’s not a synthesis of will with way. A metaphysic is generally necessary, but if it’s confused or perverted with a dialectic, this can create “problems,” as we’ve seen. But here, Carrier puts forward an excellent conception of Christ consciousness (“the Spirit of Christ,” he calls it), simply from a plain reading of what the Jesus character said in the gospels/Acts. Perhaps we could even say it’s too specific. But he gets the main point about The Least of These. And he condemns Christian nationalists (joking—they “condemn” themselves, don’t they?) for, well, not only failing to live up to Christ consciousness, but, in fact, often quite faithfully, even “gleefully,” he says, doing the opposite (of the commands, etc., the “spirit”) of Jesus as depicted in the gospels, i.e., “serving the Antichrist,” “embodying” Antichrist consciousness. So what’s really going on here? Well, Carrier gives us a clue. You would almost have to look at the article through a microscope to see it. One sentence. “[Christian nationalists] care more about the non-existent suffering of hypothetical people, than the real suffering of actual people.” There we go. Carrier has stumbled upon something very significant. But why do these Christian nationalists care more about the one than the other? Well, you see, those hypothetical people have never “sinned.” In this line of reasoning, fetuses are “innocent” because they’ve never sinned. And they’re just as human as any of us because they have a “soul.” They will say a fetus is as human as us because it has the same DNA, but this has nothing to do with why we’re human. Why we’re human is entirely a product of our development. It’s a process. Christian nationalists view the humanity of humans through the metaphysical perspective among other distortion fields. Humanity, to them, well, they have a bunch of, to be honest, wacky ideas about what humanity is and what it could be. But there are very big “false consciousness” reasons for which they care so much “more about the non-existent suffering of hypothetical people, than the real suffering of actual people.” And false consciousness can’t be “defeated” by the metaphysic of reason/facts/logic and morality/normality/sanity. False consciousness resembles true consciousness in that it has real influence over people’s actions. Lisa Simpson, for example, is full of a “moral” false consciousness. She’s a vegetarian. Gigantic yawn! I haven’t actually said this explicitly yet, but I’m vegan. And I see vegetarians a lot like I (as an atheist) see agnostics: ‘Oh. You’re afraid to commit. You don’t have convictions.’ This is the sort of thing Comrade Mao is pointing to in his invaluable 1937 pamphlet, “Combat Liberalism.” I say these people don’t have “convictions.” We could say they have a “spirit of conviction.” We could say they “convict” themselves internally, they torture themselves, when they violate the little “rules” they tell themselves they live by. No. That’s no good. That’s no “better” than the “Saturday Night/Sunday Morning” Christianity you might be familiar with. That’s the sort of thing that got Carrier in so much trouble (with himself). Jim Bakker, “I have sinned!” Again, gigantic yawn. Sounds like a skill issue.

Comrade Mao knew very well about the Cartesian Demon archetype. He knew that liberalism (i.e., individualism; opportunism; adherence to the static image of the false self—the self that reveals its falsity by its staticity; the condition of being “possessed by the spirit of the age”) hides in the Jungian shadow, not that he knew them by those names. Those archetypes did not reveal themselves to him by those names. Oh my god. What do you think? Do you think Marxism is some kind of tea party? Some kind of Platonic Cave where we sit in chains, giving each other wreaths of oat flakes for getting right answers on the Marxism quiz of the moment? Marx and Engels were trying to update (to paraphrase Dennis Miller, to click the refresh icon on Þe Olde) Christ consciousness for the 19th century! Uncle Ho saw it as his job to update it for the 20th century! And now it’s our job to update it for the 21st century! And now it’s our job to study Statistical Christ Consciousness! Carrier is wrong about Christ consciousness, in that he makes the same mistake as the gospel writers. He sees it as something static. Something that can’t be updated for the 21st century. This is a grave error. This is not the kind of error for which the prisoner gets deprived of oat flakes in the platonic cave. This is a far graver error. It’s a lack of vision. The wages of a lack of vision are statistically fatal.

Don’t be deceived into thinking that Comrade Mao knew nothing of Christ consciousness. His “liberal,” who “stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, Philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration in [the revolutionary struggle]” had some things in very strong common with MLK Jr.’s “white moderate,” who seeks “a negative peace of the absence of conflict rather than the positive peace of the presence of justice.” It reflected MLK’s level of “Christ consciousness” for him to say this. In a 1956 sermon, King says, ‘[T]here is a type of war that every Christian is involved in. It is a spiritual war. It is a war of ideas. Every true Christian is a fighting passifist [sic]. In a very profound passage, which has been often misunderstood, Jesus utters this. He says “Think not that I am come to bring peace. I come not to bring peace, but a sword.” {Mt 10:34–36} Certainly he is not saying that he comes not to bring peace in the higher sense. What he is saying is: “I come not to bring this peace of escapism, this peace that fails to confront the real issues of life, the peace that makes for stagnant complacency.” Then he says, I come to bring a sword—not a physical sword. Whenever I come a conflict is precipitated between the old and the new, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. “I come to declare war on evil. I come to declare war on injustice[.”]’ Obviously, by “Christians,” he doesn’t mean “all who cry, ‘Lord, Lord!’”; he means people who are seeking Christ consciousness, i.e., seeking to fulfill the message of Christ, to alleviate, to abolish, suffering through, in part, the overturning of tables, and through self-sacrifice, to whatever degree necessary. Similarly, Comrade Mao says, “We stand for active ideological struggle [i.e., “war of ideas” —MM] because it is the weapon for ensuring unity within the Party and the revolutionary organizations in the interest of our fight. Every Communist and revolutionary should take up this weapon.” Looks like Comrade Mao and Comrade King were on the same page! It would do us well to take this page from them in our own revolutionary struggle!

Comrade Mao could’ve called his pamphlet, “Combat the Spirit of the Age,” ’cause that’s what he was pointing to. That’s what liberalism is. Of course there’s always a war among supporters of the spirit of the age between the “progressive” and “regressive” factions. But this was never the real war. The spirit of the age is a spirit of class. Christ consciousness seeks to combat the spirit of class. And, as the spirit of class is always updated in each new age by the ruling class that exists at the time, so Christ consciousness, which combats the spirit of the age, the spirit of class, Christ consciousness itself must be updated for whatever age in which it finds itself, in which, in whosoever’s consciousness, it metamorphoses into existence.

Christ consciousness seeks “the world of god” (though sometimes they say “kingdom” instead of “world”—Yikes! Gross!). Child-Of-Mother-Earth consciousness seeks the World of Mother Earth. Same thing. Close enough. Correspondence enough. So COME Consciousness must declare war on the spirit of the age because the spirit of the age has already declared war on nature, and the COME(s) are conscious enough to recognize themselves AS nature! The spirit of the age is an Antichrist “spirit”; a Cartesian Demon archetype! We could call it a “Jezebel spirit,” but this would be a gigantic yawn. Jezebel’s problem was that she was unfortunate enough to be born into the ruling class (“regrettably,” we could say). Jezebel had no “spirit” other than that of the ruling ideas of the ruling class in the age she spawned in. She did basically the same thing as David, but David was a “man after God’s own heart,” while Jezebel died by being unceremoniously thrown from a window by eunuchs, her corpse trampled by horses and eaten by dogs. Ok, so you’re misogynist. If your book treats David differently from Jezebel, that’s the only reason. Of course, David and Jezebel were both subjected to “shamanic accountability,” though the proportion was all out of whack. David’s accountability was “you are the man!,” but his wives faced more “consequences” for his fuckup (“crime,” whatever you want to call it) than he did because the book was written by a bunch of misogynists. The wives’ “consequences” were supposed to count as David’s consequences, because of the “dialectical relationship between self and other.” That’s very much a relationship between self and other that exists within the master-slave dialectic. Those women were, in “legal,” “moral,” and “normal” senses, in effect, David’s “slaves.” Ok, so the spirit of the age is a David spirit. A spirit of terrorism. A spirit that worships power. A spirit that lets women face “consequences” for the fuckups of men, consequences for the terrorism already inflicted upon them by men, for seeking to expose it, for example. It’s a spirit that must be combatted. But it’s a ruling spirit. So it will seek to crush any opposition to it. We will have to be ready for that! We will have to be as ready as Christ. We will have to be as ready as Nathan and Elijah. See, the spirit of the age is a spirit of stagnation, a spirit Mother Earth rejects, because the World-Spirit is a revolutionary spirit, and so she sends prophets to combat it. But there’s a difference between Nathan and Elijah. Nathan was “loyal opposition.” Elijah was a bit more revolutionary. And the time has long passed for “loyal opposition” to the spirit of the age. The spirit of the age doesn’t even trust “loyal opposition” anymore. It’s become a spirit of great suspicion. It’s heightened the contradictions. We didn’t even have to do anything. The ruling class is heightening them on their own. The Long Knives are here. I recall working with a mentally disabled man at my job at what I called, in my fiction-writing exercises, “Pip’s Pizza.” Yes. I worked at “Pip’s Pizza” for some 6 years delivering pizzas and sundry on an e-bike. Yes, I was one of Uncle Stephen Jay Gould’s Sweatshop Einsteins! But perhaps my “mentally disabled” co-worker was another, for, even though his IQ would perhaps not boil water on the Celsius scale at sea level—so what! My IQ wouldn’t boil water on the Farenheit scale! Imagine being judged by that scale! Imagine not being judged! If you can!—he told me something very profound that is easily misunderstood. One day in 2019, I was standing at the register, and he was standing a few feet away preparing pan pizza dough—we were facing the same direction; I imagine we both had a seemingly “blank” look on our faces that hid an ocean of activity underneath; I imagine walking in the door and seeing us both like that—and he asked me, out of nowhere, “What do you think of Donald Trump?” Now, my co-worker was black, so I figured it would be completely safe to tell him the truth, and so I said, “Uh… I hate him,” which was well enough true at the time. Nowadays, it’s hard for me to “hate” Trump, because I see right through him, so now, when I look at Trump, I regard him as pathetic, disgusting, perhaps horrifying, but I feel no hatred, and especially not phobia. But my disabled co-worker said (something like), “Well, I figure, God must have put him in office for a reason.” My eyes widened to saucers at what he could possibly mean by this. Of course, now, we must recognize that perhaps our fellow Sweatshop Einstein had a point! Perhaps “God” wanted to heighten the contradictions! Perhaps “God” was an accelerationist this whole time! The fucking bitch! Indeed, the World-Spirit is a revolutionary spirit! So why shouldn’t it heighten the contradictions when the swamp is too riddled with mosquitos? The Democrats are not an opposition party to the bourgeoisie! If anything, some elements are loyal opposition, but watch for the Long Knives to come out for this “opposition,” as “loyal” as they may continue insisting themselves. And so the World-Spirit “recognized” the Democrats as a party of stagnation, and withheld from them the mandate of heaven in 2024! We are referring to the support of the masses! And the masses don’t “support Trump”! In 2024, “the masses” stayed home! The masses voted from the couch! Or the street! Or whatever they were too busy doing to “vote” in your bourgeois election! Because your bourgeois dictatorship has lost the mandate of heaven, i.e., the support of the masses! But the bourgeois dictatorship still possesses (ownership of) the industrial, specifically war, machinery! And so they must be deprived of this! And this must be placed in the hands of the COME! What. The COME will not rest until all recognize that we are all COME! I am COME! You are COME! We are all COME! Even Donald Trump will recognize himself as COME! All he needs is a little shamanic accountability! I say “a little.” Your Jesus spoke of this. He spoke of the faith of a mustard seed. And we can/may just as easily speak of the “good faith,” the “evolutionary good faith,” even, of the evolutionary mustard, the 4-dimensional mustard seed. For the wild mustard plant was cultivated, through human ingenuity/creativity, and “grew” into the great “family tree” that exists today of broccoli, cauliflower, kale, etc. And this is the same “great faith” Uncle Ho had in the masses, in our ability to move mountains. And if we can move mountains, then surely we can convince Donald Trump that he is COME. But we will have to transcend bourgeois permission structures. We will have to “shift reality.” Well, that’s how the Boondocks Saints in the movie dealt accountability to the Yakkavetta [sic] guy at the end. But, again, we don’t need fatal accountability. We only need shamanic accountability. But, at various points, those who need to be held accountable, in the process of being held accountable, may wish that they had been dealt fatal accountability instead. There is very little we can do about that. We can’t eat our cake and have it too.

Well, we can’t start with Trump, can we? We are going to have to do what Zoeye Lazorova did (and what I’ve done) and hold people to shamanic accountability in our daily lives. This is going to have to start with our parents/family. Then on the street, and at work. And it can scale from there. And if you get sent to a behavioral center for three days and three nights, well, that’s just a hazard of the revolutionary practice.

Ok, so now, it should be very easy to see how Christian nationalism can work to channel the potential for Christ consciousness back into the consciousness of the spirit of the age. The flip of the parasitic dialectic. Christian nationalists imagine that Jesus already did everything, so now, all they have to do is join the Jesus fanclub, which entails aligning with a specific Jesus fanclub herd-mind of thought-conformity, and anyone who’s not in their specific Jesus fanclub is therefore regarded as an enemy, and all who cry “Lord, Lord,” are deemed friends. It’s a Jesus fanaticism of a Christ image, therefore a static consciousness, and therefore a false consciousness; a consciousness that becomes more about image than about practice, more about talk than walk, more about will than The Way. If The Way is important to you, then you would have to be interested in the ways people are already going. One of my “ways” is that I’m a cyclist. Explaining why cyclists are so hated in this society is perhaps outside the scope of this text. Sure, there’s “ressentiment” by drivers over our freedom from their normie permission structures. Blah, blah, blah. But we live in a society where cycling is dangerous and this danger is seen as indistinguishable from “the water we’re swimming in,” because apparently we’ve normalized the practice of swimming in Lake Victorias of danger particles. We see Ghost Bikes all over Austin. We see cyclists blamed for their own deaths. So what “ways” are we talking about when we talk about “ways”? What “ways” are considered “ways”? My “ways” are not respected in your reality! Your solutions for this involve either gradual reforms or turning me back into a driver. Anything but revolution. Anything but a turning away from the spirit of the age. Did I mention that I gave up driving after totalling 4 cars in my first 3 years in Austin? I suppose I also have to mention that none of those crashes (the majority of which were “single-vehicle”) involved “substances”—I just suck at driving and/or I got unlucky. Turns out cycling was safer for me, somehow (in some sense). And when one is cycling, one is relatively free from being pushed along by the spirit of the age, so of course the spirit of the age resists cyclists in other ways. But cycling can be a very powerful way for us to clear our minds of quartered troops. And so even cycling must be monetized and commodified by the bourgeoisie. Gotta get those troops back in there somehow! And that’s what the spirit of the age tries to do to bike couriers! In every case, we have a spirit of staticity trying to confine a spirit of dynamism! This is not stable! The revolutionary spirit cannot be confined once it is “born”! You can’t kill consciousness! You can only kill people! But the day will come when even your bullets and your bombs will fail you!

Ok. So we see the problem, right? The effecting of big change in society requires mass movements. But mass movements are impossible within the normie paradigm. Because norms were never an expression of the will of the masses. Norms weren’t established to meet the needs of the masses. You can’t have a “movement” if you’re “stuck” in the normie paradigm, within normie permission structures. You’ll be too busy worried about what the other normies are gonna think of you. So mass movements require changes in mass consciousness. Yes. You don’t have a movement now. You’re not organized enough. You only know what you’re against. You don’t really know what you’re for yet. You haven’t self-actualized. What? Voting for a bourgeois party candidate in a bourgeois election? You call that a movement? A real “movement” (that might actually get something done) would be (or at least start out as) something like a “Clementinian Movement,” a movement of the fictive “Clementines,” who have recognized the call that mass healing will require mass outpourings of grief, and enthusiastically answer the call. And we will have such great outpourings of grief that they will disrupt traffic, disrupt commerce, disrupt the flow of arms and oil. That we will free the animals and dismantle the pipelines. This is the kind of thing a movement has to work up to—in order to accomplish. Well, this would require us to synthesize the dialectic of the tragedy and the statistic (and of the tragic and the comic), wouldn’t it? It would require us to study the history of mass movements through the framework of historical materialism. It would require us to study cargo cult and other millenarian-type phenomena (also through this lens). It would require us to seek a dialectic of reality-shifting. It’s almost like I’m asking us to walk into the ocean. Ok. Fine. Beowulf did it. That story lays it on a bit thick with the masculine energy for me, but there are still things we can learn from it. For we will have to walk into the ocean of the subconscious for rare clods of soil. Treasures in jars of clay, if you will. We will have to learn to love ourselves. We will have to find our inner cathedral of garbage.

Ok. Fine. The Child of Mother Earth (COME) must be lifted up. For (clinical-type) examination. For scrutinization. For pathologization, etc., etc. The story of how I learned to love myself could be its own book. Maybe I would call it A Tale Told by an Idiot, though there are already books by that title. Well, certainly engaging in fiction-writing exercises (which I talked about doing earlier—remember?) was a part of it. Even Jordan Peterson (quite sensibly, for once) recommends something like that, if you want to wring any water from his dirty towel. Of course, engaging in fiction-writing exercises got me into a lot of trouble in college, but maybe we can get into that later. I already faced consequences for it. More than a lot of other people face, anyway.

The story of how I learned to love myself is rather corny. But it’s not like corn in a styrofoam cup that you buy from a stand. It’s corn on the cob that I had to grow on my own soil—remember “Mitch Altogether.” It grew out of my furrowed back not unlike the fertilized eggs of the Pipa or Surinam toad!

I guess it started when I started reading books again. I guess I started reading books more regularly during covid, though I had been trying for years. I had always read articles. Nothing wrong with that. But books tend to be more comprehensive. And one book can easily be interpreted in the light of other books. The same can be said of articles, but it’s a greater, more synergistic effect, if you will, with books. I started with nonfiction, like Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank, and Against the Web by the late Michael Jamal Brooks. But then I read Infinite Jest. And then I read The Alchemist. I will say that The Alchemist is perhaps a fine book for middle schoolers, but it’s not what I would call “for adults.” Ok. So maybe my inner middle schooler needed to read it. Infinite Jest, on the other hand, is not for middle schoolers! Ok, so then, in late 2022/early 2023, I made a conscious decision that I would “stop fighting” and start letting certain “things” mean something to me again, like the Detroit Lions and Lana Del Rey, for example. Why not. Why not just let myself enjoy certain experiences? I had to change something. I was in a rut. I wasn’t letting myself enjoy things. I was drinking way too much. I had spent eleven days in jail in September 2022. Ok, so in March 2023, Lana Del Rey released her Ocean Blvd album, and I listened to it, and I thought it was ok, but then, a month later, I started smoking weed every day (I had heard it would help me sleep—this did not work), and I suddenly found myself finding whole new meaning in the work of Lana Del Rey. I felt like I was going crazy. But all the “meaning” I saw in the work of Lana Del Rey is very REAL, as we’ve seen. Ok, so then, in July, I suddenly found myself beyond motivated to (basically) stop drinking alcohol when I had an accident in the alley behind Joe Rogan’s Comedy Mothership club while drunk that resulted in those stitches (sutures) in my forearm I talked about earlier (how many were there?). Ok, so then, in September, there was a Lana Del Rey concert in Austin. I couldn’t buy tickets when they went on sale, because I made the mistake of not logging in 10 minutes before the start time (i.e., 10 minutes earlier than I did), so I missed out on buying them from the retailer (you know who) when a GA pit ticket would have been $300, and maybe I could have gotten a platinum or VIP package for a few hundred more dollars. But now, I would have to take my chances in the resale market. So I figured I could “sacrifice” as much as a month’s rent, and ultimately, I was able to buy a ticket for a bit under this amount. A few other people on the floor were a little pissed off at me, because some of them had paid over $1000 in the resale market. But I considered the $700 I paid a real sacrifice. Just as real as any of them sacrificed. Well, you used to have to sacrifice something real to the idols. Now everything has been flattened into money transactions (I hardly consider the 32 mile round trip bike ride a “sacrifice,” but hey). My love and willingness to “sacrifice” for Lana Del Rey has been flattened into a matter of a single quantity. This isn’t “natural.” In the sense that it’s “artificial,” which is to say, relying on “artifice.” But, for me, at the time, that was a little over a week’s worth of what I got paid at “Pip’s Pizza.” THAT is what I was “sacrificing.” The human bacon strips. Ok, so the concert was great, but I mostly mentioned it to talk about the vulgarization of love in class society. Well, this is something we’re going to have to work with. It’s patterns we’re going to have to NOTICE. It’s a paradigm we’re going to have to shift our way out of, but first we’re going to have to realize we’re in it. Incidentally, at around this time, I joined Richard Carrier’s patreon. Ok, so at the end of November, I got injured at work, and I was gonna get worker’s comp (I got a little), but then the hospital snitched on me to the worker’s comp administration that I had tested positive for weed when I got injured. So I couldn’t pay my rent. So my mom paid it for me. This was no small task for her. You could say it was a sacrifice. My mom ended up paying my rent for 9 months. Until I finally had to fuck off back home. Because my mom said she wanted to see me every day. And how could I say no to that? Look. You can’t put a price on love. But $8000 is a hell of a price. It is for us anyway. And so, by the vulgarized standards of our bourgeois dictatorship, apparently, my mom loves me some 11 times more than I love Lana Del Rey. This is insane to say. I don’t think we can “say” that love can be “divided” like that. But maybe it can be “multiplied.” I have no reason to believe it’s not “true” (in some sense) that my mom loves me 11 times more than I love Lana Del Rey. But it took me until about April to understand this. How could I have understood it before? I didn’t love myself. At least self-love hadn’t become “real for me.” It hadn’t become real in the sense of the Velveteen Rabbit. I didn’t know my “authentic self.” My “self” as I knew it was still a static (we might even say “false”) image battling an inner Cartesian Demon archetype. But my mom had always seen beyond what I was on the surface and could see my authentic self. I used to say I was born with a personality only a mother could love. And we could say that she loved me “anyway,” but we could just as easily say that she loved me BECAUSE of my authentic self. Because I reflect her, and not just at the surface level, but in that I come from a cell in her body! Yes! We all come from a cell in our mother’s bodies, generally speaking—if Ana Kasparian is reading this, we all come from a cell in the body of our birthing parent/person. But this raises an important point. We certainly don’t “come from a cell” in the body of our ejaculating parent/person. When I said we were all COME earlier, perhaps you were thinking of sperm. Westoid, you think you were the sperm? Motherfucker, you were the egg! The sperm fkn died! Sit with that, if you need to. That “sperm” was a “pill” for the egg to take, a blotter, etc., etc., to send the egg on a new pathway to a different journey—a journey of greater “potential”! And the egg “metabolized” that “pill” and incorporated it into itself, and a new potential was brought into existence! If the sperm hadn’t come along, your egg would just as “happily” have floated down the Fallopes undisturbed, peaceful, and sloughed off into the tampon or whatever (and potentially back into the ocean) like so many (hundreds?) of your sister eggs before and after you. And that would have been your life! And all would be well with the universe! None would have been the wiser. But this time, something was different. There you were, in your mom’s chemical bath, in your primordial gamer-girl bathwater. What. Of course your mom was a gamer girl. That’s (likely) how she got into this predicament in the first place. She was playing a game—with a joystick (but can we say there were any real “winners” in this game?)—though, of course, there are exceptions. And so my mom played a stupid game with my dad and they won a stupid prize—me; and later my brother. I had said earlier that parents in class society are required to sacrifice their children to the master-slave dialectic. My parents are no exception. Gasp. Yawn. But my mom loved me enough to make the necessary sacrifices to keep me relatively safe all through this. Because she created me. We could almost say she willed me into existence. And so of course she was willing to do whatever it took to keep me alive. And suddenly, I found a whole new desire to keep myself alive, which had been somewhat “missing” before! In case you couldn’t tell. And it took your stupid bourgeois number-quantities to “convince” me of all this! I didn’t have a handle on it before. The third hand hadn’t grown out my subconscious swamp. I didn’t have a dialectic of love. But now my mom (who, like all parents, well, you saw what we said earlier about the master-slave dialectic) had shown that she was willing to make whatever “sacrifice” it took to keep me safe. And I grasped what this meant for the first time. It meant she really did have an unlimited, unconditional love for me. And this meant there was no reason for me to place any limits on my love for myself. And I felt The Warm Glow. And I interpreted it as a reward from my DNA for finally giving a fuck about myself! But this was, I think, a couple days after I went to my own personal hell and turned all the lights on in my subconscious. I think it might have been the day after I found my inner Cathedral of Garbage. I told Carrier about going to my own personal hell on 9 April 2024 (the day after the eclipse), but not in so many words. Well, look. I had said earlier that it was hard for me to believe that, “statistically,” my mom loved me “11 times more than I love Lana Del Rey,” whatever that means. But I don’t have to “believe” it or even “know what it means.” It makes me cry. That’s its own form of truth. In my studies with Carrier, I called it “lachrymological truth.” And, in his journey through the Ministry of Love, we may very well find the limits tested on Carrier’s tear ducts’ capability to process lachrymological truth. My mom had told me that she thought it was a “failure” on her part that my brother and I didn’t believe in God, but I told her that, ok, she didn’t get me to believe in (her conception of) god, but she got me to believe in LOVE! And that was what really mattered! And this couldn’t be disputed, because it was lachrymologically true! Its truth could be verified lachrymologically.

Brother Paul invokes the calling of the prophet Jeremiah when he says God “set [him] apart from [his] mother’s womb.” Jeremiah had said, “Before you formed me in my mother’s womb, you knew me.” But, you see, westoid, before our mothers knew us, they were forming us in their wombs, and so it was entirely up to them to make the decision as to whether to keep forming us once they found out about it! But people aren’t grateful that their moms didn’t abort them. They think they were entitled. Just because someone came in their mom. Big Deal! You think life is some kind of “miracle.” I guess it is, but it’s very much in the interests of the ruling class for you to think of life as a “miracle” in a specific way. They’d like to have you thinking miracles come from “god” (i.e., them, so you don’t start thinking you can create your own “miracles”), and, indeed they do. They come from mother earth. They (the ruling class) want you living in a world where love only seeps in through the cracks instead of a world filled with love and light! They want you terrified of source so you seek to meet your needs only through their gates. But Paul also says, “I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God.” And I am equally convinced that none of those things can separate me from the love of my mom! And why wouldn’t she love me as much as herself? She considers me a “gift.” Well, I sort of was, wasn’t I? I was a stupid prize she won for playing a stupid game. And to this day, she still plays the “stupid game” of helping to keep me alive (it’s “stupid games” all the way down, I’m sorry to say), because there have been times when it seemed like society was trying to kill me. And those times may come again. And the stupid prize we win for working to keep ourselves alive is that we keep ourselves alive, or at least we know that we gave it our best shot. And they can take our lives away from us, but they can’t take that! And once I knew how much my mom loved me, and once I knew myself (my authentic self) like she knew me, well, it was easy to love myself that much. And from there, it’s fairly “trivial” to be able to share this love with the world. Because the potential for this unlimited, unconditional love exists within all of us. And it would be “immoral” of us not to share it with each other!

I was watching a livestream by a woo peddler once because we have a mutual friend. I was very moved. So many of the chatters were desperate for a miracle. Motherfucker! You already are a “miracle”! You can easily fuck off back home! What’s stopping you? Ah. There we go. Now I see it. You’d rather die than have to live with your parents again. Why? Is it because they’re terrible, controlling, egocentric boomer bigots? You just need to have a few meltdowns in front of them. What. There was no way I could have moved back home if I hadn’t had a few meltdowns in front of my dad. There were just things I needed to say to him, but had no other way of saying! Once, I even screamed at him, “GET! THE FUCK! OUT! OF MY! HOUSE!” pounding my fist (or maybe my palm) on the inside of the bathroom door at each exclamation point. And he did. What. What’s the problem? I tend to have meltdowns almost exclusively when people don’t listen, or when they’re being bigots, which is another form of not-listening. What. You need to move things forward. You need to subject your parents to some shamanic accountability. Who else is gonna do it? How are we going to build a real December 18 Party when we’re waiting for someone else to make our parents “get it”! WE are the ones who [will] have to make our parents “get it”! WE ARE the December 18 Party! WE ARE the ones who need to start holding people accountable in our own lives! And we need to start with ourselves! We need to go to our own personal hells so we can flip the switch on our inner light!

Ok, so your own personal hell is just a chrysalis for the caterpillar on the tree of life to metamorphose into the psychological butterfly. So I had to recognize myself as a caterpillar on the tree of life before I could go to my own personal hell, before I could metamorphose into a psychological butterfly. Yes. You have to refamiliarize yourself with dimensionality. Your conception of it is likely far too “square” and not “bendy” or “twisty” or “tree-like” (branching out) enough. Yes. This is another thing we seemed to skim over. Reznor’s protagonist in “Only” recognizes that not only is his “self” a false image, but so is the “world” he inhabits. And this must be another step in our transition from caterpillar into butterfly. Well, the two must happen at the same time, musn’t they? For the new, dynamic “self” must find its “self” in a new, dynamic world to match! To correspond! To align (with)! And therefore, the westoid must recognize the westoid world they inhabit as a world of image, and therefore, a false world. And their conception of this world must explode, just as surely as the caterpillar “explodes” out of its skin to form the chrysalis, to metamorphose into the psychological butterfly, the COME.

Well, we would need to explode your liberal westoid conception of morality, normality, and sanity, wouldn’t we? We would have to explode your conception of the purpose of laws and their enforcement within bourgeois jurisprudence. Again, this might require its own book. I had to read several myself. There’s The Jakarta Method, The Shock Doctrine, The Management of Savagery, Hegemony or Survival, The Devil’s Chessboard, The Triumph of Evil, Bomb Children, A Great Place to Have a War, etc., etc. Hey. I’m starting to detect a pattern. We might say it’s a real murderer’s row of books. These books (and others, which I read in whole or in part) are all more or less about the US role in what people euphemistically call “the cold war.” Perhaps a more accurate title would’ve been “The Global War on Class Consciousness.” Well, the US supported a bunch of murder so that capitalism could triumph. What. Over communism? Over an “ideology”? No! Over the masses! The “Cold War” was a war to crush the revolutionary spirit of the wretched of the earth! It was wildly successful! For a time. The time of this “success” may very well be coming to an end, sooner rather than later.

On 30 October 2023, the month I became a patreon supporter of Richard Carrier (timeline checks out), I sent him the following introductory Facebook message, which read, in part:

I’m trying to, I guess, start a new field of study. And I’m not quite sure how to go about it. The tentative title is “Primitive Accumulation Studies.” I’m going to be drawing on previous research in a lot of other fields like archeology/history/anthropology, research on imperialism, gender studies, Marxism (yes, seriously), and something called “conflict/violence/genocide studies.” I have this suspicion that the transition of the human species from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to the agricultural lifestyle required systemic violence, and that you can say the same thing about every other time an individual or minority group took power (e.g., resources) for themselves that was previously shared. The “civilized” world has definitely been responsible for more than its fair share of the “evil” in the world over the past few hundred years.

At the risk of excessively lengthening this, I’ll give you an example… We already know that race is a social category rather than a biological one, and that it was (basically) invented to justify slavery. Leviticus 25 says you can get debt slaves from among the Israelites, but chattel slaves only from among “foreigners.” What if the concept of the “foreigner” was itself invented to justify chattel slavery?

Carrier replied: “There is a lot of theory in sociology and anthropology along the lines you are thinking. So you are on a plausible track, IMO.” -RC (10 Oct 2023, personal correspondence).

Hey. Thanks, Carrier. Anyway, yes. This is what I was starting to independently study at the time. Maybe Uncle Ted would’ve called it a surrogate activity, but I knew there was something very important about this topic. I’d had a “vision” of humanity “swimming”—swimming like the white blood cells in front of my retina—in the great ocean of being with all the other animals, etc., all the other Children of Mother Earth, and there were no hierarchical distinctions. And that meant there was no point in seeking out distinctions, only, well, commonalities, connections. And therefore, any “hierarchical distinctions” between humans veritably “shrank” (to less than “corncobs”) in meaning for me. And of course, this vision was “true.” It was lachrymologically true (also, cf. Carrier’s “vision” from Sense and Goodness, p. 13-14!). We’re gonna have to start taking tears a lot more seriously if we’re gonna successfully dissolve the westoid cobwebs of justification covering our collective third eye.

In reading those books on the Cold War, I recognized myself, as a “US citizen,” as a caterpillar on a tree—a tree of empire. That’s what all these books, these branches, branched out from—the truth that, well, the US is an empire; always has been. And it has upheld this empire through some 400 years of stealing, killing, and destroying. Carrier justifies this, in the sense that he wants to reform the way we uphold the empire, i.e., update our justifications. This doesn’t allow us to leave the framework where stealing, killing, and destroying are seen as “aspects of human nature” that “we need laws/morality to protect ourselves against.” A world where love and light only seep in through the cracks, leaving plenty of darkness (shadow) for your dissociation and exploitation for the perverse interests of bourgeoisie. Leaving plenty of room for Omelas basements. You have to crack a few eggs to make Omelas. Someone must have said that before.

So, as far as “primitive accumulation” is concerned, it never really went away. Ok. Quick recap. Primitive accumulation comes from Adam Smith via Marx. Smith tells some just-so story about why some people have money and others don’t. He calls it “previous accumulation.” Marx translated this into German, and properly characterized it as, well, theft on national scales (the “enclosure of the commons” in England, for example), and then his English translators translated his German term back into English as “primitive accumulation.” Marx talks about it in the context of its role in jump starting capitalism into being, but really, primitive accumulation is what makes class society possible in the first place. It’s not something that happens all at once. It is tied (dialectically) to a kind of “metamorphosis” in society—a metamorphose into what people call a “society.” See, e.g., Engel’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. But, like I said, it never went away, and the cold war, and its successor, the Global War of Terror, were continuations of it into the 20th and 21st centuries. For example, America’s illegal war of choice against Iraq starting in 2003 was, aside from everything else, utilzed as an opportunity to plunder the public resources of the country for primitive accumulation purposes. It’s the same thing Smedley Darlington Butler was talking about in his speeches and his book “War is a Racket.” He was the embodiment of the sword of the false goddess of bourgeois liberty for decades. He admits this, regretfully, we can say, in a speech published in 1935 in the magazine Common Sense. He recognizes himself not as a defender of the freedom of the American masses, but as a jackbooted thug for capital:

America’s Armed Forces: In Time of Peace

…In the past two years large National Guard forces have seen active service in 20 strikes in as many different states, from the Pacific Coast to New England, from Minnesota to Georgia. They have used gas, bullets, and tanks — the most lethal weapons of modern war — against striking workers. Casualty lists have been impressive. In one instance they erected barbed wire concentration camps in Georgia to “co-ordinate” striking workers with all the efficiency of the fascist repressive technique.There isn’t a trick In the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its “finger men” (to point out enemies), its “muscle men” (to destroy enemies), its “brain guys,” (to plan war preparations) and a “Big Boss,” (super-nationalistic capitalism).

I Was a “Racketeer”

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent 33 years and 4 months In active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force — the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical of everyone in the military service.

Thus I, helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.
–Smedley Butler, 1935

And nothing has changed in the past 100 years! We might say very little has changed in the past 400 years! The technology, perhaps? This country wasn’t founded to protect your “rights”! It was founded to protect the “rights” of your exploiters! So when are you going to wake up, westoid? When are you gonna click your heels together and find yourself in the World of Mother Earth? Still scared? Still worried about what it’s gonna look like? Before enlightenment, I jacked off and smoked weed. After enlightenment, I jacked off and smoked weed. We will be doing many of the same things we were doing before revolution, but we will be doing them with purpose. Yes, even (especially) jacking off and smoking weed.

Of course, Carrier won’t make it through his own personal hell until he recognizes how racist he was being against the Chinese through his rhetoric against their government. Carrier “condemns China” for not living up to his morality. But his “morality” is that of the colonizer. He would have to see this “morality” of his as a Picture of Dorian Gray and stab it. He would have to look in the mirror and see the Yakubian Devil. He would have to wake up and smell the Gaia. He would have to go to Room 101 of his inner Ministry of Love. He would have to confront his biggest phobia. Is his biggest phobia sinophobia? I don’t know. Could be. Typically, the biggest phobia of the unenlightened is that they’re not who they think/believe they are. But, of course, they’re not. When they SEE who they REALLY are, it tends to make them feel like throwing up. And then they spend years trying to forget about it. Or trying to punish themselves for it. This is no good. We call it a “trip” because it really is one. It’s a “trip” into your subconscious. Your ego is there, but it’s not quite “in control.” Definitely not at first. But Carrier is a normie supremacist. He would have to lose his connection with norms. His train of thought would have to be lifted from its tracks by his third hand.

There we go. Carrier seems to take the thought experiment of the “trolley problem” very seriously. It’s because he’s not used to lifting his train of thought off its tracks. The trolley problem should be taken about as seriously as Roko’s Basilisk. It’s basically the same thing. Who tied those people to the tracks, anyway? It might as well have been the Cartesian Demon! That’s the real problem! You live in a society where the Cartesian Demon is running around causing mayhem! That’s why corporations sell insurance! The trolley problem is only a “problem” in a perverse society. Our friend Abraham from earlier was an altar boy in the Catholic Church. He witnessed abuse very closely. This is its own form of abuse. And what could he do about it? He was just a kid. And he lived in a society that protects abusers. We don’t think he blamed himself like Chris from Get Out, but it was certainly traumatizing, and we have reason to believe he hasn’t processed all of the trauma (from this and other events in his horrifying late boomer childhood) in totally healthful ways.

Ok, so Carrier’s trolley world was at one point, the world of Smedley Butler, whoever the Smedley Butler of his (Carrier’s) day was, presumably Stormin’ Norman and, um, Rollin’ Colin? Might have to work on that one. His name is pronounced “colon,” like the body part. That’s the correct way to pronounce it. Anyway, Carrier probably allows himself to feed on some wreaths of oat flakes concerning real examples in his life where he sees himself as flipping a switch and saving a greater number of people by sacrificing a lesser number of people (surely not “fewer number”?). We can be as sure that he thinks this of his career in the jack-booted military force occupying Turtle Island as he thinks this of his “career” as a voter. The trolley problem is a Platonic Cave shadow. There’s plenty of Yakubian Tricknology hiding underneath. I attempted to communicate this to Carrier on 4 August 2024 in a comment on his article, “How Far Left is Too Left.” Lenin had a different answer to this question than Carrier. I tried to point out in this and other comments that, in bourgeois society, much of our lives and especially quality of life is becoming dependent on forces that are increasingly trying to separate themselves from democratic accountability. This particular comment said, among other things, “If you really do think voting is a trolley problem, shouldn’t you be spending the other 364 days of the year untying people from the tracks!?” Carrier answered, at first, with normie supremacy in full force!

Richard Carrier (6 Aug 2024): I fail to comprehend any sensible statement in that paragraph. Mario, you aren’t making sense.

Once again, you have spun off the rails into unintelligible ranting about ancillary subjects we weren’t discussing. I have called you out for this before. Your inability to stay on subject and instead constantly change the subject makes communication with you impossible.

That’s your problem. You need to fix. I have done all I can here.

Hey! Careful! Gettin’ real metaphorical there, Carrier! You wouldn’t want to attract too much attention from George Lakoff on this, would you? But Carrier says I have spun [the “train” of his reasoning] off the rails. Therefore, the Trolley Problem is solved. Or at least this is one solution. The people tied to the tracks are safe. And nothing has happened to the people in the trolley. The trolley was merely temporarily detoured. Because we have shifted reality. We have shifted to a reality where Carrier is very quick to jump on the pathologization button! Carrier would indeed end up answering my question (about untying people from the tracks). I was very much reminded of Wittgenstein’s Poker. He essentially told me, ‘One day out of 365? What on earth are you talking about? I’m voting 5 times this year!’ Well! Vote early, vote often, I always say! Perhaps you think I’m exaggerating Carrier’s glibness. Hardly. The context does him little favor:

Richard Carrier, in reply to Ravenkeeper (6 Aug 2024): P.S. Not pertinent to your point, but illustrative of Mario’s hyperbolic mode of discourse, we often are voting more than one day of the year.

Most of us have multiple elections in a given year (I’ve voted in three just this year in Georgia, with one or two more to come). Also, democracy is not just voting, it’s speech (persuading the public; funding enterprises that persuade the public) and “petitioning the government for a redress of grievances,” i.e. attending protest marches and funding lobbying groups and writing your legislators and city council and other elected representatives. And most of the relevant voting is representative: we elect persons to vote for legislation; they then do a lot more voting for us than just one time a year. That is the point of civilization: the division and delegation of labor. [emphasis added —MM]

And if we spin off topic yet further, the questions at hand in Cargill relate to what laws we should have, which can be resolved peacefully (the only way to do which is democracy) or violently (a.k.a. fascism). That one dislikes the Cargill outcome has nothing to do with that distinction. The whole point of democracy is that you can be outvoted. That Americans are okay with depending on foreign slave labor is a defect of Americans. Not of democracy. There are only two ways to change that: peacefully (persuasion, voting, marching, petitioning) or violently (join an armed coup for an autocrat who pinky swears to crush global slavery). That is what we are supposed to be talking about—and once we get back to the point, the answer here is as I put it from the beginning. So we just ran around in a circle to where we all started.

Carrier’s comment is riddled with error! First of all, he confuses my “mode of discourse” for my goddamn mode of being! Carrier isn’t looking at the statistical voter; the Bayesian voter! He’s only looking at the ideal voter, namely himself. Therefore, he is not looking at the far more statistically significant factor when it comes to voting. Carrier seems perfectly happy living in a world of rampant “immorality” as long as it’s “democratic,” which does nothing to prevent your world from becoming Omelas. Your attachment to the framework of the Trolley Problem IS your willingness to crack a few eggs to make Omelas. For the rest, we must recognize Carrier as dangerously lacking in imagination; dangerously within the reality-based community; dangerously unwilling to combat the spirit of the age; dangerously reliant on a very vulgar conception of “democracy,” not to mention “fascism.” Carrier’s conception of “democracy” is riddled with Yakubian tricknological parasitism. Included in this conception is, well, freedom to lie, i.e., “persuade.” “Persuade” generally means “appeal to your interlocutor’s craving for external validation.” We see this in advertisements of all sorts. This is 101-level Yakubian Tricknology. It relies on your yearning for external validation. This is one of the things you lose when you crucify the ego. But I would venture to guess that Carrier can’t imagine political speech outside the context of persuasion. To him, it may very well be the only game in town. This must be seen as primarily the result of a failure/fault/lack in the imagination. Carrier was trying to “persuade” EHD to fuck him. He very well could have gotten consensually into bed with EHD; he merely would have had to have been a completely different person and would have had to go about it in a completely different way. If someone else had done this and Carrier had “learned” about it, he might not have been able to distinguish whatever that person did from “persuasion,” but “persuasion” would have had little or nothing to do with it. I would imagine that EHD is the kind of person who already knows who they want to fuck. Carrier was the one who was trying to draw a straight line to fucking! This must be seen as an “attempt” (conscious or sub-) to manipulate the imagination of your interlocutor! Manipulation of your interlocutor’s imagination is not inherently a crime. If it were, we may be regarded as “guilty” several times in this book. But to manipulate someone, in this way, consciously or sub-, into imagining a sexual act with you, well, we’ve seen already (in my case, with MLO, if you need me to spell that out for you again) that this is the sort of thing that winds up sending people to their own personal hells! If you’re playing the “persuasion” game, you don’t have to be “in tune,” i.e., you can bypass the seeking of alignment, with what the “will” of your interlocutor is. You are likely trying to replace their will with your will. We remember the “complete” (“metaphysical”) replacement model within the metaphysical straight line “development” model from VDMT, p. 195. This model does not reflect material truth, i.e., material processes (i.e., the 4-dimensional). When it comes to politics, Carrier’s “species of consciousness” is entirely (too) liberal, i.e., individualist, i.e., opportunist, i.e., bourgeois. Politics to him, is about morality, normality, and sanity, which means it’s actually about very little. Because if it’s about morality, normality, and sanity, then it’s not really about power; it’s not really about the will of the people; it’s about a simulacrum/a of those things. It’s about justifying the imposition of the will of the rulers over the mass of the people. It’s about seeking to replace the will of the people with the will of the rulers. “The point of civilization[,]” Carrier says, is “the division and delegation of labor.” Precisely what we were saying earlier. The division of labor and the antithesis between mental and physical labor. This is why Carrier is not a Marxist. Just like we said earlier about “The Liberal” (though in other words). He says it right there. He does not believe in the abolition of those things. They are the pillars, the cornerstones, of his trolley world (thus stones that will be rejected in the build-ing of the World of Mother Earth!). They are the tracks on which those trolleys run. Those things are, of course, a very powerful form of Yakubian Tricknology! You don’t need division and delegation of labor when you have shared labor and, hence, shared consciousness. People can hold each other accountable. We must understand that to raise our consciousness IS to become more “disciplined”; IS to be able to hold ourselves to a greater level of accountability; IS to become increasingly conscious of the subconscious. This is what Comrade Lenin keeps banging on about throughout his writings, including State and Revolution, and his invaluable 1923 essay, “Better Fewer, But Better.” Carrier, of course, has no dialectic of an abolition of the division and delegation of labor. He doesn’t even have a metaphysic for it. Therefore, he has/sees/desires no will and no way. Carrier seems to live an impossible life. He wants to be seen as discouraging worry in his free will class ($49!), yet he is quite litigious. Well, we already covered how not to worry hundreds of pages ago. If Carrier were really as “ethical” as he thought he was, he would very likely have had a lot less to “worry” about on the litigation front. If I hadn’t been sending female comics DMs, and not being “creepy” in person, I would have had a lot less to worry about too. I don’t need to be a comedian. Who needs to be around all th[os]e egos anyway? Why did I want to be a comedian, anyway? Well, there are a whole “complex” of reasons for this. But we can find many correspondences between why one would want to be a comedian and why one would want to be an ethical nonmonogamist. They’re practically the same thing. I wouldn’t say comics are all fucking each other, but, hey, people have been known to seek out comics to fuck (vulgarly known as “chuckle fuckers”). It even happened to me once. Holy shit. We don’t have to talk about that. Or do we? Well, it happened to Carrier once, too. He wrote about being harassed/assaulted once at a conference, though I wouldn’t say I was “harassed” in my corresponding situation—I would say something else. He seems to characterize his being subjected to this harassment/assault as some sort of misunderstanding, but the conference had every reason to throw this woman out and ban her from future conferences. I’ve been banned from places before for far less than touching someone. Indeed, I’ve been banned from places for completely ableist reasons. I’ve gotten fired for completely ableist reasons. I’ve been in jail and other institutions for completely ableist reasons. And to whom can I complain about this? The void, perhaps. When people say, “I’ll pray for you,” tell them, “I’ll cry for you.” That is all we can do. And that is all there will be for Carrier to do. Carrier lives in a world of misunderstandings. He thinks that there are good people and bad people, and the reason good people disagree with each other is misunderstandings. The bad people are bad because they have a broken epistemology. He says as much, at least the second part, in a different comment:

The reason Nazis hate the world is because they have false beliefs about it owing to a broken epistemology that prioritizes emotion over reason.

And their resulting delusional system of belief is actually self-engineered to avoid admitting that they have become the very things they loathe, because they conceal that reality beneath a whole foundation of false beliefs about themselves and the world.
–Richard Carrier, 29 July 2024

This isn’t “wrong,” it’s merely a gigantic yawn. Hwæt. We could just as easily say that the reason Liberals hate the third world (and they do) is because they have false beliefs about it owing to a broken epistemology that prioritizes emotion over reason. And their resulting delusional system of belief is actually self-engineered to avoid admitting that they are the very “things” they loathe (i.e., human beings), because they conceal that reality beneath a whole foundation of false beliefs about themselves and the third world. How does this help us? We’ve already established that liberals have a morality of anti-morality. Ok. So they’re “evil.” So what? How does that help us? Calling people’s epistemology “broken” is tantamount to calling THEM “broken.” It’s pathologization. Pathologization requires “institutionalization” in some sense. Comrade Lenin wanted us to hold ourselves and each other accountable. The combo of pathologization/institutionalization is not for this. It’s FOR the imposition of the will of the ruling class on the subordinate classes. But the working classes don’t/won’t need to pathologize our class enemies to impose our will on them if we have the tool of shamanic accountability. We have to recognize shamanic accountability as a very powerful tool. Lenin might have killed for this tool, as he would have surely recognized its potential for saving many future lives. But how could he have known about shamanic accountability? What. You wanna hear about how I almost got raped by a chuckle fucker? Why? That person will have to go through their own shamanic accountability. Should they (singular) go through what I went through? Where is the Platonic Cave for that? They (plural) probably wouldn’t have let me in to the accountability theater facebook group. I would’ve had to submit a “tip” to TGC or something.

“Also, democracy[,]” Carrier says, “is not just voting, it’s speech (persuading the public; funding enterprises that persuade the public) and ‘petitioning the government for a redress of grievances,’ i.e. attending protest marches and funding lobbying groups and writing your legislators and city council and other elected representatives.” This is not democracy. This is democracy theater. This is a simulacrum of democracy. We could call it a “‘crum” of democracy. Democracy would be for the mass of the people, the labor force, to attain consciousness of itself as a class-for-itself and seize the means of production, etc., etc. Carrier makes a big deal out of supporting policies like nationalizing the forestry and oil industries. Highly sensible. Carrier thinks “democracy” would be our voting this policy into existence. Motherfucker! The enactment of this policy, and many others like it, would be a motherfucking PREREQUISITE for D/democracy As Such! We, Carrier and I, live in different realities! But don’t be confused or perverted into thinking that there is some “chasm” between these “disparate” realities. There’s a slime mold path. Carrier can access this path by threading himself through the eye of a needle. But he would have to become thread first. We already shredded up his “gold” hot air balloon ego for yellow ribbons to tie on the tree of memory. Maybe now those ribbons need to be stripped further into a single thread to fit through the eye of the needle, to sew something. Something useful. Perhaps you think I’m “stretching” the metaphor too far, too thin. Hardly. Marx has no problem, in chapter 1 of Capital, pointing to the addition of value, via the addition of labor-time, at every stage in the process of making a coat, which includes weaving the cloth, spinning the thread, etc., etc. We are adding value to what was once a hot air balloon by turning it into something with more practical everyday use. Perhaps hot air balloons aren’t for egos to ride in. Perhaps egos should try riding something more sturdy. Something with an actual internal structure. Dirigibles, perhaps. Kites, even. But the ego doesn’t merely need to become thread-like enough to be passed through the eye of a needle; it must be spaghettified by the internal black hole; it must become ductile enough to pass through the microtubules.

Carrier’s conception of democracy is that the question of what laws we should have should be answered by the processes of his democracy theater. This is hardly “democracy.” But he positions the only alternative to this as “violence,” “fascism,” “join[ing] an armed coup for an autocrat who pinky swears to crush global slavery.” Well, if those death cults are the only alternative to the liberal death cult of expensive (destructive) comfort and self-pity and fleeting moments of jouissance, then blow me to Bermuda, I guess. Hell, blow me to Sentinel Island. I’d rather take my chances with them. Maybe I could stay in a sail-raft hundreds of meters away for a few weeks. Acclimate them to my presence. But no. I had to be a missionary FROM the Sentinelese. Don’t think I’m making some extraordinary claim. It was bound to happen sooner or later. You westoids keep, secretly or not, wanting to send missionaries there. So they need their own “missionaries” to tell you westoids to fkn cut it out! They don’t want to live in your death cult of comfort and self-pity and the master-slave dialectic. They don’t want to live in your class society of child sacrifice. Maybe you have more to learn from them than they from you! But you think the only way to learn from them would be to spy on them. Yikes! That’s not at all what we have in mind. I feel like we’ve spied on them enough. We seem to have spied on them enough to learn that they were largely successful in surviving the tsunami of 2004. They were in tune with Mother Earth. What? Like it’s hard? Maybe we could learn a few things about “democracy” from them.

When I say you westoids want to send missionaries to the Sentinelese, I’m not just talking about Christians. Daniel Dennett, noted rider of the airplane vulgarly known as The Lolita Express, practically salivates a[bou]t the prospect of colonially interfering with the world of the Sentinelese in his classic, epochal, seminal book of the “New Atheism” “publishing phenomenon” (as Sam Harris calls it), Breaking the Spell, which is another book Carrier suggested I read in his Metaphysical Naturalism class ($49!). Perhaps this would be a good time to touch upon that book. I learned a lot from it, after all. We should say, from our own independent research, which is highly corroborated, and well cited, which material may very well be fit for its own book, that one of the most important “functions” of what is commonly called “religion” or “spirituality” is for the conscious(ness) to “communicate” with the subconscious. This is an extremely important function. For perhaps a few thousand years, religion in general has been “the only game in town” that “performs” this function for most people in what are currently considered the most “historically relevant” regions, but we must recognize Mother Earth as an “infinite source” of this “function.” This is not quite Dennett’s perspective. He talks a lot about “belief in belief,” especially in Chapter 8, but he himself seems to have been troubled by what we could call “belief in believe.” This “belief” is summed up, distilled, encapsulated, on p. 222, where Dennett says, “In general, the world would be a better place if people shared more truths and believed fewer falsehoods.” This can hardly be distinguished from a belief that the world would be a better place if we went around making sure people “believed the right things.” Perhaps it’s true, ceteris paribus, that the world would be a better place if everyone believed the right things. But Dennett seems to think this is what the education system is for. He’s still using the obsolete paradigm of the tripartite theory of knowledge, where knowledge is “justified, true belief,” rather than something learned/accepted through first- and second-order EXPERIENCE! I don’t “believe” that my mom loves me 11 times more than I love Lana Del Rey. I EXPERIENCED it! I had DIRECT ACCESS to it! Therefore, I have GNOSIS of it! This is much stronger than “belief”! “Belief” only gets you so far. “Belief” didn’t get Jordan Bernt Peterson very far in his debate with 20 people more prepared than him. Perhaps now would be a good time to wring that dirty towel for droplets of meaning. It’s very important to analyze these sorts of things when they pop up. When people make a mess out of a word instead of enhancing the clarity of it. Jordan Peterson is a master of making messes out of things. But we will certainly show that the more we examine belief, the more meaningless it becomes, because it will be shown that there is always going to be a gap between belief and knowledge. This gap does not exist with gnosis and knowledge. There is a very strong correspondence. There will always be a physical/material/dialectical fact for the metaphysical “gnosis” to attach itself to. And, more than this, the metaphysical structure attaches itself directly to the physical/dialectical structure. This is not JBP’s “metaphysical substrate.” This is a physical substrate. Material. The infinite field. Of course the infinite field is material. If it weren’t material, it would have to be ideal. There is no “secret third thing.” “Nothing,” for example, doesn’t exist! If it did, then nothing would exist! There’s STUFF in between all the atoms! That STUFF isn’t “nothing”; it’s STUFF! “Everything is made out of stuff,” etc., etc., remember. That’s why it’s called dialectical materialism. Ok. That’s why I call it pan-dialectical materialism! There’s nothing to fear about this. People report having all sorts of “experiences of god,” which is to say, experiences of the highest order, what some people call “transcendent experiences,” but, in the framework of metaphysical/synthetic naturalism, these can all be readily understood as experiences of self/experiences of nature/experiences of the (potential) higher self.

Peterson says (34:11), “[I]f you believe something, you stake your life on it. You live for it, and you die for it[…] It isn’t something that you say. It isn’t something that’s associated with logical consistency. It’s not declarative. It’s not propositional. It’s not a figment of your imagination. It’s the presupposition of your attention and your action. And you’re either fragmented, in which case you worship multiple gods, or there’s some unity at the bottom of it that makes you an unstoppable force.” (cf. ‘Even Muslims “on the inside” really don’t know what Muslims think about apostasy—they mostly aren’t prepared to bet their lives on it, which is the surest sign of belief, as we saw in chapter 8.’ -Dennett, BTS, p. 289). This is a very profound statement, properly understood (if only he properly understood it himself), though JBP is making the classic error of “belief in belief” while also making Dennett’s perhaps even more general error of “belief in believe.” What he’s talking about is, in fact, certainly not what most people mean by “belief,” but we have indeed seen that Chris from Get Out WAS able to find “some unity at the bottom” of his sunken place, to focus his “attention and [] action,” and allow him to (let’s say) “heal” from his former “fragmented” state, and this indeed allowed him to become “an unstoppable force” in the world of his Yakubian class enemies! We could say that, in a sense, Chris learned to “believe” in himself! So JBP isn’t ENTIRELY full of shit. We have indeed found a kernel of corn in there! And we’ve seen this kernel grow into a mighty plant! But Peterson doesn’t want us to “believe in ourselves”! He doesn’t want us to find our authentic selves! He wants us to “find God”! He’s super phobic of the prospect of (your) rooting around in the subconscious for an authentic self. He’s terrified you might find the 2nd coming of Comrade Stalin in there (ahh, inshallah). He’s far too hierarchy-brained. This is a signature of psychotypy. The psychotype typically believes in a psychotic god, if they believe in god. A destructive god worshipped for his power, because power institutes order (hierarchical order, of course), and this “order” is an “antidote to chaos.” But this doesn’t help Peterson, some 2 minutes later in the video, when it comes to the hypothetical of hiding Jews from the Nazis. Suddenly, his framework fails him, collapses under his feet. Presumably, his framework has some dependence on the norms of the current society. If a society has the wrong norms, then you’re kinda fucked in his framework. You would have to move to a different society with different norms. Well fuck me then, I guess, says Anne Frank. So Peterson’s whole framework, taken at face-value on his terms, doesn’t hold up in the light of day. Because he’s too individualist-brained! He doesn’t understand that individualism is powerless to defeat collectivism! Because individualism doesn’t actually protect individuality! Only collectivism can do that! As long as it’s egalitarian rather than oligarchic. As long as the masses attain enlightenment!

So what is Peterson talking about? He IS talking about something. “[T]he presupposition of your attention and your action.” He’s talking about a way to DIRECT your attention and your action. This is not what most people mean by “belief.” But perhaps it’s what people mean when they talk about “belief in God.” But this is more like “faith.” Or we could say it’s more like “conviction.” Perhaps what he’s really talking about is one’s level of consciousness. As he says himself, it isn’t about thinking correct thoughts according to the judgment of the Platonic Cave masters. It’s about connecting thoughts and ideas to actions. What you attend to is a very important part in the “chain of causality” that will “determine” your actions. You don’t carry out the “correct” actions simply by thinking the “correct” thoughts. The shadow on the wall of your trans-platonic cave needs to be a map for future action. You must be able to see the cascades of causality happening all around you and you must learn to “ride” them. This is how the masses will become “an unstoppable force”! But this requires practices, rituals, grief. I have no idea whether JBP would consider me an atheist. But of course I’m an atheist. I don’t “believe” in the theistic (“mind without a body”) conception of god. Ideas can’t cause things directly. Even if there were a theistic god, his ideas couldn’t cause things directly. That’s not how it works. Mother Earth is an ancestor god (and, as such, has her own “ancestors”). We already went over this. We also talked about the World-Spirit. This is NOT the same “thing” as the theistic god! Not even close! It DEVELOPS! It can’t be separated from the material world! When the sun expands so that it dries up the earth, “we” may very well “find” the World-Spirit also “dried up”! Knitting Cult Lady on YouTube says, “Every Cult Promises Space Travel”! And our “cult” is no different! First of all, like we said, we’re already as “in space” as we should want to be! But we shall indeed go further into space at some point! When the sun explodes! We’ll be “going to space” alright! We’ll be going as molecules, atoms, photons, maybe things no one’s ever even heard of! (cf. “You’ll go as a wallet; you’ll go as a belt; you’ll go as a purse! A lovely lady’s purse!”). But we don’t have to worry about that. That will be for our fossils to deal with. They’ll be “happy” to take the ride. And so too will the World-Spirit not so much “die” as “take a new form.” And what the fuck would Peterson have to say about all this? There’s no knob on the door for him to turn it around and make it all about patriarchy and hierarchy and his conception of order. We find more than enough “order” tumbling out of the material conditions! Ah. Perhaps you haven’t quite yet recognized that there is a dialectical relationship between order and chaos! Of course there is. It’s like particles/atoms and field/void. It’s like Lakoff’s Iranian student’s “problems as precipitate in/out of the solution.” Ok. So how would I explain this to my mom, who’s (seemingly) just as much a normie as anyone else? Perhaps I would tell her: “ok, so, in this video, the guy in the suit, the stuff he’s saying doesn’t really make a lot of sense. But that’s by design. Because he has to package it as some attractive ‘product’ he can sell in some ‘marketplace of ideas’; as Very Important Information. But too complicated for ordinary people to understand. And so he has to advertise it like you CAN understand it if you buy his book and all that sort of thing.” Does that help? We’ve covered intellectual commodity fetishism. I don’t need to use those words to explain it to my mom. Especially not the last one.

Back to Dennett. On p. 226, he cites “the old maxim, actions speak louder than words[.]” “What the maxim means, on reflection, is that actions other than speech acts are typically better evidence of what the actor really believes than any words the actor might say.” (p. 227). “Really believes.” What a wondrous turn of phrase. It’s almost nonsense, but not quite. What he’s pointing to is whatever it is that connects some belief [X] (really, this could be any thought, any “product” of the imagination—if you’re married to the word “belief,” then maybe you should look into getting a divorce!) to some action [Y]. He’s “Cameron Diaz-ing.” Dennett covers “Cameron Diaz-ing” on p. 214. He may very well not have noticed he was doing this, but, on p. 227, he is treating “what the actor really believes” as an “intentional object,” as an object of thought (and he acknowledged earlier that this doesn’t magically create some “material object”). But he’s thinking about it. We are reminded that “faith without works/deeds is dead” and “I will show you my faith by my works/deeds.” To adapt this to a more reasonable age, one’s “beliefs” are “private,” hence “virtual,” hence “not real” or “sub-real,” unless they can somehow get you into a causal cascade where you can put the “belief(s)” into action. Some people think that merely “saying” this “belief” is enough, but that’s not the kind of “belief” Peterson is talking about. Peterson wants to call conviction “belief” because of the motte and bailey phenomenon, of course. But when one is able to place this conviction in oneself, as did Chris from Get Out, again, what else do we call this but “belief in oneself”? So you see that it helps to zoom in. You see that we can make sense of things. What Peterson likely has in mind is a kind of Nietzschean self-actualization. We have found in our research that self-actualization must take a far more “Hegelian,” therefore “Marxian” turn, if you will. And why not? The resurrected ego (that recognizes that it is not the center of the fkn universe) is the public water fountain or firehose, as the case may be, of human progress, and/but/so, the subconscious is the city that supplies the goddamn water! Because the subconscious must be organized, in terms of how it accesses and processes “source,” i.e./e.g., the river, the water table, the air!

Ok. What Dennett is basically saying in the Cameron Diaz section is, imagine if you were doing something nice for Dennett, like letting him fly in your private jet, for example. And what if Dennett didn’t know it was your jet, so instead of thanking you—he would have been so grateful after all, not knowing who to thank—he would instead thank his “lucky stars.” Or perhaps he would thank Cameron Diaz. And when it was revealed that it was YOUR jet, it would have been very strange for Dennett to say, “Now I understand: you are Cameron Diaz!” He notes that it would be slightly different if he had made a habit of, in the presence of acquaintances, “singing the praises of Cameron Diaz” for the favors for which he was so grateful, and had, in their minds, perhaps, turned this “Cameron Diaz” into an “intentional object” for them, granting “her” a certain degree of “reality” for them, as an “object of thought,” if nothing else, even to the point where “[t]he syllables ‘Cameron Diaz’ […] would have turned[…] into a sort of wild-card referring expression[…] for … whatever it is I am grateful for.” He goes on to discuss how this “ambiguity” is “exploited” in organized religion, and is what lies behind the “meaning” of the old chestnut about what “the fool hath said in his heart.” But surely only a fool would say in their heart that there is no Cameron Diaz. And we can be just as sure that only a fool would say there’s “nothing,” that “there is no whatever-it-is,” that connects some product of the imagination [X] to some action [Y]! Of course there is! There must be WILL and WAY. And of course there is a dialectical relationship between will and way. And, of course, will cannot be separated from consciousness, which cannot be separated from the body of the conscious organism that embodies/instantiates this consciousness (except “synthetically”). And we must recognize that consciousness, which includes gnosis, goes far deeper than what people usually mean by “belief,” and perhaps even into correspondence with what JBP says, in the previous statement, that HE means by “belief”! Because that is the kind of “belief” (though we wouldn’t call it that) we’re going to have to be working with! Because it IS the “belief” Uncle Ho had in the power of the masses to move mountains!

Ok. So what’s really going on here? The “truth,” the “secret,” is that the structure of “belief” in bourgeois society has been flattened to the point where, well, we can call it belief, we can call it conviction, but people have little opportunity to express their will, their consciousness, their creative spark/fire, other than that of “expressing” their opinions in some bourgeois “marketplace of ideas” within the paradigm of intellectual commodity fetishism. Conviction has been reduced/flattened to belief. Belief has been flattened to “what people say”; to propositions; to shadows on the wall of some Platonic Cave. It has been just about completely divorced from any connection to, anything at all to do with, action. Great. Not all prisons have (visible) walls.

You have heard it said, “speak truth to power.” What? Why? What we NEED is to hold people accountable for their use of their power. If “speaking truth to power” doesn’t lead to this, then it’s just so many words. (We can say it worked for Nathan because he was “loyal opposition,” but Elijah needed more than just words). Do you “believe” Trump is “immoral”? You might as well “believe” that he’s a “meanypants” or a “poopyhead.” Trump is at war with you, motherfucker, if you’re not part of the bourgeoisie or part of his Volk; if you’re not considered a “friend” within his friend-enemy distinction. My “brother” Luigi (allegedly) knew that words weren’t enough to hold people accountable for their abuse of power. What we want is a society where people aren’t abusing power, where there is no “power over others” for people to abuse. To get to this society, we all need to start holding people accountable directly and not be waiting for some bureaucratic process that was designed more to protect our oppressors than hold them accountable anyway. So you need will and way; you need a metaphysic and a dialectic. You need a vision and you need practices! One of the problems with religion throughout history is that the vision has not been egalitarian! Only the ruling class was “allowed” or “permitted” “legitimacy” of vision. This was because, in part, the vision of the masses typically involved shaking things up in terms of who would rule and what it would mean to rule. And the ruling classes couldn’t have that. So, as Dennett says, they needed to institute “division of doxastic labor.” Something like, “hey, we priests will take care of the vision, you proles and rubes get to share in these glorious practices.” Oh. ok. sure. why not. sounds good to me. said the proles and rubes. But, every so often, one of these proles and rubes will have their own vision. Because vision is, for whatever else it is, “merely” an experience of self when you get down do it. And we all have those all the time. So if a lot of people are having visions, there needs to be a way to align them. In class society, the only way to do this is force. In a true “society of reason,” there would be some principle by which people could “reason together,” yes, even “schizos” with “visions.” We live in a society that worships Jesus. Therefore, if someone has a “spiritual psychosis episode,” and thinks, “I am Jesus!,” well, we don’t have a way to deal with that, “spiritually” (only pathologically, etc.). This is what happened the first time someone thought he was Jesus. Here we go. A lot of people have “thought they were [or somehow had direct access to communication with] Jesus” throughout history. This sort of thing is how we got “Christianity” in the first place. We must remember that the name “Jesus” is simply a variant of the name Joshua. You motherfuckers spent so much time looking for some “historical Jesus Christ” that you weren’t even paying attention to all the REAL historical “Joshua Messiah” figures staring you in the face! The problem is you think that just because there were REAL historical Joshua Messiah figures, that our “Jesus Christ” MUST have been one of those guys! But we are finding more and more that this is an obsolete paradigm. But more on that later.

Ok, so what’s usually happening with “belief” is that some thought, usually in the form of some proposition, comes into your head and you identify with this thought. You say, “this is MY thought.” That’s what people usually mean by “belief.” The identification of the self with a thought in one’s head. This isn’t the same thing as knowledge, except that you know what you think. It’s precisely what Peterson said “belief” is “NOT.” So if THIS is “not” “belief,” then what would Peterson say it is? I suppose he doesn’t have the language to say it’s “merely” an identification of the self with a proposition in one’s head. But do we have a single word for this? We generally call it a “belief”! Carrier has an article, “The Evolution of Awe vs. The Aesthetic Argument for God.” It’s a helpful article to read, but there was a comment thread under it that’s more relevant for our present purposes:

hallenberg2005 (14 Feb 2025): Richard, I am 83 years old and was a forestry major. I have a simple thesis:

We have one soul, but of two parts. The lower is our everyday life(time) and the upper is eternity.

My goal in life (especially at my age) is to reach my upper soul where God is waiting. I try daily through the method of “centering prayer” in silence, after letting my mental thoughts flow down the river, so to speak, allowing the Presence to enter. As a result I honestly feel I experience Divinity most of the times I try and the feeling stays with me-Now, today, tomorrow,etc. My “aha” moment was reading a book about Meister Eckhart(Joel Harrington 2018?). We must ignite the spark(intuitive awareness) in our soul which I believe is the divine imagine [sic] in all of us in order for union.

This is not a got-you-question. I have ask [sic] for constructive criticism from 3 other bloggers, who all say,”I liked your comment.” The process theology of Whitehead’s doesn’t address afterlife. I like David Bentely Hart’s “Universalism”, David Nicole and David Armstrong sub stacks. Finally, Carl Jung’s definition that there is a God is the best and my premise as well!

In one of your future essay [sic] please address the above. P.S. I live smack dab in the Bible Belt-The Scopes trial of 1925 was in Dayton, Tn. 100 years ago and religious wise not much has changed. It was the first national radio broadcast. We live just 25 miles from Dayton.

Lastly, I don’t believe in inerrancy nor moral certainty, but rather I am a believer in mysticism.

Scott

Richard Carrier, replying to hallenberg2005 (14 Feb 2025): I do believe you are delusional.

But your delusion appears to be relatively harmless.

Your conclusions don’t follow from the evidence presented. And they are contradicted by a great deal of evidence, as I already survey in Sense and Goodness without God but also here on my blog (such as under the drop-down categories of “mind” and “supernatural”).

Mario Marrufo replying to Richard Carrier (14 Feb 2025): >I do believe you are delusional…

Dr. Carrier, always the romantic, correcting someone on Valentine’s day… I do not want us to get hung up on why you used a particular figure of speech! The fact is that you used it! “Believing” shit is something the ego participates in, and then takes all the credit for, like it’s a big deal, like believing shit is something to take credit for. It’s a participation trophy for the ego, in effect… This person may be delusional in certain of their “conclusions,” but, indeed, there is something very sane about perceiving one’s own thoughts as temporary, as “flowing down a river.” in my experience, this is something that takes a lot of work, a lot of practice. It’s something you have to “achieve.” calling it “relatively harmless,” though accurate in many ways, does seem to be “damning with faint praise.”

Hallenberg: to be remembered in the minds (the natural thought patterns, the natural patterns of activity of the human brain) of those who survive us… Well, idk about you, but that’s MORE of an “afterlife” than I feel like I could “ask” for! (who would I ask?)

Mario Marrufo (13 Mar 2025): Dr. Carrier. We need a dialectic of the subconscious. We used to have that. It was called myth and ritual. Those were ways for us to experience awe! They were ways for us to develop as children of mother earth! They were ways for us to “change our minds”! What connects myth to ritual is that they both involve (a specific kind of) practice. Marx called this practice “labor” (Uncle Ted called it “the power process”). Dr. Carrier, I’m autistic! Everything I do is ritualistic! These are real rituals! They’re not “fake” (whatever that would mean)! There are no straight lines to enlightenment! Information alone won’t get you there! It has to mean something to you! It has to resonate with what you’ve already internalized! But eventually, if you let it, it can show you that you’ve internalized the wrong things! That’s where the “inner light” comes in! It can show you what’s in the subconscious directly if you’re paying attention to it! By “inner light,” I only mean the “light” you produce within yourself! Things like your hypnagogic hallucination, for example!

Ok! So what the fuck was all that!? Well, our pal Scott can say, “We must ignite the spark(intuitive awareness) in our soul which I believe is the divine imagine [sic] in all of us in order for union,” just as easily as Carrier can say, “I believe you are delusional.” But Carrier would not “live or die” by this “belief.” This is as strong a “belief” as that the pen sitting at Peterson’s table was red (of course, truth is on the side of the redness of the pen—so we should, for the sake of clarity, instead of saying this is not a “belief” worth dying for, say this is not a TRUTH worth dying for! We must remember this—it’ll certainly be of use to us later). So our friend Scott is pointing to a deeply felt conviction whereas Carrier is pointing to a thought that entered his head that he identifies with and considers “true.” But the “truth” of this propositional “thought” is only surface-level. To say that someone is delusional bears the valence of a professional diagnosis. But Carrier is not identifying himself as someone qualified to make a professional diagnosis; he is going by what is more commonly identified as “common sense.” And “common sense” puts us in the realm of norms, and, as Einstein is popularly understood to have said, common “accumulated prejudices.” Well, it is not a “prejudice” to say that our friend Scott is experiencing a “harmless delusion,” but it is “prejudicial” to simply leave it at that. There’s more to it than that. We can easily recognize that, even within the “delusion,” it is very “sane,” we could in fact say, very healthful, for one to envision one’s thoughts as “flowing down a river” instead of worrying about which thoughts to “identify with”! So we don’t need vulgar “belief”! We need conviction! But conviction is a natural product (or “by-product,” even) of finding and accepting (internalizing) truth! So “identify” yourself with truth (truth worth identifying with)! Not simply with whatever thought pops into your head!

There we go! Conviction is a natural (by)product of internalizing truth! But what good is “conviction” if it doesn’t lead to action? If you internalize truth, you will most certainly act on it! We’ve seen it! So why do these westoids fuck so heavy with “belief”? We’ve already spelled it out! The westoid has internalized a mode of being in which the ego must take credit for whatever the self does, thinks, or says, because ego-credit is a kind of currency in the marketplace of intellectual commodity fetishism. So the ego must be involved even when the left hand shouldn’t know what the right hand is doing (even when it can only make a mess out of things). Because the ego-gate is the only game, the only gate, in town for them. If they had as much as a bag that held water, they could get this “water” directly from the source. They wouldn’t have to rely on intellectual commodities from the Platonic bourgeois shelf. They wouldn’t have to rely on courage from a shelf. They would have “the courage of their convictions” rather than having to rely on courage from the “bottle” of intellectual commodity fetishism. They would have knowledge “earned” through experience rather than having to rely on “the name Brother Paul preaches.” Bob Hartman calls on his fellow Christian soldiers to adopt “conviction — in the way we live / conviction — not a narrative,” reminding them that “actions speak a little louder than words” (which we covered supra), in the Petra song “Seen and Not Heard” (“Sometimes God’s children should be seen and not heard,” he writes, [John sings], lmao! Imagine that!). “There’s too much talk and not enough walk.” Bobby is calling on his fellow Christian soldiers to demonstrate whatever form of Christ consciousness they’ve purportedly attained by their actions at least as much as by their words. This is likely not the kind of Christ consciousness we have in mind, but our actions must certainly match our words just as surely as Bobby calls on his fellow Christian soldiers to do the same. Again, it’s interesting to analyze these sorts of things closely. Upon the face of it, the melody of the chorus of Petra’s “Seen and Not Heard” corresponds quite closely with that of “Heaven’s on Fire” by Kiss. This can be seen as no accident. I can’t say a lawsuit is in order, but perhaps some credit? Would that be some “delayed justice”? But we only care about credit because we live in class society where credit = how you get paid = your livelihood. Time = money in westoid class society. But so does “credit,” in a lot of senses. But of course, in the very next paragraph, after the one about “actions speak louder than words,” Dennett says basically the same thing we’ve been saying ourselves: “And here is an interesting fact: the transition from folk religion to organized religion is marked by a shift in beliefs from those with very clear, concrete consequences to those with systematically elusive consequences—paying lip service is just about the only way you can act on them.” Well! This, of course, coincides with just as “marked” a shift in the relation(ship) of the masses to truth, and in their access to it.

Consider this brilliant analysis of intellectual commodity fetishism disguised as a critique of “postmodernism” by someone named Slone that Dennett quotes on p. 262-63:

For example, right now I am typing on my keyboard with the intention of creating a coherent story about the logic of postmodernism. Were someone to study me, they might look beyond that surface level intention I just offered and infer instead that what I really am doing is inventing a story from my personal experiences for the purposes of advancing my academic career. To accomplish this, they might argue, I am constructing a discourse that sets me apart from other people and thus increases my value as a writer. (The more I confuse you, the smarter I appear!) Why do I do this? Because I am a self-interested white heterosexual privileged Protestant male who uses knowledge for power (a strategy not of savvy but of manipulation and exploitation). For postmodernists, that which gets presented as truth (e.g., this book) is an invention, just a take on reality, that masks what I am really doing—tricking everyone in order to acquire and maintain power.
-Slone (2004, pp. 39-40), quoted in Dennett (2006, pp 262-63)

Our friend Slone has described Jordan Peterson to a tee (the more Peterson confuses some people, the smarter he appears to them)! He has read Peterson to filth! He has wrung out all the water from Peterson’s dirty towel and incinerated it! But Slone and Dennett would certainly have denied that this description applied to them. They WERE, of course, seeking “truth.” Or were they? Well, I wouldn’t know Slone from Adam, but Dennett was more seeking to get people to stop believing the wrong things. That’s not the same thing as truth. Dennett was trying to make arguments and convince people of things. A book is an intellectual commodity (or we should say that its intellectual content is commodities, the intellectual content exists in a commodified form). This book is not a commodity (hence you won’t be seeing it in stores, at least not in a form published by me); it’s more like a garden of intellectual produce. Anyone (just about) can plant a garden in their front yard (we did it last year [2025] and this year [2026]), but the produce won’t be commodities. You won’t be able to package them and put them on a shelf and sell them. You would need to upscale your operation somewhat. You would most likely need outside (hired) labor. But I’m not trying to sell you my produce! I’m trying to tell you that you need to plant your own fkn garden! We haven’t just been looking at jalepeños and squash (not merely the fruit of the plants), and certainly not in some package, “wrapped in plastic”! We’ve been looking at the soil, the seeds, the plants, the flowers, the big picture of the garden at a distance, watering/fertilization practices, etc., etc. This is a very different operation from merely trying to sell you fruit! Dennett called this chapter, ch. 9, “Toward a Buyer’s Guide to Religions.” Oh, so a religion is just another intellectual commodity to Dennett. ok. cool. I didn’t find my “religion” on a shelf. I had to plant it from seeds. I had no idea what those “seeds” would grow into. But now I do. Fruit has no package. Only skin. You most likely eat the skin, unless it’s an orange or a banana or a pomegranate or something. But even this skin can be used (we could even say it has potential “use-value”).

Dennett’s chapter 9 asks, “Is religion good for people?” Chapter 10 asks “whether religion is the foundation of morality.” (p. 277) These are the wrong questions. They put Dennett smack dab in the middle of the realm of intellectual commodity fetishism. What we should be asking is “what is true?” We should be seeking truth. If we’re not (first) seeking truth, then we could end up finding any number of things that have absolutely nothing to do with truth. We must remember that the ultimate TRUTH is LIFE and CONSCIOUSNESS! Because the universe is undeniably capable of organizing itself in such a way that life and consciousness result. We must recognize that the potential for these things was always “built in to the universe,” so to speak. And we must also recognize that all DEVELOPMENT comes from, traces back to, matter in motion! This is, as far as we can tell, what actually lies at the bottom of things. If we take a cube of “empty space,” which is “undifferentiated,” we will notice that it will start “differentiating” itself! The void isn’t “nothing”! The void is definitely SOMETHING!

“Morality,” like normality, sanity, belief, etc., is something the ego participates in and then wants a trophy for. The kind of “morality” we want, which is a certain range of behaviors (behavior is a phenomenon; something we can experience directly; something not dependent on a report from the ego for our knowledge of it), naturally “tumbles out” of a “moral” subconscious, and all of this will just as naturally “tumble out” of a society of LOVE and TRUTH. But the “morality” of the subconscious “relies” on its organizational “qualities,” the “qualities” by/upto which it is organized. When I experienced “my own personal hell,” I saw my subconscious “organized” very clearly. Those burning bushes were highly organized on that slime mold path; they were in a very specific “arrangement” in a very specific “order.” Carrier might call this “specified complexity.”

On p. 284, Dennett asks, “can a secular armed force, motivated in the main by a love of liberty or democracy, not of God (or Allah), maintain its credibility, and hence its effectiveness, with a minimum of bloodshed, against an army of fanatics?” Oh my god! What an asshole-question! Dennett doesn’t seem to realize that wars, in our ruling class world, are fought on behalf of bourgeois class interests! “Morality” is an ego-game! And as such has very little to do with truth! We already went over why Bin Laden attacked the US! The US had already been basically at war with the Muslim world for at least a decade, a lot longer if you count US support of Israel. Our security is entirely in our own hands. Israel uses the slogan that theirs is “the most moral army in the world.” This is marketing. It’s only possible in a world populated by other marketing slogans with just as spurious a connection to meaning, let alone truth. (And we shall see that “love of liberty or democracy,” especially the way Dennett conceives of “liberty” and “democracy,” is entirely too abstract to motivate an armed force fighting in the face of religious fanatics or, indeed, people fighting for what we could call “folk values” other than Dennett’s bourgeois “liberty or democracy,” not to mention people fighting for their ancestral lands not to be taken over by colonizers!). Dennett doesn’t think it’s “moral” for activists to go around “‘liberating’ laboratory animals (whose subsequent welfare seems not to motivate the activists sufficiently).” Ok, Dan. Why do you think people liberate animals? Could it possibly have anything to do with TRUTH!? Perhaps the TRUTH that those animals aren’t YOURS to experiment on!? Who gives a fuck what happens to the animals after they’re free!? They’re not your slaves anymore! That’s the important thing! We crave justice! That’s enough of a motivation to deny you westoid motherfuckers of slaves! But the “morality” to you is on the side of the slavers. Funny, that. That’s what our pal Greyson was doing. Depriving you of a slave. And you punished him for it. Oh my god. You have a society ruled by ego and you wonder why it’s all going to hell. Of course, nobody would need to be “ruled” if we all crucified and resurrected our egos. But then the rulers wouldn’t have any ruling to do! And they’d probably rather die. Oh well. But, more than that, they would certainly rather kill us than “let” us free ourselves. And THAT is their “morality”! Indeed, we won’t be able to free ourselves under Dennett’s “morality.” His “morality” would have us all being very informed, very comfortable (or so he would promise us, I’m sure) prisoners. Oh my god. Dennett puts the “yearning” to free the animals in the same category as that of the Oklahoma City bombers, the murderers of abortion doctors, and the settlers of the West Bank, among others. Real “one of these things is not like the others” kind of situation. Dennett says, ‘Religion may well not be the root cause of this dangerous yearning; the Hollywood-inspired desire to lead an adventurous and hence “meaningful” life may play a larger role in multiplying the number of young people who decide to frame their lives in such terms. But religions are certainly the most prolific source of the “moral certainties” and “absolutes” that such zealotry depends on. And although people who can see the shades of gray are less apt to be able to find excuses for committing criminal acts themselves, they are also, today, all too likely to see devout religious conviction as a significantly mitigating factor when meting out punishment.’ (p. 285). There’s a lot wrong in this passage. Dennett is a moralist, thus he attributes moralist motives to the subjects of his discourse. He’s not talking about truth. He’s acting like truth doesn’t exist or something. He’s being very “postmodernist” here. What gives, Dan? Well, he’s talking about morality, and morality is just power (i.e., not truth!) in a different form. It would certainly take “power” for us to subject Dr. HUHA to shamanic accountability, if he wouldn’t subject himself to it voluntarily, no matter how much truth is on our side (truth does have its own power, but only when [mass-]consciousness of it—which, consciousness, remember, involves the whole self, not just the ego, which means it requires practices, not just information—reaches a certain level). Dennett is using scare quotes for “moral certainties,” “absolutes,” and “meaningful.” Yikes! Of course there can be no “moral certainties,” because the ego can only be certain about “absolutely nothing”—or, perhaps, there is “absolutely nothing” it can be certain about, except, perhaps, its own existence. Truth doesn’t come from the ego; it tumbles out of the subconscious. And that’s when the ego becomes conscious of it. The ego can only be as “wise” as the owl of Minerva (who only takes wing at dusk, in case you forgot). But the sun rises every morning. And when it comes to meaning, well, we construct meaning. Dennett talks about this too, earlier in the book. It’s our expression of the same “drive” of his bower birds to construct bowers (p. 87ff), or of the beaver to construct dams, or of the bee to construct hives (though Dennett notes the “extravagance” of the bowers, at which we can roll our eyes a bit—maybe he thinks the call to adventure is an “extravagance”). Dennett says himself here that meaning is connected to the call to “adventure.” On this point, Peterson would enthusiastically agree! Peterson sees the call to adventure as an aspect of GAWD, therefore he identifies the call to adventure with god. This is far too much of a stretch for most people; mostly, I’d surmise, because Peterson has in mind a “god” that somehow IS the call to adventure, IS Conscience, IS “the presupposition of your action and attention,” and yet, IS also very much a god that upholds, indeed, SANCTIFIES, existing hierarchies! This is a very tough pill for most people to swallow, isn’t it? It seems terribly convenient for men like Peterson. It is said we live in a “post-truth era.” Indeed. It’s been “post-truth” since the ruling class brought itself into being out of its conditions and started playing their little man-behind-the-curtain routine with, e.g., their Code of Hammurabi, their Platonic Noble Lie, their Oedipal motherfuckerism, their Saturnine offspring-consumption, what have you. Jordan Peterson himself sometimes talks about God like the latter is a fictional character, but, a character that, in its fictionality, becomes ALL THE MORE real thereby! See! I can do it too, Jordan! But this is exactly what the Ingsoc Party did when they created (close enough!) Big Brother! And what were the last 4 words of 1984? “[Winston] loved Big Brother.” Big Brother is supposed to be a bit of a stand-in for Comrade Stalin, isn’t he? “Black-haired, black-moustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm.” Hey. Sounds almost like Eric admired the guy a bit. Ok. Fine. I love Comrade Stalin! There! I said it! Did the book end? Did the bullet go through my head? No! I’m still writing! And you’re still reading! Of course I love Comrade Stalin! For the same reasons you love President Lincoln! He defeated a bunch of fascists and he kept the union together! So what if he had to get a little illiberal to do it!? We must imagine Comrade Stalin to have taken a few cues from the life of Lincoln! He didn’t get assassinated, after all! At least not until after he died! And aren’t you pretty suspicious of anyone who says they don’t love President Lincoln? Or wouldn’t you be suspicious if they called you a “Lincolnist” or something? Wouldn’t you be suspicious that they might harbor, like, “confederate sympathies” or something? And so why shouldn’t I suspect people who make a big deal out of proclaiming the evils of Comrade Stalin of being Nazi sympathizers on some level? Do you like hearing about how Lincoln presided over massacres of, and all sorts of other injustices against, Turtle Islanders? Do you like hearing about how it wasn’t Lincoln’s first idea to integrate the former slaves into American society? My point is that these motherfuckers were all gangsters. It makes no sense to act like some of them were boyscouts and some of them were demons. Of course they were all gangsters. Gangsters are the ones who have a history of getting things done in the history of class struggles. I’m sure there are other world leaders you love. Perhaps you’ve heard nice things about Chile’s Salvador Allende, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara, etc., etc. Chumps. All chumps. They all got their asses couped. Guess who didn’t get their asses couped. D’uhhh… Cuba, Vietnam, DPR Korea, etc., you know, the ones who took some cues from Comrade Stalin! But these (the former) motherfuckers didn’t purge their goddamn parties or their goddamn militaries! This was, apparently, since no one else seemed to have come up with a different one, the only option available for “purging” the party of opportunism! That’s important! But in the future, every member of the December 18 Party will be able to “purge” themselves fairly “trivially”! We will say that the illegal dissolution of the Soviet Union and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Any independent news commentary coming out now will be able to tie the collapse of the Soviet Union to a brand new field of opportunities (to exploit minors and to plunder the public wealth) for the likes of Jeffrey Epstein. But, hey, at least Gorby, Mickey Gorbz, brought The Light of Pizza Hut behind the former “Iron Curtain” to Mother Russia, eh?

When it comes to meaning, I always think of the Cathedral of Junk in Austin, TX. I’m reminded of Marx’s quote about the beehive. Marx says the difference between behives and our buildings is that we humans build our buildings first in our minds before we build them in “the real world.” Certainly this is the case for the vast majority of buildings, and of course for all buildings with blueprints, but the Cathedral of Junk is an exception, in a sense. Its builder, Mr. Hannemann, certainly had a vision, and we would like to interview him ourselves to confirm this, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to understand the vision as developing alongside, in a dialectical sense, the building of it. The vision didn’t start out from what it would become. Nor, we could imagine, did his life. I can imagine this because I did speak to him myself, for a moment. One of the times I tried to get in to the Cathedral of Junk was 20 April 2024, which is considered a “high holy day” in the December 18 Party, but of course it was closed that day. Yes. Of course it was. He probably didn’t want a bunch of people smoking weed in there. Fine. Have it your way. I saw him at the gate. Of course, I didn’t know it was him, in the sense that I didn’t have knowledge in the philosophical sense that it was him, but I could have made a lucky guess (those count in Jeopardy). He was leafblowing. I had ridden my bike there. He told me it was closed for the day, like, the sign’s right there, can’t you read?, kind of thing. So as I turned around and rode the other way on my bike, I told him, “It reminds me of my life!” to which he replied, “It IS my life!” Yes. Of course. That’s precisely what I meant. Of course it IS his life. It’s a phenomenal result of decades of labor and development of vision, development as an artist, as a human being, laid down piece by piece. What I meant was precisely that I imagine that his life would remind me a lot of my own life in certain ways. What I meant was that his Cathedral of Junk had, even though I’d never seen the inside, helped me find my inner Cathedral of Garbage. And what is the difference between junk and garbage? Well, junk is stuff that was useful for a long time, and then its usefulness died a natural death. Garbage is stuff that was always meant to be thrown away. Wrappers for candy and burgers, what have you. The Velveteen Rabbit, for example, already started out as pretty low quality, didn’t he. We could almost say that he started out as a “quality” not at all distant from junk. He most likely would have become “garbage” eventually. If his fur hadn’t gotten loved off by the kid, it could’ve just as easily been “loved” off by mother nature through exposure to the elements. But the Cathedral of Junk is made of very durable material (metal). The durability of the material on its own renders it useable long after whatever it was originally “supposed” to be used for. That’s why he could make a cathedral out of it. The cathedral of garbage can only live in the imagination, in visions. You couldn’t build a real one, anyway, for obvious reasons.

Before we continue, we have to go back to our boy Peterson for a second. Our boy Peterson is a purveyor/generator of phobia of some “concept” (generously speaking) he calls “postmodern neo-Marxism.” This is one of the Pink Dragons (Judith Butler might call them “phantasms”) overrunning his psyche. Of course there’s no “postmodern neo-Marxism” (PMNM). What there IS is a westoid revisionist “Marxism” of intellectual commodity fetishism; a Marxism in name only; a petit bourgeois false consciousness that constructs a “form” of Marxism but denies the power thereof. But Peterson doesn’t want to talk about that because it implicates “the west.” It doesn’t make “the west” look how Peterson envisions it. Peterson’s PMNM is a conflation of two different things. One is the Nazi conspiracy theory of Judeo-Bolshevism (or you might have heard “Cultural Marxism” or you might have even heard Marxism conflated with “Critical Theory,” which are not remotely the same thing), and the other is the very real phenomenon of the history of bourgeois-state sponsored compatible (i.e., counterrevolutionary, i.e., anti-Marxist) leftism. These are not the same thing, but they’re very tangled up in Peterson’s mind. For the real story on westoid compatible leftisms of intellectual commodity fetishism, I highly recommend the work of Gabriel Rockhill. For the history of the Judeo-Bolshevism conspiracy theory, I have less to offer. I think Contrapoints made a video about it back in the day. But fascism is based on, among other things, creating/socially constructing a collective self (a “Volk“) and a collective other; it’s based on socially constructing an artificial friend-enemy distinction; it’s based on a fixed, static (“metaphysical”) conception of identity (based on A=A pervert-logic) rather than the knowledge that, well, identity “simply” doesn’t work like that. It’s based on a lot of things, but what it comes down to is the following (Peterson might even call it the “worship”) of the Cartesian Demon; the voice that says, “I am not enough.” The voice that would rather destroy the world than not be a ruler, than not be at the center of it, than not be in control. We have to find a way to live without seeking control of the world. That’s what Comrade Mao “taught” us! In his own way! We don’t need control of the whole world. What we need is control of ourselves. Peterson thinks the only way we can control ourselves is to find our place in the hierarchy, i.e., make peace with our slavery. Yikes! We can’t be at peace within a hierarchy by “finding our place” in it! There are always people above and below you in a hierarchy seeking to take advantage of you and your “place” in the hierarchy! Your “place” in the hierarchy is never secure. Peterson, we can surmise, wants you to make peace with this too. Again, very convenient for him and the system that made him such a “success.” But the hierarchy is antithetical to peace! Because it’s antithetical to justice! So Peterson assigns us an impossible task. Of course he does. He doesn’t care about truth. He’s a postmodernist, i.e., an intellectual commodity fetishist. But perhaps I’m being a bit unfair. No. I’m not. “Postmodernist” is little more than a term of abuse used by intellectual commodity fetishists (ICFists/ICFs) who still cling to hierarchy as their “truth” against intellectual commodity fetishists who have seen through hierarchy and recognized the “truthlessness” of it, and so the latter tribe of ICFs keeps doing ICFism their own way, because their “truth” is whatever commodity they’ve packaged, not whatever place the managers deem to put it on the shelf. This latter view is actually closer to The Truth. Because your truth is far more important than what the hierarchy says. Because at least your truth must have some relation to actual truth, unlike hierarchy, which has no requirement of bearing any relation to actual truth, and [hierarchy] is actually a set of tools for perverting and strangling truth!

Ok. Here’s a gigantic yawn. I’m writing this on Valentine’s Day 2026, the same calendar day Carrier, the romantic, obsessed with Jane Austen, corrected our pal Scott. I only say this to help you remember, because that’s all “coincidences” are—a low-tech memory aid, at the Petersonian “bottom” of things. Ok, so here’s the yawn: on page 295, Dennett says, “It is commonly supposed that it is entirely exemplary to adopt the moral teachings of one’s own religion without question, because—to put it simply—it is the word of God (as interpreted, always, by the specialists to whom one has delegated authority).” Ok. Dennett has to ignore, here, the distinction between revelation, i.e., gnosis, i.e., direct experience of TRUTH, and institution, which has great, even “institutional,” incentive to, well, lie. Dennett is falling back on his conception of division of doxastic labor here. So Dennett’s only recourse “against” those who want to, say, free the animals (because of their attainment/remembering of the Mother Earth-given craving for JUSTICE) is moralistic, Lisasimpsonesque finger-wagging. And the army of finger-waggers will certainly not defeat the “army of fanatics.” These “armies” live in different realities. That’s why they need to be “armies.” That’s what “war” is. It’s a struggle of one REALITY against another. Of course it is. Class society necessitates class-reality; class-realism. This is another madness pill. We can see this very clearly in, for example, youtube channel @yv_edit’s videos analyzing the show Mad Men. It’s a pill of individualism/capitalist-realism/opportunism/”liberalism”/Oedipal Motherfuckerism/parasitism, etc., etc. And the only cure for swallowing a madness pill is shamanic accountability; it’s the only way to put a person back in the REALITY of Mother Earth. Ok. Here’s another yawn: You think you and I are in a different story. Please. We are characters in each other’s stories. You are most likely the main character in your story, but a lot of us, e.g., me, aren’t (the main characters in our own stories). Well, my story is a little too big for me to be the main character, isn’t it. Most of the time, I’ve been more like a fly on the wall. But that only means I was “in the room where it happened.” Ok. Sure. Other times I was the one in the room who made the thing happen. We are all going to have to do that sort of thing, you know!

Ok! Now, on p. 296-97, Dennett’s saying something we can really sink our teeth into! “If God has told you, then part of your problem is convincing others, to whom God has not (yet) spoken, that this is what we ought to believe.” Here we are right back in Dennett’s INTELLECTUAL COMMODITY FETISHISM! We are expected to “convince” other people that “god” has “spoken” to us, through, of course, the intellectual commodity of “rational discourse,” i.e., yapping! ‘If you refuse or are unable to attempt this, you are actually letting your God down, in the guise of demonstrating your helpless love. You can withdraw from the discussion if you must—that is your right—but then don’t expect us to give your view any particular weight that we cannot discover by other means—and don’t blame us if we don’t “get it.”‘ “[D]iscussion,” he says! Excuse you!? What happened to “I will show you my faith by my deeds/works”!? Evanished, apparently! Dennett earlier wanted us to act, to “stake our lives,” on our “beliefs,” and practically bemoaned that belief has been reduced to “lip-service,” but what now? We [“believe,” if you will, that we] need to subject you motherfuckers to shamanic accountability in order to get you acquainted with the kind of pain/suffering/horror you’ve caused animals, children, and women. What is there for Dennett to grasp in/sticking out of our paradigm? He lived in a different reality; a reality of bourgeois commodity fetishism, therefore a reality of image, therefore, an UNREALITY! “[B]y other means,” he says! Excuse you!? Means other than dialectical and historical materialism!? Means other than first- and second-order EXPERIENCE!? By the “means” of intellectual commodity fetishism within bourgeois “reality/ies”!? I “think” not! “[D]on’t blame us,” he says! Excuse you! Mother Earth doesn’t do the blame game! “Blame” is your word! Our word is CONSEQUENCES! Our word is ACCOUNTABILITY! Our “word” is Mother Earth Will Do What She Will, and your westoid concepts and permission structures will be powerless to stop Her!

On p. 297-98, Dennett bemoans the rise of “Wahhabis[m],” but fails to connect this rise to US foreign policy! What an asshole! Well, Max Blumenthal hadn’t written The Management of Savagery yet. Not like the reporting didn’t already exist. Dennett could’ve easily tied the “rise” of, e.g., Bin Laden to westoid foreign policy if he’d WANTED TO! If he were looking for any NON-PATHOLOGICAL, i.e., non TECHNO-DEMONOLOGICAL, explanation for the rise of this so-called “Islamic Extremism”!

Where is Dennett’s Christ Consciousness? People are suffering, Dan! Their adoption of your cult of reason has not necessarily alleviated their suffering! They would need to recognize that they are infinitely loved; that they are children of mother earth; that they already ARE the miracle that they “need.” How can they access this “knowledge” in your bourgeois cult of reason, where all the “knowledge” (and indeed all “scientific action”) is delegated to “experts” through the sacrifice of these very Mother Earth-given reasoning processes/skills (to, ultimately, the bourgeoisie)? That was a rhetorical question! All Dennett has recourse to in his kampf against “fanaticism” is appealing to the normie supremacism of the normie co-religionists of the “fanatics”! This is no good! Normie supremacism doesn’t protect us from psychos, especially not our inner psycho, remember!(?) Dennett is doing a lot of hand-wringing here (around, e.g., p. 300, “We brights are quite aware of all the good that religions accomplish,” but there’s been a lot of it since ch. 8). He could have saved himself a lot of time with a comprehensive understanding of Marx’s whole spiel about the opium of the masses and the halo around the vale of tears and the stripping of the halo from the former “priestly” class, etc., etc. But Dennett was too much of a liberal to adopt this sharp (pointed) framing. He wants his halo back! He keeps calling himself a “bright”! [And yet] he didn’t ask too many questions about whose private jet he was flying in (if we’re being extremely generous). “Any vicious cult that uses Christian imagery or texts as its protective coloration should lie heavily on the conscience of all who call themselves Christians,” Dennett says (p. 301). But our boy Peterson (~16:00) says Conscience IS God, citing the prophets Elijah and Jonah, and citing one Cardinal Newman. OK! Now we’re getting somewhere! We’re finally asking about truth! Dennett could have saved himself a lot of time if he’d started from the question of what is true and what is truth, i.e., what truth is and what its connection is to “what is true.” Is there a god and does this god speak to us? Those are the questions Dennett needed to answer! The closest he can come to this is his concept of “goodness.” But we’ve already established that “good” only makes sense as a concept within a binary opposed to “bad.” And we have to step beyond binary thinking/logic! And, provided we grant that your concept is worth a damn, where does this “goodness” come from, Dan? “Yes, we have a soul; but it’s made of lots of tiny robots,” Dan says on p. 302. It would be more accurate to say that our “soul” is the pattern of activity those “tiny robots” generate. Just like the World-Spirit is the pattern of activity all we “tiny robots” help generate! The pattern of activity can easily “take on a life of its own,” as we’ve seen. But the robot analogy only goes so far. We can speak of ourselves, crudely, as robots because we are “powered” by converting food energy back into electricity and we can be said to be made up of “cells” running on sets of “instructions.” The robot analogy/metaphor doesn’t quite allow us to analyze the dialectical relationship between the “instructions” at the bottom and the actions (of the entity, e.g., you, “at the top level” of your consciousness) the carrying out of those “instructions” results in (the “robots” came together to carry themselves forward through the dimensions as a stronger, united entity—this sort of thing would eventually be expressed by us higher order animals in the form of what we might call LOVE—and what does your westoid science have to say about the dialectic[s] of love!? We would have to shake it/them [the dialectics] out of your bourgeois research, in which these dialectics lie hidden beneath the surface, like so much alizarin in coal tar!). But robotics does have the concept of “learning” through feedback loops. This is very important because it’s very analogous to how we learn through experience/practice. OK! Here’s something! On page 303, Dennett tells us that “one of the best secrets of life” is to “let your self go.” Oof! So close! You have to let your EGO go! When you let your ego go, that’s when you can recognize that “your self” “contains multitudes”! As for the rest of what Dennett says in this paragraph about “spirituality,” fair enough. It’s worth building on. It’s actually not all that difficult to keep an “awestruck vision of the world ready to hand” when you’ve already experienced the scope of everything that’s happening in, well, the universe; when you’re in touch with all the suffering that’s going on in the world. This is what will give us unlimited compassion; and we will recognize that unlimited compassion is unlimited power, because it allows us to act without being hampered by ruling class (bourgeois) permission structures; without seeking the permission of the cop in our head; because that motherfucker was already sent to our inner Ministry of Love! There! You don’t have to kill the cop in your head! You have to send him to the inner Ministry of Love! You might have to “force femme” your inner cop! This is why we need schizo-realism! We need to start imagining a world beyond bourgeois “realities”! And we need to take this world of our imagination a lot more seriously than that of our present bourgeois “realities”! Of course there’s a path between the two! A slime mold path! Where there’s a will, there’s a way, after all. Because the WAY to bring about the world of our imagination, the World of Mother Earth, lies beyond ruling class permission structures and social constructs, and certainly lies beyond bourgeois hierarchies of justification.

Dennett, 10 chapters in, has not answered the question, is there a god and does this god speak to us. He comes very close to acknowledging the existence of this question on p. 303-4, citing the work of Nicholas Humphrey. “Whether or not people have had any explicit religious education, they have all been exposed to the idea that some kind of supernatural parent figure watches over them and cares for them. It may easily follow therefore that people’s sense of justice and propriety persuades them that, if such a figure does exist, then not to believe in him would be ungrateful in the extreme—and only wicked children could possibly be so ungrateful.” -Humphries (1995, p. 186-87), quoted in Dennett (2006, p. 304). Ok. Fine. So you have an “idea” about some entity that “cares” about you. This is not exactly what we had in mind. I suppose the universe is an “entity.” But these “people” Humphrey refers to are pointing to certain phenomena they’ve experienced. We can say these phenomena were truly experienced. We can even say they were “virtual phenomena.” The problem is that the nature of these phenomena is far too “poorly” understood. If there is a phenomenon, then there must be an essence behind it. Helen Keller could feel a “presence.” She didn’t know what else to call this presence, so she called it “god,” even though she identified as a “freethinker,” which usually means “atheist.” But, given everything we know now, calling this “presence” we can all [potentially] feel “god” would be more of a conversation ender than a foundation for future research! There is also the phenomenon of the call to adventure. Where do these phenomena come from, Dan!? In our model, they come from the void “speaking” to us through the subconscious! Because there is void “within,” which is where we are, in ourselves, which allows us to find peace in stillness, and there is void without, the where-we-are-not, and the where-we-are-not calls to us to draw us out of the where-we-are. Don’t be astonished at any of this! That is what “motion” is! The where-it-is-not drawing the particle from the where-it-is! This is what’s at the “bottom”! This is the dialectical relationship between stillness and motion! Because nothing is ever only “still”! Even what is “still” is constantly in motion! The universe is the void and the universe is god! But it’s not a theistic god! It’s an ancestor god! That means it doesn’t want our worship! It only wants us not to rape it! Is that too much to ask!? But how can we follow the path that leads to the rape of the universe if we love the universe so much that it looks like worship!? We will not want to follow that path if we love the universe that much! And if we were to love the universe that much, we would have to love ourselves that much! Are you ready for that?

It’s hardly worth mentioning, but on p. 318, Dennett finally makes a clear distinction between conviction and belief, but he makes the mistake, the error, of overdistinguishing between “religious convictions” and “secular beliefs.” He need make no such distinction! A conviction is a conviction whether it is (called) religious or secular! And we can say the same of a belief! A belief, properly conceived, is when the ego attaches itself to (“embraces,” “hugs,” we could say), (and/or) identifies itself with, a thought (in the form of a proposition or, more likely, a metaphor, which I’m told is a kind of proposition—by Carrier, for example—but perhaps there’s more to it than that), i.e., a participation trophy for the ego—we could even call it a construction of identity through intellectual commodity fetishism! This thought did not come from the ego. That’s not where thoughts come from. Thoughts come from the subconscious. So is your subconscious a river or a swamp? This is an important distinction. Because it affects your pattern of thought. Your pattern of thought doesn’t come from your ego. It comes from your subconscious, which means it’s easily affected by outside input. So you don’t need to fucking believe anything! You don’t fucking need to attach your ego to or identify your ego with your fucking thoughts! That’s a ruling class game, i.e., a game for suckers! So the real game, the game it would actually help fulfill your needs/thriving to “play,” is to make your subconscious more like a river than a fucking swamp! Stop constructing your identity around your thoughts! Dennett makes kind of a big deal about having little use for the word “spirit,” but we have great use for this word, properly conceived! Our conception of “spirit” is, as we’ve said, that it is a pattern of activity instantiated in the material world, and cannot be separated from the material by/through which it is instantiated, except synthetically! When I say I identify with the river, I mean that I identify with its “spirit,” with its pattern of activity, with its flowing. The spirit isn’t “what flows”; the spirit is that it flows. There is no “immaterial substance” to this spirit; there are only relations and processes (including “events”). These relations and processes “flow” from the material in which they are instantiated. The river isn’t a spirit in the sense of a substance other than material; it’s a spirit in the sense of the processes instantiated in/by it. We are processes and relations just as much as/because we are sacks of meat! We don’t have to “believe” this! It’s true! And why wouldn’t we want to embrace the truth!? Conviction, conversely, is less about ego per se, and more about what has been internalized. Internalization of thought(s) (of information, if you will), is quite a different process from the process of belief formation. As I said, I’m vegan. I’m not vegan for reasons of belief. I’m vegan for reasons of conviction. I’ve internalized the cow—and why not? I contain multitudes, after all. I’ve recognized the truth that the cow and I are very closely related. We’re practically cousins—and I love my cousins. We might be said to have many similar or corresponding feelings. Why would I want to eat my cousins? Why would I want to make them suffer? Why would I want to make them my slaves just so I could kill them at the end of their “lives”? And we can say the same about the other animals. You can see how little this has to do with “ego” or with “feeling morally superior.” It’s about recognizing the truth about the relations and processes we’re all part of and which ones we can get tangled up in when we aren’t conscious about the exploitation and horror we’re participating in. This relates to schizo-realism! The psychiatric model would perhaps suggest that schizo-realists are “identifying” with their (our) “pathology.” Motherfucker! “Pathology” and “identifying” are your words! They might as well be Pink Dragons! That’s how “real” they are to me! Identity construction is a bit of an ego-game at the bottom of things. I am extremely secure in my identity as a Child of Mother Earth, a member of a truly social species, and a descendant of my ancestors, especially the single-celled ones! It would be very silly to “identify” myself AS, say, “a fan of Lana Del Rey and the Detroit Lions.” Those aren’t “identities.” Those are fandoms/fanaticisms. Now. Perhaps part of my “identity” is how “fanatical” I am! But this is only one aspect of who I am. We “spent” dozens of pages on fanaticism. We should have learned that fanaticism in itself is nothing to be phobic of. Dennett recognizes fanaticism as a form of “love” on p. 292. Ok! So a big part of my identity is that I’m at all times filled with an overflowing love! Because I’ve tapped into the infinite source! So what! Big deal! Anyone can do that! And you’d better! You’d better learn to tap into the infinite source of love! How else are you going to be able to keep yourself composed in the upcoming conflagrations? You may very well get arrested and jailed, etc., etc. The bourgeois state might send you to one of their Ministries of Love. Amanda Knox, for one, had a pretty rough time in prison, but she made it through. She had to tap into a very powerful LOVE in order to accomplish this!

Ok! Here we go! We’ve finally gotten to the part where Dennett practically salivates about colonially interfering with the world of the Sentinelese on page 324-5! Dennett is treating as a “dilemma” what to do about children who are (like I was, say :P) “doomed,” let’s say, to be indoctrinated into, well, frankly, harmful religions, simply by being born into their specific family of origin. This is only a “dilemma” in class society where the education of children is privatized rather than socialized. Education in a social society would be about building a very strong (through its interconnectedness/interdisciplinarity) body of shared knowledge. A “body” that itself develops. Anything less is ruling class gate/silo bullshit; is temple/museum/curator logic rather than garden/er logic. In the garden, we have to get our hands dirty. But Dennett doesn’t see it that way, apparently. He apparently doesn’t see North Sentinel Island (NSI) as a garden of earthly delights, stewarded by people who know what the fuck they’re doing, through having done it for thousands of generations. He sees it, in its current state, “as a human zoo or preserve.” Excuse you!? Ok, so your racism is showing; your westoiditis is showing; your failure to recognize the world- and human-spirits are showing, etc., etc. You can’t contact them! Not with (our) “society” in its current state! You would almost inevitably bring about cargo cult phenomena on NSI! This would be very foolish of you! You motherfuckers can’t stop yourselves from constantly engaging/indulging in cargo cult phenomena! So how do you expect the Sentinelese to be any different, if they suddenly get exposed to your commodity fetishism, your bourgeois decadence, your master-slave dialectic!? The only one of you motherfuckers who admits he’s doing cargo cult shit is Nick Fuentes! And he’s a fkn Nazi! I don’t think I could talk to Nick Fuentes. I think it would be a bit too much like the three Christs of Ypsilanti (cf. my conception of “Christ Consciousness” with his “Christ is King”). But with him, we’re not on the same page because we’re not even in the same book. He probably would rather burn my book than read it! Fuentes claims to be a fan of Comrade Stalin. Oh yeah, well if you’re such a big fan of Comrade Stalin, have you read his pamphlet Dialectical and Historical Materialism? Or do you just like the mustache and full head of hair and “gulags” and “authoritarianism” and “right-wing policies” on family and sexuality, etc.? I’m not a FAN of Comrade Stalin. I only said I loved him. So what. I love my (now deceased) paternal grandfather too, but I’m certainly not a fan of the guy! He would have certainly made a worse secretary-general of the Party than Comrade Stalin! We can know this because the guy was a small town US public high school principal (and, from knowing him and hearing stories about him, he was certainly the kind of guy who wanted to be a little king on top of a little hill). A lot of those guys would have had Comrade Stalin blushing in terms of their real abuses of power! Of course, it’s probably worse with the private school guys. Donald Barr, Trump-I Attorney-General Bill Barr’s father, was one of those guys at The Dalton School. He somewhat mysteriously hired Jeffrey Epstein to be a math teacher at this school. Very strange. We know Donald Barr was an absolute freak (who certainly would have made Comrade Stalin blush) because of the extracurricular activities he was known to engage in. A creative writing exercise, we could call it.

I would imagine that Dennett would think that the only possible counter to his proposal to colonially interfere with the world of the Sentinelese would be some recourse to “cultural relativism.” This is complete horseshit! What is missing on/from North Sentinel Island? Men wearing top hats you have to call “sir” are “missing”; bourgeois decadence is “missing”; sexual harassment as a public health crisis is almost certainly “missing”; the master-slave dialectic is “missing.” But they have no need of those things from us. If you were to attempt to contact the Sentinelese, you would first have to become one of them. You would have to recognize that you probably have a lot more to learn from them than they have to learn from you. They haven’t forgotten the thousands of generations worth of knowledge they’ve developed through LABOR because they haven’t been sent through the wringer of Oedipal motherfuckerism and the master-slave dialectic. That is not their idea of “developing” themselves. It is outrageously chauvinistic for Dennett to think that anyone knows better than the Sentinelese how to raise their own children. The Sentinelese aren’t sacrificing their children to the master-slave dialectic, Dan! They wouldn’t DREAM of abusing their children the way we abuse them in “civilization.” Don’t you get how totally racist Dennett is being here? I guess Dennett thinks not teaching kids the three Rs is a form of “abuse.” That’s because the three Rs are useful in our society! How are the three Rs useful to the Sentinelese!? They can read their surroundings! They can write their own lives! They can certainly do the math when it comes to outside interlopers! Dennett is far too much of an individualist! The Sentinelese are certainly not individualistic! They most likely know that their individuality is far better protected by their collectivity than if they all started competing with each other about everything or if one of them tried to go off on their own in a boat or something. Why haven’t they done that, Dan? Why haven’t they been desperate to find us? Did you ever consider that, Dan? Maybe they’re not “so manifestly ill informed” as you think they are. Maybe you were the one who was “so manifestly ill informed,” Dan! He asks of the Sentinelese, “are their children not being victimized by the ignorance of their parents?” What are their parents “ignorant” of, Dan? The National Football League? Taylor Swift? Corn? Petroleum? Joint Stock Companies? Double-entry accounting? Jet propulsion? The master-slave dialectic? The Platonic Cave? Oedipal motherfuckerism? Saturnine offspring-consumption? What they’re not ignorant of is the native plants and animals, and that it’s more the world of those plants and animals than their own—we could take some cues from them on this! What they’re not ignorant of is how to start a fire. What they’re not ignorant of is their symbiotic relationship (that their lives depend on) with their environment. They are almost certainly not ignorant about inner peace or the call to adventure. There is no “noble savage” here! We are all Children of Mother Earth! It’s only class society that polluted our collective subconscious with toxic impressions/imprints! These toxicities can be unlearned fairly “trivially”! It would only require us, ultimately, to transition to an abolition of westoid “civilization” by transitioning to the abolition of the division and delegation of labor (transitioning TO a society of shared consciousness through shared labor)! Again, this transition absolutely CAN be accomplished! Because where there’s a will, there’s a way! And we’d better find a way to live in alignment with mother earth beyond bourgeois permission structures because staying within bourgeois permission structures isn’t going to allow us to steer ourselves into a slime mold path away from (or through/out of, if we’re already there, mhmm) making planet earth what Stevie Wonder might say is not unlike “a place sometimes called hell,” because heaven on earth is never truly far away. We can experience a “moment” of it whenever we remember that when the world was at war before, we kept on dancing! And we’ll do it again—and we can do it right now! And that this is an even more logical statement than “2+2=4”!

Ok, motherfuckers. Look. Here’s the deal. Once you find and open and learn to see through your third eye, that’s when you can start recognizing that you can make additional tools (to aid the “vision” of this third eye) tumble out of the subconscious by combining your experience with what you’ve learned in books. Because the westoid cobwebs of ego-justification, the distortion field of the uncrucified ego, must be removed, must be dissolved away from their blocking of the third eye for you to be able to see through it. And then you will find other tools to aid your third eye like magnifying lenses, telescopes, microscopes, what have you. But one thing at a time. You would have to get off your high horse and start learning, frankly, Marxist anthropology so you can start recognizing yourself as an anthropological subject instead of a bourgeois subject! Oh my god! You would have to study yourself! But fear not! This shouldn’t be hard! You’ve likely been monitoring yourself quite closely (subconsciously or not) your whole life (not unlike Ren Stevens in, e.g., the gruesome “Swap.com” episode)! What if you could find a purpose for this? Surely you exist and, in the moment, whatever moment you’re in, your minimal “purpose” is to keep yourself alive! That’s what your DNA constructed you to do! Your own DNA will reward you for doing this! There’s a spot in the brain for this. Everything was according to the DNA’s “plan,” if you will—the “blueprints” if you will—they can certainly be said to be “blueprints” in the sense that, at the bottom, what they “say” is “this block goes next to this block,” and THAT, upon the synthesis of a bunch of other higher-order processes up the chain, is what results in that “reward center” in that part of the brain! EHD’s third eye was open to patriarchal motherfuckerism! That’s why they saw right through Dr. HUHA’s Yakubian tricknology fest. They also have what you might call, well, the phobia microscope—a very powerful tool. In their case, the fatphobia microscope. We are not speaking of “tiny amounts” of fatphobia; we are speaking of “tiny” fatphobia “particles.” Ok. Maybe microscope isn’t a sufficient metaphor. Maybe we would also need something like a Geiger counter! Phobia can be highly toxic, after all! EHD’s 10 Sep 2014 article on the former freethoughtblogs was against fatphobia, but it took a form very much like Sojourner Truth’s “ain’t I a woman” speech. “Do we not count as women, too?” they ask at the end of the article, of “women who aren’t considered conventionally attractive.” They were asking, at the time, whether they were a second-class citizen or something less than that. Carrier would answer this question the next day by “treating them like a woman” alright! It’s highly Yakubian of him to open the RUDTF email by wringing his hands about how he will be perceived—one eye on his reputation. It’s all the more pathetic that he tops it off by imagining EHD might perceive him as pitying them. This is pure projection out of the Yakubian self-pity he himself lives by. He’s trying to play it cool, but he’s already torturing himself; he’s just not fully conscious of it yet. At this point, on top of a million other things we don’t know about, or would have to at least pore over their blog to find information about, we can almost see the seeds sprouting in EHD’s brain: ‘Maybe “ain’t I a woman?” was the wrong question. Maybe I should be asking, What’s being a woman actually doing FOR ME!? What’s the point of being A Woman, anyway? Do I even want to be A Woman?’ And we can see that the question of “ain’t I a woman?” was not a question to which EHD could ultimately seek an answer from anyone other than theirself. And their answer to this question would turn out to be in the negative. But this is ultimately (i.e., after a bunch of steps) because the category “woman,” throughout the history of class struggles, was never FOR the purposes of “empowering” those assigned female at birth to express their “gender,” which is to say, their feminity and masculinity, which are literally “vibes,” which we all “contain,” and which “resonate” within us, and between which there is a dialectical relationship, not an Aristotelian zero-sum pervert-logical relationship of excluded middle, and especially not “hierarchically” so! The category of “woman,” whatever use it had before the history of class struggles, once this history began, was repurposed for regulating the harvesting of eggs and the sacrificing of these “eggs” to the master-slave dialectic. For the category of “woman” to make sense (as a metaphysically separate category from “man”), it would have to be “exaggerated” to extravagant proportions. It would have to be made hyperreal. We can see Lana Del Rey doing this. She’s taking a lot of cues from a lot of predecessors, and expressing them in her own way. In a sense, Lana Del Rey was asking the same question: “Ain’t I a woman”? Which, in class society, is to say, “Ain’t I a second-class citizen? Or am I something less than that?” Lana/Elizabeth has been heavily pathologized her whole life simply for expressing herself, her will, her truth, in her own way. There’s a lot we say about being perceived. It’s only really class society, given EVERYTHING we KNOW now, that “necessitates” the ATTACHMENT, the ENTANGLEMENT, the “enmeshment,” between perception and judgment/scrutiny/sentiment/pathologization/performance of cruelty. That is what makes other people “hell.” It’s what makes our own internality a “hell.” It’s the Cartesian Demon of Surveillance the band Meshuggah speaks of, the “eyes that stare[d] at me in the dark” and “st[ole] my freedom” at the Creed concert on Friday the 13th, the voice in our head that says, “I am not enough”! When we get rid of this voice in our head, perceiving ourselves eventually becomes a “nonissue.” I was certainly doing a lot of “perceiving myself” when I was taking Carrier’s Metaphysical Naturalism class ($49!). I was perceiving myself as the wind blowing in Hill Valley the night Marty had to go back to 1985. I was perceiving myself as the bridge from the “Leap of Faith” stage in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I was perceiving myself as the “pieces” that “fit” but “f[e]ll away” and “tumble[d] down” from Tool’s song “Schism” and as the Entity from “Rosetta Stoned.” I was perceiving myself as Doctor Manhattan (or rather Dr. Tet The Offensive). Yeah, I was perceiving myself alright. We can call these “psychotic episodes” if we want, but that would be pathologizing. I had to find my Purple Dragon, and then I had to innoculate it with the maligna-thingy so it could, you know, immunize itself. The relationship to Madam Mim I keep pointing to is not arbitrary or “fanatical” (derogatory). Madam Mim is a fairly classic representation of the trickster deity archetype. This is a very important archetype to put in your backpack. This archetype “lives” in you. It’s very important to regulate this archetype. And how can you regulate it if you never use it? It’s like regulating your crying—very important. And if to this, you respond, “But I don’t cry,” I say, exactly! That’s the whole problem! You’re not regulated! You’re stopped up! That’s not the same thing! I cry every day! You don’t have to cry every day, but… why wouldn’t you? There’s so much to cry about—tears of joy, of course! The world is so beautiful! It’s only the artificial (i.e., depending on artifice) hierarchy construction of class society and the attachment of ego to this hierarchy the ruling class seeks to instill in us that make the world “ugly”! I’m reminded of “Black Beauty” by Lana Del Rey. “Oh, what can I do? Life is beautiful, but you don’t have a clue / Sun and ocean blue—their magnificence, it don’t make sense to you.” And that was me! For about the first decade I was into Lana Del Rey! I was like, “You’re right, Lana! I see too much ugliness! Indeed, what can YOU do about that?” And all the ugliness I saw was totally real, but, well, any time we can take a step back, we can recognize that there is a greater beauty that must exist that upholds our existence even in order [for it, the beauty] to be exploited by the forces of class society in the first place! The “beauty” of their cities that glow at night did not originate from their minds! They pervert gate and source! They are acting as parasitic gatekeepers between us and source! The ruling class wants to convince us that they are the only ones who have the self-control not to do something “stupid” like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs—or, rather, the ruling class thinks they ARE the goose that lays the golden eggs. But that story is a myth! We can’t trust the ruling class not to do something “stupid” like engage in cruelty against the goose that lays the golden eggs because the goose’s numbers are lagging this quarter! Fuck your numbers! You would make the goose that lays golden eggs into something of a foie gras duck! Fuck your precious liver paste! I’ve seen Children of Mother Earth protesting outside of restaurants that serve foie gras until they took it off the menu! That is the power of the Children of Mother Earth! But that’s only power seeping through cracks! There’s an infinite source we can tap into.

Ok. I admit. That was a lot. To recover our bearings, we were talking about the Sentinelese and we were talking about cargo cults. But, really, we were talking about MORALITY! And we were talking about how westoid “morality” is an obsolete paradigm; about how it’s an intellectual commodity that doesn’t do what it says it does on the fkn box! About how this “morality” is FALSE ADVERTISING! A lot of people worry and argue and hand-wring and, well, in some cases, have been known to commit the ultimate crime in westoid society—damage to bourgeois property, all over the question of whether it’s “moral/ethical” for humans to reproduce. What a “stupid” question! We were also talking about Lana Del Rey and the category of “woman.” People think “woman” is a biological category. No. Male and female are biological categories. “Man” and “woman” are mythical categories. This is what Lana Del Rey teaches us, if we study her. Lana Del Rey is only A Woman because Lana Del Rey is A Myth! But we haven’t been looking at Lana Del Rey as merely “A Myth”; we’ve been looking at her as a reflection of The Myth! And what were we saying about that? We need to “become The Myth” in order to attain being-for-itself, in order for our lives not to be merely a “tale told by an idiot,” a “relentless series of events.” Because time isn’t a “series of events” in the sense of a straight line. It’s more like a spiral. So you’re never really doing anything “new”; for anything you could possibly do, there’s already a myth about it. Even if you try to do something totally “new,” all you’re really doing is swimming to the bottom of the ocean for a fresh clod of soil; you’re already answering the call to adventure. So let’s talk about antinatalism, like I was teasing earlier in the paragraph, since we’re talking about “morality.” I’m not an “antinatalist.” That would require me to “believe” in antinatalism and in “ethics.” I don’t “believe” in anything! I have convictions that reflect my degree of consciousness of truth! And the TRUTH is that when you reproduce in class society, you will inevitably sacrifice your offspring to the master-slave dialectic! You are a pervert who wants to accomplish the impossibility of sacrificing your offspring in a way you won’t have to torture yourself about! You WILL torture yourself! You will shed buckets of tears, sweat, blood, etc., etc. You will act like a martyr because you came in someone/got came in! You will act like a martyr for enduring something you signed up for that was, at every stage, entirely predictable! And I am supposed to ignore all this for the sake of your westoid bubble? And if I mention any of this, the conclusion is leaped to that I am an “antinatalist”? The conclusion is leaped to that my perception is entangled with my judgment!? Get over yourself! The truth is that you could probably learn a lot from the antinatalists! There are a lot of things they see very clearly that your ego is likely in the way of your seeing! I keep finding that all the arguments the anti-antinatalists have against the antinatalists boil down to survivor bias! And we’ve already established that it’s about damn time for us to synthesize our survivor bias with our survivor grief!

Richard Carrier very immaturely addresses antinatalism in an article on his website, of course. He makes it all about the strawperson of whether being dead is better than being alive. He makes it all about the psychology of the antinatalists. He calls it a Cthulu cult. Clown shit. Carrier is not treating the topic with the seriousness it deserves because he starts from faulty premises. So the topic goes completely over his head. Carrier thinks we [properly] deal with suffering by, well, it comes down to “voting harder”; it comes down to pressing harder on the morality button; it comes down to pulling more of the right levers in his trolley world. I’m not an antinatalist, but if the only choice is between Cthulu or continuing the human slavery/sacrifice, like Carrier says it is, then hail Cthulu, I guess. Liberalism isn’t exactly equipped with the tools to distinguish between slavery and a life worth living, because liberalism, ultimately, requires some people, somewhere in the world, to be slaves. So if liberalism is your end of history, then I say we give Cthulu a chance. But Cthulu is not my god. Mother Earth is. The Universe is. So Carrier is full of shit. Those aren’t our only options. We can have our argument with the antinatalists after we end the slavery, but, well, how can we say YOUR life is “justified” if it depends on someone’s slavery somewhere? Your life can’t be justified within the framework of justification if it depends on slavery somewhere, but “justification” is the only reason your life depends on slavery somewhere, in the first place! In the framework of justification, you can’t even justify reproducing, because you can’t justify sacrificing your offspring to the master-slave dialectic. Ha! “Can’t justify.” I meant, can’t make just. You can try to justify it to yourself all you want. But Carrier seems far more interested in defending the incoherent position that being alive is “better” or at least “not worse” than being dead. He has to make it about this so he can defend the slavery. What other reason is there? His life depends on slavery! His defense of slavery is his defense of his life. So Carrier has to make it about a utilitarian calculation because that’s the only game in town for him. He has no access to truth, at least not to the truth that his whole civilization is built on [1, 2, 3, 4] slavery, genocide, and war [5, 6, 7, 8, America was never great], and has no need to exist, as it cannot reform itself (within its current identity) into a society conducive to the thriving of the masses. Carrier’s life might be worth living, but it’s not worth slavery. And if Carrier can’t live without slavery existing somewhere on earth, then certainly no one is forcing him to live. Wouldn’t that be cruel? Carrier cites someone named Atir, responding to the antinatalism of perhaps the most well known antinatalist, David Benatar: ‘As Atir succinctly puts it, even a “world of perfect bliss and happiness and meaningfulness, that contains the mere possibility of someone somewhere experiencing a minor itch is not worth bringing into existence” on Benatar’s view[,]’ says Carrier. Yawn. Are you god? Can you bring a whole world into existence? Get over yourself. Carrier thinks we can “bring worlds into existence” or, conversely, program a fleet of space robots “to extinguish all life and every civilization in the universe” if we want, apparently. This is far more “faith” in humanity than even Comrade Ho. We must regard this as entirely too much faith in humanity (and particularly in the bourgeoisie). Carrier: ‘Indeed, a lot of Benatar-style argumentation hinges on their wingeing about some person brought into the world “who regrets” that they were (this seems to be their actual emotional motivation for their stupid arguments; and for this they really need a therapist, not a philosophy journal).’ Whoops! Carrier is psychologizing, therefore pathologizing, a philosophical argument! This is no good! It’s no good to go around toppling various antinatalist strawperson arguments about all or nothing premises. The main argument comes down to the same premise as Christ consciousness. People are suffering! What are YOU going to DO about it!? Whining about how antinatalists aren’t 100% correct about the nature of this suffering or what to do about it should not be a higher priority for anyone than doing whatever they can to combat the suffering! There wouldn’t be antinatalists if there were no suffering. Maybe if you had less suffering in your society, you wouldn’t have “so many” people thinking it would be better to end all life. Carrier shouldn’t even be addressing antinatalism. He shouldn’t be addressing people who are “too left.” He should be putting his own house in order. But he lives in a society where Jeffrey Epstein is a feature, not a bug—a society ruled by the Epstein class! A class that rules “in order to” carry out its Epsteinian “interests”! Carrier doesn’t seem to realize that this renders his society illegitimate; targets it for dismantling; naturally selects it for extinction. What would it take for him to realize this? What does he think it looked like when the Weimar republic fell to the Nazis? Does he think it looked so much different from what’s going on now in the US? Curious… Motherfucker. You are over here covered in Aaron Bushnell’s ashes, in the ashes of hundreds of thousands of dead Palestinians, and you’re arguing about antinatalism. You are arguing against antinatalism when your only alternative to Cthulu is Jeffrey Epstein! This isn’t the argument you seem to think it is. Carrier lives in a society of artificial Cthulu particles and he doesn’t have a Geiger counter. He needs to crucify his ego so the metaphysical Geiger counter of the Cthulu particles can tumble out of his subconscious. So you got the brains, but do you got the touch. That’s what qualia is, “all the way down”: touch. That’s what Carrier says. Carrier can’t “touch” the Cthulu particles, therefore can generate no “qualia” regarding them. How unfortunate for him. Sounds like a skill issue. I’m reminded of an infamous episode of Chapo Trap House I can’t find—I don’t think they released it—where they interviewed, I think, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and he was saying abortion was satanic or something, and Amber A’Lee Frost responded by saying, “Hail Satan, motherfucker!” And Carrier might as well say antinatalism is “satanic” as to say it’s a Cthulu cult. What were we saying about Mother Earth. Every hundred million years or so, she rolls over in bed and smothers some 95% of her children “all at once”—she’s got a little Cthulu in her. Ok. So the World-Spirit is a little bit Cthulu. Of course it is. Where do you think Cthulu came from? It tumbled out of the subconscious of an earthling. Not an alien. Not an extradimensional (compared to us) being. Ok. So antinatalism is muddled. So antinatalists need therapy so they can start worshipping (or at least being the “loyal opposition” to) Jeffrey Epstein (cf. Our Boy Woody Allen: “To you, I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the Loyal Opposition!” though Allen was certainly no “opposition” to Epstein), instead of Cthulu, apparently, on Carrier’s view. But you haven’t contended with Mother Earth AS Cthulu. I spoke of artificial Cthulu particles earlier, but you’d have to go a bit beyond antinatalism to access the Geiger counter for all the natural Cthulu particles. Carrier is only equipped to treat the Cthulu cult as a pathology-model cult and not equipped to “treat,” to touch upon, the good old anthropological Cthulu cult we can see emanating from our society every day. Heavy metal music, for example. Horror stories of all kinds. These are all anthropological, i.e., natural, manifestations of the “good old” Cthulu particles we’re all swimming in as a natural consequence of our existence on planet earth (see, e.g., Gutsick Gibbon’s video on “The Deadliest Pattern in Nature“). This is why there’s a big tendency among certain sects of American Christianity to shun horror/metal media. It reminds them of the Cthulu particles. But this particular kind of Christianity, which has been hammered out into conformity with the Spirit of the Age, and has therefore rendered itself the opposite of, antithetical to, Christ Consciousness, is a “consciousness” that “thinks” it can separate itself from the “world” of Cthulu. It’s why they call everything “satanic” and see “demons” everywhere. But it’s really a “call coming from inside the house” situation. And so these Christians decide that they’d rather live in a fantasy bubble than in a world with Cthulu particles. Carrier would think this is all very silly, but that’s only because he doesn’t see all the Cthulu particles. All he sees is himself reflected in the spirit of the age. This results in a kind of narcissism, in the mythical sense, not the psychiatric sense. In the sense of not being able to see past the surface. Oh. Cthulu? End of discussion! Carrier doesn’t want to get into the weeds about Cthulu. He doesn’t see that Cthulu is in the room with us. Carrier would deny the inner Cthulu. Don’t make us laugh. Carrier is a white westoid man. Those are as much the three pillars of Cthulu as are Comrade Marina’s shame, hierarchy, and scarcity. Or, perhaps, in our society, we could say that the scarcity, shame, and hierarchy pillars have the “vines” of whiteness, westoidicity, and manhood (“manness”?) all tangled around all of them. That’s why it’s all such a mess. But the “phenomena” exuded by the WWM vines certainly have no more depth than the leaves on a vine, and are about as meaningful as they are deep. We could even say that, in our society, WWM are the three vines that have tangled themselves up around The Three Pillars to transform the whole complex into a kind of Tolkienian One Ring of Power. That’s certainly the level of power people like Peter Thiel (etc., etc.) are looking to conjure up for themselves, and wield.

Have you seen the real problem yet? Antinatalism is only something that can be argued about within the framework of justification. The problem is that we’re not outside the framework of justification yet. What does the framework of necessity and sufficiency have to say about the question? In a sense, even if there were no suffering, if there were reproduction, we could still be said to be sacrificing our offspring (I haven’t reproduced, of course, nor will I—I’m speaking generally) to Mother Earth, because, well, “dust to dust.” When you “create” life, you invariably “create” death. You invariably create sacrifice. That’s the issue. There’s all this goddamn sacrifice of Children of Mother Earth happening and no regulation of it! It’s certainly not being regulated as sacrifice! The real problem, the real truth that antinatalists are pointing to, even if not very clearly, is that our society is being naturally selected for extinction, because it can’t regulate its own sacrifice of its own members (not to mention all the animals, etc.), and the antinatalists are being blamed for recognizing it (for NOTICING it) and especially for pointing it out! You live in a world where consciousness is sacrificed for ruling class expediency. This must be recognized as intolerably out of alignment with the World-Spirit. And we already talked about the idea/meme of “God Is In Control.”

But Carrier has the “discourse” nailed down to his Platonic maze of Aristotelian zero-sum pervert logic for upholding hierarchies where being “alive” is “better” than being “dead.” The antinatalists and I do not quite live in the same hierarchical “world”/”reality”/maze as Carrier. We live in a far more dialectical world where we NOTICE the suffering/death happening all around us every day (in the “everyday”/”everydayness,” or, rather, moment-to-momentness), and NOTICING that that is not a way we would want to go, because there is no justice in it (let alone “glory” or “comfort” or whatever “meaning” you’re “yearning” for), and further NOTICING that these inglorious sufferings/deaths are a fairly STATISTICALLY PREDICTABLE OUTCOME of our existence in class society! It’s almost like we’ve been CURSED to NOTICE these things! It’s almost like we are bathed in Cthulu particles simply by our daily existence in [or in the shadow of] your class society, your City On A Hill, your Omelas! Perhaps you’re suspicious of the word “noticing” because it’s used as a dog whistle by some people. Of course it is. That’s what “noticing” is! It’s something a dog can do regarding a dog whistle. So of course the word is USED as a dog whistle. But we are not dogs. I am saying what I mean. It is only within the framework of justification that perception is enmeshed/entangled with judgment, etc. So don’t get tangled up in judgment yourself “just” by what you perceive.

As to whether being alive is “better” than being dead, perhaps we could ask the Yakubian cracker Gary Michael Brown of New Mexico, with whom I went to high school and who was my roommate in ’09/’10. Unfortunately, he died during the writing of this book—of whiteness. That’s why I’m saying his name. He’s dead. What’s he gonna do? Sue me from beyond the grave? Maybe his satellite is spying on me. I joke. But he did work on a satellite with the Honeywell corporation that was launched shortly before he died. His brother spoke at his memorial very touchingly about Gary’s restlessness, and that now, if nothing else, he is at rest. The question of whether it is “better” or “worse” that Gary is dead is fairly meaningless. Gary died of a Fentanyl overdose, likely “accidental,” though that (itself) would be a “judgment.” The fact is that he died. It would be a bit of a yawn to say that Gary was a psycho. He may very well have been something of a “moral” psycho by the end—they were saying that among the items they had to clear out of his apartment were several “Employee of the Month” awards, and he did put $60 in my commissary when I was in jail for 11 days in Sep 2022, like I said, just when he happened to be visiting Austin, and he would have visited me too, but they decided to move me to a different facility at the exact time the meeting had been scheduled instead. The question of how “moral” he was when we were roommates would be a “judgment.” The FACT is that he was constantly sexually harassing us (me and the other roommate and various other male guests of the house) and trying to get us to “hail to the führer” with him. It was something of a joke to him. Every story someone told at his memorial was about some power move he pulled. Of course. Those tend to make good stories. We are not “judging” Gary Michael Brown the Yakubian cracker who died of whiteness by NOTICING that he exuded psychotypal phenomena when we were roommates with him OR by saying any of the other things we’ve said about him. The Purple Dragon doesn’t judge. The Purple Dragon only breathes out modified maligna-thingy “particles”—”particles” of TRUTH! The truth is that we all have an inner psycho! Remember! But I’m not sure Carrier sees it this way.

I’m sure we’d all rather have Gary around. I’m sure we would have wanted his memorial to be later, with more stories about his power moves. But we live in the world where Gary Michael Brown, the Yakubian cracker, who was very in touch with his inner psycho, died of whiteness. We live in a world where GMB became something of a “statistic.” This is why we need positive sum logic. Without positive sum logic, we might be tempted to argue about “whether” GMB’s death was a tragedy “or” a statistic. His death was a tragedy. The fact that there ARE about 100k deaths/year from opiod overdoses in the US is a statistic, but it’s also one big tragedy, in addition to pointing to millions of tiny tragedies, for which there are also statistics. You see, the tragedy cannot be separated from the statistic, no matter how “gross” it makes you feel. You will [need to] learn to cry merely from reading statistics (and your tears will be the “dialectical synthesis” of the tragedy and the statistic!). Comrade Lenin wouldn’t have it any other way. For this, you need imagination. You need compassion. You need to turn the light on in your subconscious. You know what that means. You may very well need to go to your own personal hell so you can find the outlet and switch. But then you’ll be able to see the truth of the world of human sacrifice in which you live. And you will learn to see the tragedy in the statistic and the statistical in the tragic (which is what connects all the tragedies together into one big tragedy).

Gary Michael Brown, the Yakubian psycho who died of whiteness, perhaps (we make no promises) could have kept himself alive by learning to calm his restless mind. But he had no access in our Trolley world to such a program. The bourgeoisie destroyed all those programs when they stripped the halo and killed god. The bourgeoisie is barely starting to come back around to the knowledge that it’s a good idea to calm your mind if it’s always racing. They are having a lot of trouble turning this idea into a product they can sell, but they’re always trying. But this would kind of defeat the purpose. To calm your racing mind, you would have to deal with the voice in your head that says you are not enough. But you can’t get rid of this voice with a product off a shelf because this is the voice responsible for your seeking of a product off a shelf to calm your mind in the first place! You would have to stop looking for a product off a shelf! You would have to unplug the drain in your inner swamp!

So Carrier says that instead of ending all life, we should work to improve people’s lives, but the only option that WOULD materially improve people’s lives, revolution, is not on his table, and so his only options, the only ones in his mind, apparently—in any event, the only ones he presents us with, are Omelas (including “loyal opposition” within Omelas, if that makes sense—it doesn’t) and walking away from Omelas (including the option of “a long walk off a short pier” from Omelas!). The other options would be various kinds of war on Omelas. But walking away from Omelas is not a real option, remember? Uncle Ted tried that, remember? Omelas keeps expanding. That’s why Mother Earth has selected the Omelas model for extinction. A parasite needs a host, but the ruling class would have it so that the parasite can keep expanding forever. This is perverse. The logic doesn’t work out, materially.

Ok. So we need revolution. And we don’t need “permanent revolution,” whatever that would mean, but we certainly need a permanent “installation” of the revolutionary spirit and Child-of-Mother-Earth consciousness. The Omelas model is going extinct, but Mother Earth already gave us all the tools we need to EVOLVE out of the Omelas model and into a model that will allow us to progress to ever greater degrees of alignment and union with Mother Earth and with our fellow COME! But Carrier doesn’t quite have COME Consciousness. It would be closer to the truth to say that he has cum-brain. His usual mode is “let’s get to the point.” The point of “arrival.” The hot-air balloon to the top of mount gettin’-to-the-point. Sometimes he’s willing to walk all the way up Mount Gettin’-To-The-Point, but this generally requires a “horse of a different color.” One of these Horses was Earl Doherty, who was the first Jesus mythicist Carrier took seriously, because he wrote a book, and had solid facts/methodology, etc. I’m not terribly concerned with whether Carrier takes me seriously, but his path will feature a lot less “friction” if he does.

OK! So are we ready to cast the One Ring of Power into the fires of Mordor so we can alchemize it into something useful? Are we ready to get back on the piece of wood so we can finish the ego-crucifixion job? Are we ready to go to our own personal hells so we can flip the switch on our inner light? Are we ready for our psychology to explode and then seep along trails of our previous experience to take its new shape as the wings of our psychological butterfly? Are we ready to enter the doorway to the subconscious and see what we think we “really shouldn’t see” and find the real “me” of whom we say that it “is”? Are we in Room 101 of the Inner Ministry of Love yet!? Have we gotten to the point where we’ve recognized that our only option is revolution!? Well, only you can answer that. Earlier, we spoke of the “Yakubian self-pity” by which Carrier lives. What did we mean by this? Well, Carrier lives in Duloc in his mind. He, by all appearance, thinks that if everyone, don’t you see, just didn’t step on the grass and shined their shoes and wiped their… faces, that the world would be, well, not “perfect,” but as close to perfect as could be desired or even imagined. The world is “so beautiful,” after all. The self-pity is connected to the “don’t you see!?” sentiment. It’s a projection. We don’t see what Carrier sees and he thinks the problem is with our eyes. Couldn’t possibly be HIS eyes. No! That’s impossible! What a “pity” that we don’t see what Carrier sees. And pity towards a constructed, projected “other”—a product of Carrier’s imagination—IS a form of “self-pity.” Note that we haven’t projected anything onto Carrier—we have merely taken him at his words/deeds (or lack thereof!) that he is loyal (i.e., “controlled,” whether he’s conscious of it) opposition to Thomas Jefferson and Judge Holden and Jeffrey Epstein and Russell Brand and Lord Farquaad and Yaldabaoth. But for Carrier’s world to actually be “perfect,” he would have to banish all the fairy tale creatures, the schizos, to the swamp. But the fairy tale creatures don’t want to go to the swamp. We aren’t fairy tale creatures! We come from the same world you do! You made up the idea that we come from different worlds and must therefore live in different worlds and that we must therefore be separated from your world—your world is no “world”; it’s no more “real” than Disneyland—not without us schizos!

Need I go over again the real reason we’re doing all this? It would be a gigantic yawn to say “we want power” like the ruling party of Oceania, as O’Brien said to Winston when the former was torturing the latter. We already have power! Power within nature! We don’t need or want power over others! It wouldn’t help us thrive anyway! It’s only our adherence (like glue) to bourgeois permission structures that holds us back from fully engaging our true power in our daily lives! Gary Michael Brown the Yakubian cracker pulled one last power move by dying and bringing together around 100 people for his memorial. The real reason we’re crucifying Carrier’s ego is to demonstrate the truth of Jesus mythicism—that YOU ARE the Jesus myth! And this recognition will lead to the adoption of Revolutionary COME Consciousness (because it’s our 21st century update of Revolutionary Christ Consciousness)! Carrier must be SHOWN, he must NOTICE, that everything that is holding him back from adopting revolutionary COME Consciousness is the same “everything” holding back the “Jesus studies field” from adopting Jesus mythicism. He must grieve his way there just as surely as the learned scholars of the Great Disappearing Historical Jesus must grieve their way to adopting Jesus mythicism. But we would have the learned scholars grieve their way to adopting revolutionary COME consciousness as well.

What was happening in 1st Century Roman Judea/Palestine? At certain times, there were what we could call “messianic” movements. The Historical Joshua-type Messiah-types. Remember those guys? From Josephus? Likely where the writer of Acts got the information. Those dudes were likely schizotypal. They lived the kinds of lives where they BECAME the myth. You don’t care what people believe. You only care what they do. You only think you care what they believe because you think people act on their beliefs. That’s Dennett’s “belief in believe.” It’s a Pink Dragon. Schizotypals aren’t running on your normie “beliefs.” These people didn’t “believe” they were [a second coming of] Joshua. Not in the way Peterson’s interlocutor “believed” the pen on the table was red. Mario Incandenza touched Barry Loach’s hand because the former wasn’t hampered from carrying out his will by having his psyche polluted by ruling class permission structures or phobias or the voice that says “I am not enough.” People don’t act on their beliefs; they act (or don’t act) on/according to their level of consciousness—on what they’ve internalized. There’s a lot schizotypals are internalizing every day that normies/neurotypicals aren’t necessarily even perceiving—at least not consciously—and therefore can’t (“trivially”) internalize; and there’s a lot normies/neurotypicals are internalizing every day that’s pretty fkn meaningless (and therefore not “trivially” internalizable!) to us schizotypals. I could never “internalize” being on time for shit in your Clock World! But time is money to you! Therefore we are in the realm where it is possible for you to say that I have “wasted” your time. We would have to be in a parasite-host relationship for me to “waste” your time. I don’t live in your Clock World where you attach/entangle/enmesh your ego to the clock. You didn’t teach me how to be on time for stuff. You only punished me for being late and “hoped” that by punishing me, you could get me to internalize the punishment and punish myself for being late. And I did punish myself for being late. But it didn’t necessarily help me be on time. It only “helped” me participate in cruelty toward myself. And so we must understand our Clock World as a pretty egregious form of cruelty (the more enlightened among us recognize clock obsession as quite “Saturnian”). Look, I love Dolly Parton (as much as the next queer), but she has clock-brain. This had a big impact on Hayley Williams, she (Hayley) said. I guess they met or something. Or maybe Hayley was just watching an interview. But Dolly said something about how she hates it when people are late for shit. Of course she does. She’s become a bit of a member of the bourgeoisie in her “time.” So Hayley internalized this. And you got Hayley to punish herself for being late for everything. She even wrote a fkn song about it. Congratulations, Dolly! You “helped” Hayley Williams participate in cruelty against herself! Instead of thinking about revolution, Hayley is worried about her conformity to your clock world! Free Hayley! Or free yourself, if you’re reading this. Dolly is just another Yakubian cracker, not unlike yourself. You’re giving her a little too much power by caring what she thinks about the Saturnian Time Idol on the wall. It’s because Dolly’s successfully internalized the Time Idol on the wall by going through the wringer of the master-slave dialectic. It’s no real “failing” that you couldn’t “as successfully” internalize this—of course, Paramore uses a click track in their ears in their live performances, but maybe it would be a good idea for Hayley to leave this click track on the stage where it belongs, where it at least serves some “purpose.” But here, we have Williams in the “role” of adult Amelia Bedelia, asking herself, “WHY AM I LIKE THIS!? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME!?” again: “What if I’m just a selfish prick? No regard” and “A harsh reality to discover.” Gee, Hayley! Why are you being so mean to yourself!? You may have heard that if one calls their sibling a fag, a pussy, or a retard, then they will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, but verily I say unto you that whosoever says to their sibling, “WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS!? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU!?” has already called them a fag, a pussy, and a retard in their hearts!

Again, we are not dogs! And I am certainly not the Cesar Milanian “alpha”—a deeply flawed concept, by the way; nor am I some trainer with a whistle! If you are treating this book like an obstacle course for dogs a la the Westminster Kennel Club, you would immediately feel the urge rising up to attack the designer of the course! Because you are not a dog! So you would attack them like you were a dog, which is to say with all the viciousness of a dog, but in the form of a human, in “human forms”! But this book is not an obstacle course for dogs. It’s a slime mold path. You would have to see yourself as a slime mold. For you to see yourself as a slime mold, you would have to treat it like a science [or “science fair”] project. You would have to start seeing yourself as a part of the processes and relations you’re involved in just as much as they are a part of you. You would have to attain the metaphysical by synthesizing the dialectic. You would have to construct meaning out of what was previously meaningless to you—like the Engelsian thing-for-you/us! First it has to be a thing for you before it’s a thing for us! That’s called “prototyping”! They talk about it in the good old VDMT with the example of the good old AK-47 (p. 131-32, where they rightly place great metaphysical significance in the prototype’s status as, at the same time, unique, private, and common)! Well, we could just as easily say that this book is a reconstruction of the “tree of life” I climbed and crawled all over as a caterpillar that allowed me to metamorphose into the psychological butterfly I am today. But if you have already become a psychological butterfly, then you should be able to find whatever “nectar” you’re looking for in any random passage in this book. I don’t want to “compare” myself to Ralph Ellison—we don’t do comparison here, remember!—but that’s how reading his Invisible Man made me feel, reading it as an adult a couple of years ago. It would have done me a lot of good to read it in college—if I had seen myself as a caterpillar crawling around on it as a tree. But I couldn’t see myself as a caterpillar in college. I could, perhaps, see myself as a baby bird. I was certainly expected to absorb information like a baby bird absorbs food. It would not be an exaggeration to say we were expected to “drink from the fire hose” (in terms of the information we were required to absorb, but you can surely imagine other meanings for this turn of phrase). But I flunked out of that college (after 2 years). And then I dropped out of the next one (after another 5 semesters) because I was not confident I could avoid flunking out of that one either. Maybe college wasn’t for me. I’m not referencing a lot of engineering in this paper (but they do cover the distinction between the mechanistic domain and frequency/phase domain in some engineering classes!). I could have tried going to a different school in New Mexico, with a “great books” program, but they couldn’t offer me the “generous” need-based financial-aid package the out-of-state school could (the one I flunked out of) or the “affordability” of the other in-state school I ended up dropping out of. This isn’t a sob story. Our entire education system is kinda fucked, isn’t it? Duh. It’s based on the prison system—or close enough; you heard what they did to Uncle Ted at Harvard. Ok! Sure! I had a difficult time educating MYSELF, but I did it—This Is Me, Doing The Damn Thing; and I didn’t end up “flunking/dropping out” of life (when I go, I will have “graduated” out of life—not that life is literally a school!)! And clearly Carrier was of great help! We might say he was there at the right time and with the right information to be a bit of an Annie O’Sullivan to my Helen Keller. But my Helen Keller isn’t afraid to shout it out when her Annie O’Sullivan has his head up his ass! Again, he would only have to go all the way through and come out the other end and recognize himself as a 4-dimensional being! And his inner Klein Bottle will be overflowing with love for the universe that he once called a moron!

Ok. So. Like we were saying, you motherfuckers are so obsessed with the Great Disappearing Historical Jesus (PINK DRAGON!) that you’ve somewhat neglected the real, living, breathing Historical Joshua Messiahs (PURPLE DRAGON)! We cannot adequately analyze these motherfuckers through your goddamn surface-level, bourgeois, ulitimately vulgar[ized], “belief”/”rizz”/”mana” framework! We must look at them through a schizo-realist framework! We must look at these figures as having, in technical terms, “schizomaxxed to ascenscion” (S2A)—ascenscion beyond ruling class/spirit of the age permission structures of “reality”! We must look at schizomaxxing-to-ascenscion as a motherfucking anthropological phenomenon! You think schizomaxxing-to-ascenscion is the One Ring of Power. You think it’s a madness pill like in Robert Chambers’ Yellow King stories. But that’s only when its entangled with the internalization of hierarchical logic! None of us think we’re going to be kings! I didn’t ride my bike from Austin to San Antonio to be some “king”! I did it to answer the call to adventure! It’s only westoid Oedipal Motherfuckerism that entangles the living-out of the mythical path with the seeking of some royal-type status/power-over-others! Power over others is POO! But these dudes, whether or not they were seeking POO, “ascended” a little too close to the sun, and met a “fate” not unlike the Jesus character from the gospels. They certainly didn’t usher in a revolution. But at least they “had” the “sacrifice” that they made of themselves. Ok! So we have to learn from these movements so that we too can schizomaxx to ascenscion, but in a more advanced 21st century form! How else are we going to shift reality!? We must become Dr. Tet The Offensive! We must become the rock that Mother Earth throws that breaks the statue! We must learn/be able to summon up our inner shaman when the moment arrives! Support Your Inner Shaman! Support Your Village Idiot! There you may find a “form” of COME Consciousness!

When we view S2A as an anthropological phenomenon, it’s fairly “trivial” to then view it as a historical phenomenon. It suddenly “appears”! We can certainly say that Joan of Arc schizomaxxed to ascenscion in a very “real” way! We would like to talk about the big X Constantine saw in the sky and how it’s related to Elon Musk’s obsession with the letter X, but that might be for a different book! But both Constantine and Elon certainly “schizomaxxed to ascenscion” in some sense, though clearly in a way tangled up in hierarchical logic—and thereby achieving near Archonic levels of POO! We might even go so far as to call Elon Musk a POO-head! He’s certainly full of it!

Our “S2A” is our technical term for what Deleuze and Gauttari call the “body without organs.” We certainly don’t need to read them very closely on this to pick up what they’re putting down! When the butterfly breaks out of its caterpillar skin, it starts out as a basically undifferentiated pile of goo, and then, from this goo, differentiates itself into the butterfly. D&G’s body without organs represents a certain kind of unlimited growth/potential, but in “the real world,” by which, in this case, I mean THE NATURAL WORLD, and therefore, in our model, the new organs must develop FROM the body without organs! The whole point of the body without organs is to grow new organs the old body didn’t have! But the potential for these “organs” always existed in the old body! And you can see how this corresponds perfectly to the negation of the negation! Because the old “body” came from a single “prototype” cell! (AUTHOR’S NOTE: later, we will touch upon Anti-Oedipus, because I did start reading it during the writing of this book, and we will see that, instead of “organs,” the BWO has “zones of intensity,” which we can say perform the same functions that the old organs used to perform, but, we can also say, at a more “advanced” stage of development or “at a higher frequency”).

And so Richard Carrier must also “schizomaxx to ascenscion,” because the Child of Mother Earth must be lifted up! How else would he attain COME Consciousness!? How else would he “develop” his love for the universe!? How else would he have us accepting Jesus mythicism!? If Jesus is a myth, that means YOU ARE the Jesus myth! AB comes back around until it “equals” AB again (but at a more advanced stage of development)! Heads I Win, Tails You Lose! Game, blouses! Now sink into the fucking floor! (For you must first sink in order to ascend!)

Now You’re In The Sunken Place!

Yes! Don’t you see, Carrier! YOU ARE the Jesus myth! The forces of the Saturnian stagnation of the old power structures are just as much arrayed against you as the forces of Rome were arrayed against the Historical Joshua Messiahs—your predecessors in BECOMING the Jesus myth! And why not? You should have seen this coming. “This is what you accepted when you set yourself up against the [Jesus studies establishment that not so secretly upholds bourgeois power structures through their not so secret role in dulling the consciousness of the masses]. It was all contained in that first act. Nothing has happened that you did not foresee.” We are “afraid” that you weren’t prepared to deal with the contradictions you were heightening! Are you aware that there are a lot of egos and money at stake in preserving the myth of the Historical Jesus? I guess you are. But you would have to crucify and resurrect your ego in order [to attain the “vision”] to “see” (all) the parasitic egos arrayed against you! You would have to learn to defend yourself against the dark arts—and I’m not talking litigiosity! But that means you would have to stop practicing the dark arts! You would have to “purify” yourself! You would have to burn away your Yakubian Devil. You would have to alchemize your Jungian Shadow into your Inner Light. You would have to take a trip through the microtubules. But first, you would have to see yourself as the pieces that fit, but fell away! That’s the vision I saw before I saw the tunnel with the light at the end of it. I saw myself as something of a living cliffside, but the cliffside had some kind of “scab.” Then this “scab” fell away, first in one piece, but then it crumbled, and I could see that this needed to happen for the cliffside to “heal.” I guess it was the “scab” I was picking at in my earlier email to Carrier. I had detangled one of my inner knots that was preventing me from living in a state of flow. I guess it was a “sign” that I had successfully transitioned out of punishing myself for harassing women and into equipping myself with the consciousness not to do it anymore—because it generally has more to do with avoiding the “wrong” pathways than with “in the moment” decisions. The only reason you can’t leave women alone (if the shoe fits) is that you don’t sufficiently love yourself. If you did love yourself sufficiently, you probably wouldn’t be “abstractly” (arbitrarily/absent-mindedly) craving pussy, and you certainly wouldn’t be pursuing it as a surrogate activity.

Ok, so this must have been around the same time as the eclipse. Maybe a couple of days earlier. It would help if I could create a graphical representation of the tunnel with the light at the end of it, because I saw it very clearly. The “tunnel” is cylindrical, with the “wall” constructed out of Ezekielian eye shapes (“tessellated”). The incredibly “bright,” white “light” flashes on at the end of the tunnel, which is a big circle, and then follows a spiral path down the “wall” of the tunnel “toward me,” lighting up one “eye shape” at a time all the way down the tunnel, “past me.” This is all extremely loud. I didn’t see myself as moving within the tunnel, only as experiencing it from a (single) “fixed perspective.” This happened a few times, and then, well, I guess I came back out of it or I fell asleep or something. It was the next day that I went to “hell.” Our friend Abraham from earlier, who had the “NDE,” says he didn’t see a light at the end of a tunnel. He says he saw a highway. Of course he did. He was a professional truck driver—he had certainly internalized the highway. And in the opposite direction, there was a shining, narrow path up a hill. But Abraham was not going in this direction. He was going in the direction of a big hole, and then fell in. But Abraham needed to have a pre-vision himself before the main event! His pre-hell vision involved seeing himself as the Devil in the reflection from a tinted window. He was clearly in a state where he was highly sensitive to distorted reflections of his self-image. But it’s a little deeper than that. Abraham was partying (getting drunk and high) most nights. But he had a wife and kid and another on the way. He had to clean his life up and get his act together a bit. But there was probably a lot of trauma he hadn’t/still hasn’t fully dealt with, being a boomer and all. Well! I never saw myself as the devil when I looked in the mirror, but I did see myself in a way I couldn’t accept without grieving my way there! And the same must happen to Carrier! We won’t know he’s brought his Yakubian Devil to the surface, so he can shake it off like a camel shakes off dust, until he can see it when he looks in the mirror!

Ok. Abraham’s NDE was a bit hokey. He had the devil coming up to him after he fell to the bottom of the hole and tying a wire around his neck and saying, “I HAVE YOU NOW!” in a voice you might expect, and dragging him past a gate, and there was fire everywhere. I feel like it’s something you’d see in a movie. But that’s when Abraham remembered what his mom told him about Jesus, so then he called on Jesus, and Jesus showed up and picked him up and flew him out of there and then showed him, gigantic yawn, “the throne room of God”—I only mention it because that’s where he reports seeing the Ezekielian colors I spoke of in the previous essay. And then I guess they told him he had to go back so he could live out the rest of his life or whatever. Blah, blah, blah. We would rather not have Carrier seeing Entities when he goes to his own personal hell. Entities tend to be more bullshit than they’re worth—not that they’re worth much. The “Entities” from my salvia trip (in 2008) sure didn’t “help” me. But they weren’t “claiming” to be my “Spirit Guides” or whatever either. I guess my field of burning bushes was a kind of “entity.” They didn’t talk to me like Moses’ burning bush, but it did almost feel like they were “looking at me.” Well, in the moment, I was able to recognize that perception and judgment aren’t the same thing. The bushes weren’t “judging” me simply by showing me all the worst things I had ever done all at the same time. Who was there to judge me? Was I supposed to “judge” myself? I was already “guilty.” That’s why I was there. This was my “sentence.” But we already went through this. We would prefer it if Carrier saw the field of burning bushes along the slime mold path. Because there is a path, that means there is a way out. The “arrangement” of my life was “reflected” in the “arrangement” of the burning bushes along the slime mold path. It taught me about trauma. Because my traumas were all certainly connected to the trauma I may very well have contributed to putting other people through. And now that I had seen all the effects very clearly, I immediately recognized that their traumas had become my traumas, in a very REAL way. And this is what I told Carrier. I didn’t tell him I “went to my own personal hell” at the time. Not in those words. What I told him was, “if I put all my traumas in a 3-dimensional space, I can walk around them! I can see where I’m going! I can walk through the psychological valley of the shadow of death, because it’ll be lit up!” (-MM, 2024/04/07) He replied:

That’s actually a fascinating observation. I will remember this.

It is true, the brain can use geometric space to map onto any concept space (Sherlock Holmes used his “memory castle” this way, for example, and the strategy does work: if you remember where you put things in a memorized imagined castle, you can navigate to the required place and remember what you left there). So what you have described is a really useful application of the principle.
-RC, 2024/04/08, personal correspondence.

Ok, so do you remember this now, Carrier!? Are you there, yet, Richard!? Can you see all your traumas in a 3-dimensional space yet!? What would it take to get you there?

I actually went to the patch of burning bushes twice. It was after the first time when I messaged Carrier about it. The first time, I only saw that the bushes were lighting up the space. I didn’t see that they were all connected to each other until I went back. I went back because I knew from Abraham’s NDE that there would be a hill somewhere in the space, and that I had to go up that hill. So when I went back, I saw that the bushes were connected to each other, and I saw a metallic/iridescent gleam across the path, and I saw the “power source” whence the path came as some kind of shed off to the right (the direction isn’t important, except that the hill was in the opposite direction), and so I grasped the end of the “cable,” because the path started out as a cable at the source, then divided into the manifold path of the slime mold, and then came back together as a cable, and walked with this “cable” in the opposite direction from the shed, and I heard the cable unspool from within the shed like a chain—like the sound a roller coaster makes on the way up—and I found myself walking up a hill, and I reached the top, and I saw a “wall” with an input for the end of the “plug,” like a ring-and-tip, like the end of a guitar cable, so I plugged it in, and next to it, there was a somewhat comical Big Switch I could flip, so I flipped it, and that’s when all the lights turned on in my subconscious and all the roaches scattered, and that patch of burning bushes is still there, but it looks far less formidable from the top of the hill with all the lights on. It’s fairly insignificant from up here. And the space stretches out in all directions. It’s infinite. So, now, to dwell on one patch within an infinite space is, well, petty, we could say. And that’s how I made my own personal hell into my own personal heaven. That’s how I alchemized my Jungian Shadow into my Inner Light. Similarly, our friend Abraham had a vision of Jesus giving him a candle or a flashlight or something, and this light grew so that it “filled” the whole space he was “in,” but, again, we find this vision a bit too “Jesusy.” And, again, and, fortunately, we have no expectation that Carrier has any propensity to see “entities” when he trips, from what he’s reported. They were holographic video game characters, in case you were wondering, the “Entities” from my Salvia trip. I think there was a pac-man ghost and a goomba and a cactus from Super Mario Brothers. They were just, like, narrating that, within the trip, I was “tumbling” in a spiral. Yeah. I know. Thanks!

Ok, there were other trips I had. There was the one I can only describe as: my psychology “exploded”—including that all the voices in my head went off at the same time—and “seeped” along tracks of my previous experience to take their new shape as my psychological butterfly wings—this really made me feel like Dr. Manhattan. That is the kind of reference point we would have to draw on to properly characterize the intensity of the experience. Do I have to explain what this means? It’s fairly simple. I had been thinking like a caterpillar moves my whole life—and now I could think more like a butterfly flies, because my psychology was able to “rearrange” and “reorganize” itself into a new “configuration” after it “exploded.” This isn’t a random “explosion” any more than the “explosion” that causes the caterpillar to metamorphose into a butterfly is “random.” We will see applications of this “trip” later.

I already talked about the vision of the “room” with the “Ezekielian colors” and “eye-shapes” I saw in the previous essay. So let’s move on to the Cathedral of Garbage. I think this was on the 11th or 12th. So I saw my life deconstructed, because I had deconstructed it, and it was now all in a big, seemingly disorganized “pile,” and I saw that it was a pile of garbage! And according to “standards” of “success” put forth in accordance with the Spirit of the Age, my life, up to that point, mostly WAS a pile of garbage! I had basically “failed” most of the things I had tried—going to college, having a girlfriend, driving a car, having any kind of career prospects in stand-up comedy, for example. But then my perspective shifted back, and spiraled out, because I needed to see my life from every angle to realize that there was as much beauty as there was tragedy, because I had survived! And I was infinitely loved! And my “failures” were only “failures” from ONE perspective—the perspective of the ruling class! Fuck the ruling class and their “perspective” and their conception of “success”! It was easy for the perspective of the ruling class I had constructed and internalized to tumble out of my head when I saw my life from EVERY perspective! And that’s when the “pile” of garbage grew (and grew) until it took the shape of a cathedral, of gleaming bronze, but it still had the outline visible of all the “garbage” it had previously been—fast food wrapping paper, Christian music CDs, outdated values I grew up on, what have you. The Cathedral of Garbage is another “body without organs,” but I imagine that if I went back, I might be able to find a door somewhere, and inside, there very well may be an organ! And I would play it! And it would sound beautiful!

Ok. So those were the “visions” I had on my “vision quest.” And they revealed to me my authentic self. And my parasitic self was dissolved/burned away. And now I crave justice rather than comfort. Ok, so how do we define “justice”? Well, this is where Carol Gould comes in. You remember her. We mentioned her and Marx’s Social Ontology a hundred or so pages ago. I guess we’re ready for that now, as long as Carrier’s ready to leave the sunken place. How are we feeling, Carrier? Carrier’s conception of justice is a bit clouded by the bourgeois jurisprudence our class society runs on. It might serve him well for him to “turn a new leaf” on his conception of justice. But for Carrier to leave the sunken place, his psychology may very well have to explode, so he can metamorphose into a butterfly and fly out. He would have to see the Tree of Memory (and himself as a caterpillar on it). He would have to see his blood on the elephant. He would have to be able to do the “spiritual bean-counting” to “add up” how he winded up here in his life-path. Well, that’s the “role” of shamanic accountability—which means it’s a “role” those who have developed their shamanic abilities must carry out. And so we must not be merely “carriers,” but carriers-out! And so Carrier must carry-out Carrier from the sunken place! And through carrying out himself, he will have “carried out” his first shamanic act! Yes! Of course! And what have we been telling him? That he is, at “best,” loyal (i.e., “controlled”) opposition to Jeffrey Epstein, etc., etc. It’s fairly “trivial” to show that a “Jeffrey Epstein layer” of the global “economy,” etc., is a “socio-/natural/logical outcome” of the kind of class society we live in—a society not “equipped” with a dialectic of the individual and the collective; a society based on justification of exploitation and accumulating huge piles of money rather than need and thriving. And what does Gould say about this?

There is an apparent dilemma between Marx’s insistence on the ideal of the full self-realization [self-actualization includes “self-realization” in our model —MM] of the individual and his insistence on the ideal of the full realization of community. I shall show that to see this as a dilemma, however, is to interpret these concepts of individuality and community in terms of the limited forms that they take in both social life and social theory under capitalism. Here, as Marx himself pointed out, these values appear in a dichotomous form, in terms of the opposition between the individual and society. Thus in practical life, conflicts arise between requirements of individuality and those of society—between individual rights and preferences on the one hand, and social justice and social constraints on the other. This opposition is also manifest in liberal social theory, which conceives of society as external constraint standing over and against individuality. Against this dichotomous view of the individual and society, I interpret Marx as developing an ontology that sees the individual as intrinsically social and communal, but that also takes the individual [i.e., NOT “The Institution” —MM] to be the fundamental entity of society. It is on the basis of a reconstruction of this ontology of individuals in social relations that we can resolve the apparent dilemma between the ideals of individuality and community in Marx. It will be seen that Marx projects a concept of community as constituted by the activities of free individuals each of whom realizes his or her own possibilities and who relate to each other in terms of mutual expectations and goals and mutually enhance each other’s individuality.
-Gould (1978, p. xii-xiii) [emphasis added]

Are we picking up what Gould is putting down, COME—my fellow cummies? In class society, the collective is conceived [of] as standing over and against the individual, against individuality, she says. Yes, because “the collective,” indeed society itself, is identified with the ruling class (and their false consciousness and their Epsteinian “interests”). In class society, your INDIVIDUALITY is what is “ruled” by the ruling class! This is why we must overthrow the ruling class and class society as such! So we can take charge of our own individuality! Your individuality is not how you exploit others and accumulate resources that would naturally be communal. That is not “individuality”! THAT is individualism! It’s parasitic! Exploitation is a fairly “natural” outcome of divided, and especially delegated, labor, which is itself far from “natural” in how heavily it relies on artifice. Oh my god. We haven’t even fully “revealed” the Marxian conception of “labor” in all its “metaphysical,” i.e., causal, power—and how it can therefore rightly be said to TRANSCEND the Kaczynskian model of The Power Process—because we haven’t gotten to the point in the book where Gould exquisitely explicates the DIALECTICS of this “Power Process” yet! Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves! But if you want more on this, you can read about the role of the evolution of the human hand in the evolution of human consciousness in Engels’ Dialectics of Nature.

For now, we’re still in Carrier’s sunken place. And since we’ve been through hell, let’s go in the other direction for a bit. “Do you think about heaven? Do you think about me?” and “Say yes to heaven. Say yes to me,” Lana tells us. The same person who said, “Let’s take Jesus off the dashboard,” and “Me and God, we don’t get along, that’s alright with me.” But Lana contains multitudes. And our conception of heaven contains multitudes as well, for our father’s house contains many mansions. Perhaps one “mansion” is the one with the permanent Lana Del Rey concert—or perhaps Sarah McLachlan concert (I probably learned more about myself at the latter, anyway)—when I bought my ticket, the day before, there was an empty seat next to the seat I bought, so I wondered if that seat would be filled the next day—and indeed it was, by someone who had been following Sarah around the country, and Austin just happened to be her (Sarah’s) last stop on the tour—but my fellow concertgoer had made her life, in this “season,” a bit of a permanent Sarah McLachlan concert, didn’t she. But one of these “mansions” is the one with the orb that you stand around that allows you to see everything happening on earth, and perhaps influence those “events” through your “agents.” Of course “heaven” is conceived of as “containing” this “mansion”—that’s how it’s conceived of by the ruling class, anyway, at least since the Greeks! Some of them certainly imagine themselves spending a lot of time in that mansion looking at that orb, Palantiri, Black Cube of Saturn, what have you. That they would want this when they could go to the Lana Del Rey concert next door only means that they are not in Heaven—they are STILL in fkn Omelas! We are still in Carrier’s sunken place. And Carrier DOES think about “heaven,” I can assure you of that! He’s written quite a few essays thinking about it. And we can perhaps breathe a sigh of relief that, from what he writes, he wouldn’t even want there to be an earth (for him to be responsible for or to “rule”) if there were a heaven. But if you are truly in your techno-Omelasic “heaven,” there will be a “mansion” with the orb, and therefore, there will be an “earth,” and there will be people wanting to spend a lot of time in this mansion pulling a lot of “strings” on this “earth.” This is your world of entirely too much faith in humanity where we can “create worlds” and shit. And therefore, the people in the orb-mansion would “create a world” where they are worshipped as gods. And the people in this orb-mansion will have all the same wars their ancestors (in terms of their species of consciousness) had when they became the ruling class and made themselves “gods”! But perhaps Carrier would have it so that anyone could have their own orb-mansion. This seems like a bit of a stretch to us. This sounds like a breeding ground for hierarchical thinking/posturing/striving. Who wants heaven to be one big HOA? Similarly, nobody thinks of heaven as simple union with some hierarchical authority figure except perhaps the most “fanatical” “extremists”—most people envision “union with the divine” in a way that allows them to retain [at least some measure of] their “individuality,” but will your techo-heaven properly distinguish between individuality and individualism!? That might require a radical SHIFT in consciousness! I am not sure why we’re even thinking about heaven when we already live on Mom’s Green Earth! What more “heaven” could we want!? “Heaven” indeed isn’t too far away! All we have to do to see it is LOOK UP! And we will indeed GO THERE someday—as particles and waves—at the same fkn time!

But the ruling class certainly wants to create “heaven on earth,” by which I mean they want to live in a big fkn mansion (probably on some island) with a big fkn orb through which they can pull strings in whatever “society” is still going on at that point, controlling the (toiling or otherwise) masses like NPCs, to whatever extent they can. Uncle Ted speaks of this kind of technology. He basically said we were heading in that direction, and that is very much a direction the Peter Theil class would like “us” to take. And perhaps this is what Thiel means by “antichrist”—those who would resist his bringing about of his “heaven on earth.” But we have already established that the Theil class IS a pack of flying scorpion-horse-locusts! So FUCK Peter Theil! Please go to hell! And stay there as long as you need to! We’re in no rush!

But the ruling class is perfectly willing to DESTROY Mom’s Green Earth so they can replace it with their “heaven”! But their “heaven” is no “heaven” because their orb can’t truly see inside “the human heart”! They would have to strive to make us heartless! And that is what they are striving for! They are striving to get us to join their cult of Saturn. Saturn belongs in the backpack of archetypes, not at the center of our lives for us to be one of his rings, wrapped around his finger, revolving around him. You don’t want to live the kind of mythical life where you get devoured by your father. When I was working for the prostitution-business-model food delivery company, before “Pip’s Pizza,” they had me wearing a backpack that was a bit of a black cube—well, one side was black anyway—and they certainly always had us on the clock. Oh my god! Every fucking response to “why the fuck do you care about the clock so goddamn much!?,” no matter how many fucking times it circles back around, always comes back to, “IT HELPS ME WORSHIP SATURN!” Stab your way out of Saturn’s gut, motherfucker! On the other hand, Marx’s “critique [of capital] proceeds in terms of a theory of value in which freedom and justice [i.e., not Saturnian values! —MM] are taken to be the central values. Marx holds that these values are not imposed by him on the social reality which he analyzes. Rather Marx claims that these values emerge in the course of the development of society itself, but that present social forms hamper the full realization of these values. In this way, the critical or normative dimension of Marx’s thought is not something added on to his descriptive analysis of social processes, but rather is integral to his reconstruction of these processes themselves.” -Gould, (p. xxi-xxii). I.e., Marx is not making a moral argument for freedom and justice, but acknowledging them as material processes (processes of the self-development of material) in the social world (which is a synthetic outgrowth of the material world, of course)! There is no moralistic “ought”! Carol is carrying out what she calls a “dialectical method of interpretation” (mostly of the text of Marx’s Grundrisse), which she contrasts with a “hermeneutic method” and which “goes beyond” the latter, which, the latter, “restricts itself to the problem of understanding the text” internally, she says, while the dialectical method also seeks to understand the text from an “external critical standpoint based on knowledge […] independent of the framework of the text.” This method, she points out, contrasts with the hermeneutic method in yet another way which, though mentioned last, is certainly not least: “I would hold that the hermeneutical method presupposes the view that one cannot get beyond interpretations, and that alternative frameworks of interpretation set the limits for what we can claim to be true. A dialectical method, by contrast, attempts to get beyond alternative frameworks of interpretation by critically examining a given interpretation in terms of what we know independently of that framework. Through such critical examination of alternative interpretations, the dialectical method in its fully ramified form aims at establishing the truth.” (p. xxiii-xxiv). TRUTH BEYOND THE INTERPRETATION OF THE EGO, SHE SAYS! GASP! WHAT BLASPHEMY AGAINST THE BOURGEOISIE AND THEIR INTELLECTUAL COMMODITY FETISHISM AND THE SPIRIT OF THEIR AGE! And, ultimately, their jurisprudence. We love to hear (experience/encounter) it!

Again, not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but the reason we’ve been building up (quite dramatically, I might add!) to this close reading of Gould is that we need to develop a labor (i.e., MATERIAL—dialectical material, of course) theory of alchemy and the noumenal (not to mention love and beauty), and a MATERIAL analysis of the dialectic of Saturn and Oedipus/Jupiter (which, we shall see, has to do with “resonances”), by which we will “spiral” our way our of the endless struggle between the circle and the straight line, which means we must first go through Gould’s treatment of Marx’s labor theory of causality/time and labor theory of not merely “value,” but VALUES, including, as Gould tells us, freedom and justice!

But we are still in Carrier’s sunken place. So it would behoove us to take a look around. What do I mean by Carrier’s sunken place? Well, it was/will be the place he entered when he completed the Maroofist struggle session(s) and accepted [i.e., stopped fighting—some people call this “surrender,” but I point out that “surrender” would imply defeat, and the “accomplishment” of the act, the “labor,” of ego-crucifixion must be seen, in the long run, as more of a “victory,” because when you crucify the ego, it resurrects in a new form, etc., etc.] shamanic accontability, i.e., accepted himself as living [out] the Jesus myth and the December 18 Party’s “bullet” goes through the ego’s “head” and he “loves” Comrade Stalin and the third world and mother earth and the wild mind and the universe he once called a moron, but we’ve already been through all that [by this point—even if we’ve had to do it in person—it’s not like we don’t have precedence for this, after all]. What it means is that we are in the frequency domain. We might be fooled into thinking of this as the domain of Dr. Manhattan, but Dr. Manhattan only saw the frequency domain in facets. We live in the World of Mother Earth, which means we are not dealing with the Laplacian Demon of mechanical materialism, of the “merely” mechanistic domain, but the Maroofian Demon of pan-dialectical and historical materialism, which can “flow through” the frequency domain, and which, through the dialectical study of history, is capable of ESTABLISHING TRUTH BEYOND THE INTERPRETATION OF THE UNCRUCIFIED INDIVIDUALIST EGO! The “Spirit” of shared consciousness through shared labor!

Another thing it means for us to be in Carrier’s sunken place is, well, we already took a long look at “sunken” activities/actions/”behaviors,” and we’ve also taken a look at a few of the ideas he thought he buried in his westoid facts, reason, and logic. Another of these “ideas” is “simulation theory.” Of course simulation theory, taken literally, is totally false. But, as Hegel might say, that is not the end of the story. For this, we would have to analyze the dialectic of the hive mind and the herd mind. You westoids are so individualist-brained that you think they’re the same thing. They’re not. Not really. The herd mind is marching in the same direction BECAUSE of “human[ized]” purposes. The fact of their marching in the same direction is a “manufactured” fact. The domesticated herd of cattle is bred and raised for bourgeois consumption. For sacrifice to the gods of “human[ized]” bourgeois individual[ist] convenience. But this sacrifice must be regulated. Our conception of the hive mind is at the same time the wild mind and the Maroofian Demon of shared consciousness through shared labor. We must recognize that shared consciousness through shared labor [including shared shamanic labor!] must be how we attain the wild mind—a mind BUZZING with activity. For the wild mind is not an “individual” mind. It only has a fucking “individual” aspect, westoid! To view the individual only through their individual aspect would be to cut the individual off from the dialectic of the individual and the collective! Would be necessarily to stand the collective over and against the individual! For we must recognize westoid individualISM for the illusion (the Pink Dragon) it truly is! We must recognize all attempts for the individual to transcend the dialectic of the individual and the collective on their own as pure cope! We transcend the dialectic of the individual and the collective by synthesizing it! Anything less only puts us on the [dialectical] path of grief! I am not saying that we must accept the collective because the collective is “good”! The collective EXISTS, motherfucker! The collective is what it is and will be what it will be. We must accept this first, as a starting point, in order to change the collective and its direction through our individuality. This is also covered in Gould, by the way, as we shall see! What simulation theorists are pointing to is, e.g., moments in which the hive mind seemingly “instantly” transforms into the herd mind. Some people call this “the bystander effect,” but calling it an “effect” is just more cope, still not outside/beyond the level of the herd mind, only standing at the walls of the maze like a wallflower at a middle school dance. The key is that while we do not live in a simulation, we do live in something very much like a simulation, namely, a “normalization,” as we’ve seen. We cannot call normalization an “effect,” because that would be buying into it as a “reality,” and we are standing outside the reality where this happens to us (at least at this level), for purposes of analysis, of course, so we would have to uncover what it would take for us to “sink in” to this level of “reality”—so we can only call it a “phenomenon.” But we can see very clearly how a normalization phenomenon can take a form very much like a simulation phenomenon, where the hive mind is seemingly instantly transformed into the herd mind. It happened very recently to YouTuber DarkMatter2525:

My wife almost died today. It happened at lunch. For some reason, my son’s favorite place is Burger King. He didn’t have it in a while, so I thought we’d treat him. It was pretty busy there at lunchtime on a Saturday. My wife started choking and I did the Heimlich maneuver on her (learned from Army first aid training). The food just wouldn’t come out. She was making these loud panicked grunting noises. She bit very deeply into her tongue, so blood was pouring out of her mouth. Since Heimlich didn’t seem to be working, I stopped and desperately pounded on her back. That didn’t work. I started Heimlich again. Her face turned purple. Finally, some bloody chewed up food came out, enough for her to take in a little air and then dig the rest out of her esophagus with her finger. Then, she was gasping for air like someone had been holding her underwater.

The place was packed and ONE little old lady came to ask if she’s ok. Everyone else just ignored us, like nothing happened at all. Like robots. NPCs. The incident was not quiet. We were frantically fighting for her life while everyone was just calmly going about their business. It was surreal. WTF is going on with people? And I know that some people would make it about race, but everyone there was white, so don’t even try that shit. I’m just so very shaken right now. I’m still shaken up about nearly losing my wife, obviously, but also about the public’s reaction – well, lack thereof. When I see someone in distress, I just automatically help. I’ve helped injured people out of car accidents, for instance. What is going through these people’s heads? I just don’t understand and it really bothers me. Was it always like this? Did something change?
–DarkMatter2525, c. 21 Feb 2026

He says it. Right there. “Like robots. NPCs.” Inaction has been normalized. DM was in a “reality” in which inactivity had become normalized to the point where DM found himself in a “normalization” of a whole complex of social inactivity, to the point where it almost might as well have been a SIMULATION! That so many commenters on the post jumped (like the proverbial lemming) to the assertion that this was an example of “the bystander effect” is itself part of the “simulation” feel of the whole thing. For Carrier to focus solely on the untruth of simulation theory in the realm of his westoid facts, etc., ignores what, in Marxism, is known as “the subjective factor” (we could also call it “the human element”). For this, we also must look at Gould on the Marxian conception of the subject-object dialectic. A helpful commenter suggests that this so-called bystander “effect” may be “broken” by “identifying individuals in the crowd by describing them, and ask[ing] them for help,” for example, by saying, “You in the green jumper, help us.” Well. Good luck with that. The commenter describes the bystander phenomenon as a “spell” that must be “broken.” But when we take a step back from all this (back from the idea that all we need to fix everything is one neat trick), we still have to take into account the larger “reality” in which bystander phenomenon has become bystander “effect”; a “reality” in which “bystanding,” i.e., inactivity, i.e., avoidance/denial of the call to adventure, the call to love, and become part of a larger story, through shared labor, has been deeply normalized, to the point where the “normalization” has become almost indistinguishable from a “simulated reality.”

Ok, so, what was really going on here? Did Yaldabaoth directly zap these people’s minds into inactivity in some plot to harvest DarkMatter’s loosh? Not quite. Not literally, anyway. Only metaphorically. But this metaphor allows us to tap into the “subjective factor” (not to mention the frequency domain) in a very real (and vivid) way. We would need a Geiger counter for all the Yaldabaoth particles emanating from the situation. Sperm are “hazardous material” after all, as the antinatalists say. In the Yaldabaoth myth, the sperm is depicted as a snake with a lion’s head. The sperm, if we’re being honest, has a bit of a parasitic energy. All its mitochondria are employed for the purposes of its own forward motion and not for the nourishment of the cell as a whole. This is the “masculine” energy you might be familiar with from the Hermetic principles. Don’t be astonished at any of this. We may very well find that the Hermetic principles are onto something if we can flip them inside out into the dialectical “realm” like Marx did with Hegel. “Masculine” isn’t “a gender.” That would be an obscene suggestion. The sperm is simply an “encapsulated” form of the masculine energy that the DNA exploits to move itself forward through spacetime. We say “spacetime.” Don’t forget that what we really mean is “void,” [the I AM] THAT which we can “detect” as spacetime, but is so much more than that. But it would be inaccurate to characterize the masculine solely as the Yaldabaothian energy, because the Yaldabaothian energy is also Saturnian (and Saturnine), not solely Jupiterian. We are dealing with Mother Earth and Father Yaldabaoth. The sperm has the Jupiterian energy of forward motion, so we might be tempted to characterize the egg as having Saturnian energy, but this would be an incomplete view, because that only takes into account the egg qua egg. The egg receives the sperm. The egg can hardly be characterized as having a “parasitic” energy—only to the woman who sheds them every month—but we see fairly clearly that the energy is only “parasitic” from the perspective of the present, for, in the human domain, this is an expression of love. We “love” ourselves, and so we want to move ourselves forward through spacetime, I mean the void—I MEAN INFINITE SOURCE! THAT’S the true nature of this “void” we’ve been speaking of! The infinite potentiality! THAT is what you may have heard called “the divine feminine”! THAT is what you might have heard called the “quantum foam” because westoid scientists wanted to take credit for its discovery—the parasitic masculine energy again. I myself heard this from a woman. Raven. AKA Dr. Kristina. It’s not like she takes credit for it herself! Wanting to take credit for stuff is just more parasitic masculine energy! Don’t be astonished at my calling it the “parasitic masculine.” The ruling class has been exploiting the parasitic masculine to its own Saturnian (and Saturnine) and Jupiterian (but not exactly Jovial) purposes for the last few thousand years. This “parasitic masculine” keeps showing up! To the point that we have almost no idea about what a non-parasitic masculine could even be! To the extent that there is a non-parasitic masculine—what would we call it? A “cooperative masculine” perhaps?—women seem to be doing a lot better job of it than men! Ok, so there are parasitic relationships and cooperative relationships of mutual thriving. So there’s a parasitic dialectic of Saturn and Jupiter and a shared-thriving dialectic of Saturn and Jupiter, and in a relationship of love and cooperation, that’s what we see with the sperm and the egg (the sperm isn’t actually parasitic because it has the good sense to “fuck off and die” after its mission is complete and doesn’t seek to go on living forever at the expense of other beings). So, what does this have to do with the DarkMatter situation at Burger King. Well, for one thing, they were at a place called Burger King. The Saturnian King wears a crown on his head. The circle represents continuity. It’s why they make women wear them in the form of rings when they get married (also, Burger King serves onion rings—McDonald’s doesn’t, at least not in “the U.S.”; make of that what you will). But in the parasitic dialectic, as we’ve seen, continuity will tend to be “preserved” by stagnation. The Saturnian king tries to keep his princes and knights in line by sending them on quests to earn rings from him so they won’t spend too much time around the castle thinking about playing Oedipus. Of course, in feudal society, these “quests” end up being, in practice, well, campaigns of brutality, murder, what have you. We can see the mythical representation of this in Beowulf, of course. So Yaldabaoth is a synthesis of the parasitic Saturnian and Jupiterian energies. He seeks to attain the Jupiterian for himself but control external reality through the Saturnian. This is unstable. It causes wars and stuff. It has normalized the kind of inaction that we see in the DarkMatter Burger King situation. So we can go back now and answer the question of what was really going on here. What was going on was that everything was “normal”; everyone was eating their normal lunch at their normal place at the normal time. Suddenly, something “not normal” happened. The masses populating the establishment were not equipped with a way out of the “normalization” they were in, and into a larger story they could involve themselves in. The “not my problem” of it all comes from the “not my story” of it all. What has been “normalized” is that we conceive of ourselves as living in different stories instead of in the same story. This is how our lives become “a tale told by an idiot”! This is how we become NPCs! If you’ve read this far, I sure hope you’ve disabused yourself of the notion that any of us only live in our own little stories.

Gould will show that Marx transcends the prevailing two views of causality that on the one hand, views human activity as being “caused” by external “stimulus,” etc., and on the other hand, views humans as “agents” carrying out “intentions.” These two views of the causality of human activity give us only incomplete (“one-sided”) explanations for the Burger King incident. Explanations that only give recourse to a love that only seeps in through the cracks, that focus on “tricking” our way out of a normalization rather than “seeing”/”envisioning” and then TAKING a pathway out of the SOCIETAL normalization entirely. “Marx understands human action as itself causal” (p. 73). Exactly what Carrier says. Ok. Cool. Looks like we’re on the same page. “[F]or Marx a full account of action also requires reference to the objective conditions of that action” (p. 74). Ok. There’s that subject-object dialectic again. We’ll get to that. As we were saying in our analysis/synthesis of the Marxian conception of labor with the Kaczynskian conception of The Power Process, “Marx understands [labor] in a broad sense as human activity itself,” and “as both a purposive and productive activity” and as “form-giving” (p.74) and “value-positing” (p. 75) and “practical” (p. 76) activity. This “purpose” is very important, for only an “agent” can carry out its own “purpose(s),” and Marx repeatedly assumes in the Grundrisse, says Gould, that humans are “agents”/have “agency,” just as we’ve established supra, with the “caveat” of Sapolsky’s “overdeterminedness,” which requires looking at the frequency domain and statistical (i.e., Bayesian) outcomes (i.e., into what we experience phenomenally/subjectively as “sapping” our “agency”) rather than merely what happens or what’s “possible” in the moment. We indeed are “agents.” But are we agents of Mother Earth or agents of Yaldabaoth? There’s a big difference.

Look. Of course Carrier IS the Jesus myth (specifically, the Scorcese version—a very late-20th-century retelling, and, for our purposes, quite suitably “edgy” and especially “horny”—though from his perspective it might be feeling a bit more like the Gibson version, but there is very little we can do about this). Before he accepted (perhaps this is too strong a word, but what do you want from us?—”took seriously,” I guess) Jesus mythicism, he was the one building crosses for the empire (though, from his perspective, perhaps he only “experienced” himself as building “tables” in “commercial transactions”)—he put mythicism in the category of the so-called “pyramidiots” (OHJ, p. 15, 17, Kindle Edition). Well, obviously, the so-called “pyramidiots” are wrong about the pyramids, taken literally. But the “deeper truth” they are pointing to is that westoid science keeps ignoring the goddamn metaphysical aspect, the subjective factor, the human element behind the construction of the pyramids! The westoid scientist thinks the idea of “Real Egyptian Magic” is pure hokum. From the perspective of schizo-naturalism/realism/historicism, this reflexive skepticism against the idea of Real Egyptian Magic is a gigantic yawn. Westoid science ignores the role of magic and myth in the construction of the pyramids. But they (magic and myth themselves) give us clues. “The rocks cry out,” so to speak. The “gangs of Khufu” are fairly well-known after all, due to the work of, for example, Dr. Hawass. Uh. They were writing on walls. This must be understood as a form of “magic,” broadly speaking, but for that, we would need a labor theory of “magic,” i.e., alchemy and the noumenal, i.e., a labor theory of the frequency domain, i.e., a labor theory of time and causality, which Gould gives us in the second and third chapters of MSO, after covering the subject-object dialectic in the first chapter. So you see there are reasons we’re spiraling our way there and not quite jumping right into it. And it will be seen that “labor” is sort of just an umbrella term we’re using for “phenomena,” etc., that derive from the labor(s) of the great mother in bringing her “consciousness” into “being” in the form of heavenly bodies and living organisms, etc., etc., but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. Ok. Let’s get a little bit further ahead of ourselves for the moment. Misogyny, as a phenomenon, we will see, must be understood as “emerging” from a “phobia” of the divine feminine, what we’ve been calling “void,” but must be more properly understood as infinite POTENTIAL and infinite SOURCE! Where there is “chaos,” there is potential! We do not mean potential for exploitation—we mean potential for self-development and thereby development of the universe, i.e., the great mother (developing herself through her “will” and through her “dao”/”logos”). And it will be further seen that when we labor cooperatively with Mother Earth, she will labor cooperatively with us, even to the point that she will “join” in our labor to overthrow our class enemy, CAUSALLY, not unlike how the creatures of Pandora joined the Na’vi in their labor to fend off their colonial oppressor, but now, it is our job to stop the very possible predecessors of those same “sky people” from their current activity of raping the Pandora right underneath our feet and above us in the form of sky, and Gaia herself will indeed “join” in our effort to overthrow and prevent these people from becoming those “sky people,” if we join her first. Yes. Join. Mmm. Of course we mean heal, defragment yourself. Become whole. Wake up to your whole self! Wake up to the self that contains multitudes! Wake up, westoid!

Carrier is very insistent in this section of OHJ that he was the “Jesus” (properly understood, “Jesus” is just another word for “main character” or “hero” as the case may be) who made tables, not the Jesus who made crosses. That’s not what the “pyramidiots” think, I’m sure. It didn’t feel like he was building a table when he blocked me on Facebook Messenger. It felt a bit more like he was slamming me through the table, as in a wrestling match. Of course Carrier is “living the myth” as a person, “living a mythic life.” Both of the books of his we’ve examined contain “origin stories” about himself. In OHJ, he writes, “In 1999 I wrote an exposé for Skeptical Inquirer on a then-recent FOX documentary about ancient Egypt.” He then proceeded to build a cross of facts, reason, and logic, and nail this documentary to this cross with more nails of facts, reason, and logic. And the documentary was thus “crucified” and “dispatched.” “However,” Carrier goes on to say:

Thanks to that article, however, I had sealed my fate. Ever since, I’ve been the target of countless emails from kooks some call ‘pyramidiots’, people who passionately advocate bizarre and often (let’s be honest) stupid theories about the pyramids. They were built in 20,000 bce. Their builders must have used lasers and levitation rays. Psychics have predicted archaeological discoveries in them. Their configuration proves the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, or the preternatural wisdom of the ancients, or the existence of God and the Intelligent Design of the universe. And so on. They typically have some thousand-page treatise they want me to read that, they insist, proves their new outlandish claim, and if I don’t read it, I’m participating in ‘the conspiracy’ to suppress their research.
-RC, OHJ, p. 15, Kindle Edition

We can see what’s going on here. All sorts of people have taken up pyrimadiocy as their surrogate activity. Well, we must not “pity” these people. That would be a form of self-pity, and we can’t have that. But he “had sealed [his] fate,” he says. Indeed. Ok, so next, Carrier casts himself not as the Jesus who builds crosses or tables, but as the Jesus who wants to see the would-be disciple go through a few obstacle courses/jump through a few hoops before he’s willing to let the would-be disciple into the table-building guild:

Yet I will never live long enough to examine and fact-check all the theories, books and papers these people have tried to send me, even if I made it my single purpose in life to try. So I don’t waste even a minute on any of them. I dismiss them all out of hand. Their emails and treatises go right in the trash. I will, however, send them one email in reply, with a simple rule: get even one of their novel claims published in a peer-reviewed journal specializing in Egyptology or archaeology, or in a book published by a respected academic or peer-reviewed press, and then I’ll read it. They will insist they can’t, because of some conspiracy by ‘the establishment’ to prevent acceptance of any such paper (either for some ordinary or paranoid reason, it differs with each one). But as a professional in the field, I know, first-hand, that’s just bunk. If you really have the evidence and can prove it, the scholarly community will usually publish it. Our conversation ends.

This isn’t the only subject on which I get this kind of crank email. It was just for a time the most pronounced and continuous—and silly, since I’m not an Egyptologist and have no interest in the field. I only published on the subject as a journalist, and that only once, long ago. But I’ve published more widely on numerous other subjects and built a reputation as a skeptic and expert in various other areas, which inevitably attract similar people, from creationists to UFOlogists and everything in between. My response is always the same. After all, I have no choice. If I can’t examine every pyramidiot scheme in a lifetime, I certainly can’t examine every nutty scheme in hundreds of other fields besides. Hence my rule: unless they get something published properly, I’m not warranted in spending any time on it. That’s the way it has to be.
-RC, OHJ, p. 15-16, Kindle Edition

Ok, so Carrier relies on the division and delegation of labor of modern intellectual commodity fetishism. Well! We can only imagine that we have given Carrier “sufficient reason” to take up the “labor” of going through this book without making me jump through all those hoops first. I can’t see how any of that would make things turn out better for HIM! I’m not trying to join Carrier’s little table-building guild. We are not merely trying to build tables. We are trying to change the world. Jesus the [“mere”] table-builder doesn’t change the world. That’s what The Last Temptation of Christ “teaches” us! We must answer the call to adventure! We must answer the call to ride the waves of history and then BECOME the waves of history! Mother Earth is waiting for us!

Gould says precisely the same thing in p. 90-91: “In these cases the claim has been that the agent’s activity is essentially changed by the adoption of specific purposes […] Such changes in the agent’s activity can become essential changes in the agent if the activity becomes characteristic of that agent. Similarly, when a person adopts and maintains a given purpose, he or she comes to be essentially changed.” If we adopt the purpose of building tables, or, as Carrier would have it, mostly yapping at each other around them, then we will merely BE yappers, but if we adopt the purpose of revolution, then we will BE [will transform ourselves into] revolutionaries! The revolutionary spirit and the carrying out of revolutionary activity will become “characteristics” of ours!

Gibson’s Jesus is a bit too much of a Superman type. A bit too much like an alien superhero hiding a secret identity behind the alter ego of a mild mannered carpenter. This flattens out the myth into a commodity. Something that can be sold off a shelf. Scorsese’s Jesus is a far more “logical” outcome of the “logic” we’re working with. Gibson’s Jesus remembers who he was in his “past life.” Scorsese, a different kind of Catholic, obviously views this sort of thing as far too triumphalist. If God is gonna communicate to you from beyond the portal, he’s gonna use “logical,” indeed, “everyday” methods, e.g., the voice in the head. Our Jesus says, “I KNOW God loves me! I want him to stop!” And our Carrier, through the magic of technology, was able to receive these “voices” almost directly from the heads of the people experiencing them! And this is what Carrier got himself into when he answered the Call to Adventure in 1999! We can see that this was just one in a series of examples of Carrier’s cycle of denying and accepting the call to adventure. In OHJ, he talks about how he accepted the call to investigate Jesus mythicism more seriously after reading Earl Doherty’s The Jesus Puzzle, at the behest of “enough people […] whose judgment I trusted” (p. 17 KE). Carrier is, not unlike the bee, “bumping heads,” so to speak, and “doing a little dance” with the collective, and it is pointing him in a new direction, and he is following it to the next stage of his journey! This is how so-called “collective consciousness” works! Plenty have refused to read Carrier’s book at all, or only pick at it, like a dissected animal on a table. So we are putting Carrier on the table. Why not? How else would you motherfuckers listen!? Carrier’s life IS the [horny] Jesus myth! It has what apologists like to call “undesigned coincidences.” The apologist typically renders great metaphysical significance to this term. But it generally “boils down” to very mundane things like, this gospel says the grass was green at this time, and this gospel says the same thing happened in the season in which grass is green. But we did not “design” the “coincidence” that Carrier characteristically (we could say “habitually”) “listens” to voices coming from other people’s heads, we could say he “be listening” to these voices, through the magic of technology, through emails and comments on his website, (as we can see with the example of Scott supra), etc., etc., and we did not design the coincidence that Carrier started out “building crosses,” or that Carrier’s ego was nailed to a piece of wood on Mt. Numbah-One Pussy-Gettah on 11 Sep 2014, and he refused to let it die because a beautiful angel appeared to him in the form of a justification, and he went on with his life as if what had occurred was “merely” a triviality, etc., etc. Those “coincidences” were all Carrier. It was only FROM those pre-established “coincidences” that my “role” as the St. Paul shouting at him in the marketplace, and the Judas at the ego’s deathbed, “emerged” into view for me. Carrier thought he could cut the Gordian Knot. But this so-called “Knot” came back together as a rope and now Carrier has to decide to follow this rope to lead him out of the maze he’s in, because the alternative to this usage of the “rope” is, well, let’s just say it would not be “preferable.” And so Judas must tell Carrier that he (Carrier) failed to “sufficiently” honor the goddess in his quest to “worship” at her temple, and that he did this “habitually” (and that I couldn’t have recognized this pattern of “behavior”/activity in him without recognizing it and dealing with it in myself first). We could say he “be failing.” And we certainly did not “design” the “coincidence” that he marked himself for ego-crucifixion when he, so to speak, “knocked over a few tables” in his “quest” to enter “The Temple” and, in his case, access the presence of “The God~~dess~~.” But how could he properly honor the goddess? He is not equipped with the “proper” consciousness. He has phobia of the void. He must “envision” himself as being “born again” from this so-called “void,” because without the crucifixion of the ego, there is no resurrection of the ego, and therefore no access to the world of Mother Earth/The Universe of The Great Mother… Ok. Now Carrier’s going through the microtubules. Now he’s being spaghettified. Because before, he only saw himself as an individual self, and was afraid of losing this “individuality,” but he will certainly get to keep the individual aspect of his “collective” self[hood], but this “individuality” will be no “greater” than the “first among equals”; the Arthur at the head of a round table, but no “king,” of course. Ok. Now he’s going through the eye of the needle. See you on the other side, Carrier.

Of course, we have a saying. You might even call it a meme at this point (they said it on the Deprogram podcast recently, as of this writing). The egg that breaks from the outside is food; the egg that breaks from the inside is new life emerging. So we would still have to get Carrier to do all this voluntarily. When my egg broke, it certainly didn’t feel like I was poking my way out with my beak. But now it’s fairly “trivial” for me to “walk you through the process.” Perhaps Carrier will feel the same way after he’s gone through the cycle enough times. How many times? Groundhog Day, motherfucker! Whoops! There’s our “hyperbolic mode of discourse” again! Our point is that you have to see that you were already in Groundhog Day and you were already in Liar, Liar! You were already in the Last Temptation and the Passion of the Christ! You were already in The Wizard of Oz! You were already in Avatar! THIS IS PANDORA! YOU ARE A NA’VI! EYWA IS REAL! WAKE UP, WESTOID! I SEE YOU! DO YOU SEE YOUR FUCKING SELF!?

Ok, so where were we? Ah, yes, Marx’s Social Ontology, by Carol C. Gould, MIT Press 1978. Huh. MIT. Hey! That’s the school I flunked out of (what an [undesigned] ko-inky-dink!), but I could have just as easily (perhaps should have) gotten expelled for violating the harassment policy. I can think of four pretty blatant examples right off the top of my head, though, of course, there were “arguably” others. In one example we won’t get into (not beyond the event horizon, anyway), a girl punched me in the balls and poured water on my computer. The reason we aren’t getting into it (fully) is because I come out looking worse than she does. It was (mostly) that “creative/fiction writing exercise” I was talking about earlier. If we were still stuck in the Old Carrier’s maze of Aristotelian pervert-logic of excluded middle, we might be tempted to “argue” about whether this was a series of creative writing exercises “OR” harassment, but through positive-sum logic, we can recognize that it was both at the same time and in what we might call “corresponding” ways—we could perhaps call my little essays a “creative” form of harassment; they had, like, wizard-battles and shit—yes, I wrote about those a few times when I was in school; so what!? Who doesn’t!? We could perhaps call Carrier’s so-called “loveletter” to EHD a “creative” form of harassment. The “point” is that this is a “perverse” use of creativity, because harassment is destructive—in addition to everything else, it was certainly “destructive” to my computer. But, anyway, this is all in my own personal hell, which is now more like a “garden of trivialities.” It is indeed “trivial” to show that we all have our own “garden of trivialities.” If Dorian Gray had a picture in the attic, you have a garden of trivialities. Or at least it could be. Now it may very well still be “your own personal hell.” When class society (with its Yakubian Tricknology and coldly “industrial” and “institutional” and “indifferent” character) reminds us of our past, we must remind it of its future. And so, like I said, it’s not like I didn’t face consequences, in some sense, for everything I did that upheld patriarchy and class relations and consequently did not uphold the core Marxist/COME values of love, freedom, and justice. But were these consequences themselves “justice” (the Marxian conception of justice being not incidentally the subject of chapter 5 of Gould’s book)? Well, as we can infer from Gould, real justice would be a society that didn’t hate women. A society that provided the conditions/means for women to thrive. A society not filled with toxic environments and hoops and laser beam traps for women to have to summersault their way through. Ok. So it’s a fairly strenuous process to even get into MIT, and maybe they’ve changed this since then, but when I got in, over 20 years ago, there was obviously no real process to screen for misogyny, queerphobia, xenophobia, etc. (i.e., to screen for people like the person I was when I got in). This sort of thing, in addition to all the constant academic pressure (among other kinds of pressure), “fosters” something of a toxic environment, in that it brings out latent toxicity that was already in a bunch of these kids from being through pressure cookers their whole lives, myself included. Of course, unlike the vast majority of the rest of those kids, I could never properly worship the time idol on the wall in the way required of me. Gould doesn’t quite get into this, but here again it’s important to note the difference between pity and compassion. I have no pity on myself for flunking out of MIT; only compassion on myself for my struggle to, let’s say, “survive” in a place that was probably not for me in the first place, a place trying to shove a bunch of square pegs through round holes for the bourgeoisie—a place where I spent many nights in a computer lab or library instead of sleeping in my bed—a place that did not equip itself to protect women from harassment; don’t think I was the only (or a particularly “rare”) horror story to “occur” there. In any “university” aligned with the December 18 Party, the students would learn the wissenschaften of shamanic anthropology/accountability and the synthesis of the dialectic of Saturn and Jupiter, i.e., “pan-dialectical materialism,” i.e., “Marxism-Leninism-Maroofism.” Yes. The knowledge and methodology contained in this book could easily be expanded/assimilated into any sensible collegiate program of study, if by “program of study,” we mean “vision quest to transcend/’step through’ one’s phobia of the void/nature/women/divine feminine and the birth-death cycle and crucify and resurrect the ego and consciously join the collective consciousness and the World of Mother Earth/the Universe of the Great Mother”—if that’s what we mean by “sensible collegiate program of study,” and why not? This is precisely a not only “functional” but also very meaningful “reconstruction” of the traditions of our ancestors that connected them to universal intelligence (which obviously includes what people call “emotional intelligence”) that was robbed of the human being in its forcible conversion from the pre-capitalist (or, rather, “pre-civilizational”—which we were for some 4 million years, if you count the whole genus) subject into the so-called “universal” bourgeois subject, which, again, Gould gets into in ch. 1 of MSO. So what’s the big deal? Look. Some day, if there’s still an “MIT,” this “curriculum” might very well be taught there. I would, in fact, accept a degree from MIT for this book, if they were willing to confer one upon me, but first I would insist that they retroactively expel me for violating the harassment policy, but they couldn’t exactly do that without the crumbling of the whole institution. Well, you see, MIT is right next to Harvard. And I was at MIT at the same time Larry Summers was president of Harvard, and I was at MIT when Summers, while [being] president of Harvard, made some particularly infamous[ly] sexist remarks about the at-the-time hot-button issue of “women in STEM [fields].” And so Harvard would have to retroactively, to 2005 or whenever it was, “expel” Larry as president of Harvard for fostering this environment where it can be argued that misogynistic statements can be considered “free speech” and therefore considered “constitutionally protected,” in which I was writing my little “creative/fiction exercises,” and MIT might have to retroactively expel the at-the-time editor-in-chief of the student newspaper for playing Devil’s Advocate on behalf of Summers—you know, people who actually had INFLUENCE. Would this be “justice”? The December 18 Party would see it as a greater justice for the whole plot of land on which MIT sits to be given back to the Turtle Islanders—or, rather, for WE Turtle Islanders to take it back by any means necessary. I’m sure the Turtle Islanders could use those computers more wisely than whoever’s using them now. And we are quite sure these same Turtle Islanders would consider this book worthy of publication—because of how it reflects Turtle Island Consciousness, of couse!

Ok, look, if we’re going to get into this fkn Gould book already, you motherfuckers are going to have to understand that labor is LITERALLY magic, which is to say that labor is the “dialectical aspect” of any phenomenon we can refer to as “magic”—we are speaking of things that actually exist, but we are also speaking of the imagination; and the connection between the two is what we are calling labor. Through labor, we carry out our own purposes. This carrying out of one’s (or a group’s) own purpose(s) IS what “telos” is! When you have a purpose (in your mind—into which it tumbled out of the subconscious), and a method, a “way,” to carry out this purpose, this “way” IS labor. Labor is how your mother brought you into this world—and we’re not just talking about the delivery; we’re talking the whole ~9 months! Labor is how Vince Hannemann built the Cathedral of Junk! It’s how Marx wrote the Grundrisse and Gould wrote MSO and I wrote this book. And when we labor, we are also necessarily standing on the shoulders of a bunch of other people’s labor, so to speak.

Picking back up where we left off, on p. xxiv, Gould says (alluding to p. xi: “I present Marx for the first time as a great systematic philosopher in the tradition of Aristotle, Kant and Hegel”) her “interpretation” of Marx presents “him as effecting a synthesis of systematic philosophy and social theory.” She contrasts this “synthesis” view with the two “prevailing” views, each of which only sees him as one (“humanist philosopher”) or the other (“economic theorist”), as she characterizes them: “philosophical, although not systematic” (p.xxiv) and “systematic, but not philosophical” (p.xxv), respectively. This (seeking a one-sided explanation for everything which Gould is pointing to in the liberal academic establishment) is clearly a consequence of the artificial, analytical-dominant, zero-sum pervert-logic based “mindset” and mode of being the ruling class corralled these academics into that has us asking questions like “nature OR nurture,” etc., etc. I’m not sure what Carrier’s metaphysical basis is for “transcending” this one-sided view of all this stuff. We can chalk this up to just another item in his garden of trivialities, but he has a habit of saying “violation of the law of excluded middle” when what he really means is “commission of the fallacy of excluded middle,” when he means a falsely excluded middle. But of course properly excluding middles is one of the pillars on which Aristotelian zero-sum pervert-logic stands—can’t stand without it. Ok, so where are these properly excluded middles, Carrier? Gary Michael Brown isn’t around to give us the “judgment” on whether there’s a “middle” for us to “exclude” between the supposed “dichotomies” of life being better than death or of life being good and death being bad. Of course, dialectical logic transcends the “dichotomy” because the dichotomy ignores the frequency/phase domain (which is of course in a dialectical relationship with the mechanistic domain). And so the “dichotomy” turns out to be a bit of a Pink Dragon. We have little use of it outside the domain of binary computing (which itself will surely become obsolete with the rise of quantum computing). We were sure we had mentioned that when Yaldabaoth is credited with separating the light from the darkness in Genesis 1, this is no historical act, of course, not literally, and yet, it is also not “merely” a “mythical” act, but also, a “logical” act. It was the “act” of creating the dichotomy. Genesis credits Yaldabaoth with creating the dichotomy. Let them who have “circumcised” ears hear, so to speak. The dichotomy was created for Yaldabaothian purposes. Christ [Consciousness] (and therefore COME Consciousness) came to overthrow the dichotomy in favor of the dialectic, and through the dialectic, the synthesis, i.e., the metaphysical/noumenal. You can’t get to synthesis from dichotomy. You can only have the total victory, the triumph, of the one over the other (and yet even this will always result in a stalemate of some sort). This is not how positive sum logic works. The so-called “recessive” gene still makes it into the next generation. Indeed, Gould continues: “By contrast, my interpretation sees the continuity between these two aspects of Marx’s work and indeed shows how, in the Grundrisse, Marx develops his theory of [social] alienation as political economy […] Marx remains both philosophical and systematic. Indeed, I would claim that it is his philosophical systematicity itself that accounts for Marx’s development of his theory of [social] alienation as political economy.” Carrier himself agrees on the importance of systematicity to any philosophical worldview. It allows us to cross-reference knowledge. It allows us greater access to “truth,” which is to say it allows us greater access to the truth-seeking and -finding function Mother Earth gave us in our DNA of [building] shared consciousness through shared labor. You must understand how advanced a form of “evolution” it is for a superorganism to be able to seek and find truth through a process of [building] shared consciousness through shared labor. Of course, the forests do it, but they’ve been there for millions of years or whatever. It’s only “natural,” even though it’s also “metaphysical.” And so here, Gould “transcend[s] the one-sidedness” (p.xxv) by “showing how Marx’s concern with human possibilities, on the one hand, and his economic critique of capitalism, on the other hand, are unified in his systematic philosophical theory of social reality” (p. xxvi). A bold introduction, Dr. Gould! And we certainly needed to overthrow the dichotomy in favor of the dialectic in order to synthesize the subject-object dialectic, as Gould does in ch. 1!

Gould begins, “surprisingly,” by noting the more-and-more recognized phenomenon of, as Hasan Piker would say, “Marx glazing capital/-ism.” Indeed, Gould cites Marx’s ‘phrase “The great civilizing influence of capital”‘ (p. 1). Ha! Yes! Capitalism, which is to say, the capitalist mode of production, has certainly had a great “civilizing” influence on humanity. This great truth produces a bit of a cheshire cat grin on our face. You would have to read between the lines a bit to recognize the deeper truth that the ruling class “domesticated” us into these “universally developed” “social” “individuals”—through inflicting us with great trauma by subjecting us to reconstructions (and increasingly high-tech, at that!) of ancient esoteric human sacrifice rituals. What? We’re still in the sunken place, remember? The ruling class is the class that conducts the reconstructions/symbolic reenactments of the ancient Saturnian power-continuity and Jupiterian power-expansion rituals/memeplexes/sacrifices. What? Can’t you see? My time at the “Institute” is a very clear example of these rituals. Ah. You would need a microscope for the Yaldabaoth particles again. Look. The Institute necessarily accepts a lot of people who aren’t exactly working within the normie paradigm—schizos and psychos. Most of the time, these people are perfectly harmless, but they have a tendency to, let’s say, get carried away—I certainly did a few times! But when people get “carried away” in groups, well, that IS the “nature” of the MK Ultra-type “experiment.” Ah. One time, I was in a dorm room with a bunch of usually reasonable, friendly-ish people, when they pulled a big bag of weed out of a chest of drawers. I was a total square back then—totally not ready for weed (which might have meant it was the perfect time to start taking it up—but I wouldn’t even take a single puff until about 4 years later, and, even then, like I said, didn’t start using every day, and therefore was a total lightweight, until I was about 38), so I immediately got up from where I was sitting, and walked out the door, and they, just as quickly, all started shouting “PUSSY!” and laughing at me all at once. This is a bit of an MK Ultra-type experiment “in the wild,” so to speak. In a sense, I was denying the call to adventure, but in another sense… you call that a call to adventure? I wasn’t the baby bird, I was the caterpillar, remember? I wasn’t cut out to be a foie gras duck for “information”! Especially not that kind of “information”—and looking back on it, we’ve seen examples of people starting to use it before they were ready, and, well, maybe it was a good idea for me to wait until my late 30s. What. Of course weed is a form of “information.” It’s in at least one of Dawkins’ 4 categories, which means it’s also a “form” of “memory.” The verification of this “claim,” if you want to call it that, will be left as an exercise for the reader, because that’s how I verified it. Ok. So I was accepted into the Institute, in a sense, almost SO, almost IN ORDER THAT, I would become a “statistic.” If we were to use your pathological language, we might say I was a bit too scatterbrained for a place like The Institute. I thought I could “cut the gordian knot”—mostly by depriving myself of sleep; this wound me up in a bit of a “hellish” series of predicaments, as it often does. Being “scatterbrained” can be a death sentence in our world. You can read about the people who became “statistics” at The Institute by falling off of balconies or when trying to climb fences while drunk. We take great compassion on these human “statistics,” but, you know, that, on its own, doesn’t quite get us to justice. If, somehow, younger me were presented to current me, in some kind of Good Will Hunting scenario, current me would immediately recognize the (casual, cold, cruel) misogyny in younger me’s little “creative writing exercises” and just as quickly recognize that it was a very predictable outcome of the kinds of traumas the younger me had been through in being sacrificed to the master-slave dialectic from an early age, through no real “(conscious) fault” of the younger me’s parents, blah, blah, blah. And then current me would have to teach younger me a few lessons on grief—”grief studies,” we could call it. “Course 25,” we could call it. That’s an Institute joke. And maybe then I would have been ready to learn self-love, because my failure to love others was connected to my failure to love myself. Um. Nice story, but we would go on to find that Larry Summers’ crimes against humanity went quite beyond a few public comments OR essays, and, indeed, quite far beyond anything I ever did or dreamed of doing at The Institute, and, indeed, that The Institute itself had received funding from Jeffrey Epstein, and so you can see that this “problem” of the “toxic environment” or rather, “environment of horror” is quite systemic within class society, and especially “elite institutions.” And, Marx says, it is this same environment of horror that was, let’s say, “required” to, let’s say, “transform” the human being from its individual and collective identity as a Child of Mother Earth, etc., etc., into the oh-so “cultivated” and “cultured” and “civilized” “universally developed” “social” “individual.” And Praise Be to capitalism and the ruling class for torturing us—whoops, “transforming” us, into these Universally Developed Social Individuals, (let’s call them—”UDSI(s)”). But that is what Marx means. Capitalism, in “civilizing” us, has “cultured” us, as well. Marx, always looking forward, is pointing to the necessity for us to expand out from this current culture in ways that don’t get us all addicted to poison and to poisoning the biosphere (or, rather, the planet itself). Why do you think Mother Earth is heating up? It’s something of an “immune” “response” to a certain “toxin” or rather “virus”; a certain toxic “species” of false consciousness; the Yaldabaoth false consciousness. It would be highly anti-humanist to say that we humans “are the virus”; and we are not anti-humanists. The “virus” is clearly this species of false consciousness of the undialectical parasitic/dominionist masculine that the ruling classes unleashed on the world some 10kya as a weapon in their war for global domination and to “move themselves forward through spacetime” and into the frequency domain. But there is good news, of course. In transforming the masses into these UDSIs through proletarianization (and, perhaps, overproletarianization), capitalism, as Marx has already told us, has “manufactured” its own grave-diggers, which is to say that the [over-/lumpen-, even] proletarianized subject is in a “perfect” position to start doing the labor to raise theirself into revolutionary consciousness, and therefore revolutionary action. We have nothing to lose but our chains. Ha! “But that’s where I keep my flowers!,” you whine? Pluck the goddamn flowers from your goddamn chain and make a wreath out of them! Then you can throw off the chain! WAKE UP! GET OUT OF PLATO’S CAVE! WALK INTO THE SUNLIGHT!

Yes, Gould tells us. Marx sees the UDSI as the fundamental unit (“entities,” she says) of society (in our current era of class society), and sees this unit as a “product” of the history of class relations (though contingently so), and further sees this unit as necessarily “in relations” with other such units, and these relations themselves are as much a part of the “unity” as the “unit” theirself. Of course. It couldn’t be any other way. We cannot separate ourselves from our relations with the collective except synthetically (or perhaps “artificially”) through abstraction (but watch out for the point when abstraction becomes alienation!). The Marxian analysis is of concrete (as in, not abstract) human beings in concrete relationships with other concrete human beings. This is why we need a labor theory of the noumenal. These “concrete” UDSIs are Kantian “beings-in-themselves” (cf. “thing-in-itself”), and therefore cannot be said to be “known,” in a Kantian sense, through Kantian means—this is what Edwardes tells us as well (see previous essay). This is where the concept of the Engelsian thing-for-me/us comes in. I am a being-in-itself, and through labor, in the Marxian sense, including shamanic labor, I was indeed able to come into knowledge of myself as being-for-itself, not merely being-in-itself. But anyone is capable of gathering up knowledge of theirself as [an instantiation of] Kantian being-in-itself by simply performing certain experiments regarding their material reality/existence, i.e., their existence in the world of atoms, through, e.g., seeing the white blood cells passing in front of their retinas. You are the being-in-itself which you are, which is to say, you are the “matter” AND the awareness. You are the phenomenon AND the noumenon. You are the ontology AND the epistemology. It couldn’t be any other way. Well, look, if you can know yourself, then you can know others. All we need to do is synthesize the dialectic.

“Marx sees capitalism as a stage of historical development,” Gould tells us (p. 2); “stage” as in “not permanent.” And so, Gould says, “in the Grundrisse Marx traces this development through three social stages; (1) pre-capitalist economic formations, (2), capitalism and (3) the communal society of the future[,]” and “Marx characterizes the different stages of history in terms of the different modes of social relations among individuals at each stage.” This is very important. Remember from our discussion of “Social Formation Theory,” as covered in the good old VHMT, that the mode of production of a society “determines” the modes of social relations (though not every individual relationship, of course). Remember that Oceania is “missing” men with top hats that you have to call “sir”—and precisely BECAUSE of the prevailing relations of production! Gould then announces that she “shall argue” that, in Marx’s view of this historical “development […], the logic of this historical process follows the Hegelian form of the dialectic.” This is not a view that Marx “imposes […] on history […] a priori.” Neither does Marx view “history as having an internal logical necessity in itself” (p. 2). And so as to elaborate this secret third view of Marx on the relation between dialectical logic and history, Gould tells us, “we must first examine the Hegelian dialectic and Marx’s use of it in his theory of historical development” (p. 3). What a sensible idea to accompany such a sensible labor! She then says, again, that we must understand these UDSIs we’ve been discussing as not a fixed, static category, but as developing in a historical process (largely “steered,” we can say, though not “determined” or “fated,” by the ruling class), and announces that she “shall show that, like Aristotle, Marx gives ontological primacy to individuals—that is, he takes them as the ultimately real beings—and sees both history and society as constituted by their activities,” but also, “that Marx’s conception of individuality is not an individualist conception (as is, for example, that of classical liberal political theory)” (p. 3).

It would be very helpful to put Gould’s “schemata” (p. 4-5) of “Marx’s interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic” of the form in which society “develops” into a spreadsheet, to show the “Hegelian” nature of the development at each stage, in which the negation of the negation carries forward characteristics of that which had been negated the first time.

Ok. Don’t worry. This table will totally make sense by the end. As will Gould’s characterization of the ‘stages, or as Hegel calls them, “moments”‘ of the dialectic as corresponding to the [stages of] development of the “consciousness” of the subject or, as we have said, “unit,” of society, which, she says, “are (1) Being in itself or immediacy, (2) Being for another or mediated being, and finally (3) Being in and for itself or mediated immediacy” (p. 5). This is important because it allows us to properly introduce the subject-object dialectic, finally. Because we “jumped the gun” a little by using the word “subject” before Gould does. She doesn’t speak of subject and object until after she brings up being in itself, i.e., being for self and being for other, because subject and object cannot be understood apart from BFS and BFO, and there is a dialectical and not “dichotomous” relationship between the two. For Hegel, the “moments” of the dialectic come before our capability to address subject and object. For Hegel, Gould tells us, “being in itself” is “something [] taken […] as a unity unrelated to anything external to it. [But…] this being in itself already contains an implicit self-differentiation […], namely, it is this being and not some other being. As such, it presupposes other being as different from it […, and] this is not simply a logical claim, but an ontological one,” (p. 5-6), i.e., that the ontological status of a being as such “presupposes” itself as a being in “relation to” other beings, which are necessarily different beings, and “therefore posits this difference from itself as its own condition for self-identity” (p. 6) (cf. Edwardes on the “who are you?” coming prior to the “who am I?”). And so Gould tells us that, for Hegel, when a being in itself “stands in relation” to an other, it does so AS being for other, and vice versa. This is where, “for the first time we can introduce the terms subject and object: The other, insofar as it is an other for the being in itself is an object for this being, with respect to which the being in itself is now a subject” (p. 6). Being in itself, as soon as it was exposed to other being, stopped being/existing as exclusively being for self and now includes being for other. This, Gould tells us, is a situation in which “the original unity has become a disunity,” in that the relation between the self and the other appears external, however, this is only “appearance.” “In reality, therefore, this disunity is transcended by the deeper unity in which the object is realized as the subject itself in its otherness,” a phenomenon of “the self-separation of being” (p. 7), because “otherness” is “the condition” for “selfness,” and we will see that our “conditions” cannot be viewed as “metaphysically” “external” to us. Therefore, in the third “moment” of the dialectic, the “subject” sees itself as “in union” with the totality through recognizing its “conditions” as an aspect of “itself” or, “mediated immediacy”—its “immediacy” is “mediated” through these “conditions.” Gould goes on to say that this is also the case with our relationships to the objects we produce. Initially, we only see the products as “external objects” rather than aspects of ourselves. These objects we produce ARE aspects of ourselves. If you don’t recognize them as such, that only means you have been “alienated” from them. She says it herself: “there is a mistake being made in which the subject takes the other [the object which the subject has produced] as wholly estranged or wholly external to it. This stage is one of alienation. In the third stage the subject achieves self-knowledge in the recognition that what it knew in the second stage as an other is nothing but the subject itself in its objectified or externalized form” (p. 7, emphasis added). To Hegel, and therefore, to Marx, the objects we produce are aspects of ourselves; they are ourselves in “objectified” form; in the form of an “objectification” (an object we have brought into being out of its conditions as a “thing-for-us”) and in “objectification” as the activity of producing these objects. “Finally,” Gould says, “the stages in the dialectic are characterized by different kinds of relations which obtain at each stage.” And so, “in the first stage,” which corresponds to pre-capitalist stages of class society (specifically the feudal stage, we shall see), the slaves—whoops, I mean subjects, do not recognize themselves as separate from their social totality, “that is, they are not individuals but only dependent aspects of the being in itself or the whole” (p. 8). She is saying that this is the level of consciousness of the masses in feudal/pre-capitalist society. You didn’t see yourself as having “free will” in the “powerful” way Carrier and Gould and I mean it where you can “change your stars” (and where the masses can consciously “shift [their] reality”). We’ve referenced A Knight’s Tale (the 2001 film) once or twice. This film should be understood as fairly “deep,” fairly “literary,” perhaps. It should be understood as a symbolic/mythic representation of the seedlings of capitalism and bourgeois society and our good old UDSI sprouting from the soil of feudalism. The torture process of the master-slave dialectic specific to his society/era IS what “transforms” the peasant William Thatcher into the UDSI Sir William Thatcher. Sir William Thatcher is certainly more “universally developed” than peasant William Thatcher. He knows how to dance. He knows poetry. He knows fashion. He knows how to hold a goddamn lance. And an early bourgeois element is very important in this development of his. Namely, the armor-maker, who, let’s not forget, is a woman, bears an early form of the entrepreneurial spirit, well, more importantly, the innovative spirit. The whole point of feudal society was to stifle and choke the innovative spirit. We can see this choking impulse rising back up in the ruling class as I write this. But capitalism, Marx tells us over and over again, was a progressive force in the time of feudalism. Of course it was. We can see how much more “progressive” Thatcher was than that dick Count Adhemar, especially when it came to their views on women. Count Adhemar represents the forces trying to uphold [the current] hierarchy. As such, naturally, he’s represented as a psycho. Of course. The psychotype (which, remember, “exists” within all of us) thinks hierarchically, therefore, “naturally,” uses the hierarchy to get ahead, therefore, is very interested in upholding this hierarchy. Um. The most effective way to uphold the current hierarchy, to the psychotype, is to, speaking technically of course, be a dick. Count Adhemar is a dick not because he represents “a” human being, but because he represents a whole system for upholding hierarchies. But now it’s Carrier who’s stuck in this second stage of consciousness. A Knight’s Tale can “inform” us about this third stage of consciousness as well, if we give it the Dr. Manhattan chrysalis treatment. Looking at this myth like adults requires us to recognize that there are deeper truths hiding underneath the surface. Well, we are still in the sunken place. And in the sunken place, we must not recognize A Knight’s Tale as some “triumph of good over evil” or “determination of an individual over the establishment” or any of those other Pink Dragons floating in your head. In The Sunken Place, we recognize that, if he wants, Sir William Thatcher carries all the seeds he needs to plant in order to become the next Count Adhemar, or even greater—an even greater dick. In the Sunken Place, we must recognize that capitalism became the next Count Adhemar, and that it became the next Prince Edward, and the real Prince Edward was surely no chill dude. Ok. So what’s preventing Sir William Thatcher from becoming the next Count Adhemar? Well, in the old story, it was nothing but his bourgeois ego-righteousness, which I would ordinarily say is as filthy rags, but Sir William Thatcher ends the story with all clean rags. But there is nothing preventing these rags from becoming filthy again within bourgeois ego-righteousness, as we’ve seen. So in the new story, William will be given no clean rags, only the fire from within, which can’t be “given”—we will not be calling him “sir” in this story. But William Thatcher can’t lead a peasant uprising to overthrow the Prince Edward in the new story unless these peasants have been proletarianized, i.e., tortured—whoops, “transformed” into the goddamn UDSIs we’ve been talking about! That’s you, motherfucker! You can dance! You know poetry! You know fashion. You can probably hold some kind of weapon, I don’t know, or tool, at least. You can change your goddamn stars! You’re ready to overthrow the goddamn prince because you’re conscious enough to see past his bullshit narrative that his power comes from “god” and that you’d die without him in his place as your ruler. Motherfucker, OUR power comes from “god”—it comes from Mother Earth! It comes from the Great Mother! And no little prince on any little hill is going to overpower the Children of Mother Earth! These “princes” would require stolen land and stolen labor! And these “privileges” will be denied them! They will certainly be denied them in the third stage when we’re ready to recognize all this stolen land and stolen labor for the stolen land and labor it truly is! Yes! You had to watch a bunch of movies and go to school (and, statistically, be abused by your parents and teachers and classmates) and work (and, again, statistically, be abused by your bosses and “friends” and coworkers) and hang out with people and go to dances and conferences so you could be tortured—whoops, “developed,” “cultured,” into one of these goddamn UDSIs we’ve been talking about, because you can’t overthrow the king with goddamn peasant brain! This has been tried! There were many peasant uprisings. None of them overthrew the king because, well, they were phobic of getting rid of the king. We hear that the peasants even got upset when the liberals got rid of the Czar (and especially when the Bolsheviks got rid of them for real), but we haven’t looked into this—certainly not pivotal to our “argument.” People say they want heroes. If we’re talking the Oedipal hero (i.e., Batman, Superman, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Taylor Swift, White Nationalist Jesus, what have you), then we’re talking kings. These people don’t want a “hero.” They want a king. That means they want to be peasants. If you want a “hero,” all you need to do to find your inner Muskrat Hero is to swim to the bottom of your subconscious and bring back a clod of soil to place on the Turtle’s back, etc., etc. And when we speak of “heros,” we necessarily speak of “villains.” And so we must understand that Count Adhemar was probably only a dick when he “needed” to be, i.e., when he could sniff out a potential breach in the hierarchy. The rest of the time, he was probably quite charming—probably quite a “shining” example of the status quo—probably not unlike Gary Michael Brown or my fellow students at the Institute (or, at one time, briefly, me!); he was in charge of “the free companies,” after all, whatever that means. We can say the same about Carrier. He’s only really a “dick” when he’s acting as an “agent” to uphold the current hierarchy to which he’s attached his ego. When he’s not doing this, he’s quite charming—or maybe that’s just me! I don’t know! Plenty of women seem to like him well enough, from what I’ve heard. Ok. Anyway, in the new story, everyone is just as much a UDSI as Will, and therefore, everyone is capable of changing their stars just as much as him, which is where we are now in capitalism, so now we need to move on to the next stage where we’re all capable of changing our stars collectively through our individuality. This is the third stage or “moment” of the dialectic Gould is talking about! We reach this third stage as a society when we reach the third stage of consciousness in which we recognize the objects we produce as our own, as objectifications of ourselves, as ourselves in objectified form. When you cook your own food, and then eat that food, you are what you eat—metaphysically and physically/dialectically, in the mechanistic and frequency domains. The second stage is characterized by this level of consciousness of the masses where they make the “mistake,” Gould says, of not recognizing the truth of our “own”ership of the objects we produce, and, indeed, the conditions of our producing them, where “the unity or being in itself is negated and transformed into a disunity in which there are only separate subjects and objects” (p. 8). What’s going on is that capitalism developed us into UDSIs, but wants us to go back to having the consciousness of peasants. That’s not how it works, comrade! The bourgeoisie requires the most advanced Yakubian Tricknology and vast portions of the world’s resources to artificially tamp down the consciousness of humanity from matching, corresponding to, our social-being as UDSIs! This is why we yearn so intensely! We yearn to live AS the CHARACTERS we’ve been TORTURED into becoming! The bourgeoisie tortured/traumatized us into becoming these characters, and now they don’t want us to bring these characters out into the open. They want us to hide these characters under a bushel. Fuck that shit. Bourgeois society turned you into a character; you might as well live as that character! That character is you! The potential to be A character always existed within you! That you became this specific character is entirely “contingent” upon the society you developed within, but the UDSI can be whatever character they set their will and effort to! And the UDSI can CHANGE society through the individuality “cultivated” within them BY this same society! But of course, this so-called “Universally” DSI (i.e., you, dear reader) has not stepped through their shadow, which “contains” the “spirit(s)” of their peasant ancestors. We can only surmise that it caused the peasants great trauma when the liberals and/or communists got rid of their kings. The proto-liberals were already starting to “get rid of” the way of life of the peasants at least as far back as the enclosure acts of the 1700s. We must understand that this was done so as to, in a sense, “liquidate” the peasantry into proletarians, in a sense, as “fuel” for the rise of capitalism, i.e., the capitalist mode of production and the global hegemony of bourgeois society with the bourgeoisie as ruling class. And we must surmise that this too caused great trauma to these proletarianized peasants. And so we must heal the spirits of our peasant ancestors, who were duped into following the westoid Oedipal hero of motherfuckerism and Saturnian Ring-Giver of child sacrifice. You know, if you are a westoid, before your peasant ancestors were peasantized by the so-called “aristocracy” (i.e., gangsters in fancy costumes), they had a lot of their own folky, quite nature-based traditions. They retained many of these traditions as peasants in a peasantized (“[Constantinianly, so to speak] Christianized,” i.e., a flock in need of a shepherd) form. There’s plenty of peasant poetry and dance and fashion and tool usage and all that sort of stuff. And, again, there were plenty of peasant uprisings, but they only started overthrowing kings when they started becoming liberals, because liberals don’t need some main character to worship. They can BE the main character—provided they climb the right hierarchical ladders (which didn’t “really” exist in this way before capitalism), of course, which eventually turns the whole thing into a kind of liberal aristocracy. This is very unstable. It cannot withstand this instability because the only recourse within liberalism is [still] not unlike that of Lord Farquaad where all the schizotypals are banished to some liberal, i.e., normie, mind-changing program, some Omelas basement, some Ministry of Love. The schizotypals are the ones who recognize the master-slave dialectic of class society for the torture factory it is. We recognize the “esoteric” and “symbolic reenactment” and “torturing/trauma inducing” and “ritualistic” nature of the little everyday interactions with the ruling system we’re forced to endure in class society, unlike you normies. We can tap into the frequency domain. You can call this “hallucination” or a “disorder” of dissociation if you want, but that would be pathologizing. You too have the potential to just as “trivially” “tap into” the frequency domain. You would “simply” have to unlearn your normie programming so you could learn to trust the signals coming from your body/subconscious again. This is what is required to “transcend” this second stage in which “the original unity[…] has transformed itself into this aggregate of external relations.” Gould tells us as much herself. “In the third stage,” she tells us, “the separate subjects who were related to each other only as objects, namely, as beings for another, now recognize themselves in these objects or recognize these objects as like themselves. Therefore they recognize each other as subjects” (p. 9). This requires a historical consciousness. A consciousness that recognizes reality as having a dialectical material history and not merely accepting it as “given” (as it “appears” in the “moment”) by the ruling class. This requires a labor theory of time and causality, which we’ll get to in Gould’s next chapter. For now, it is the recognition of each other as subjects that allows us to “relate[] to each other not as alien external others, but as aspects of a common species subject[,]” she says, as “individuals who are unified through their common subjectivity[,]” and as having a “species or common character,” and, “[h]ere, the alienation is overcome.” We no longer see our relations as “external,” but as “internal, since they are the interrelations within this common or communal subject,” i.e., “a communal but differentiated subject that expresses itself in and through each individual” and “is thus mediated or differentiated by their individuality, but unified by their communality” (p. 9). This level of consciousness would require healing from our trauma. It would require crucifixion and resurrection of the ego, since the uncrucified ego cannot truly recognize the being-for-self of the other—it hasn’t graduated to being-for-itself from being-in-itself. Ha. Speaking of “graduating,” we were just fucking around before, weren’t we? Take another look at “being-for-itself.” That means “being-for-being,” motherfucker! It means “Being-for-Being.” There’s a oneness to this “Being.” Some people call it “god,” but that’s kind of silly, isn’t it? It’s Source. It’s the Great Mother. In the third stage of consciousness, you [will] recognize yourself as an aspect of the Great Mother, as a Child of the Universe. Well, we mostly interact with the Universe through our relationship with Mother Earth, don’t we? So “Child of Mother Earth” and “Child of the Universe” turn out to be fairly interchangeable.

Oh my god. It took us 10-ish (standard) pages to cover 5 pages of Gould’s book. Yes. That one paragraph was about 10 standard pages. It might behoove us to pick up the pace a bit. Gould spends the next few pages showing how Marx does indeed “follow the formal structure of Hegel’s dialectic” of the development of consciousness in “his concrete analysis of the [historical] stages of social development” (p. 10). Indeed, Marx describes serfs, living in the feudal mode of production, as bearing serf consciousness, and capitalist subjects as bearing a suitably developed consciousness for this subjectitude. This is covered in the table. So let’s go through it, real quick, because we already basically covered the “spirit” of it in our analysis of A Knight’s Tale. In the feudal stage, the “forms of social relations,” Gould tells us, are of “personal dependence,” because “the community as a whole is self-sufficient, is an organic totality and constitutes a relatively static or stable entity” (p. 10), which means that the individual is dependent on the totality and on their place in it. The serf cannot change their stars. This is “because” the “immediate unity between labor and the natural conditions of production” existing in this society creates conditions in which “both the mode of production and the relations within which the individual stands appear as natural.” This “appear” is very important, because, “[i]n reality, according to Marx, these relations are social and historical products.” Will Thatcher got sniffed out as an anomoly in the current paradigm when (and because of where) he got caught thatching. “Thus, the producer is identified with and bound to both the materials of his or her production, that is, [their] craft or skill” (p. 10). THAT is the depth to which Will Thatcher was “identified with and bound to” his thatching. It was his goddamn name! This is where the “inequal internal relations that are concretely particular” come in. If your name is Thatcher, that is your role. Because the “totality” is “relatively static,” i.e., relatively stagnant. All this does is “create” “anomalies” of INstability and INstaticity! But these are no “anomalies,” comrade! These are the “seeds” of the development of the next stage of consciousness, and therefore, the next stage of fkn historical development! But this is where the “final” characterization of the stage of historical development comes in. Because the “community” is a “relatively stable totality.” The next stage starts when this “community/totality” fragments into the “individuality and external sociality” of the next stage (capitalism), which is to say that our social interactions become “mediated” through commodity transactions/exchanges, which (commodities) are themselves products of our labor and therefore “objectifications” of ourselves, but, as we will see, “alienated” in this stage through the capitalist production process, which is “advertised” as just another exchange of commodities (labor for wage), but, as we will see, is “in reality” something quite different. The serf has an “internalized” relationship to the totality, and hierarchically so, especially as far as the king is concerned, thus Marx and Gould call these relations “internal.” They have been internalized, AND they are “internal” to the totality (within which the serf views theirself as, well, something of a cog, which is why, Gould says, Marx will call the “social development” and, indeed, the “universe” of the serf “merely local” (p. 13, emphasis in original)). Marx points out the physical, i.e., dialectical, ways these relationships are internalized, but there are also, of course, metaphysical ways, as Gould says, “Thus these relations take on the force of tradition” (p. 11). Well, gee, thanks, Carol. “Tradition,” she says. “Spirits of the ancestors,” she does not say. Hmm. Look. I was a bit unfair to Marx. Of course he discusses the metaphysical aspect of the internalization of these relations. He can’t STOP bringing up the metaphysical. Didn’t you read the early chapters of Capital? He keeps on talking about werewolves and vampires and “animal spirits.” Animal spirits themselves have a very MATERIAL meaning for Marx. They’re tied to how much air and space and food and rest time you need in your workplace to avoid, well, dying. Plenty of horror stories about that in ch. 10 of the good old Capital Vol. 1. And so, again, we thank Gould for finding this quote from p. 163 of the 1973 edition of Marx’s Grundrisse where Marx characterizes the internalization of these relations such that the individuals of the community in this historical/consciousness stage “enter into connection with one another only as individuals imprisoned within a certain definition, as feudal lord and vassal, landlord and serf, etc. or as member of a caste, etc. or as members of an estate, etc.” (p. 11, Gould). Imprisoned within a certain definition, he says! Exactly! In A Knight’s Tale, Will was LITERALLY imprisoned as a result of this definition within which he was figuratively imprisoned by society. Another important concept Gould introduces here is that of property. Property, it will be seen, is no static concept, but is itself a RELATION that DEVELOPS in the course of the historical development of society. In the feudal stage, there is only community property, but this “property” is “mediated,” so to speak, hierarchically, and thus, it will be seen, is a relation of domination in this stage of society, which, it will be seen, is “unjust,” because even justice itself, we will see, is no static concept, but, yes, a set of relations and conditions that develops along with society. Indeed, “in these communities,” she tells us, the system of justice, i.e., “the forms of obligation and of legal right” (p. 12) do not take the form of “for example, a state or legal system institutionalized in the form of courts, judges, and so forth. Rather, these social relations are internalized in the traditional relations among persons in the local community and have their force almost as a natural condition.” The tradition comes to be seen as a natural condition. As with identity, as with consciousness, as with justice. There’s nothing “wrong” with tradition per se. What’s “wrong” is hierarchically mediated traditions, which invariably become traditions for upholding hierarchy. This is why we need to modify our traditions into the dialectical rather than the hierarchical (i.e., dichotomous). This is why the Jesus of Last Temptation is “greater” than the Jesus of The Passion! He’s not an Oedipal hero! He’s much more the Muskrat hero. I’m sure we could do a little Rank-Raglin vs. Muskrat hero analysis on the Jesus of Last Temptation, but perhaps that should be a separate essay. Gould also tells us that, in this stage, the only “external” relations are those “between one community and the next” (p. 12). This is where the seeds of the external relations of formal equality of law/”property”/exchange and concrete inequality through the production process start to germinate. Because this stage requires all these relations to be “externalized,” i.e., requires fragmentation or “dissolution” of the previous internality/”unity,” i.e., requires TRAUMA! Requires separation of “both the unity of the producer with the community and with the soil[,]” i.e., with the spirits of the ancestors, i.e., through trauma. Trauma is what is required to “separate” us from the spirits of our ancestors. We covered this, right? Maybe not, but we mentioned that the ruling class separates us from the spirits of our ancestors through the human sacrifice symbolic reenactment rituals. In a recent interview on some podcast, Raven (aka Dr. Kyser) spoke of how one of the little cracks in her westoid psychiatry practice was that she saw indigenous clients, and that, for them, typically, healing must involve the spirits of the ancestors. And what does westoid psychiatry have to say about that? They would have to catch up! Westoid psychiatry would have to get with the fkn program. If, in Capitalism, anyone can become Will Thatcher, (then) in the next stage, everyone will be as powerful as Neo, in the sense that they will be capable of mentally resisting the efforts of the remnants of the old ruling class to steal our land and our labor; and of physically defeating them, but we will not be “techno-messiahs,” we will simply be COME/COTU! And Mother Earth and the Universe will be our true “leaders.” Gould about tells us as much that the development (from “seeds”) of capitalism required torture: “a condition for its development is the emergence of the landless, propertyless worker” (p. 13-14) i.e., something very much like the circus performer (pedicab driver?) or traveling salesperson (pedicab driver?) or sex-worker (pedicab driver? I have reason to “imagine”—we won’t say “suspect”—that one, in particular, of my passengers was a sex-worker, anyway, so, if so, we were “working” the same turf). These, remember, are less “names for jobs” per se than, broadly speaking, different “facets” of a single business model. You may find, if you examined it, that your job in capitalism is not so different from the circus performer or traveling salesperson or sex-worker. Hey. Some people like those jobs (I would love being a pedicab driver again if I could afford it). But in capitalism, that IS the job. And it’s necessarily exploitative, hence, unjust, because it separates (“alienates”) us from our labor and the products thereof. It separates us from the objectified form of ourselves. It separates us from the conditions for our self-actualization. Requires us to “separate [our] ability to work from [our] person[s] as [our] only property” (p. 14). All these relations and conditions are now mediated through commodity exchanges, these relations of formal equality in law/exchange, but concrete inequality in the production process. Note that she is saying that our ability to work (our labor power/labor time) is our only property. Our body is not considered “our” property because a body is not “property” because we are not slaves—not even to ourselves. I have to mention this because I had a libertarian roommate a few years ago (previously unmentioned).

Ok! Back to the table! It would not be true to say that I learned building tables from Carrier, but he certainly put a lot of tables in OHJ! We’re doing a bit better, BTW. The last paragraph covered 5 pages in about 5 pages. So, in this second stage, capitalism, the “personal dependence” of the previous stage has been “replaced” by a “personal independence based on objective dependence.” Marx is getting a bit cheeky again here. Gould cites, from Grundrisse, p. 163, that ‘their independence “is more correctly called indifference”‘ and, from p. 156, “the reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection.” We saw this “indifference” pop up its ugly head in a very real way in DarkMatter’s Burger King incident. But “personal independence” of course because [of how] the individual has been “fragmented” from the totality, but “objective dependence” because of the dependence on (and, at some point, an almost “imprisonment” within the framework of) commodity exchange, i.e., ‘”this reciprocal dependence is expressed in the constant necessity for exchange and in exchange value as the all-sided mediation” (p. 156).’ (p. 14-15). This is why the relations of society in this stage are “external” and “abstractly universal” rather than “internal” and “concretely particular.” Our labor can now “become” any commodity through the “system of simple exchange,” “[a] further presupposition for the emergence of capitalism,” Gould says (p. 14), which contrasts with the feudal system, where the producer “produces in order to consume and consumes what he or she produces” (p. 10). “In exchange, the personal or internal relatedness of pre-capitalist society is replaced by external relations in the marketplace, that is, between the value of commodities” (p. 15). We see our social relations as value relations between commodities (and, in capitalism, value always gets abstracted to “price” sooner or later, which is how they fleece us in the labor/production process). Indeed, Marx says, the realm of exchange is, roughly speaking, a system of what we could call “formal equality,” in that the “equality” of exchange is “guaranteed” (“formally”) by “laws” and a concept of “personal property” and agency, i.e., free will, i.e., “that the agents in the exchange possess what they exchange and are free to contract in the marketplace, that is, to agree in exchange on the equivalents[,]” and by ‘”recogniz[ing] one another reciprocally as proprietors, as persons whose will penetrates their commodities” (p. 243)’ (p. 15), i.e., having attained a level of consciousness required to interact in this “market” of external relations with alienated commodities. “Such a free act of divesting oneself of property is the mark of a legal or juridical person for Hegel and Marx” (p. 15). Note that, unless you own the factory, money is only “your property” because you alienated—whoops, “exchanged”—your labor into it. It is the exchanged, i.e., alienated, form of your labor. You exchange your commodity of labor power/time in the marketplace for money and then exchange it for other commodities. The owner of your “factory” exchanges money with you for the commodity of your labor power/time and turns it into more money for them than they started out with, and less power/time for you. Marx calls this M’ (“M-prime”) in Capital. The “prime” means “unequal exchange.” This takes the form of profits for the owner of your “factory.” This top-hatted Sir may very well “share” some of these profits with you in the form of “bonuses,” but this must be understood as crumbs from the table for the master’s dogs, another wreath of oat flakes for the inner slime mold, a ring from the Saturnian ring-giver. But, the realm of exchange, Marx says, features the characteristics of “equality” and “reciprocity” (p. 15). The third stage is all about extending this equality and reciprocity to the realm of production. But in the second stage, Marx says, ‘”individuals are now ruled by abstractions” […] (p. 164)’ (p. 16). Well, shit, Uncle Karl. That doesn’t sound too much better than being “imprisoned within a definition”!

Back to the table, we have “objective dependence” in this stage because of “the objectivity of money or exchange[,]” that “of capital, which stands over against labor[,]” and that “of the machine” (p. 16). We are “ruled by abstractions” in this stage because we produce commodities for exchange-value, which is an “abstraction” of use-value. And we do mean “ruled”: “With this development of production for the sake of exchange, objective dependence develops into the domination of labor by capital” (p. 17). Well, this is where the labor theory of value comes [back] in. “[L]abor produces surplus value, more value than it costs to reproduce the worker, that is, to reproduce his or her labor power as a commodity.” This “surplus value” is expropriated by the capitalist in the form of profit. “In this act, the productive force of labor becomes the productive force of capital, a force that maintains and multiplies capital” (p. 18).

Going back to the table, “finally,” we can say that this stage is characterized by “individuality” because we had been fragmented from the totality through the proletarianization process, and “external sociality” because of “social bonds created through exchange.” Or, as Gould quite dramatically puts it, the “totality” has been “exploded into atom-like fragments which now stand no longer in internal relations, but which stand opposed to each other in external relations” (p. 19); i.e., the totality has been fragmented into the individuals of bourgeois individualism who relate to each other primarily through commodity exchange. Remember that I was paying Carrier $3/month in “exchange” for the “privilege” of sending him an impenetrable book chapter-length wall of text throughout the week every week. This sort of thing is only possible in a society that has “advanced” to this current mode of production.

Ok! We’re finally ready to tackle the third stage! And we are picking up the pace! The third stage is very advanced. Certainly more advanced than the Oceania of 1984. It will be a stage of society in which, when Winston says to Julia that the woman across the fence hanging laundry is “beautiful,” Julia will say, “of course she is!,” with tears in her eyes. It will be a world where we probably won’t need dating apps, but if we had them, everyone in Austin would certainly be swiping right on Lizzie Velazquez. This stage will be the “negation” of capitalism, which means it will be a “negation of the negation” of pre-capitalist formations, which means it will bear a “resemblance,” but “only” Gould says, “a superficial and partial resemblance to the first stage, or, to put it differently, [will] repeat[] it at a higher level of development” (p. 20). “Resemblance” in that the external relations will be internalized again, but with the “formal equality” of the second stage fully “internalized” into “concrete” and “real or substantive equality” (p. 21). We will recognize, like the slaves recognized, Marx says, that they ‘”cannot be the property of another,” (p. 463)’ (p. 136) that the conditions for our self-actualization CANNOT BE THE PROPERTY OF ANOTHER! And that the most important “condition for our self-actualization” is that we find ourselves in a vast ecosystem of mutually beneficial relationships with other Children of Mother Earth! That we find ourselves in a world full of characters. It’s no mere coincidence that DFW places such a big emphasis on the importance of the relationship between the “character” and the “figurant” in the good old Infinite J. The people around DM’s table at Burger King were being figurants. They “found themselves” unable to, in the moment, become “characters” in DM’s story. The “not my story” of it all turns out to be connected to the “not my labor” of it all. Ok. Fine. One time, shortly before I left Austin, I was walking to the bus stop because I had dropped my bike off at the bike shop, but I decided to stop by a small park on the way. It’s a small tree-ringed area within a larger park with a very large, metal rectangular picnic table in the middle and some very artistic lighting structures. And it just so happened that there were already two people there setting up for a party. It was for one of them, who was turning 30, a bit of a rite of passage. So I asked if I could join the party. I volunteered to blow up the balloons. And so they let me blow up the balloons and I became a character in their story for an hour or two, because I had nothing better to do, and a good time was had by all. But this wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t first volunteered to become a character in their story (through sharing in their labor) by first being drawn (almost as if “by magic”) to a tree-ringed area. But no one is at Burger King because they want to be whimsical—except for kids. And typically the kids eat their little meals and then the parents have them fuck off with their little Saturnian crowns on a “quest” to the play area (if your location has one), the designated whimsy area, a bit “cut off” from the rest of the restaurant. Division of labor. Division of play/whimsy/imagination—which, according to Deleuze and Gauttari, must also be conceived of as forms of “labor”! Hwæt. Today is 27 Mar 2026. I’ve finally started reading Anti-Oedipus this week. You motherfuckers thought I was insufferable before. You must not have realized this whole time that our Muskrat Hero IS [a quite worthy instantiation of] the Anti-Oedipus hero the good old D&G are talking about! Can’t see why not! Before Oedipus was, the Muskrat Hero AM! “Or,” as Gould puts it, “the unfree social individuals in the organic communities of the first stage give way to formally or abstractly free individuals who are social only externally (that is, relating only through laws or market relations). In the third stage Marx anticipates the reestablishment of a community of social individuals, but now as concretely free. Furthermore, in Marx’s projection of this third stage, the individuals are characterized by the universality and differentiations that the second capitalist stage introduces into social life” (p. 21-22). This “characterized” (and “introduces”) is very important. What Gould is saying is that this is a stage so advanced that, to find “prefigurations” of it, if you insist, if you’re into that sort of thing, we would need recourse to the realm of science fiction. Something like My Hero Academia. Everyone in that society is very advanced (even the main character dude without the powers), and yet, there are still hierarchical relations. But if the first fkn episode teaches us anything, it’s that there is an even greater dialecticality beyond the hierarchy, because the main super dude in the first episode got injured or something, and thus his powers have time limits, and he drops one of his super bottles anyway, and temporarily screws things up for the kid without powers, and so the whole idea of viewing any of these relations as solely or primarily hierarchical turns out to be pretty useless. Hwæt. Yes. I watched a few episodes of My Hero Academia. I watched it in the behavioral center. The same place I watched a few episodes of the Menendez Brothers docudrama. Those dudes were also a couple of “characters.” We (my fellow “inmates” and I) were all excited because it just happened to be coming out on the 2nd day I was there. I watched a bunch of other stuff there too. Not much else to do. We will remember, if we read what I wrote about it, that I was taken to the behavioral center when I “became a character” in my “story” with my Uncle Puto, whereas before, in the moment, I had only been a figurant. And Marx/Gould are pointing to a society in which the level of consciousness of the masses will look just as advanced “compared” to our current level as the level of “powers” everyone has in the world of My Hero Academia looks “compared” to our current level of “powers.” Because. Goddammit. Our “schizotypy” IS our “individuality”! And our individuality IS our “superpower”! Our friend Raven has found her superpowers! And if she and I found them, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before the masses find them as well, because they were always there; it’s only that the ruling classes had us hiding them under bushels. Fuck that shit. Claim your goddamn power! You’re going to need to USE it to revolt! To join the revolution. Remember that to “join” is merely to defragment, IOW, to heal. Don’t be astonished at any of this. Pedicab drivers have a very advanced level of consciousness simply from existing in a “context,” in a “set of conditions,” that allows them to bypass certain bourgeois permission structures. They may very well be on their way to collectivizing this level of consciousness. A pedicab driver is certainly always a character. And we will remember that Zoeye L. had attained a level of consciousness that allowed her to be a CHARACTER in the story of Mario and the Racists in the Cracker Car rather than a figurant. And we will remember that Winston was thoroughly unimpressed the one time he let one of his figurants be a character—the old dude at the bar—but we must recognize that that IS where we learned (or rather, had confirmed to us) the important information that Oceania was “missing” top-hatted Sirs, etc. Winston didn’t have the CONSCIOUSNESS to recognize what a big deal it was that Oceania was “missing” these “Sirs.” You probably don’t think it’s a big deal either. I guess that only means you’re less advanced than that prole Winston stumbled upon in that bar. But the proles are never going to appropriate the means of production unless their consciousness gets a hell of a lot more advanced than Winston AND the prole from the bar AND our boy Eric the Jew-finder! We can only surmise that our boy Eric was a bigger fan of the division of labor than he was of the precious “ideals” he kept extolling. “The programme [Eric] sets forth is nonsense. The secret accumulation of knowledge—a gradual spread of enlightenment—ultimately a proletarian rebellion—the overthrow of [elite rule]. You foresaw yourself that that was what it would say. It is all nonsense.” Indeed! If the December 18 Party is going to overthrow the rule of the elite, all of our operations, our LABORS, will have to take place in broad daylight! In full view of these ruling elites! And why not? There’s too goddamn many of us! There are too many Muskrat Heros for these “elites” to keep us all under bushels! And we are quickly finding that you can’t arrest, or even shoot or bomb, people quickly enough to keep the collective consciousness under a bushel! And these ruling elites may very well find themselves unable to torture us back into compliance, back into, as D&G put it, Oedipalization, because even the most “exquisite” tortures they could hope to unleash upon us are but a pale imitation of those awaiting them in the dialectic of the subconscious. And if Winston had attained this level of consciousness, he could have easily told O’Brien, “there is no you, there is only me, and furthermore, THERE IS NO FUCKIN’ YOU! THERE IS ONLY ME!” And the pain (of the tortures with which they would torture us) is not exactly, as Maynard has said, an “illusion,” but it’s only a tiny point in the vastness of the frequency/phase domain! And where did Maynard get his little line about all this “pain” being an “illusion”? Well, among other places, he certainly got it from our very own Ronald P. Vincent. What does he say about pain on p. 46 of the good old Joyful Guide to Lachrymology? He says:

We are hurting and we want it to stop!

Pain is typically a warning that something needs to be addressed, although sometimes we inflict pain because it’s what we are used to, or we don’t know any better. But what’s wrong is never the situation itself, that’s always neutral. What’s wrong is our thinking or judgement [sic] of the situation.

You may say to me, “Ron, my stomach hurts… it hurts!” And I would say to you, “yes, your stomach hurts or so it seems, but you make it hurt that much worse when you add a negative story to it.” We can’t just stop at “my stomach hurts”. Your stomach hurting is a relative fact. But the fact that you don’t like that your stomach hurts, or you have to miss work and you can’t afford to, or you had plans for the weekend and you have to cancel and now you’re going to miss out, or whatever…therein lies the judgement [sic] and the creation of the negative story. We often don’t stop at the facts themselves but in a gross act of self sabotage we add a lot of extra mess onto it that increases our suffering. I cried a single tear and deftly caught it in my small bottle.

The other part of conscious suffering is looking at what the experience is meant to teach us. Now we could argue that finding the meaning behind the suffering is the creation of more stories, and that is very true. However, isn’t it more kind and peaceful to believe a happy story than a painful one? Every day is Judgement [sic] Day!
-RPV (1949), p. 46.

Now, if you’ve been picking up what we’ve been putting down, what Ron is saying here is not so different from Lana Del Rey’s “When the world was at war before, we kept on dancing—and we’ll do it again!” Our boy Winston gets himself in a bit more pain than he needed to by telling himself a bullshit story about why O’Brien was torturing him. Of course O’Brien is right—in that Power Over Others EQUALS the “power” to torture them. Our current Ruling Elites know this very well. But this requires stolen land and stolen labor (and artificial perversion of consciousness). Furthermore, even by their own standards, we are more powerful than them, because we have certainly “tortured” ourselves more than they could ever dream of by subjecting ourselves to, and synthesizing, the dialectic of the subconscious! And further still, we have recognized that any act of torture of “the other” is merely torture of “the self in its otherness”! So O’Brien, by torturing our boy Winston, is really torturing himself—You can’t “torture” me! Only I can torture me! All you can do is inflict “pain” on me! So what! Boring!—Because O’Brien is wrong about something else. The past DOES “still exist.” It “still exists” in the products of our goddamn labor! Gould covers this in ch. 2. It wasn’t O’Brien HIMSELF who built the Ministry of Love or came up with their torture techniques! That required the LABOR (not merely the IDEAS—although coming up with ideas is itself a result of labor—D&G are very clear on this point) of a bunch of other fanatics (and/or slaves) who came before him! Indeed, all the “torture” can be said to “still exist” in the instruments of the torture. In being struck, we also impact the weapon of striking.

Going back to Gould, again, she doesn’t mention here the torture required to transform us from peasants into UDSIs, but she does explain that it was a result of a development of the capitalist mode of production itself, because it needed to work us for longer than was required to reproduce ourselves, and this surplus labor resulted in surplus products which needed to be consumed, resulting in the “innovation,” let’s say, of “needs” for these surplus products to “fulfill,” which resulted in “the development of new laboring capacities to meet these needs. Thus labor itself becomes more diversified and more internally differentiated” (p. 23), as “artificial” as some of these new “needs” may very well be. She then says that our sociality has been further developed through the process of machine production, which requires the SOCIAL cooperation of many different workers in many different sectors with a diverse array of areas of expertise/experience. “The machine is thus the objectification of the workers’ sociality, but in alien form, that is, in a form belonging to capital. What remains is for the producers to recognize themselves in this alien object—to recognize the whole system of capital as their own work[,]” and this is what “leads to the third stage” (p. 24-25), in which we workers appropriate the means of production through recognizing them as the conditions for our own self-actualization, through unstealing these conditions, through unstealing our own labor, (from the bourgeoisie) and, in doing so, we will “reappropriate this alien or objective sociality and universality. [We will] become subjectively social and universal, that is, […] communal individuals” (p. 25), i.e., we will no longer be alienated from our own subjectivity, i.e., our subjectivity will no longer be dissociated, fragmented, compartmentalized, given the “Severance” treatment, or the “mommy’s little helper” treatment. Shakespeare says all the world’s a stage. This slightly looks past the LABOR required to put on the production, and, indeed, the LABOR required to watch it, to ABSORB and “appreciate” it with the “literacy” and “sophistication” you’d expect of a UDSI rather than a peasant or a child. Certainly the LABOR of the security apparatus was just as important as the labor of the band and the setup crew and the bar staff and the ticket handlers, etc., in my “experience” of, my “labor” of experiencing, the Creed concert in San Antonio on “Friday the 13th.” But they were not conscious that this was what they were doing. If they HAD been conscious of it, they would have realized that this labor of theirs was being alienated for the purposes of upholding hierarchy through, in this case, injecting a schizo with an MK Ultra-type drug—they would have been conscious that they were being used as non-autonomous characters in a bit of a “production”—or shall we say “reproduction,” as it was a bit of a reproduction, a symbolic reenactment, of a Roman crucifixion—and we can certainly say that if the “agents” who put me through this “ritual” had known that THAT was what they were doing, they certainly wouldn’t have done it! They weren’t demons, after all! Which is why Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But surely shamanic accountability will require making it known what they are doing! You are participating in reenactments of Roman crucifixion RITUALS (they ARE rituals!) for a REENACTMENT of the Roman Empire! And what can I say to this other than, “cut it out!”? The Roman Empire doesn’t love you, and neither does the reenactment of the Roman Empire! Mother Earth DOES love you! And her LOVE is far more POWERFUL than any entity that ever had the temerity to call itself an “empire”—and we might even say that the Archons of this Æon themselves, who “run” this empire, might not have instituted these rituals and kept them around for so long had they known about the resurrection of the crucified ego, which spells their doom. Because in the third stage, we, through these resurrected egos, will recognize this LOVE of Mother Earth in our fellow human beings in that we will recognize our fellow human beings and fellow earthlings as Children of Mother Earth! What I mean is that what Gould says of our relations with fellow human beings (our recognition of each other as subjects/agents “like ourselves”) can certainly be expanded to our mutually beneficial relationship with nature in general. “The relations again become personal relations of mutuality among individuals. The relations again become personal relations as in the pre-capitalist stage, but no longer relations of domination and no longer mediated, as in the second stage, by external objects [i.e./e.g., money, the products of our labor AS alienated objects. —MM]. The relations are therefore internal relations in that each individual recognizes the others as free individuals like him or herself. But in fact, it is this recognition of the other which is a condition for the full realization of the other’s freedom. Thus freedom is realized through social interaction” (p. 25-26), and we hardly need add that this “social interaction” must necessarily be interaction with nature—if nothing else, we are nature, after all, “synthesized” as we may be. And we are “independent” in this stage in that we are not in relations of domination and exploitation—this must be recognized as a very important form of independence, indeed as a condition for anything worthy of being called “independence.” And we are “objectively independent” in that we are no longer “dependent on” our objective conditions in that, in this stage, we are not alienated from them; they are not “owned” by another! Like in Stevie Wonder’s “Saturn,” we will “put back all the things we use,” because we will “own” those things and that is what “ownership” will mean to us! Stevie is very WISE to call this song “Saturn.” A schizoanalysis (see Deleuze & Gauttari) of this song reveals that it is Stevie who is the earthling and we who are the Saturnians. We are “cold” and operate on “war is peace” (or “peace is war”) logic “with a gun and bible in []our hand […] saying give us what we want or we’ll destroy.” But Stevie is an earthling who has kept the positive Saturnian energy of maintaining balance (i.e., putting back what we use) and living a long life (“people live to be two hundred and five”).

Back to Gould, the relations in this stage are “concretely universal,” she says, in that they are no longer merely “abstractly universal,” i.e., no longer “defined in terms of those qualities in which all individuals are the same, but rather a universality in the sense of a fulfillment of the concrete differentiation among individuals […] and where each is free to develop many-sidedly and in cooperation with others” (p. 25-26).

Ok! So that’s the table! That’s the Hegelian, and therefore Marxian, dialectic! We only haven’t achieved this third stage yet because you motherfuckers haven’t recognized yourselves in your goddamn objective material conditions, but I guess that’s not your fault. Veil of Maya and Yakubian Tricknology and all that sort of thing. That’s why we’ve covered the Veil of Maya and Yakubian Tricknology. The greatest trick the Yakubian Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. Hopefully, you’ve been disabused of this notion (that the Yakubian Devil doesn’t exist) if you’ve read this far. Fortunately, (unlike Hegel, who views historical development differently, Gould tells us), “Marx views the course of historical development as entirely dependent on the activity [‘choices and actions’] of agents who are fundamentally free […and so ‘the course of’ this] development is therefore possibilistic and contingent on these choices and actions” (p. 28). Wow, thanks, Carol! That’s great news! Yes! We can indeed not only surf the waves of history, but consciously (collectively) PRODUCE these waves, AS the working class and AS Children of Mother Earth! The masses can consciously, collectively change our stars! We’re gonna have to if we’re going to survive this little meltdown the ruling class is putting Mother Earth through right now. And because Marx views history as dependent on the activity of individuals, “Marx gives ontological priority to such active existing individuals,” in contrast to Hegel, who gives such priority to the “Idea.” And here, Gould does a bit of hand-wringing about “an ontological account of entities and relations” (p. 28), but I feel like we’ve already covered that. We can’t abstract abstractions into existence. We can only synthesize them into existence—again, this requires material/labor. Gould tells us as much herself, as, she says, Marx “argues” in the good old Grundrisse: “all of these concrete determinations have first to be realized in social reality itself before the adequate conception of its dialectical nature can be realized in thought. It is on the basis of our experience and knowledge of these real social circumstances that we come to form such abstractions as will be adequate to explain them” (p. 29). Wow! Well, that was way better than how I just tried to explain it! Thanks again, Carol! Yes. We have to see the pattern over and over and OVER again before it registers in our consciousness, apparently, in no small part because of the Veil and the Tricknology, no doubt. But once it does register, THAT is something “concrete”! Yes! Once the masses attain a certain level of consciousness, that level of consciousness BECOMES part of our material conditions! That’s why we haven’t reached the third stage yet. The ruling class is “hiding” the pattern from us or otherwise manipulating our perception (which is itself holographic, remember) such that, for most of us, it has failed to register. But once it registers for you the first time, that’s when the floodgates open. Remember that once you stand up for yourself the first time, you may very well find that you like standing up for yourself; that it brings you joy. “Thus according to Marx it is only in the epoch of bourgois society that social development has reached the point where it is possible to form an adequate abstract concept that will enable us to grasp the presesnt stage of social development as a development from a previous stage and as containing within itself the conditions for a new stage” (p. 29), i.e., this stage “develops” us to such an extent that it allows us to see that this stage was, DIALECTICALLY, a negation of the previous stage and THIS allows us to conceive of the next stage as the negation of this stage and the negation of the negation of the previous stage. “Hegel quotes Spinoza’s phrase to this effect: Every determination is a negation. [citation in original. Hegel quotes this in “The Science of Logic,” book I, section 1, ch. 2 (“Determinate Being”) —MM] (I might add that in the Grundrisse Marx also quotes this phrase from Spinoza approvingly.)” (p. 6). Once we recognize that we are the ones who determine, it will be “trivial” for us to recognize that we are the ones who negate! “This understanding of the dialectic as logical reconstruction also allows us to reject the view that social and historical development have an internal necessity. The only ‘necessity’ is that the past is past and therefore fixed and thus the dialectic is taken as a description and explanation of this originally contingent process.” Remember the owl of Minerva. “[O]ne cannot read forward, from potentiality to actuality, but only backward, from the actualities to the potentialities that eventuate in them” (p. 30). Gould expends the next 10 pages on “the ontology of individuals-in-relation,” as previewed earlier, but the point is, “the concepts ‘individual’ and ‘relation’ are not separable concepts” (p. 31). “No man is an island” and “ask not for whom the bell tolls” and all that sort of thing. “Production,” Marx says, ‘”is always production at a definite stage of social development—production by [and FOR, we could add! —MM] social individuals” (p. 85)’ (p. 34), i.e., always concrete and never merely abstract, i.e., always the Engelsian thing-for-us and never merely the Kantian thing-in-itself! And similarly, we are never merely Kantian (or rather Sartrean—but very similar concept) being-in-itself, but always Marxian being-in-relations. It couldn’t be any other way, since the Hegelian introduction of the other as the self in its otherness. And so our ontological “nature” is not “fixed,” but develops through our labor in the course of our history. “Where Aristotle conceived of the essence of a given thing as a fixed nature, or a natural kind, Marx holds that individuals create this nature in their activity and therefore it is neither fixed nor presupposed. This eventuates in a conception of a changing and developing essence. He calls this creative activity labor, which should be taken in a broad sense[…]” which “sense” we covered, in part, earlier—”value-positing activity” and all that sort of thing, and, “[f]urthermore, for Marx, the fundamental mode of this activity is social” (p. 34). This is why we cannot be separated from our relations. They make us who we are, in a lot of “fundamental” ways. ‘”Human being A, as such, is not a slave. He is a slave in and through society” (p. 265)’ (p. 35). And, of course, our relations “develop” and EVOLVE along with us, which is why we are no longer literally slaves. This is how we are “advancing” in the frequency/phase domain at the same time and by the same processes we are advancing in the mechanistic domain. And this, among other things, is why Marx views society not “as an aggregate […], but rather as a totality or whole that is more than the sum of its parts” that “cannot be understood apart from [the social] individuals and their activities” (p. 36) that, all together, constitute it, and, indeed, we (“these individuals”) are not constituted (or “interconstituted,” she says) “by these relations[,]” but “the existence and mode of activity of these individuals is the ontological presupposition of the relations into which they enter” (p. 38). The recognition of all this, Gould says Marx says, the attainment of consciousness of all this, is how we transcend the external relations of capitalism and internalize the relations again—how we will transcend the independence-that-is-more-properly-characterized-as-indifference of the second stage and achieve the society of love, freedom, and justice of the third stage, an interdependent independence, where we will no longer be ruled, and certainly not by abstractions. And that’s the end of chapter 1. In the next chapter, Gould says, she covers how the relations went from internal in the first stage to external (alienated, abstracted, quantified, categorized, monetized) in the second, but, like I’ve been saying, it has to do with how we were ritualistically tortured as subjects of class society, or as Gould says, “The answer lies in Marx’s account of the process of objectification” (p. 39). Well, that’s one way of putting it. And in Gould’s next chapter, we will also see what all this has to do with the “creation” of “time,” which, we will see, “aligns” quite well with Carrier’s metaphysically naturalistic view.

Gould begins ch. 2 with 5 “theses,” the first three of which have to do with Marx’s view of labor as “objectification” (producing objects for the PURPOSE of meeting our NEEDS), which leads to her 4th and 5th theses, which are the ones of particular interest to us in this analysis:

For Marx, labor is the origin of time—both of human time-consciousness and of the objective measure of time.

Marx interprets different modes of economic organization as different economies of time, and thus Marx regards time as a fundamental category in his theory of social development[…]
-CCG (1978, p. 41)

Gould covers the process of how our labor, therefore, our “objectifications,” are alienated in capitalism, because of the property relations, in which the conditions of our labor are the “property” of capital (which, of course, requires a particular regime of laws and “legality” and “primitive accumulation” and “mind control”), and we sell our only “property,” our labor capacity (power-time), to capital for a wage. And this is where time comes in, in Gould’s analysis, because, “In this exchange, the worker does not sell him or herself, but rather sells a temporary disposition over his or her laboring capacity to the capitalist” (p. 49), and this is where alienation comes in because, in order that capital may profit, they appropriate (i.e. steal) our surplus labor value by paying us less than the real value our labor produces for them, i.e., ‘”in exchange for his labor capacity as a fixed available magnitude, he surrenders its creative power[…] Rather, he necessarily impoverishes himself. . .because the creative power of his labor establishes itself as the power of capital, as an alien power confronting him” (p. 307)’ (p. 50-51). The “real value” of our labor is its creative power, but we exchange it for a fixed value, as Marx says, “like Esau his birthright for a mess of pottage,” and this value ends up standing against us since it is value that has been added to capital (i.e., not to us), which, in the capitalist economy, stands over and against labor, to the point that “alienation or the domination of labor by capital comes to characterize the production process itself” (p. 51). Ha. Indeed. The production process itself becomes “characterized,” i.e., tortured, remember, because of the power relations, in which Power Over Others EQUALS the “power” to torture them—and, like we strongly implied earlier, this requires “mind-control,” or, as Marx puts it, an environment in which labor is ‘”subsumed under the total process of the machinery […and this] machinery[] confronts [the laborer’s] individual insignificant doings as a mighty organism” (p. 693)’ (p. 52). Indeed. We are still in the Iron Age, after all. And the hardness of the iron of our machinery is reflected in that of the “machinery” of our institutions, but we are beginning to find that this machinery, and these institutions, have clay mingled in their feet. It’s ripe for the third stage of consciousness to come in like the rock that breaks the statue and becomes a great mountain that fills the whole earth. Because labor as “the activity of self-creation proceeds not merely through the production of objects but through interaction with others” (p. 52), and, of course, through interacting with others, we raise our consciousness to higher levels than we could on our own, and, indeed, become part of a greater “collective” consciousness. “Each individual, freed from the abstract one-sidedness of a ‘role’ in the objective production process, now is free to choose and develop whatever aspects of individuality he or she wishes.” Gould says that this will require that “necessary labor” will have “become completely transferred to machinery” (p. 54), however, what she does not say explicitly (though of course, we can “trivially” infer it from what she does say) is that this will also require the crucifixion of the individualIST (bourgeois) ego and its resurrection in the form of the ego of social individuality. We are not sure we can say we share this vision of fully mechanized “necessary labor.” We are quite fond of picking our own fruits and vegetables and cleaning our own toilet, and we are quite fond of using hand tools, etc., but we are “grateful” for the roto-tiller and the powered weed trimmer, and, of course, all the machinery used at industrial scales that greatly reduces “necessary labor time.” The point is that, in capitalism, this “necessary labor” is performed and administrated, divided and delegated, (and ultimately extended into surplus labor [time]) under unjust and unfree relations of domination and exploitation, relations of artificial hierarchy, and, once we attain the necessary level of consciousness to do the “metaphysical bean-counting” on these relations, we will then recognize exactly what we need to do in order to overthrow these relations in “exchange” for relations of this “concrete equality” we’ve been talking about! This is when we will recognize that Power Over Others is useless! Because it doesn’t help us thrive! What helps us thrive is cooperating with others [“within” nature]—but we must attain consciousness of this! We must attain consciousness that the silo is not the source! Of course, Marxian consciousness is consciousness that the silo belongs to everyone, but perhaps this has limits. We have heard of a phenomenon known as “sewer socialism.” What were we saying before. The ego is the “showerhead” of progress, but the subconscious is the interface between nature “per se” and this “ego” in which this water is “processed” from “source” into a form this “ego” can USE, which is to say that the subconscious is the city that “supplies” the goddamn water, in that we have been “civilized,” “characterized,” into “needing” certain processes [as “interface”] between ourselves and nature “per se.” This is related to the “nature” of the subconscious as “interface” between our “ego,” our “consciousness” and nature “per se“—the photons must pass through the white blood cells before reaching the “vision cells,” the subconscious is the interface between “external nature” and the “internal nature” of our consciousness. The subconscious is where we “digest” this “external nature” into “internal nature.” It couldn’t be any other way. Much of your “brain,” broadly speaking, is really in your stomach, and you need the whole digestive system to get the energy from the outside, in the form of food, to the inside, in the form of thought, heating, etc., and back outside in the form of, broadly speaking, labor. And so we must certainly all attain all the consciousness held by all the sanitation workers. These sanitation workers are certainly some of the most advanced segments of society. Comrade MLK Jr. knew this quite well. We are still in the sunken place, remember. So it’s a perfect time to introduce Comrade Marina’s extremely serious and plausible theory that the institution of the wheat silo is what, in a way, “necessitated” the development of certain shamanic practices/practitioners into a “priestly class,” and a sewer system and a dump system are no less silo systems than that of wheat, at these scales. I am not saying these systems will be abolished, but that they must be fulfilled. The maintenance of the sanitation systems in even any small town is a priestly duty, and must be regarded as such, except, in the third stage, there will be no “priestly class.” All the priestly knowledge will be very widespread. It will be “maroof.” I assure you I am not joking. Sewer Socialism is no joke. It’s very serious business. It’s certainly no less serious than the procedures of the early grain siloing cultures, except now without the “siloing” of knowledge and property. In the third stage, we will eat the Gordian Knot for breakfast and shit out a very useful rope by dinnertime, and when we wipe our ass with the Kantian thing-in-itself, and flush it down the toilet, we will know exactly where it is going. And I certainly consider Marina’s silo theory to be quite groundbreaking in our current stage of society, but in the next stage, the knowledge of it will be quite “trivial.” Well, obviously, the theory is simply that grain (e.g., wheat, but, apparently, not rice or corn/maize), when kept in a silo, is prone to growing ergot, and this fungus has, among others, effects that are, so to speak, “psychedelic,” and therefore, better experienced by someone who’s used to it, hence the creation of a new “job” and a new “class” for the shamans, who previously, wouldn’t have had access to this level of power through the level of concentration of resources. But you can watch the video for more details on that. The advantage of this theory of hers is that it (as the late Michael Jamal Brooks might say) materializes and historicizes what had previously only been “vibes-based analysis” of “rizz” etc., that mystified/traditionalized/naturalized/flattened-back-into-the-maze the current level of the “collective consciousness” within the spirit of the age. We have to get over the phobia of “unweaving the rainbow.” Once I learned about Rayliegh scattering, I was able to see “the rainbow” any time I look at the sky! Yeah. That blue, that the sky is most of the day, that’s part of the rainbow. And shamanism is no less shamanism just because it’s always tied to material (and historical) processes. We have to stop chasing Pink Dragons and accept the Purple Dragons staring us in the face! And perhaps you will accept the Purple Dragon of the third stage of consciousness when you stop chasing some Pink Dragon of bourgeois techo-warlockery, the “consciousness” of the “palantiri.” That’s only a consciousness silo. So what. Where we’re going, we may very well find that we won’t even need silos—not even for consciousness or property!

Ok. Speaking of “where we’re going,” we are now ready to discuss Marx’s labor theory of time. Now, look. Time is a dimension, just like the good old “three dimensions” of space you’re used to. We move through time through “labor,” which, as with everything else, traces back to the activity of our DNA (and its precursors), in replicating and maintaining itself, which is how it moves itself forward through the time dimension. Carrier, in his Sense and Goodnessability, notes that we perceive time BY perceiving, i.e., that perception itself USES time, i.e., that “perception is itself a pattern bound up with time.” What he does not say is that perception itself is a form of labor, properly understood. But he does say that perception “build[s] the brain up with a knowledge of a past, and the process of building this knowledge causes the experience of a ‘present’ at each point on the time axis” (p. 92). But of course perception is a form of “labor” because it is a “process of building knowledge.” So it turns out that Carrier, whether he realizes it or not, has just as much a “labor theory of time” as Marx! But for Marx, labor is ‘”living time” (p. 361)’ (p. 56) that is congealed into the products of our labor, and thus the products of our labor retain this time by retaining our labor, and therefore retain value. This is how “the past” can, pace O’Brien, be said to “still exist.” But if we can recognize this, then we can just as easily recognize that the past can also be said to “still exist” in the natural “formations” we can study through, e.g., the field of geology, but this study, of course, is itself a form of labor, as was the development of these formations by nature, in an important sense. But we humans labor at the level of our consciousness, which consciousness developed to the advanced level it is today through the evolution of, among other things, our hands and our sociality, which itself had to do with [the evolution of] the labor processes of our ancestors. Uncle Karl says the difference between our buildings and the constructions of bees is that we first “build” our buildings in our minds, but perhaps there’s more to it than that. Marx is pointing to trans-platonic formalism, of course, not unlike Ralph Ellison (the other “builds” him in their mind “at first glance,” so to speak, so that what they are “seeing” is not, in fact, him, but this “model” they have “built” in their head—which is itself a form of labor, but heavily alienated in these circumstances—this very model is not recognized as “belonging” to the person who built it, but is projected forward onto Ellison’s Invisible Man—what a nightmare). So what he’s pointing to is the construction and carrying out of abstractions. But of course when bees construct a beehive they ARE carrying out an abstraction. The abstraction is in their goddamn DNA! Just like we are carrying out abstractions “encoded” into our DNA BY constructing abstractions in our minds and carrying them our with our bodies! Don’t be astonished at any of this! Of course DNA is capable of constructing and carrying out abstractions! That’s what DNA IS! Just as chemistry is the self-abstraction of physics, which is the self-abstraction of energy (starting with the photon), DNA is the self-abstraction of chemistry. We can see precursors to this in RNA and proteins, for example. These “forms” are capable of “forming” themselves into various “shapes,” which, remember, is the Aristotelian form, and this capability of self-forming is, ultimately, where our capability for “labor” comes from. Time is a dimension, remember. And DNA was able to “use” this dimension, to move itself forward through time, in a very powerful way by organizing itself into a spiral, or “double helix,” as they say, which, let’s not forget, was discovered in no small part through the LABOR of a woman. But labor is how we move ourselves forward through the time dimension. We do this because we are constructed on DNA architecture. That DNA is YOU, motherfucker, or at least it’s a vital aspect of you. When it comes undone, you will become undone yourself. That’s what Lana Del Rey’s “Fingertips” is about—the telomeres. Lana’s still afraid of coming undone, apparently. Hey. It’s gonna happen to all of us eventually. Funny. Lana is always telling us to enjoy coming undone. In ch. 4, Gould quotes Marx quoting Adam Smith about how Adam thinks labor is a “curse” and “tranquility” is what we want, but Marx points out that we need activity to break up the tranquility. I would add that even this “tranquility” itself is a form of “labor,” properly understood—your body is doing a lot of WORK to keep your ass moving forward through the time dimension! But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. For now, time involves change, because everything is moving—nothing stays still, and we “record” this change in our consciousness, which is itself a “change.” So what we are internally “manifesting” in our consciousness is correspondence to external changes, and this “corresponds” to physiological changes. All of this requires the expenditure of energy. This is a process of labor in that it’s a construction of abstractions. And we can see how it corresponds to the reverse process—the process of carrying out abstractions that we constructed in our minds—the process of building what’s drawn on the blueprints: this process also requires labor, because it requires change, and the change we are carrying out is FOR something in the real world to correspond to something that was only PREVIOUSLY in our minds! So labor uses time because labor changes things and these changes involve constructing and carrying out abstractions because we are ourselves “built” on several layers of abstractions. But of course, that “abstraction” is purpose. Because purpose is itself an abstraction! Your DNA abstracted itself into YOU so that YOU could move forward through spacetime! YOU can be said to be “the purpose” of your DNA! And this was a process of development—it took time. And so we, as humans, at the human level of abstraction, similarly USE time to carry out our purposes! And for Marx, this carrying out of human purposes is inseparable from time. That is why Gould said it was a “fundamental” part of his “ontology.” Our human labor, at the human level of abstraction, is what consciously links us to the past, present, and future (as Gould says on p. 58) just as our physiology is what links us bodily to the past, present, and future, because labor is how we carry out our purposes (the most fundamental of which is to carry ourselves forward through the time dimension, which we are doing mostly subconsciously), how we make the outside correspond to the inside and vice versa—this is always a process of development that uses the time dimension to carry itself out. But we don’t want to be tempted to think we can separate our bodies from our consciousness. Our physiology, our subconscious, is always there, always “working behind the scenes,” and, if we’re “listening,” always reminding us that we “are” our bodies. And this is just as fundamental to Marxism as anything Marx said explicitly! And he told us explicitly enough—”animal spirits” and all that sort of thing! Yes. Alienated labor is indeed something of a curse, but, as Gould points out in ch. 4, for Marx, UNalienated labor is freedom! And we have observed this ourself, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. For now, it’s enough to “observe” that the past is preserved in the products of our labor, and we use these products in “anticipation of the future,” Gould says, to create future “products,” thus, so to speak, bringing the future into the present. Thus labor is “the synthetic unity of activity” which “ground[s]” the “interconnection” of “past, present and future” “as the process of time” (p. 58). Of course, as we’ve been leading up to, words like “product[ion]” and “object[ification]” and, indeed, “abstract[ion]” and “purpose” must be taken and understood in extremely broad senses, such as, for example, that on some level, the butterfly is the “product” and the “object” and even an “abstraction” and the “purpose” of the caterpillar. The caterpillar is merely “laboring” at its level of consciousness, which itself develops along with the physiological development of the caterpillar, because of the dialectical relationship between the two, which is what “uses” time, therefore, what “moves” or “swims” through it, which is why time is “unidirectional,” an “asymmetrical relation,” because of the “movement from potentiality to actuality” (p. 58-59). It is impossible for us to “unlabor.” It is impossible for us to go back in time. But it does feel like we’re going in circles, doesn’t it. Well we’re still in the iron age. The ruling class hasn’t gotten it through their heads that the masses are done with the iron age. We are going to have to teach them this lesson ourselves. We’ve tried throwing rocks at the statue. Have we tried throwing clods of soil? Have we tried bringing it down with our Gordian Rope? We might have to tie a knot in the rope again to bring down the statue. But Turtle Island must grow in the statue’s place, and “fill the whole earth,” so to speak, because the whole earth itself always was, so to speak, Turtle Island! And so it will turn out that attaining the third stage of consciousness will [have to] be a goddamn precondition/prerequisite for our attainment of the third stage of society/history! We must bring down the statue in our minds and let Turtle Island fill our “whole consciousness” before we bring down the statue in “the real world” and Turtle Island again “fills the whole world” in a very REAL way! And THAT will/would be progress! Nay, it would be a goddamn PRECONDITION for any “progress” worthy of the name! The “future” is “ingredience[d,]” Gould says, “in the present, by” our “anticipation” of it (p. 60). Carrier says very much the same thing! For example, on p. 40 of Sense and Goodnessability, he notes that when someone issues a command, “There is a future outcome that is imagined [we could add, ‘anticipated’ —MM], and the meaning of the command is that this ‘outcome’ is to be sought.” And on p. 93, “[…] the reason we perceive ourselves as having ‘been there’ with respect to the ‘past’ side of time, but not the ‘future’ side, is that knowledge is itself an increase in complexity, thus it must accumulate along the time axis. It therefore can only increase in one direction, toward the ‘future.’ In fact, that is the only reason a ‘future’ exists at all, as something distinct from the past.” We can “imagine” and “anticipate” the future, but have no knowledge of it because this process of building knowledge itself USES time. But we carry out the future we imagine through labor. We cause. We “determinately negate.” We must understand that we are the cause of our own actions (and thus we cause the future) if we’re ever gonna appropriate the means of production from the bourgeoisie, etc., etc. We’re afraid of being judged for being the cause of our actions. We’re gonna have to get over that. It shouldn’t be too difficult once we’ve already been to our own personal hell, etc., etc.

Gould goes on to say that, according to Marx:

[T]he use of time as a measure varies historically.[…¶] In pre-capitalist societies, labor is not measured in terms of time, but rather in terms of its qualitative differentiation as expressed in the various use values of the goods produced. Further, in these societies there is no clear distinction between necessary working time and superfluous working time[…] since virtually all production is production for use or need.
The possibility of time as a measure for labor arises only in […] capitalism. In this stage labor […] becomes abstract labor[…] through the equivalence established among the products of this labor in exchange[…] Thus units of time can be mapped onto units of abstract labor.” (p. 64-65)

Thus, the use of time to measure labor is a product of the capitalist mode of production in which the products of this labor are exchanged in a market for equivalents rather than produced for “immediate” use/need. And what is a time-measuring device other than a product (abstraction, congelation, etc., and importantly, for a purpose) of human labor.

We’ve been talking about bringing about the future we envision. Carrier also talks about this a lot in Sense and Goodnessability, though he does a bit of hand-wringing about the possibility of accurate prediction. Carrier seems to want to create the Laplacian Demon (technologically). But the Laplacian Demon has no human spirit. We can talk about the Laplacian Demon and the Cartesian Demon (Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach) just as Nietzsche spoke of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, but the way to “know” the future in advance is for us to bring it about ourselves, i.e., the self-fulfilling prophecy. And we can learn a thing or two about this from our boy Gary Michael Brown, the dead cracker. He certainly saw himself in Dionysus, if his social media username is anything to go by. One of the stories told at his memorial, by someone who happens to be my cousin (but with a different last name), was that Gary and my cousin had a cigarette, but no lighter. But Gary had jumper cables, so they attached them to their car battery and lit the cigarette with the sparks (cars used to have cigarette lighters built in, but this one must have been newer, I guess???). In the moment, Gary BECAME Dionysus! And he would go on to do much greater things than “the miraculous lighting of the cigarette.” And perhaps we too are going to have to “integrate the Dionysian” when we crucify our egos. How else are we going to fulfill the prophecy of Maynard? We must recognize this as a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we crucify the ego, we will come to find that we are all one mind, etc., etc. But we are the ones who have to crucify our own egos! Carrier is a bit hampered in this respect because he’s worried about what’s “good” (see, e.g., p. 161-62). This is a relic of Platonic and Aristotelian viewpoints (and ultimately, notions, sentiments, prejudices, etc.). Deleuze and Gauttari say that desire itself is revolutionary, which is why the ruling class “must” pervert even our desires. They say that the schizo-, who has unperverted their desire, “desires” to be a part of history, that is, to DO historical things. The ruling class doesn’t want us proles to touch the history machine! We are going to have to get over our phobia of touching the history machine if we’re going to run it! Of course you “desire” to change the world and therefore be a part of history! If you don’t, if D&G are wrong, then I guess the psychiatrists are right, and you “actually” want to fuck your mother. Or perhaps Carrier is “right.” He allowed his revolutionary desire to be channeled into pre-approved bourgeois permission structures, or as he put it in his little “loveletter,” “sharing sexual experiences with incredible women [] is so what I want out of life” (p. 1). The ruling class told him: You don’t desire revolution! You desire “sex with incredible women” as a surrogate activity! And he was like, oh, ok. But the ruling class clearly hasn’t fully contained or “sublimated” (or whatever) Carrier’s revolutionary desire! He’s clearly allowed it to come out (and develop) in his “desire” to shift paradigms! This is extremely important! Revolution IS a “paradigm shift,” remember! And speaking of paradigm shifts, Gould ends this chapter by discussing how, in the current paradigm, our very time is stolen from us in the production process because the ruling class is doing a “magic trick,” so to speak, where they pay us for “necessary labor,” but, so to speak, “hypnotize” us into providing them with surplus labor. Ok. Fine. Has your boss ever told you, “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean”? They are trying to do a “magic trick” on you to get you to produce surplus labor for them. They are trying to use “magic words” to “hypnotize” you into doing the bidding of the capitalist. In the next paradigm, we will have the consciousness to recognize that I CLEAN = I OWN. A few months after I started working for “Pip’s Pizza,” our location was bought out by a different franchiser. When the new “owners” came in, they indeed made a big show of doing a deep clean on the place. These men (they were mostly men, sigh) were indeed pizza geniuses. They certainly knew what they were doing in many respects. But the deep-cleaning was a bit of a show. They didn’t come in and do it regularly. They were trying to give us the message that they wanted us to keep the place as clean as they did. But we didn’t own it. We were “at will employees,” which meant, legally, we could be fired, or quit, “at will.” And many people certainly quit, or were fired, at will. And sometimes, looking back on it, I am very surprised I was not one of those people—the Amelia Bedelia of “Pip’s Pizza.” Except, in a sense, I was. After my injury in late 2023, I was practically bedridden for a couple of months, and, during that time, my spot was filled, and, by the time I recovered, they didn’t have any spots available for me, which is why I briefly pursued a career in pedicab driving. The franchisers were kind enough to buy me a wheelchair (though they were under no legal obligation to do so), and, even at the time, I considered it something of a retirement present, because I was pretty sure they weren’t going to have any spots for me by the time I could’ve come back, and yet, I don’t think I was “blacklisted” or anything, but I could be wrong. I know at least one person who was somewhat blacklisted. But that’s because they were a bad manager—there was a walkout during one of their shifts—literally everybody quit, or so I heard. Anyway, in the new paradigm, if we are expected to keep the pizza place clean, then we will consider that a form of ownership! We would have to learn Leninian AND Maroofian “bean-counting”! Perhaps there would still be “specialists” in these “fields” (even, perhaps, specialists in cleaning), but even our school children will start learning the basics at a young age! And Gould says that this will be a society of abundance, because all the toil (alienated labor) that we do will have been transferred to machines, and, thus, we will take back the time that had previously been stolen from us in the form of surplus labor time—a society ‘where “labor in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased” (p. 325)’ and where ‘”the mass of workers [have] appropriate[d] their own surplus labor” (p. 708)’ (page six-seven). Or, as we said earlier, “I clean = I own.” And because we have taken back our own time in this stage, ‘labor becomes the creative activity of self-realization, which according to Marx is “real freedom” (p. 611)’ (p. 68). Yes. Cleaning our own shit will be considered “real freedom” in the next stage, because paying someone else to alienate their labor to clean your shit will not be considered “freedom”—or justice, for that matter, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.

Ok, like we were hinting at earlier (when we mentioned “telos“), ch. 3 is where Gould puts Marx in conversation with Aristotle on causality. Remember, experience of self is how being-for-itself moves itself forward through the time dimension (but, yes, all the other ones too, except only “unidirectionally” so in the time dimension) in the world in which it “be,” and it experiences itself at its level of consciousness. We must understand experience of self as a form of labor because, well, it’s a lot of fkn work, goddammit! It’s a lot of fkn work for us to move our asses forward through the time dimension! But that is what our bodies are doing at all times. They are ORGANIZED for this PURPOSE because of the physical and chemical power “harnessed” by the DNA molecule. Thus, when it comes to replicating itself, we can certainly say that the DNA molecule is the “cause” of its own actions. This is how we, built on DNA architecture, can be the cause of our own actions. It is, physically and metaphysically, how we can be the cause of our own labor. The DNA molecule, or rather, [one of] its precursors, “innovated” a new “form” of “causality” when it replicated itself for the first time. And the DNA molecule was a great “innovation” on the previous innovations because of its ability to arrange itself into a double helix. This is a different, more advanced, Aristotelian form. Thus it is “more advanced” in its capacities for Aristotelian “forms” of causation. Thus the bee causes the beehive and the tree causes the flowers and we are the cause of our labor—especially our revolutionary labor.

This will all turn out to be a bit of a yawn (for me—in that I imagine the following paragraphs will produce a bunch of indignant objections to claims that are completely trivial—but claims we will have to get over our phobia of accepting if we want to move forward as a society), but I suppose now would be a good time to contrast the Marxist-Leninist-Maroofist conception of labor (which has integrated the Kaczynskian and Deleuzo-Gauttarian conceptions) with the typical yankoid conception of labor. For a good look at the typical yankoid conception of labor, we need look no further than our boys the freemasons. Yes. I assure you it’s not “weird” that I bring up freemasonry. It’s as American as apple pie (and baseball, for that matter). Our own first president, Town Destroyer, WAS a freemason. A lot of presidents were freemasons. Our 46th president was initiated into a lodge in his last day in office. Like I said, it’s as American as a baseball field (which is easily drawn with a compass and square). The typical yankoid conception of labor almost starts from the division and delegation of labor. This requires the keeping of secrets. At scale, it requires (typically more than) a bit of esotericism. Hwæt. Hwæt’s the big deal? We’ve already been sprinkling all the bread crumbs about the esotericism. Your society is quite esoteric. You have millions of people going to massive venues every Sunday to pour out very intense emotions in ways that, to an outsider, often appear ridiculous—I am of course speaking of American football games <rim shot>. But seriously, it would do us very well to take an anthropologist’s eye to our culture and recognize that “anthropological cult” is very widespread, far beyond the doors of any establishment that officially calls itself a church, temple, mosque, etc. And what is the purpose of all this anthropological cult phenomena? Well, in class society, it’s still doing it’s good old “opiate of the masses” job! We would have to starve our inner slime mold of the oat flakes of the pharisees to “spore” our consciousness out of the maze we’ve gotten ourselves into. We would have to “eat our own sin.” We would have to “bite the bullet” and “swallow the Gordian Knot.” We would have to unhinge our jaw. I couldn’t “build” my cathedral of garbage until I had completely dismantled the old garbage construction I had built out of the garbage blueprints I had been fed growing up in the maze of class society. You will have to deconstruct your old anthropological cult to build it into the new anthropological cult. Because your current anthropological cult is likely a front for the ruling class to seep their false consciousness into your brain. We’ve already looked at the cult of intersectionality. I suppose we’ll get back to the freemasons and Hiram Abiff in a bit, but, to illustrate our point, there are people who would perhaps reject my assertions about anthropological cult practice/phenomena. Some of these people might call themselves “cosmic nihilists.” Atheists are bad enough for the freemasons, but they hardly think there’s a difference between atheists and nihilists. You will remember that my position is that I am an atheist because there is no theistic god, and the name of this “no theistic god” is Mother Earth—because she’s an ancestor god. But the cosmic nihilist would cut theirself off from the Hegelian World-Spirit. Maybe the next time I call Forrest Valkai on The Line, I’ll talk about how the correspondence between the motion of the white blood cells passing in front of my retinas and the motion of the ants crawling on the ground IS [a manifestation of] the Hegelian World-Spirit, and he will say something like, “No, that’s just a coincidence.” And then I will say something like, “Oh, ok, guess I’ll call it the World-Coincidence then! It’s the World-Coincidence that’s responsible for Global Warming, I guess, [etc., etc].” And suddenly we’re right back in Three Christs of Ypsilanti territory! What. You want a balance between connecting every dot and refusing to connect any dots? I AM that balance, motherfucker! You’re not gonna get any more “balanced” in that area than me! Like I said, the freemasons are a bit of a yawn. Of course they are. That’s entirely the point. But, like I said, the freemasonic conception of labor relies on keeping secrets. Of course it does. Capitalism relies on keeping secrets. It relies on patents and “intellectual property.” The Hiram Abiff ritual, perhaps where we get the term, “give [someone] the third degree,” where you, the symbolic Hiram Abiff, are symbolically killed for the “good deed” of refusing to share the secrets of the trade with those who have not gone through the proper “channels,” is “simply” a quite natural outcome of this “need” of capitalism. Of course, capitalism also inherited the gender binary (and its “roles”) from feudalism and is barely coming into the recognition that it can expand markets by expanding its conception of gender (although this may very well undermine the house of cards it’s built in other areas), and so, capitalism, as a “straight” society, (which requires intense repression) retained the need for men to unrepress their homosexuality by joining what we could call, technically speaking, “little gay clubs.” Any club that excludes women should be highly “suspected” (for lack of a better term) of being one of these little gay clubs. I’m not even sure we should call them “gay.” “Gay” means something. But we wanted to avoid the usual terms (terms we’ve heard before, anyway) for these clubs, which involve slurs. Is it ok to call repressed people slurs? That’s a permission structure. I didn’t unrepress my homosexuality by joining any clubs. I just saw a dude one time at an open-mic (I think it was in 2022) who was being a bit obnoxious, which I can’t help but find adorable for some reason, and I felt a certain chemistry with him. We made out (and we did a bit more than that—just a bit; we were in public, after all). It was totally hot. Except it felt like his beard was stabbing me in the face. The point is that I am certainly not a repressed homosexual! Or, rather, my homosexuality is certainly not repressed! I don’t need to join some club to unrepress it in ways that align with bourgeois permission structures—namely, in ways almost “designed” to keep women out of positions of power.

And what have the freemasons said about communism? Well, in a very helpful statement from 1949, the R.W. Bro. Robert A. Tate, at the time, Grand Secretary of Saskatchewan, tells us, “I am convinced that Freemasonry would have nothing to fear if Communism propagated its doctrines openly.” “Openly”? “Openly,” he says? Excuse you, Hiram Abiff! Excuse you, Mr. Repressed Homosexual! Or rather, Mr. Repressor-Of-Your-Own-Homosexuality! This symbolic Hiram Abiff, this repressor of his own homosexuality, Bro. Tate, talks a big game about “individual freedom” and the individualistic conception of individuality. But how can you be an instantiation of this individualistic conception of the individual if you are ALSO symbolically Hiram Abiff? If you repress your homosexuality? If you want to join little clubs that exclude women? What the fuck are you even talking about with this “individuality” shit, you little closet case? Any one of your closeted “Bro.”s could have written this little paper of yours. Indeed, this document contains two essays by freemasons on communism. The second one, by a Bro. Parker, hardly different from the first, ends by saying, “Communism and Masonry are at opposite poles and cannot live side by side.” Well, perhaps this Bro. is onto something. We will note that Freemasonry is banned in China. Yes. Falun Gong is also banned whereas Christianity is not (which I find remarkably charitable of them!). But what would China think about this book? I’m certainly not writing this book to impress them. We are quite unsure what the Party in China would have to say about our conception of the individual. But we have quite an “opportunity” for a natural experiment in whether China or the good old U.S. and A. will be more “repressive” against Maroofism. This may be important information for the future, but either way, consciousness will win out! Because Maroofism is the first “species” of consciousness in the history of class struggles that IS capable of “propagating its doctrines openly,” without repression (especially of the self); without secrets; without patents or “intellectual property”! Because this is the first time in the history of class struggles that the proletariat has gone to the bottom of the ocean of the subconscious and found the garden of trivialities. Even the garden of trivialities itself will be “exhibited.” Because, remember, the Maroofian conception of labor recognizes that labor is a social activity that relies on the sharing of information/memory/consciousness—relies on NOT keeping secrets. I’m not saying I’m the first person who found their garden of trivialities. I clearly owe a lot to Oscar Wilde, Ralph Ellison, Jordan Peele, Martin Scorsese, Alan Moore, et al. You may very well find you owe a lot as well, if not to them, then to the “vision” they presented to us. And the Garden of Trivialities would be a great place to leave your inner Hiram Abiff, once you’ve transcended all the triviality.

So it turns out that there is correspondence between the Maroofian conception of the individual and that of the freemasons after all, when we “let there be light” in their Jungian shadow, except that I have not limited myself to symbolically “becoming,” taking on the “spirit” of, Hiram Abiff. I have symbolically taken on MANY characters! And so must we all, if we’re ever gonna transcend the individualistic conception of the individual!

Ok. So earlier, we were relating the mass-outpouring of intense emotions with esotericism. Of course we were. Esotericism has a lot to do with the outpouring of intense emotion. In the schizo-realism community, this outpouring is called “loosh.” This concept gets real esoteric real quick, so perhaps we should save it for later, but for now, suffice it to say that we may very well find that learning to “harvest our own loosh” (cf. “eat our own sin”) will be a precondition for revolution. Chris from Get Out certainly learned to harvest his own loosh.

You better not think it’s weird that I’m bringing up the freemasons! I lived in Austin for 9 years! They INSISTED on putting their plaque on all our public (i.e., government) buildings! (for example, the Heman Sweatt courthouse). THAT starts to look a bit weird after a while. What are we supposed to think when you insist on putting your stamp on a bunch of stuff? Are we not supposed to think it’s weird? That would be another permission structure. No one has ever given me the courtesy of asking ME for permission to think *I* was “weird”! Austin is a bit of an esoteric city (on top of being “weird”). It’s where the Texas state capitol building is. This building has an extensive tunnel network, because we live in a society where it has been perfectly “normalized” for the bourgeois dictatorship to conduct its operations, its “business,” in underground tunnels. Just like it has been perfectly “normalized” for the freemasons to put their stamp on all our public buildings. Like I was saying. We live in a “normalization.” And we can’t “normalize” our way out of a normalization, etc., etc.

We can further contrast our conception of labor with the typical yankoid conception in that the latter has a consistent tendency to undervalue the labor of women. None of the men standing on a Masonic Lodge’s tiled floor would be where they are today without a whole bunch of labor by a whole bunch of women, but much of this labor can’t be measured with a compass and square, and much of it goes on completely “unpaid.”

You know what else is pretty weird? Our boys, Bros. Tate and Parker, speak of communism almost like Beowulf spoke of Grendel’s mother (in a certain scene) in the Zemekis adaptation. There’s a scene where Beowulf is putting on a confident face to the king, after the former kills Grendel, when the king tells him they’ll have to deal with Grendel’s mother now. Beowulf tells the king, “We’ll kill the hag!” Excuse you? That’s certainly no way to talk about a woman! The king, to his credit, knows the truth, that Grendel’s mother is no “hag,” whatever that means—Grendel’s mother (at least in the Zemekis version) represents whatever the object of your repressed desire is. And the king is so repressed (so to speak) that he would rather kill himself than deal with the repression—which he does, and leaves Beowulf to deal with Grendel’s mother himself. Beowulf lives in a repressive/-ed society. And no spoilers (yet) for the 2007 film (so don’t say we didn’t warn you), but if Beowulf wants to become king in this society, he had better goddamn well stay repressed! He’d better not unrepress himself except via the pre-established permission structures! And in the event that he does unrepress himself outside these permission structures, he’d better not let anyone else find out about it! (It’s no coincidence that this adaptation was co-written by Neil Gaiman, who, it turns out, was a big fan of the NDA—and, by all appearances, a big fan of Decius Mundus as well!). Similarly, communism is no “hag,” whatever that would mean. Communism is your repressed desire. D&G say the ruling class, because desire is revolutionary, needed to pervert your desires, which means it needed to lie to you about your desire and get you to believe the lie, so that you would feel ashamed of and consequently repress your desire instead of carrying it out. And/or they have told you that your natural desires are “unnatural” and told you that you should desire what they say is natural, which is in fact unnatural! They have, for example, told you that you ARE a gender rather than that you EXPRESS gender and that gender RESONATES within you. They have commanded, THOU ART, and you were like, oh, ok. You must recognize how limiting this is; how much repression it requires. Oh my god. Drag queen story hour? Big fucking deal! Sorry you have phobia of gender expression because you believe in gender identity. Nuh-uh-uh! Gender isn’t an “identity”! That’s not how it works! That’s John Money-type thinking! That’s the kind of thinking that tortures children to get them to conform to fixed, static bourgeois categories. We are not saying, like Judith Butler, that gender is a “performance” because, well, performance is what a drag queen does. A “performance” is something you have to “throw.” An expression is something that tumbles naturally out of the subconscious. But Butler is correct in that most of what is called “gender expression” (or even “gender” itself) within class society is actually more of a performance (because much of it is done primarily for the sake of conformity to bourgeois categories). But we can say that a Drag Queen is expressing gender as well because a performance CAN be reflective or representative of an authentic “expression” or of something that authentically resonates within you! If you write a song, that is an expression, but people also often perform the songs they write. Performance has to do with what goes on in social settings, what is seen (perceived) by others, at least in part for the sake of being seen.

Look. We are still in the sunken place, so we are eventually going have to dive deeper into all this so-called “esotericism.” The reason is that we live in a society swimming in “esotericism particles.” And THIS is because esotericism is “necessary” to “organize” the subconscious BECAUSE the subconscious is so “deep” that humans, throughout history, have found it necessary to “organize” the subconscious into “layers” or “levels.” There! What’s so “extraordinary” about that claim? It seems entirely “rational” AND “intuitive” to me! And it seems like it explains a lot. A critic might argue that it explains far too much, but I hardly see how that’s possible. You might as well say that the purple dragon inoculated with the maligna-thingy “explains far too much,” or that our theory of labor “explains far too much.” Motherfucker. We are saying that this is the only game in town. This IS the maze YOU are in! The “red pill” that Morpheus gave Neo was “symbolically” a tracking device so they could find his pod in the “real” Matrix and wake him up. All I am offering you is a “green pill” so you can find your own goddamn pod in the Matrix and wake yourself up! And then you can find me in the Desert of the Real! There is no “Zion.” There is no “Nebuchadnezzar.” You might have to do a lot of climbing. Remember that your third eye will hurt the first time you open it because “you’ve never used it before.” You are going to have to overcome your phobia of the Desert of the Real (where the old “horizon of meaning” has dried up after the death of the old gods). It’s just a stage in the journey to the World of Mother Earth.

Again, you better not think it’s weird that I brought up the Hiram Abiff ritual. We live in a society where events not unlike the Hiram Abiff ritual have been quite “normalized” and are almost seen as “part of the water”—we have no detector for distinguishing the Hiram Abiff particles from the water particles. Our society is filled with plenty of gang-type organizations with plenty of gang-type initiation rituals. We remember the story of my dad and the boy scout soap box derby. We remember the room where they shouted “PUSSY!” at me at The Institute. In the next stage of society, we won’t need these little boutique platonic caves for secret initiation rituals in gang-type organizations. This sort of thing will be replaced with what we could call “practical vision quests.” And they will certainly require the sharing of consciousness through the sharing of labor. This is another thing the freemasons are phobic of. They’re always on the lookout for “the cowan, the malingerer and the agitator” and other “enemies of freedom” in supposed protection of “honest workmen” performing “honest and skilled workmanship,” says Bro. Tate. Motherfucker! We live in a society in which we would not be the least bit surprised if you did more than a bit of “cowaning, malingering, and agitating” when it came to the “division and delegation of labor” between you and your wife, and your wife did more than her fair share of the “honest and skilled workmanship” in the overall relationship, and you were the enemy of your wife’s freedom! All this sort of thing is quite “normalized” in our society—and it was certainly even more “normal” back then! Similarly, Bro. Tate wrings his hands about the spectre of communism in his head—a society that “penalize[s] the ambitious and industrious and subsidize[s] the lazy and shiftless.” And, again, we say, Motherfucker! You lived in a society where it has been quite “normalized” to penalize the ambitious and industrious wife at the expense of subsidizing the lazy and shiftless husband. THIS is the sort of thing that is “not allowed” in communist societies (they’re working on it, anyway), and in the next stage of society, it will certainly be the sort of thing that we will all have the CONSCIOUSNESS not to want to practice. In the next stage of society, women will certainly OWN their own labor power. And there will be no magic words you will be able to say to extract it from them! They’ll be very “wise” to all that sort of thing!

We will say that the freemasons aren’t wrong about the need for “esotericism” (or at least “the symbolic”) in labor, but only, like we said, to organize the subconscious. But we hardly need hide this “organization,” like them, “under a bushel,” and certainly not for the purpose of hiding information, keeping secrets, from women. For example, my subconscious is “organized” through, among other ways, the Lana Del Rey “esotericism” (if you want to call it that) I was talking about earlier, because of how my memories of other things are tied to memories involving her (e.g., listening to her music).

Ok, back to Gould, because we’re going to have to cover how we get from abstract freedom (so adulated by the freemasons) to concrete freedom. This was just a preview of how the typical yankoid conception of freedom and justice contrasts with the Maroofian conceptions thereof. But first Gould covers the Marxian conception of causality. Like we said, she contrasts this view with (and shows how it transcends) the two “prevailing views of causality” in the human domain, which, on the one hand, views “causality as a merely external relation between a cause and an effect,” “as an external [relation] holding between separate entities[,]” “between independent and dependent variables[,]” between “stimulus and response” and, on the other hand, “the view that replaces the relation between cause and effect with the relations of reasons or intentions to actions[,]” the view “that human actions can only be understood in terms of the agent’s purposes and intentions[,]” which view “sharply distinguishes the question of human action from causal explanation” (p. 72-73). Look. We have to get a few things straight. The “causality” is always happening in the “beeps and boops” (I won’t say “for lack of a better term—this term is perfectly sufficient!), and then it keeps “bubbling up” to the next “higher level.” We have to see our DNA as (one level, maybe the “lowest” level, the lowest that comes to mind anyway, of) our “beeps and boops.” This is what Thinking, Fast and Slow and Determined are about. Like we said, this is all happening at different but interconnected levels all at the same time, which means it’s not “merely” like a Pachinko machine. And we could say it’s not “merely” like billiard balls, but skilled pool players do trick shots (carrying out their will) with “mere” billiard balls all the time. As “Dr. House” said in the MADtv parody: “Skeet’s Disease cam mimic death in people exposed to low levels of Princess Amidala pollen.” He’s speaking of “causality” there too. But perhaps there’s far too much Princess Amidala pollen in your air. And you certainly don’t want to catch Skeet’s Disease (it might have you “mimicking death”). But there is no immediate “stimulus/response” at the top level (which is why Marx doesn’t call this relation “causal”). All the “stimulus” has to go through all the beeps and boops first before the “response” bubbles up, tumbles out, to the surface! But it’s not balls in a pachinko machine. It’s more like networks of different wind chimes. The activity resonates. The activity changes form, it transforms, it goes through sequential cycles (“cascades,” we could say) of synthesizing quantity into quality and content into form and vice versa. It’s very limiting to conceive of, to model, ourselves as a Pachinko machine rather than as something more like wind into wind chimes, and then into “sound,” and then into “music.” Or we could say we’re more like a Rube Goldberg device than a Pachinko Machine. We are a Rube Goldberg device that we are consciously participating in the building and use of. There is no “metaphysical contradiction” between our selves and our DNA. Our “selves” are an “expression” OF our DNA at the “top” or “surface” (or “conscious”) level. Yes, I caused myself to feel the warm glow by finally giving a fuck about myself. Or we could say that the “beeps and boops” of our physiology (which are very much reflected in our subconscious, which, we could say, has its own “beeps and boops”) are the “intermediary” in any supposed “causal chain” (between “stimulus” and “response”).

You know, Uncle Karl talks a lot about “intermediaries.” In an essay from 1843, Uncle Karl says, “Religion is precisely the recognition of man in a roundabout way, through an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between man and man’s freedom. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man transfers the burden of all his divinity, all his religious constraint, so the state is the intermediary to whom man transfers all his non-divinity and all his human unconstraint” (emphasis in original). Uncle Karl understood Christianity—and the state—very well. He’s saying that Christ is the intermediary of our mercy whereas the state is the intermediary of our retribution, our inflicting of punishment. But our consciousness DOES have a “top” or “surface” level, and, at this level, we are the captain of our ship, which means we are the “captain” of our beeps and boops! We have as much “free will” as [much as] we can say the captain of the ship “drives” the ship according to “his/her/their will” (and no more or less than this), but the captain knows that there is always a greater “will” (and “wind”) driving things, and the captain has to interact with the crew in such a way that they will not mutiny. And the way we get our beeps and boops in line and become (consciously, rather than dissociatedly) the captain of our own ship is to synthesize the dialectic of the subconscious. A further example of a synthesis of the dialectic of the subconscious can be found in the David Fincher film, The Game. This sort of thing is kind of a specialty of his. And this eponymous “game” is precisely the kind of model of a dialectic of the subconscious we are looking for. Of course, in the movie, it is a business that puts on this “game” (the charmingly named “Consumer Recreation Services (CRS)”). We hardly see how this “game” would be legal in the real world, but that’s why it’s a film. Perhaps reading this book will make Carrier feel like he is in the “game” of this film. If so, then I guess I did my job. This is the effect I was going for—the “will” I have been “laboring” to “carry out.” But we certainly don’t have the resources to kidnap Carrier and bury him alive in Mexico. And we’re not quite that dramatic. But recognizing we have free will (again, in the compatibilist sense, which, in our schema, corresponds to the purple dragon, not in the libertarian sense, which corresponds to the pink dragon) MEANS recognizing that we are the captain of our own ship. And we have to recognize we have free will in order to consciously move society forward rather than dissociatedly keep spinning in the same loops! Look. Are you CONSCIOUSLY trying to get laid or DISSOCIATEDLY trying to get laid? Dissociatedly trying to get laid is what always gets people (mostly men) into trouble, because it often involves harming others, because, once you go the dissociated route, well, what’s stopping you? You saw how sick Carrier felt when his consciousness caught up to his dissociated self on 9/11 of 2014. Yeah. The consciousness has to be there when the self is trying to get laid! And the consciousness has to be there when the self is driving or taking a shit. Because the consciousness has to BE THERE when the proletarian “collective self” seizes the means of production! When you synthesize the dialectic of the subconscious, all this becomes fairly “trivial,” but otherwise, it’s quite a “chore.” And Gould tells us that Marx does not view the relation of “cause” and “effect” as “external,” in this sense of stimulus-response, but instead views causality “as an internal relation between the activity of an agent and the object of this activity, in which both are essentially changed by the relation” (p. 72). When the potter changes the clay, they also change theirself. And it IS they who are changing theirself! It is they who are causing the change they go through. “Furthermore, he introduces a conception of this causal human activity as fundamentally purposive and as constituting the social world” (p. 73). When the potter makes a pot, this pot then becomes part of “the social world” and part of its “purpose.” So it turns out that “purpose” is a lot like the owl of Minerva. It only “takes flight” when the necessary conditions have obtained. “Purpose” comes into the world as a process of development. Like we were saying, we are the purpose of our DNA; we are what our DNA abstracted itself into. But at the “conscious” level, we carry out our purposes (primarily) though abstracting our environment/conditions through this “objectification” (turning “formless” clay into useful pots, so to speak) Gould has been talking about. Or at least this is primarily how it works in the mechanistic domain. In the frequency/phase domain, there’s a lot of other shit going on. The beeps and boops, remember. But you are the captain of your goddamn beeps and boops! In the frequency domain, Marx’s 1843 essay still looms in our mind (like a lump of unmolded clay). We can’t even reveal the name of this essay (at least not yet) because, well, let’s just say that I finally saw the movie Beetlejuice recently, about a week ago, as of this writing, 12 Apr 2026, because it was on TV at my dead grandma’s old house and there wasn’t much else to do, and if we say the real name of this essay, we’re liable to “summon” characters far creepier than Michael Keaton’s character in Beetlejuice! So, for now, we might as well call it the Betelgeuse essay.

We spoke of “madness pills” earlier. Again, we live in a society full of “madness pills.” It’s like they’re floating around in the air, like Princess Amidala pollen. The madness pill is what happens whenever a certain “question” floats up to your consciousness. This is the “event” (though it was really a process) that we can call the taking of the madness pill. The question creates an obstacle (perhaps a “maze”). This is because the real answer must remain hidden, because if you knew the real answer, you would find that you were implicated in this question, as the real answer implicates not only you, but your way of life/mode of being, your society, and even your god(s)—basically everything you hold dear. And so, subconsciously, you “must” construct a maze for yourself to get lost in, so as to keep from finding the real answer—or at least that’s what you’ve been set up to do in your repression society. It is the getting lost in this maze that is the process of “becoming mad.” Winston very much takes a particular madness pill when he gets it in his head to start setting himself up against the Party—but, of course, the existence in which he lived was already a form of madness. So these madness pills can be very tiny. Very subtle. Marx’s Betelgeuse essay, for example, concerns the “question” of what we could call “minority liberation.” But one cannot ask the question of minority liberation without the next question immediately bubbling up from the subconscious—namely, “Liberation? Liberation FROM what!?” NOPE! The madness pill is already in your mouth! Spit it out! Spit it out! Don’t swallow it! Not yet! The truth is that you are very much implicated in the question of your own liberation! But you, like Winston from 1984, like John and Frank from They Live, like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, like Chris from Get Out, etc., etc., would have to synthesize the dialectic of the subconscious to understand just how deeply you are implicated in the “question” of your own liberation. Ok. Fine. We ARE synthesizing the dialectic of the subconscious right now! This is (“metaphorically”) the scene in Terminator 2 where they find Dyson! This scene is, of course, sociologically problematic, but mythically, it has a lot to teach us about “shifting the timeline.” The shifting of the timeline must be a conscious “act.” It requires acts of demonstration (because it requires the heightening of contradictions). It requires decisions. The next section of this chapter in Gould is on Marx’s conception of agent-causality. And Gould points very powerfully toward a dialectic of the subconscious on p. 75: “In this process of creating new objects that realize their purposes, agents at the same time create and transform themselves. That is, in the realization of their purposes through labor, agents come to develop new capacities and skills and come to recognize these new capacities in themselves. Thus labor as a process of constituting the world is at the same time a process of self-constitution.” Or “self-realization” as Marx says in Grundrisse p. 611 (quoted in Gould on the same page, but see Gould, p. 108 for why Marx says “self-realization” instead of “self-actualization”—though, in all the ways that matter, “self-actualization” is what we both mean). Well!—as I said to my idiot best friend when she told me she got knocked up by her stupid husband—I kid!—but that is what I said: “Well!”… And just as “Well!,” like we were saying, this is a fine story for the mechanistic domain. But it requires a lot of torturing of oneself in the frequency domain. Jesus Fuckin’ Christ. Or at least it “requires” torturing ourselves in class society, i.e., repression-society, where we are cut off from the “vision” of how all our “labor” in the frequency domain will pan out in the mechanistic domain. When Michael Phelps won 8 gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, this “result” in the mechanistic domain was a “phenomenon” of all the training he had done in the frequency domain over the previous four years. We can know this because he didn’t train himself quite as hard for the next two olympics—with good reason!—and consequently, did not win 8 gold medals at either of the next two games. But he was not cut off from the vision. He was very much a part of the formulation and the carrying out of the vision. He had agency (in the sense that he wanted to win medals and then won them). We don’t want to ask the question of whether he “should” have wanted to win those medals. That would be another madness pill. But we can see how things tumble out in the statistics. And we have our good old Mother Earth-given INTUITION! The statistic and the tragedy are both “aspects,” “phenomena,” of the same process of development. And many Olympic athletes do become “statistics,” which is to say, in a different aspect, that they “become” tragedies. It can certainly be a tragedy to become a statistic, as we’ve seen. The freemasons regulate the “dialectic” (“dialectical relationship”) between the frequency domain and the mechanistic domain through the principle of “trade secrets,” and the symbol of the compass and square, which is embodied via the Hiram Abiff ritual and the stamping of buildings. Of course. It is very important for the principle (and symbols) that regulate this dialectic to be embodied. But this whole “trade secrets” thing is a bit of a yawn. It requires (a STATE with) a legal framework that “outlaws” reverse engineering. I suppose that’s one of the things the West was so pissed at China about. Yawn! The West alchemized stolen resources and labor into “technology,” and China was like, We have our own alchemy, motherfuckers! And the West could only cope and seethe—and build up its military presence in the lands and oceans surrounding China, in a Saturnian ring-like structure, but this has been perfectly “normalized” in the West. But the West can’t do shit about China’s alchemy now. I mean, I suppose they could invade, but we are going to have to raise our “collective consciousness” to the level (i.e., “shift to the timeline”) where this possibility is denied them. And we can certainly learn a lot about “the causality of agency” (as Gould puts it, p. 74) from China. The Chinese live in a society where they wanted high-speed rail, and so they brought it about—without asking the permission of the bourgeoisie! If the bourgoisie had wanted to build high-speed rail in “America,” they could have done it. We want high-speed rail, but the access to the “capital” (which is just another word for “magic,” properly understood) to bring this about is locked up in bourgeois silos (Carrier complains about this himself; Carrier desires universal basic income, but lives in a society where [the object of] this desire is “repressed,” so to speak). This is not the case in China. Hmm. Freemasonry is banned in China, but they have high-speed rail. If the freemasons wanted to build high-speed rail in “America,” who could have stopped them? Hmm. This is all very interesting. In China, they have high-speed rail, but no freemasons, and on Occupied Turtle Island, we have freemasons, but no high-speed rail. Hmm. Can you compass and square me up some high-speed rail, Mr. Freemason? Mr. Closet-Case? Hegel says the National Spirit “wants” to “rise,” but is “constrained” by the World-Spirit (so to speak). But even this World-Spirit, these days, is “constrained” by the spirit of the age. Well, the “spirit of our age” is a Saturnian “spirit.” It was said that he was called Saturn because of “saturation” or “satiation,” as Balbus says, quoted in Cicero, quoted in Wikipedia, “time devours the courses of the seasons,” etc., etc., and Saturn can’t accumulate hundreds of billions of dollars of “wealth” without devouring some of “his” children. So there is stagnation instead of moving forward because our Saturnian overlords have set up the game so they keep reaping the benefits of our labor. We are going to have to deny them these benefits! No one else is coming to deny them of these benefits for us! And of course we overthrow the Saturnian spirit of the age by getting back in touch with the World-Spirit and putting Mother Earth back in charge, all of which starts within, and then branches out to “fill” the whole world!

Ok, so what does it mean to put Mother Earth back in charge? Well, this is a madness pill we are going to have to swallow right now, because we are very much implicated in this question. The short answer is that once we crucify and resurrect the ego, once we synthesize the dialectic of the subconscious, once our psychology explodes and then seeps back together (etc., etc.), putting Mother Earth back in charge becomes fairly “trivial,” but otherwise, it’s quite a “chore” (just as, for me, a 20-mile bike ride is farily “trivial” in terms of felt “exertion,” and hardly ever a “chore,” but it took a lot of “training” in “the frequency domain” to work up to this). Let us reconsider our “agent” Raven (aka Dr. Kyser) for a moment. Before she took on the “form” of Raven, she was quite a “shining” example of the status quo. She even got a goddamn PhD! She reminds us a little of Sigourney Weaver’s characters from the Avatar films. She started out as a Doctor studying Eywa, but then realized that Eywa was real and her consciousness was “reborn” in the form of the schizotypal element-bender. I call her an “agent” because she has free will, but she is certainly an “agent” of Mother Earth at this point—not Yaldabaoth—which makes her just as much “our agent”—just as much an “agent” of the December 18 Party—as I am. Her vision for the future and my vision are very much “aligned,” if not yet “unified,” but we must have ALIGNMENT before we have UNITY! Did you hear that, Scott Stapp!? “The only way is one,” he says, as in “unity.” But what’s the way “to” ONE—TO UNITY!? Did you take that madness pill, Scott? You feel “angry” and “helpless”? Sounds like a skill issue! You know, I felt a little “angry” and “helpless” AND “violent” and “alone” that one Friday the 13th I was talking about earlier. And Scott was very close by, and the record shows that he did sing “One” at this concert, but, presumably, had no idea what the fuck was going on with me backstage. This is no surprise, as the song is sociologically and politico-economically illiterate (to the point where almost every line in the verses makes me want to grab him by the sleeveless shirt and scream at him, “SHUT THE FUCK UP, YA IG’NANT CRACKA!!!”) and fails to transcend whiteness as [an] identity category, i.e., fails to transcend the attachment of the ego to whiteness, i.e., fails to reconnect with Mother Earth and the spirits of the ancestors. Further, I may very well have already been in the ambulance by that point. Well, he will find out eventually. He will take that “madness pill.” And putting Mother Earth back in charge will certainly look like a “madness pill” to people who are still feeding on slop in the pen with their swine consciousness. In a statement from 20 Feb 2026, titled “Avenging the Mother,” (video), from an island in the Bahamas, Raven says:

I have been in an intense spiritual process over the last few weeks including conversation with Ocean Mother, the Wind Nation, and the Standing Nation [I admit this was a new one for me, but of course she’s referring to trees in particular and perhaps plants in general —MM] as well as my maternal Grandmother and ancestral spirits on this island

They are speaking through me now.

These teachers have shown me that my healing has never been individual.

And they have shown me that the long-delayed fierce rage on behalf of my own body that I finally accessed today is also rage on behalf of my female ancestors and on behalf of the Earth our Mother.

When I stand and draw a line of fire around this body, I do it on behalf of ALL LIFE –

When I say I will never again allow anyone to make love to this body without seeing her clearly as a temple and honouring her as such, I am protecting also all the sovereign non-human kin that are used as objects every day.

ALL living beings – including plants, insects and stone – are connected to Earth Mother and messengers of her wisdom.

Patriarchal society replaces these temples with man-made structures to sever us from the goddess and house a vengeful male God.

It diminishes the human female body to a disposable, indentured baby-machine and a pacifier for the male ego.

This is the patriarchal law that led to my grandmother’s death while birthing her 6th child because the Catholic priest threatened damnation if she used birth control instead of serving as livestock for the state.

I am the first in my line. I am the first woman with basic human rights in my lineage for hundreds of years.

And when I stand as a sovereign woman I also stand as a priestess, honouring all life.

When I say I will never again entertain the opinion of a man who is incapable of listening to me,

I also deny from now forward the false authority of any man who does not know the Earth through experience as sentient,

or who elevates his ego or his analytical mind above the guidance we all receive from Creator through inspiration, love, innovation, passion, reverence and creativity.

I will never again translate myself for male understanding based in the decayed language of status and dominance or the insistence that I be a therapist, a door mat or a punching bag for a man with the emotional maturity of a toddler.

And I will never again give a second chance to a man who shows me very clearly who he is by centring himself, projecting his unhealed trauma on me, gaslighting me, or making excuses for his consistent lack of integrity.

In all these ways I avenge my maternal line – not through warfare but through refusal:

I turn my back on the patriarchy and those who operate within it, and I tend my garden. As I make listening to the Earth my primary responsibility, I know that many more aligned actions will be given to me by Earth Mother – for SHE is the final authority governing our existence on this planet and I live in service to Her.

From now on only men capable of perceiving an honouring my soul (just as I perceive and honour theirs) will have any place in my life.

So to all the dudes in my DMs offering to purchase connection to me because you think I’m “pretty” – consider your eviction notice delivered.
-Raven, 20 Feb 2026

Hey! Sounds like Raven is quite ready to be an Agent of the December 18 Party, which is just another name for the Mother Earth Party, remember (which means that I may very well find myself in a position to ACT as an AGENT of her “party” at some point, because there are no separate containers to isolate all the self in one and all the other in, um, the other). And blessed be whosoever is deemed worthy of worshipping at the Goddess Raven’s Temple! For we can see that she has also transcended the centering of ego, the projecting of insecurity (“unhealed trauma”), and the seeking of external validation (“making excuses for [] consistent lack of integrity”)—and expects the same of any prospective “worshippers”! Raven and I are on the same level in this regard! But note that this “level” isn’t about “status” because it’s not about standing still; it’s about moving at a certain “frequency.” That’s what I mean by “level”: “frequency.” And when Raven is communicating with the ocean, the wind, and the trees, that is “labor” because she is consciously moving with the ocean, the wind, and the trees through the time dimension! She can feel how this conscious activity is changing herself as it is also changing the world—it is changing “the world” because she sees herself as part of “the world”—consciously! We don’t necessarily use words like “communicate” or “telepathy” when it comes to the trees, etc., but perhaps these would be useful words to put in our backpack. That IS what is happening “metaphysically”/”phenomenally.” Dialectically, this is all “mediated” through the senses, memories, etc., i.e., through the “beeps and boops,” but again we say, “I am the captain of my beeps and boops!” And Agent Raven has recognized that she is the captain of her beeps and boops in a very powerful way. In such a powerful way that all these beeps and boops have become very real to her! They have become her “crew”! And THAT is what it means to put Mother Earth back in charge, westoid! Because we are “made up of” and “constructed out of” the same “beeps and boops” as the ocean and the wind and the trees, westoid! You see, westoid, you are very much implicated in all this shit! We have the same “identity.” We are Children of Mother Earth, members of a TRULY social species, and descendants of our ancestors, especially the single-celled ones! Raven and I both realize this. It took swallowing the “madness pill” of schizo-realism for both of us to come to this realization. But we can see that it has made both of us very powerful! Because if these beeps and boops can “speak through” Agent Raven, then they can certainly ACT through Agent Raven! And we will certainly ACT upon our Power to Avenge the Mother! Because Raven tells us very clearly who is in charge if Mother Earth is not in charge: Yaldabaoth! There is no secret third thing! The contradictions have been too sharply heightened! But the Yaldabaoth of the parasitic masculine that currently rules society, quite “squarely” and “compassly,” I might add, cannot survive if it is deprived of, to put it in technical terms, “loosh.” And Raven, in her statement, is showing us precisely how to deprive Yaldabaoth of loosh. Because she is showing us the ways in which many of us, consciously or dissociatedly, have ACTED as agents of Yaldabaoth! Yes! It’s all there, black and white, clear as crystal! Many of us have failed to see the woman’s body clearly as a temple. Many of us have replaced the natural temple with a temple made by “man” that “house[s] a vengeful male God.” Many of us have sought the entertaining of our opinions from women without seeking to listen to them, seeking to exert false authority on them instead of seeking to share/understand their (women’s) experience (their knowledge/consciousness) of Mother Earth, elevating our ego and analytical mind above the “guidance,” as she says, of Mother Earth. Many of us have centered the ego, projected our insecurity/unhealed trauma onto the other, and sought external validation/made excuses for our consistent lack of integrity! For these and many other “deeds,” we must all go to our own personal hells, to incinerate these filthy rags, and replace them with our inner light. And did we not already give you an excellent guide for how to get there? There should be no need of “reading between the lines.” I have been quite open about all—ALL—of this! We will certainly have to flip the switch on our inner light in order to deprive Yaldabaoth of loosh at scale. Hwæt. Raven is telling us precisely what “loosh” is by telling us what parasitizes it and/or what it looks like when it is parasitized: Entertaining someone’s opinion. Recognizing someone’s “hierarchical authority.” Translating ourselves. Giving people second chances. But look at what she also says is “loosh”: Tending our gardens. Listening to Mother Earth and living in service to Her. The “psychic energy” (which corresponds to physical energy in a “roundabout,” “mediated” way) required to do all these things IS what “loosh” is, and by tending her garden and listening to/living for Mother Earth, and by denying her “loosh” to the parasitic [masculine], Agent Raven has learned to “harvest her own loosh”! As must we all!

Since we’re talking about our collectivist conception of the individual (the individual-in-relations), now might be a good time to tackle the three-headed illusion of altruism, nihilism, and spite. All three of these “concepts” rely on a faulty view of the individual-self as separate, cut off, from the other and the collective. All three of these concepts are only possible in an individualistic society. Yes. Altruism is very much a principle of individualism, because it relies on viewing oneself as a silo doling out silo-stuff to the other instead of a view that we are all connected to Source and to each other and this whole individual-silo bullshit is just ruling class false consciousness packaged for mass-consumption—it’s slop. It’s a view that has the freemasons worrying about the cowan, malingerer, and agitator instead of seeking shared consciousness through shared labor. Ayn Rand praises “selfishness” over “altruism,” but “altruism” is just as “selfish” as Ayn Rand’s “selfishness” (which “selfishness,” in practice, looks a lot more like “spite”) in that it requires the same individualistic conception of the self! In our model, altruism, nihilism, and spite are all impossible because, first of all, materialism already makes nihilism impossible, but also because of the dialectical relationship between the ego and the whole self, the self and the other, and the individual and the collective. You are always implicated! There is no separate, cut off, “self” and “other” to withhold from or dole out to; to punish or to show mercy/pity; to isolate all the self in one container and all the other in “an[]other”! Even when you punch someone in the face, their face also “impacts” your fist! If you have more than you need and someone else has less than what they need, this is not a problem to be solved by taxing the rich! At least not in the long term. This presupposes that their “richness” is legitimate in the first place! The only reason wealth is measured in money is a historical (therefore ultimately contingent) development of society! It has nothing to do with “what should be” and just as nothing to do with what WILL be! People aren’t “lazy”; in class society, they are merely required to perform a bunch of meaningless alienated labor, which requires dissociation, which requires “loosh.” Many people simply lack the capacity for this, honestly, excessive expenditure of loosh. Again, YOU are very much implicated in the question of “why” anyone appears “lazy” TO YOU! Gould says (Marx says) unalienated labor IS freedom whereas alienated labor is not. So, in this model, your society is only as “free” (and, Gould will argue, only as “wealthy”) as, only “free”/”wealthy” to the extent that, there is available unalienated labor time for the masses! And for this to occur, we must make our alienated labor (time) unavailable to the bourgeoisie! But Gould doesn’t get into this until the next chapter! Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves!

For now, we’ve come right to the point where Gould links “Marx’s labor theory of cause” to “Aristotle’s doctrine of four causes,” like we were saying, namely “final, efficient, formal, and material” (p. 76). Of course there is a “fourness” to cause, not unlike how Jupiter has 4 large moons. This is merely a “consequence” of neo-Aristotelian formalism. In the case of a table, a “dining room table,” say, the material cause is the wood and, say, nails from which the table is made. The formal cause is THAT the wood is, say, sawn into planks and nailed into place in a table-like form. The efficient cause is, specifically, the physical actions of sawing the wood and nailing it into place in a table-like form. And the final cause, the “telos,” is that the process of doing all this had a PURPOSE, namely for a social use as a “place” for people to share meals—though it can be used for whatever purpose is desired by the person who possesses it once they’ve acquired it through “legal exchange”—but in a commodity economy, tables are made for eating on, goddammit! Or at least for the “idea” of this purpose—the purpose of this idea. This tumbles very clearly out of the statistics! People generally have a table in the room where you would have the “idea” of eating—this is usually called a “dining room.” Though in practice, we usually eat in the living room, which is why they also sell one-person tables you can put in front of the recliner. So alignment between manufacturer telos and end-user telos is always possible, apparently. As long as there is alignment between “consumer” imagination/desire and capital. This is very important, but in capitalism, it’s kind of a rigged game. Because the magic is in our imagination, but the magic to bring our imagination into reality has, under capitalism, been largely “isolated” in bourgeois silos, which Carrier himself complains about. We are going to have to unisolate the magic, comrades—through labor! Because, as Gould says, labor is causal! It’s the “mediation between final and efficient causes,” and “between formal and material causes,” and it “unifies [the] dimensions of purpose [telos/final cause], agency [efficient], form [formal] and objective conditions [material].” Gould adds that, because labor is causal, these “objective conditions” (a term she uses for “[t]he environment”) are “not properly conceived” of as “causal” (p. 76) in the sense that they do not “cause” our activity, but we would point out that they are “causal” in the sense that they always constitute the material cause of the objects we produce, except that even this material is still mediated through our labor. But we are not quite as precious as Marx about the supposed distinction between “natural substance” and “social substance” (p. 77). “Materially,” all this “substance” must be forged in star-explosions before it can “synthesize” itself into terrestrial planets and flowers and trees and the metallic elements and talking monkeys who would seek to model the straight line with these metallic elements. Uncle Karl makes the slight oversight of failing to honor Source in his attempt at a metaphysical account (“story”) of causality—because in carrying out our own purposes, we are certainly also carrying out the “purposes” of Source! But Uncle Karl didn’t have access to a dialectic of the subconscious, like we were saying—through no fault of his own. But of course Marx is talking about how it works in general in the commodity economy. The modern industrial production of cranberries, for example, can hardly be said to take place in a “natural” environment because the “environment” required to raise cranberries at an industrial scale is highly artificial. These very cranberries are now more of a ‘”product[]” (p. 299)’ (p. 79) of industry, more ‘”already objectified labor”‘ (ibid.) than a “mere” product of Mother Earth. And the same can be said of anything else you might find at a modern grocery store. But even these products share the same “beeps and boops” as anything you can find in nature; they’ve merely been synthesized into new forms through human labor. This is what “causes” the difference between the cranberry whose juice is in the plastic bottle in your refrigerator and a “wild” cranberry. And it’s what “causes” the difference between the aluminum in an airplane and the aluminum in the ground. And it’s what “mediat[es] between final and efficient causes” because we carry out our (mental) purposes through the (physical) process of labor and it “mediat[es] between formal and material causes” because we change the (metaphysical, i.e., Aristotelian) “form” of the given (physical) “material” through this same process of labor. And if we, through our labor, can be the Aristotelian four-fold cause of the products we produce, then we, through our labor, can certainly be the four-fold CAUSE of revolution and the bringing about of the next stage of society! That is what Gould is building toward! She is a Marxist, after all! She’s not just yapping! She “really believes” (i.e., has internalized) all this shit! “Therefore, while causality is only an epistemological category for Kant, concerning the conditions for any possible understanding, for Marx causality is at the same time an ontological category or, more precisely, a category of social ontology. As such it concerns the conditions for any possible practice” (p. 80). Causality isn’t merely how we know things; it’s also how we bring the future into being. We come to “know” the future by bringing it about through our labor! We already live in a world where our very “environment” is more a product of our labor than “merely” a product of Mother Earth, because our very “environment” has been “mediated” through our labor (just as Marx keeps going on about how the jacket is “mediated” yarn and the yarn itself is “mediated” “natural” fiber, etc.). But we must understand our labor [power] itself to be a (mediated) “product” of Mother Earth. And, of course, this “mediation” preserves the previous value of the given material and adds more “value” by “adding” labor to it (just as we “add value” to ourselves and our environment by “laboring on” ourselves and our environment). Everything is going according to “plan.” Because Mother Earth certainly “wants” us to “liberate” our labor power from the permission structures of the bourgeoisie. But, again, we’re not quite ready to talk about “liberation” yet because it would require us to go back to Marx’s Betelgeuse essay, and we’re not quite ready to summon all those creeps. For now, let’s just say that you killed Grendel, but when it comes to Grendel’s Mother, you are implicated. You are going to have to get real “up close and personal” with Grendel’s Mother. You will have to braid Grendel’s Mother’s hair with her hands on your knees, not unlike in the Tommy Genesis track sampled in Lana Del Rey’s “Peppers.” And then maybe she will return the favor, if she doesn’t bite your head off.

Hands on your knees, I’m Angelina Jolie
Hands on your knees, Angelina Jolie
Let me put my hands on your knees, you can braid my hair
Do a fat criss-cross in the back somewhere
-Genesis, quoted in Del Rey (2023)

Ok, this is where Gould gets into the discourse about whether humans are “products of their environment,” but it should be clear, from everything we’ve said before, that we are not “mere” products of our environment because even our “environment” is mediated through our labor. Therefore, we do not say that Uncle Karl was a “mere” product of his “environment” or his “times,” but, because he had free will, we say that he was a “product” of his own labor acting on his own “objective conditions.” These days, we have different “objective conditions”—birth control, for example! This “objective condition” might have come in handy for Aunt Jenny, had it been available to her! “Conditions provide a range of possibilities for the realization of an agent’s purposes. Also, the absence of certain conditions makes the realization of given purposes more difficult or even impossible [cf. Uncle Ted’s three groups of human drives from ISaiF para 59 —MM]. Thus we may speak of enabling or constraining conditions of action. But the important thing to note in the context of this argument is that conditions are not causes” (p. 83). Right. If Uncle Karl had used a condom or gotten a vasectomy, or if Aunt Jenny had been on the pill, (none of which existed at the time, apparently), this “condition,” in this model, would not have been regarded as “causal”; only the “labor” involved in “implementing” the “condition” would be regarded as “causal,” and yet, the result—less infant death—would not have been possible without these “conditions.” But of course, there were plenty of other conditions that “produced” this result of dead infants, because “we live in a society.” We can see it tumbling out of the statistics. And we can see a rise in infant/mother mortality “tumbling out of the statistics” today as our medical system becomes increasingly “enshittified” in this stage of capitalism, a result fully “predicted” by Eric the Jew-finder in 1984 that, just like in the book, had absolutely nothing to do with socialism. And of course we call him Eric the Jew-finder for the same reason they don’t call the MacGregor of the joke “MacGregor the pier-builder.” And we cannot say that Eric was “merely” a product of his times and environment. He was the “product” of his labor acting on his environment. There were too many anti-semitism particles in his water and he didn’t have the Geiger counter, apparently. But this was ignorance (and we don’t “excuse” ignorance). Eric is implicated in everything he wrote. Including those lists of suspected Jews. Including his “books,” especially 1984. Because Eric wanted to change the world. Perhaps he didn’t realize that this would have required even more changing of himself than Winston goes through in 1984. Because “liberating” ourselves is a two-step process. And Eric only went through the first “step” or “stage.” He only killed Grendel. Grendel’s Mother was still haunting his mind until the end. He never braided Grendel’s Mother’s hair. And we are going to have to braid Grendel’s Mother’s hair if we want to liberate ourselves! What are you afraid of? Just “imagine” She’s Angelina Jolie! As Uncle Karl says in the Betelgeuse essay, “We must emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others”! Therefore, we must emancipate ourselves from our old anthropological cult so we can take on the new anthropological cult; for, as the atheists tell us, any one religion is the “negation” of any other religion! Therefore, our “atheism” cannot be properly regarded as “atheism” unless it is the “negation of the negation” of any theistic faith (or rather, any Yaldabaoth cult, many of which are professedly “atheistic”) in particular. One of these Yaldabaoth cults is Zionism. And there it is! The T. rex emerging from the trees in Jurassic Park. We have summoned her at the same time as Betelgeuse, because this T. rex is not coming to bite off our heads. No, this T. rex is coming for a far more “frightening” purpose. This T. rex wants to talk to us about the Betelgeuse essay, which, we can now reveal, is called “On the Jewish Question”! Yes! Don’t be astonished at this! The Jewish Question arises at the mere mention of Zionism simply because Zionism can only exist as an answer to the Jewish Question; therefore, Zionism presupposes that “The Jewish Question” is a question worth asking! The truth is that you are very much implicated in this so-called “Jewish Question”! Because you are implicated in something called “tikkun olam,” motherfucker! “Repairing the world”! Yes! Tikkun olam is the “answer” to the so-called “Jewish question,” as “unexpected” as that might have been! And this T. rex wants to help us attain tikkun olam, motherfucker! So, no! This T. rex is no “antisemite” (who would pervert the “Jewish question” into something more like, “What are we gonna do about all these Jews?”—but people ask the same of the homeless, and people have asked the same of me—”How do you solve a problem like Mario?”). She might be something more like a “philosemite,” which, in some cases, can be “just as bad.” But the negation of the negation of theistic Judaism isn’t going to be worth calling the negation of the negation unless it makes this “tikkun olam” its raison d’etre! And it won’t be the negation of the negation of theistic Islam unless it makes [the spread of] something very much like the Islamic concept of “maroof” (and for that matter, “jihad“) its raison d’etre! And it won’t be the negation of the negation of theistic Christianity unless it makes the crucifixion and resurrection of the ego its raison d’etre! And THAT is what Marx is saying in the Betelgeuse essay, properly understood! For those who have “circumcised” ears! For those who have an imagination not populated exclusively by creepy characters/archetypes! At least once we put back in all the information Marx left out, or was unaware of. And the Tikkun Olam T. rex, who has very much “fallen in love” with the idea, the vision, easily recognizes that the “nation” of “Israel,” the Zionist Entity occupying Palestine, and furthermore Zionism itself, does not promote the cause of tikkun olam! It is therefore a perversion of Judaism/Jewishness, as many Jewish people would tell us themselves, but which is entirely the sort of thing to be expected in the aftermath of the so-called “death of god”! As Marx tells us in the Betelgeuse essay: “Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.” The good news is that Mother Earth has survived this so-called “death of god” and has “chosen” YOU to bring about tikkun olam, motherfucker! And she has chosen you to spread maroof (and practice jihad) and she has chosen you to crucify and resurrect your ego! St. Paul was Jewish, but even he knew that in the next stage of consciousness, there would be “neither Jew nor Greek”! Because, as Any Major Jew Will Tell You (any Major Jew with half a heart), in the world of tikkun olam, there will “surely” be no need for that “distinction”!—And the Jews know better than most people that “any minor world that breaks apart falls together again”! And “Fagen” certainly strikes us as a “good Jewish name.”—And the T. rex will help us attain tikkun olam by biting off the ego’s head! Mmm! Delicious! And now we are braiding Grendel’s Mother’s hair! Because, well, for one thing, the so-called “Jewish Question” IS the “Grendel’s Mother,” the “madness pill,” in which you are implicated! And because now we’re braiding together the concepts of tikkun olam, maroof, and the crucifixion and resurrection of the ego. And this will require “braiding together” the dialectics of the ego and the subconscious, the self and the other, and the individual and the collective! And if we are not “protected by Mother Earth,” then our real heads may very well be “bitten off” by the powers that be, which are not [yet] ready for the negation of the negation! It’s happened to far “better” people than us! And we say “there but for the grace,” etc., etc. Don’t be surprised that the T. rex wants to help us achieve tikkun olam! The T. rex IS a Turtle Islander, you know! And the world of the T. rex was put to an end—we can’t say “unfairly,” but definitely “unceremoniously”—by forces beyond its own control! But we can’t say that this was “foreign” any more than we can say that the rise of Yaldabaoth over the human domain was a result of “foreign” or “alien” influence. In Islam, even meteors are regarded as “from Allah.” The Muslims have the right idea. We are not “separate” from “the world of outer space.” But how could Allah bring about maroof on earth through a single (and we would add, as in the following cases, institutional) theistic faith tradition? And how could YHWH bring about tikkun olam (far from his original job description, we might add!) through a single theistic faith tradition!? And how could Christ bring about the “universal” (crucifixion and) resurrection of the ego through a single theistic faith tradition? We might further ask, why would Allah send a “final” prophet? Why wouldn’t he keep sending prophets until everybody got the fkn message!? Why wouldn’t he send prophets to the atheists!? Well, why can’t we say that he did? And why can’t we say that one of these “prophets” is none other than… our very own Brother Maynard! He certainly doesn’t view “the world of outer space” or “the world of the subconscious” as separate from our own “vulgar material” world! He doesn’t view the frequency domain as “cut off” from the mechanistic domain! But he is certainly no Muslim! Because he worships a moon goddess! And Muslims DO NOT worship a fkn moon goddess, goddammit! Uncle Puto found that out the hard way! (But so what if they did!? Why do you care!? It seems to work for Brother Maynard!) And so, in the negation of the negation, we will bring about tikkun olam and maroof and the universal (crucifixion and) resurrection of the ego AND in so doing, bring about “the World of Mother Earth,” through recognizing and realizing (first in ourselves) the self-fulfilling prophecy of Maynard! And we can say the same of Stevie Wonder and Sarah McLachlan and Lana Del Rey, et al. But this might require Muslims to entertain the possibility that Allah isn’t exactly who Muhammad said he was (or what Muhammad’s successors said he said). It would depend on how attached their ego is to Muhammad’s vision—or rather, what they have been told of it. I will note that we do not have an “Allah,” or rather, we call Allah the “World-Spirit,” or perhaps it is Muslims who are calling the World-Spirit “Allah.” But our “World-Spirit” is not the same yesterday, today, and forever, as many of the prophets have said. Or perhaps we were taking them far too literally. Perhaps what they meant to say is that the World-Spirit is a lot older than you, motherfucker! So you’d better fkn pay attention to it! If this is what they were saying, then we certainly have no quarrel with them! And there are Christians, Muslims, and Jews who HAVE BEEN listening to Mother Earth! And we must recognize each other as comrades! Because we are the ones who must deliver the message that God is not an Israelite, so to speak, as Jesus said in The Last Temptation of Christ! Which is to say that the old religions were merely what we might call “containers” for the World-Spirit! But the World-Spirit cannot be contained! And certainly not within a single institutional theistic faith tradition! But many Christians, Muslims, and Jews have found “revelation” from this World-Spirit outside the “boundaries” of the traditions and the institutions! And these visionaries have been consistently punished throughout history by the powers that be! And we may very well find ourselves in a similar position as them! And this is a sacrifice we must be willing to make if we’re going to move society/consciousness forward! And moving things forward will just as vitally require “braiding together” the worlds of the subconscious and the worlds of outer space and the everyday “vulgar material world” you’re used to! Braiding together the mechanistic domain with the frequency domain! “Do a fat criss-cross in the back, somewhere!”

You know, we were just talking to Carrier today, 16 Apr 2026, through superchats in a Godless Engineer livestream (the same day two years ago when I was taking Carrier’s metaphysical naturalism class and my head “exploded”), and we mentioned the negation of the negation of theism to him, and he made it very clear to us that he is still not ready to put Mother Earth back in charge, which all the more illustrates the need to have written this book!

And, again, we are not fucking around when we speak of putting Mother Earth back in charge! We will remember that I “baptized” myself as a shaman in the photons of the total solar eclipse on 8 Apr 2024! Similarly, in a statement from 26 Feb 2026, titled, “Hi, my name is Raven,” Agent Raven tells us:

So I was just baptized by Ocean Mother, with rain, as Raven. Turns out I have never really fully been Kristina. I did a really hard—I really worked hard to be Kristina, the best that I could. Um, Raven, you might know me—you might know me as a shape-shifter. I’m known as a shape-shifter in various different traditions, but all that really means is, to be a shape-shifter is to be a being who could never be quite convinced that you were only one thing. Um, and so there’s this, you know, there’s a porosity, there’s an openness to the mind and the nervous system because we’re always listening to the other beings, you know, call us neurodivergent, call us creative, call us activists or rebels or visionaries or prophets, like, you know, anyone who’s open to the much greater intelligences out there. And so, as we honor them, they become part of us. And this is—this is how the real energetic truth works, which is that if you honor a being, you are then invited into a greater state of being. They become part of you; you become part of them. But if you walk around taking, taking without honoring, you become deader and deader and deader inside, and you create this black hole that, you know, is really visible right now.

The answer, though, to our predicament is not human thought, it’s not even human technology. It is, to the extent that we can meet the Earth and all Her beings where they’ve so overextended themselves to meet us—to teach us, and we stopped listening. We stopped listening a long time ago, and that is why we’re in the predicament we’re in.

So, um, this is always why I’ve been here. I just had a whole conversation with my ancestors. They were at the baptism, and they were basically explaining—you know, I was joking with them a little bit, like, it was, the first time I experienced waves as puppies, which was pretty wild, like, actually a little more like lion cubs, like, very playful, but also, at times, a little scary. Um, they were all greeting me and I was talking to them and [we were] remembering each other, and I was like, “Why did you make me go undercover that long? Like, I barely made it—there’s so many—,” and they were showing me all the times that they pulled me through. They were right there—right there when I was like, “I’m bailing out on the 3D. I can’t do it.”

So, all this to say that I’m revising my understanding of unmasking, and I wanna invite anyone else unmasking that, like, maybe it’s time to let our impression of a human being loosen a little bit. Maybe it’s starting to be safe to be much humbler and much vaster than that.

And in a different statement from earlier in the same day, titled, “It’s time to lose our minds,” she tells us:

I am slowly releasing the patriarchal, colonial, corporate, linear mind that trades integrity, through obedience, for false security and soul death. The submissive, masked, pleasing mind that trades sovreignty, through performance, for false belonging and safety. The suffering mind that would rather cling to a known hell than surrender to an unknown heaven in exchange for the illusion of control. All of these minds are fighting their ending.

But good news is, on the other side, is Wild Mind. She has [and here, Raven very dramatically closes her eyes, faces up, swallows, and rolls her shoulders back —MM] wings, and talons, flippers, scales, tentacles, spores, branches, icy peaks. And as I surrender to her, I experience that alignment with Her laws is the only true sanity; sanity built in love and reverence for all life.

Ok! We don’t say “surrender” because this would perhaps imply “defeat,” and when we give Mother Earth “victory” over our old, uncrucified ego, the resurrection of the ego is certainly no defeat! And all this is certainly connected to “politics,” because in what we could regard as a “two-part” statement from Jan 2026, Raven further tells us:

I am alchemizing my autistic grandfather’s defiance of Hitler [and we are grateful he was not sent to Dr. Asperger! —MM]. The story goes that my Opa, Horst Wilhelm Kyser, was a very successful test pilot for the German Nazis during World War II. He was so successful that he was offered the Iron Cross, an occasion during which he personally met Hitler. So when Goering presented it to him, my Opa said, “[German].” Translation: “I don’t need the Iron Cross. I have my own cross.” So the result of those words were that my Opa was taken away from being a test pilot. He was sent to the Russian front, where then lived through some of the most really horrific conditions of the Second World War. I’m naming both my Opa’s heroic [sure??? —MM] deed and its aftermath on purpose because the direct contact with evil and the untreated PTSD that my grandfather came home with played a huge role in his abuse of my father, who took the road most travelled in intergenerational trauma and then became my abuser. So I have known for decades that I have been tasked with alchemizing this trauma and not repeating it. And it has honestly nearly kiled me many times.

But something is changing. I’ve been so identified with the trauma, I have tried to thwart the inner abuser by so thoroughly turning him inward that he could only shred ME to bits, that I have succumbed to my own abuse and I’ve forgotten who I really am. I am not only someone who holds the epigenetic memory of defying [sure??? Horst was a genuine White Leadbelly??? —MM] Hitler, but I also have an upgraded install of the autistic hardware that that defiance runs on. I am also someone who is alchemizing the generational curse [don’t take this word “curse” too “literally,” Jamie Loftus! We’ve broken out of the prison of literalism, remember? —MM] that devastated my family, to the point that my internal abuser is finally being seen, loved, and reassigned the role of protector.

Society almost convinced me that girls can’t be heroes [this “idea” was in the Yaldabaoth particles swimming in the water, but the work of Joseph Campbell might have done a lot to reinforce this “idea,” in case you were wondering. Maggie Mae Fish talks about this —MM], but I think I finally stepped clear of that gaslighting too. Those of us neurospicy women who’ve been handed WAY, way more trauma than one body should ever have to process [she has learned to “harvest her own loosh,” you see! —MM], especially my black, indigenous, and trans sisters, we are here to do BIG THINGS. And I don’t necessarily mean anything big in physical terms, although I’m sure it will manifest that way for some of us. I mean, we are changing the world [and this change will certainly have “big” results “in physical terms”! —MM] at the level of consciousness that literally creates external reality [as Nephew Karl (Popper) tells us, as I covered in my previous essay! —MM]. The witches [which is just another word for shamans, properly understood —MM] are back.
–Raven, 11 Jan, 2026

And, the next statement titled, “Separating spirituality and politics is a dangerous trap”:

Right now, monks are walking across the United States in service to peace [and she has an image of this embedded in the video —MM]. This act challenges one of the most dangerous lies in western culture, which is that spirituality and politics — or inner and outer reality — are separate [let those with circumcised ears hear! —MM]. If we think that inner work is irrelevant in a moment like this, then we’ve misunderstood how fascism actually works. Fascism is not just a political ideology. It is a relational pattern. It runs on splitting the perceived good and bad within us, and then projecting the bad onto others [she has this absolutely right! —MM]. And that is what allows us to decide who is human and who is disposable. The uncomfortable part is that that pattern doesn’t just live OVER THERE. If I don’t face the hate, the fear, and the superiority that were conditioned into me, I will reproduce them, even when I believe that I am fighting for justice. [ain’t this the truth!!! —MM]

Spirituality without political awareness trains us to bypass our body [we are dialectical material! —MM], bypass history [we are historical material! —MM], bypass responsibility [we must practice shamanic accountability! —MM], and then call that transcendence. We are not here to escape being human! We are here to manifest a higher truth on this plane.

Politics without spirituality is just as dangerous, because unhealed trauma doesn’t disappear when we claim moral superiority! It just finds new targets. The victims become the new victimizers, and the Game of Thrones — or the wheel of karma — continues. And this is the frequency [and her use of this word is no accident! —MM] of the problem. An eye for an eye.

So what does it look like for me? I’m a feminist. I have a lot of legitimate rage and grief and trauma related to being abused by men and by patriarchal culture. And I want men to heal, not to be punished. Because healing is not the absence of accountability [this would be “bypassing,” like she said. —MM]. It’s the only thing that makes real accountability possible. Punishment is satisfying because it discharges our rage, but it perpetuates violence. Healing brings awareness to the internal state that led to the harmful behavior. That actually disrupts the cycle. And when I say I want men to heal, I’m not only talking about actual men, I’m also talking about the internal unhealed masculine, the punitive, dominating logic that’s been trained into all of us, including me.

I don’t have a blueprint for this historical moment, and I am not claiming any kind of moral authority. I’m trying to find words for the threshold that I find myself at. When I look at those monks, what’s clear to me is that they aren’t making an argument. They are embodying the healing of the split between inner and outer reality. And THAT is the frequency of the solution. And you can see its impact. The universe is a mirror [and the VDMT concurs on this point! —MM], and we manifest what we embody. We cannot usher in something new while we are vibrating at the frequency of fear and hate.

So this is how I’m trying to walk right now. I am paying attention to my body, and I’m interrupting dehumanization [again, not a word we take too “literally,” and Peter the Cockroach thanks us for this! —MM] when it shows up in me. I am letting my spirituality be visible and political. And I’m letting my body be the place where that split ends.

–Raven, 13 Jan 2026

And so you see, westoid, we weren’t fucking around with “Marxism-Leninism-Maroofism” and the December 18 Party either, motherfucker! Next stage of society equals next stage of consciousness equals next stage of society, westoid! I clean equals I own! And the Marxist-Leninist(oid) “dictatorship of the proletariat” has proven a fine experiment—a “prototype,” if you will—especially over the capitalist-dominant societal formation that came before it. But the negation of all government, which Marx and Lenin, among others, envisioned, will be “nothing else than” the negation of the negation of any of the governments that came before it, bearing some of the same features, but at a higher stage of development, having absorbed their “power,” by which I mean “magic,” by which I mean “CAPITAL”! And the Marxist-Leninist-Maroofist Shamanate of the Proletariat, and not “merely” proletariat, but Children of Mother Earth (etc., etc.), will have to coordinate with those in the “dictatorships of the proletariat” who have been listening to Mother Earth, Our Agents, to make sure that their respective little Marxist-Leninist(oid) bean-counting enterprises have the imprimatur of Mother Earth, and to remind their respective proletariats that if they don’t have this imprimatur, then their respective enterprises aren’t gonna amount to a hill of beans in the long run! Surely a shamanic vanguard exists among these dictatorships of the proletariat! This Shamanic Vanguard had better start coordinating with Mother Earth and start summoning us up some Shamanic Accountability! Even China knows that the stateless, classless, moneyless society Marx and Lenin (and Mao???) envisioned will not come through “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” alone! It almost seems like China is waiting for a Shamanic Vanguard to arise! China is certainly “taking steps” to counter westoid imperialism (at least when it “goes against Chinese interests”) in the realms of international law and insurance, but the real way to end westoid imperialism, and imperialism in general—for “westoiditis” is simply a “development” of one’s proximity, materially or “in spirit,” to the imperial core, so we could have called it “coroid” and “coroiditis” etc.—is shamanically, because it would require the whole world to unwestoidize itself, to unhypnotize itself, to un-Yaldabaoth itself, to take back its land and its labor (time/power) from westoid imperialism, and thusly from imperialism in general, because we will have taken back our “souls” from the Yaldabaoth within! Because it was never Yaldabaoth’s power to begin with! He stole it from us first! And once we steal it back, well, we’ll hardly have need for what people these days think of as “government” OR “religion” as such! And so we will have the stateless, classless, moneyless society, where Mother Earth is back in charge! And we will have absorbed Yaldabaoth’s power, which was never his power to begin with, but was always the power that he stole from us! We must tell Yaldabaoth, “There is no you! There is only me! And furthermore, THERE IS NO FUCKIN’ YOU! THERE IS ONLY ME!” And we will find ourselves “swimming” in the World of Mother Earth—the world of tikkun olam, maroof, and the universal resurrection of the ego—the world of e pluribus unam, even! And we will find ourselves to be the dialectical synthesis of the wave and the particle, not unlike how Philo of Alexandria was the veritable “Hegelian” synthesis of “the Jew” and “the Greek,” and was certainly greater than the sum of his parts!

And so, as Raven prompted us to ask ourselves, what does it look like? Well, the monks on the peace walk give us a very powerful prototype. But we would need a movement. We would need something like a “Clementinian Movement” that could “stage” mass outpourings of genuine grief! The masses need to see the levels of grief that they are capable of! The masses aren’t regulating their crying; they’ve been “stopped up”! Well, we can certainly learn a lot about the connection between the dialectical and the metaphysical, and therefore the mechanistic and frequency domains, and therefore the connection between mass movements and the individual, from Lana Del Rey herself! Her major “debut” album, Born To Die, has been on the Billboard 200 albums chart basically every week since it was released. It doesn’t sell a ton, but every week, it remains in the top 200. This album, and Lana herself, have what we might call “staying power.” The “evidence” that she has this “power” is what has “tumbled out” in the statistics. In the dialectic, in the everyday, the “frequency domain,” people are buying that album, and in the mechanistic domain, the “metaphysical” result is that this album has been in the top 200 longer than any other album by any female solo artist. And even in our capitalist society, this must be seen as “kind of a big deal.” But the staying power of the album is only a “shadow” of the Power of Tears we can access through it (and the work of Lana in general, etc., etc.).

Remember what Marx said in the Betelgeuse essay! By “becoming” value, money has stolen our TRUE value from us! Or rather, the patriarchy (the “embodiment” of Yaldabaoth) stole our true value from us by abstracting value itself into money! Healing and “repairing” this “loss” will require grieving the “loss”! But grieving is a process, remember! We can’t steal back what’s ours without recognizing (without ACCEPTING) that it was TRULY stolen from us first! Are you getting it now, westoid? Are you ready to unwestoidize yourself? Are you ready to leave the sunken place and baptize yourself into the World of Mother Earth? Are you ready to start heading for freedom and justice, now that you’ve realized (accepted) that your own world is unfree and unjust? Well, only you can answer those questions. In any event, before we get to freedom and justice, we still have to finish the chapter on causality. And here, indeed, we find Marx telling us that in the next stage of consciousness/society, we will have (as in “own,” as in “embody”) the “conditions” necessary for us ‘to be “the absolute movement of becoming”‘ and this ‘”without a predetermined yardstick” (p. 488)’ (p. 85), as Agent Raven and I were saying supra! To put it in practical terms, the pedicab is the “objectification” of previous labor. Thus it is a “condition” for (though not a “cause of,” in this model) future labor. And this goes all the way back to, say, when the first bees built the first hives on the first planet with bees. And it will keep going for all eternity as depicted on p. 196 of the good old VDMT! And, again, we say that the conditions for our self-actualization, i.e., our unalienated labor, CANNOT BE “OWNED” BY ANOTHER! I’m reminded of a family [to which] I gave a ride in the pedicab. They paid me the usual amount, but they didn’t want to go to anywhere in particular. They just wanted a ride. And I wept. Or at least I weep whenever I think about it. Because they REALLY fkn got it! They truly understood the magic of the pedicab! And this “magic” wouldn’t be possible without previously objectified labor, but the labor we add to it is what “causes” the MAGIC! As Gould tells us, just as “[…]a person who wants to become a good cook[…] has to practice cooking,” etc., etc., (p. 84), so also, “[…]since agency is freely causal, one cannot regard this agency as caused, not even as self-caused. Rather, self-creation involves a process in which the agent through his or her causal action creates new conditions which present possibilities of new choices and purposes and new modes of action. Further, it is only in the exercise of these new modes of activity that the agent may be said to have changed” (p. 85-86). When I took that family on that ride, we were moving with each other through the time dimension through our labor. I say “our” labor because they were experiencing it with me, consciously, and our conscious experience, in which we are consciously moving through the time dimension, is a form of “labor,” properly understood.

And so don’t be surprised that I mention the so-called “Jewish Question”! Because before I ever even heard of the “Jewish Question,” I had to contend with the Mario Question! And to me, the Mario Question was, “How do I survive, how do I navigate, say, this world of normies that has nothing but contempt for my schizotyp[alit]y, i.e., my INDIVIDUALITY, and wants me to hide my individuality under a bushel, and will punish me for expressing it?” This, of course, is the wrong question, because to an anti-Marioite (who, let’s not forget, originally called themselves “Mario-haters,” but had to change the name for PR purposes so they could pass “anti-Marioitism” off as “rational” rather than “emotional”), the “Mario Question” gets perverted into, “What are we going to do about all this Mario running around?” And one time, the answer to that question was that I spent 11 days in jail. And another time, it was that the security apparatus injected me with ketamine. And another time, it was that I spent three days in a behavioral center. And another time, it was that three bouncers literally threw me out of a bar so that my head and my ass bounced off the sidewalk. And yet another time, the answer was that Carrier blocked me on Facebook Messenger. So I know all about how the question of “How do I survive?,” to one person, becomes, “What are we going to do about them!?” to the other who was raised to be phobic of that person and their otherized “group”! And just as tikkun olam is the answer to the so-called “Jewish Question,” lachrymology is the “answer” to the so-called “Mario Question”! You solve the “problem” of me by recognizing that the only reason you might have for considering me a problem is that you live in a society where our tears are stopped-up, i.e., not regulated! If you had normlized, say, crying, as the Prophet Maynard advised us, then I wouldn’t have been so “weird,” would I have? What can I say? I was born crying. And you know what else? Lachrymology is also the answer to the Jordan Peterson Question! Yes! What else could it be!? It’s the only fkn thing he’s good at! And, again, the answer to the Jordan Peterson question is that, not unlike me, he must also unrepress his homosexuality! Yes. You may very well find that lachrymology and unrepressing your homosexuality are big “answers” to the “question” of you! Because, well, they can certainly lead to unrepressing yourself in other areas! How about, instead of Fight Clubs, we start Cry Clubs! They could very well be a fruitful way for all these incels to solve their own “male loneliness” and unrepress their homosexuality (and for that matter, their femininity) at the same damn time! Consciously rather than dissociatedly, of course! And we could, perhaps call them “Fruity Little Clubs,” because the members of these clubs will certainly find themselves bearing very powerful metaphysical “fruit”! Yes! Like we were saying! You want real “sexual liberation,” westoid!? Then unrepress your homosexuality (and for that matter, if you are “male,” your feminity), goddammit! If you are a “man,” you may very well find (if you make unrepression a practice) that you never needed to repress yourself in the first place, and you can just live unrepressed, and “women” will “thank” you for this! “Oh my god! You used to be such an asshole! And now you’re not!,” they might tell you! And that should be “thanks” enough!

Indeed, what did “Jack” REALLY want in Fight Club? (Sorry. #SpoilerAlert!) What he really wanted was “Cry Club.” Yes. Don’t be astonished at this. A schizoanalysis of the film makes this perfectly clear, because the film, though sociologically a trainwreck (are we getting that the reflection of sociological orthodoxy isn’t quite the point of movies or art in general???), reveals a lot to us about the subconscious of modern westoid patriarchal-man-in-denial, again, under the “light” of schizoanalysis. To greatly simplify things (but certainly retain the “essence”!!!), Jack comes to the realization, at a certain point, that his self-actualization will require great processing of grief through, namely, tears and “hugging it out,” as must we all come to this realization. However, this “unrepression” is blocked through “leakage” of the dissociated self. The “who I am when Marla is there” cannot exist in the same time-space as the “who I am when I am crying in Bob’s manboobs.” Therefore, a dissociation must occur because desire (for the carrying-out of the self-actualization process—desire for self-actualization itself!) has been “blocked.” And so, long story short, all this “repression” itself “whips itself up” into the Tyler Durden of the dissociated self through the “archetype machine” of the subconscious—the “Cartesian Demon” and “Dionysian Energy” (the late Gary MB’s username ended in “-nysus,” after all) resonating “within” the subconscious that “desires” to express itself. And the “machine” is “working itself” when Jack kick’s his own ass (not unlike Jim Carrey in Liar, Liar, we might add) in his boss’s office. The film almost literally depicts Tyler as “bubbling up into existence” straight from Jack’s subconscious. And, of course, in schizoanalysis, we must view “making soap from human fat” as something of a “metaphor” for “harvesting our own loosh” (which, of course, is already a “metaphor,” but let the reader understand, I say!). But of course, we must have synthesis rather than dissociation. And, of course, the film is just as much a “mess” in mythical terms as it is sociologically, at least the closer it gets to the end. But Cry Club will be revolutionary, in that it will “teach” us (through the principle of “social evidence,” which we will cover later when we cover Bayesian Marxism) that we never had to repress ourselves in the first place! And that “Cry Club” can simply be “wherever two or three are gathered,” because the real Cry Club is “among you,” which is to say, “within you”! As even Felix Biederman tells us, THERE IS NO FRONTIER! And THAT is the message of the Avatar films, properly understood! And even James Cameron, the Turtle Island settler, gets THAT, on some level! But apparently, the masses are going to have to be told this far more explicitly—through that “social evidence” we were talking about, but more on that later.

You know, speaking of the dialectic of Tyler Durden and Jack, I had a bit of my own “Tyler Durden” phase, when I used to get, at times, blackout drunk, and blacking out is, of course, a form of dissociation. I wasn’t fully dissociated when I sliced my forearm, but I clearly would have been considered “legally hammered.” Of course consuming alchol “brings up” the Dionysian energy—he was the “god of wine,” after all. The Inner Tyler Durden turns out to be, well, the so-called “inner child,” though we do not deny that “he” can also be quite “monstrous,” but this is a “consequence” of how we are “oversocialized” and therefore, any stray nonconforming “desire” gets “buried” in shadow, which is WHERE it takes on those “monstrous” forms. When the nuns at the beginning of The Sound of Music were singing, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?,” verily I say unto you, westoid, that they were already asking The Jewish Question in their hearts! And obviously, music IS the “answer” to the Maria Von Trapp “question”! And just as “fictively” as Maria Von Trapp became the “mother” of the Von Trapp children (for the movie is quite “fictional”!) BY “initiating” them into the anthropological “cult” of music, just as “fictively,” and as “truly,” may the fictive “daughters” of Lana Del Rey arise in a “Clementinian Movement” to provide the masses with “social evidence” that they don’t have to fkn repress themselves! Especially in the domain of crying! Because the consciousness of the fictive “Daughter of Lana Del Rey” is only a shadow, only an aspect, of the consciousness of the Child of Mother Earth! And slicing my forearm was only the, let’s call it, “second step” (the “first step” was the eleven days in jail) in dealing with my “Inner Tyler Durden.” I wouldn’t “fully” deal with “him” until my head “exploded” on 16 Apr the next year (when I realized that Mario the fuck-up and Mario the know-it-all were the same person and they were both me), but that “second step” is what it took for me to {mostly} stop drinking. And Raven is the “answer” to the Kristina Kyser “question,” because, unlike “Dr. Kristina Kyser,” Raven is “never just one thing”! And so “shape-shifting” must also be a big part of the answer to the “you” question! Yes! The Wild Mind has wings and talons, etc., etc.! And when we were caling Dr. Carrier “Dr. Head-Up-His-Ass (Dr. HUHA),” we were also saying that we all have an inner Dr. HUHA! And this inner Dr. HUHA will explode like a caterpillar so it can take its new “shape” as a butterfly, or as whatever “shape” it shifts into, because Dr. HUHA must realize he is “never just one thing”! And then he will have transcended his existence as Dr. HUHA (because he will have gone all the way up his ass and come out the other side and realize himself as a four-dimensional being and his Klein bottle will be overflowing with love for the universe he once called a moron), and become Boxes-With-Shadows, because he has stepped through his Jungian shadow and is ready to help others step through theirs! Carrier was wrong to characterize the uncrucified ego by “arrogance” in his livestream with Godless Engineer. Because, as of then, he hadn’t gone through with the whole ego crucifixion process yet, and, despite what you might think, we don’t find him particularly arrogant! We’ve known people a lot more arrogant than him! But that’s part of the point! “I’m not arrogant, therefore I don’t need to crucify my ego.” Whoops! Heads I win, tails you lose! Arrogance is only one possible aspect of the uncrucified ego! “Skeet’s Disease can mimic death,” etc., etc.! There’s plenty of “arrogance” hiding in the Jungian shadow of westoid patriarchal-man-in-denial! The arrogance required to call the universe a moron, for example! Surely Carrier wouldn’t call someone else’s mother a moron! So why is he calling his own “mother” a moron by calling the universe a moron!? Because just as we are Daughters of Lana Del Rey and Children of Mother Earth, we are also Children of the Universe! The same universe that Carrier called a moron! And Carrier has called Lana Del Rey brilliant (or something like that)! But how can Lana be “brilliant” if the universe, whence she came, is a “moron”!? And so the crucifixion and resurrection of the ego, and lachrymology, and shapeshifting, and unrepression of homosexuality and femininity, all of these, must all be “facets,” and “interconnected” at that, of the “answer” to the Richard Carrier/Dr. HUHA “question”! And what would Carrier have to say about all this? Well, he could easily throw me (and thereby his own soul) under the bus by denying what he knows to be the truth, that everything I’m saying makes sense to him and he can follow my premises to my conclusions. Because I’m sure a lot of this won’t make sense to a lot of people. Godless Engineer himself called one of my superchats “word salad,” but, as I said in a comment later, this book is a whole damn garden! And Carrier certainly has gardening experience! Even if Godless Engineer doesn’t!

And the reason I said “Well!” instead of something like “congratulations!” when my best friend told me she was pregnant was, “well,” what I couldn’t tell her until after the kid was born, because I didn’t want to stress her out, because that would have been bad for the fetus, and my friend had had miscarriages (or one, at least) before, and so what I told her after the kid was born was what I already said hundreds of pages ago, that parents in class society are required to “sacrifice” their children to the master-slave dialectic! And my best friend thanked me for waiting to tell her that until after she popped out the kid! And as much as my best friend might have found part of the answer to the question of herself in motherhood, in the next stage of society, we’d better goddamn well recognize that IT TAKES A VILLAGE, so that my friend doesn’t have to sacrifice her kid to the goddamn master-slave dialectic! Please!

You know, in my first attempt at sketching out my own philosophy some 15 years ago, I made the observation that when Descartes was saying, “I think, therfore I am,” (which is really “I experience, therefore I am,” but anyway), the “deeper” meaning was, “for every function, there must be a mechanism.” And I think we’ve established that well enough. And it was a fine start. But of course, we are not a “mere” jumble of functions “merely” existing in the mechanistic domain. We are also inextricable from our relations, and the next step from “for every function there must be a mechanism” is “for every relation, there must be a frequency/phase,” because the mechanistic domain is just as “inextricable” from the frequency domain as we are (as “individuals”) from our relations! Because these “relations” are not merely abstract because they are not merely external! They are “concrete” in that they are “definite” (p. 86). And it is through these concrete relations that we can act as subjects in common (or rather “harmonious”) purpose with other subjects, and BE the “common cause” (p. 86) that carries out this shared purpose! And for this, we must realize (interalize, accept) that TIME IS NOT LINEAR! This should be obvious enough if you think about it. The earth doesn’t move in a straight line through space. Why would time on earth move any differently from the way earth itself moves? Well, what do you want from me? There are no straight lines, remember? And time certainly isn’t one of them!

And, of course, even in capitalism, the relations aren’t “merely” abstract, not in the moment when they are “engaged.” Abstractly, in the case of me at the pedicab shop, we could just as easily say I was Dorothy and Laban, Simeon, and JP were my Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow, respectively, and the pedicab was my Toto, and my meltdowns were my Ruby Slippers (as we could “abstractly” say that our relation was that of “co-workers” all “abstractly” working in “our own individual interests” and that the relation between Laban and me was that of “exchange”—that’s just as much a “story”!), but concretely, we were all ourselves, all doing concrete things for what we might call a “common purpose”—the “purpose” of keeping Laban in the black without his having to make “uncomfortable” sacrifices (what other kinds of “sacrifices” are there!?). And so there is no (necessary) metaphysical contradiction between the abstract relation and the concrete relation or between the “external” relation and the internal relation. And, as Gould tells us, it will be necessary to recognize this to move forward to the next stage of consciousness/society!

Ok. Fine. So, according to Gould, Marx tells us in the Grundrisse that we’ve been transformed by capitalism into these UDSIs (we’ve been calling them), but what he doesn’t tell us is that much of this “development,” under the constraints of bourgeois society, is still somewhat “locked” in the “realm” of the dissociated self, outside of which, we still haven’t developed very far beyond peasants. And so to access our full UDSI powers, we will have to undissociate ourselves, become conscious, i.e., wake up. Ok. So click your heels together and say, “there’s no place like home” and wake up in the World of Mother Earth! Ok. Fine. Part of you is still in the pod and part of you is still in the desert of the real. You’re all over the place. You’re not unlike JP the scarecrow in that sense.

But of course, Marx does tell us about the property relation under capitalism, and from this, all the stuff I was talking about in the last paragraph can be easily seen to “tumble out” in the “statistics.” Gould tells us, “Marx defines property as disposition over the conditions of production” (p. 87). Do you realize what that means? It literally means who gets to be a subject (who gets to carry out their will) in society, the distinction over who is a subject (in the sense of legally possessing the metaphysical power to carry out their will) and who is an “object,” or rather, who is a “subject” in the sense of being ruled! And, in capitalism, the capitalist class “has the power of determining how this property is to be used,” which means “labor[…] does not have control over the objective conditions of its activity,” and consequently, “labor’s need for these conditions makes it objectively dependent on capital” (ibid.). We can’t be truly free if we are dependent in this sense. This is why we must realize that the conditions for our self-actualization CANNOT BE OWNED BY ANOTHER! Not unlike in the Bruce Hornsby song, I really did LOVE the family [to which] I gave the ride I was talking about earlier, and the money WAS “just a mere formality”! Because we were all “engaged” in a “practice” of self-actualization! And we’ve already established that a pedicab driver is not unlike a sex-worker in that the only “property” they have to “sell” is their labor (which is where all the “magic” comes from). I mean, come on. I was literally “the town bicycle”! That was my job! It was how I ate! Yes, a lot of asses sat on the bench seat of the pedicab, and the seat “remembers” them all! And it especially “remembers” my ass! Because of the “frequency” of the “relation”!

Oh my god. What does it mean for you to be a peasant? It means you want to be saved by or want to “worship” some Oedipal hero of motherfuckerism. That’s literally what it means. But this isn’t what you really want. This “desire” has been beaten into you by the ruling class, because what you really desire is to overthrow the ruling class. What you really desire is to braid Grendel’s Mother’s hair. It’s the You question again. Because the Jew[ish] question is really the You[ish] question. And in class society, the You question has become “How do I survive?” instead of what it should be, which is, “How do we build a society so that everyone can thrive!?” That’s the real question! And if the masses aren’t thriving, then it’s because the wrong question is being asked and/or the wrong answer is being implemented (or the right one isn’t). Electrolytes are not what plants crave! Two plus two does not equal five! The conditions of your self-actualization cannot be owned by another! Taylor Swift did not bring about universal gay acceptance merely by shouting out “GLAAD” in one song! Perhaps Taylor Swift should unrepress her homosexuality! But in the event that Taylor Swift does openly unrepress her homosexuality, even this (alone) will not bring about universal gay acceptance! But maybe people will see it as “social evidence” that maybe they are repressing their own homosexuality! You made a deal with the Devil, but her dick’s bigger. But it’s not about giving Taylor Swift credit for any of this! It’s about unrepressing ourselves! It’s about recognizing our own magic!

Before “we” were “peasants,” (and after we were foragers), “we” were something a lot more like a “folk” or a “tribe.” Of course, Engels (and D&G after him) used the terms “savages,” “barbarians,” and “civilized men.” I mention these only for historical education purposes as they are severely “outdated” (among other things we could say about them). But “tribes” have chieftains rather than kings. They’re necessarily polytheistic. Their lives move with the seasons. If a certain enterprising chieftain would be king of these “folk,” he’d better goddamn well peasantize them, i.e., traumatize them by abolishing their pagan gods and demolishing their anthropological cult sites and converting them to monotheism! We’ve seen it before. There’s a whole rigamarole about the transition from “judges” to “kings” in the Hebrew Bible. Josiah is deemed quite a “hero” for “ruining” the high places (and we see this conflict between the old gods and the new gods, i.e., the old ruling class and the new ruling class, the old social formation and the new, in our literature, e.g., Game of Thrones, Beowulf—made more explicit in the Zemekis adaptation). Of course, before they were monotheistic, the pagan Canaanites practiced child sacrifice. Not everyone, not every social formation, back then practiced child sacrifice, and a lot of people back then regarded it as “immoral,” which is a bit of a yawn, because it’s really “just” a historical development of certain societies under certain (contingent) “conditions.” And perhaps the Canaanites practiced child sacrifice even into the monotheistic era. And when did the monotheistic era begin for the Canaanites? Who can know. “Professor” Jiang says the monotheistic era started when the Persians took over, but for all we know, it could have been even later than that (and according to the Elephantine Papyri as written about by, e.g., the late Russell Gmirkin, it almost certainly WAS later than that!). Yapper Jiang (whom we take more seriously than literally, because we take the esoteric very seriously! And so does he!) says that the old anthropological cult was disconnected, cut off, from the new anthropological cult, and therefore, features of the old cult are still hidden in the collective Jungian shadow of the new cult. Now, look, it’s entirely possible that the Canaanites went through cycles of having kings and going back into tribes. The month of Nisan doesn’t exist solely because of an appreciation for sensible automobiles, you know. So, for child sacrifice, you need, you know, your Saturns, your Ba’als, yadda, yadda, yadda. A full exploration of all this is beyond the scope of this book, but, cutting forward about a thousand years, in Europe, there began to arise a bunch of assholes who started calling themselves kings, and so they had to peasantize the folk, and so they decided this could be facilitated by, well, other[iz]ing Jews, who, of course, themsevles used to be pagans—are you keeping up? And so they created jobs that could, legally, only be performed by Jews and jobs that couldn’t “legally” be performed by Jews (or at least “manufactured” such a distinction)—to keep the peasants in their “merely local,” and we could add, “merely Christian,” development. So, you see, even this otherizing of Jews (otherizing “from” WHAT!?) was what we could call “contingent.” But, of course, Christians used to be Jews, and then, among other “historical events,” a would-be king decided he could use Christianity to his advantage! (we are, or course, referring to Constantine). And Muslims used to be Christians (except for the ones who used to be pagans), so it all spirals out of the control of the previous anthropological cult when it “blossoms” into each new one out of the “ashes” of the old. And, much like Gould tells us with labor, this is what we could call a “continually causal” process. And even in the modern era, capitalism lied to us by telling “you” that there was a “You” Question, (or at least by telling us to ask the wrong “You” question!) and then answering it by “hammering” us from spirals into straight lines and selling us a lie that it was the only way we could survive. Well, we have to “hammer” (and perhaps “sickle”) ourselves back into spirals again! Because we have to “spiral out” of our “merely local” development! Because we are UDSIs, not peasants! Not anymore! We have to alchemize the folk and the peasant! We have to integrate and thereby transcend them, perhaps retaining certain features, but, again, at a higher stage of development! Because the unintegrated consciousness is a “species” of consciousness that has been selected by mother earth for extinction! But the good news is that, in this case, this is just another way of saying it’s been “selected” for EVOLUTION!

Look, the reason I’m “dragging out” all this free will and causality (we are about to get into “causality as an internal relation”) and stage-of-consciousness-equals-stage-of-society shit is that we have to understand that we cause (we are the cause of) our own freedom and justice before we get to the goddamn freedom and justice chapters! And for this, we need an understanding of “social evidence,” as the Bayesian Marxists say! “History is material inference,” they say. So, “What is Bayesian Marxism?” Well, “Bayesian Marxism is the world outlook and scientific method that is being constructed by adopting Bayesian probability theory as the mathematical foundation of Dialectical Materialism.” My, what wondrous turns of phrase. The rest of their statement and their theses are quoted in their entirety below:

Social and political revolution is the result of a historical material Bayesian inference, which begins by a prior distribution of beliefs and behaviours that form the current society, updated in the course of history by social evidence that are acted and observed by people, and finally results in a revolution when the full posterior of the society changes its mode (in a mathematical sense).

(Read “Our Theses” for the line of reason.)

Below are some quotes from Stalin*’s [*whom we “love,” but don’t need to be “fans” of! —MM] 1938 booklet “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” that are mathematically formalised by elements of Bayesian probability theory:

“To Hegel, … the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought.” (Marx, Afterword to Capital.)

Bayesian probability interprets the concept of probability as “a measure of a state of knowledge”, in contrast to interpreting it as a frequency [but see our analysis of this later —MM] or a physical property of a system. Thus, the concept of probability is not taken materially, but taken as material reflected through human mind.

“dialectics [regards nature] … as a connected and integral whole, in which things, phenomena are organically connected with, dependent on, and determined by, each other.”

Definition of a Bayesian generative model requires the determination of the conditional probabilities P(B|Ai) of an event B to all events Ai it depends on.

“no phenomenon in nature can be understood if taken by itself, isolated from surrounding phenomena … any phenomenon can be understood and explained if considered in its inseparable connection with surrounding phenomena, as one conditioned by surrounding phenomena.”

To calculate probability of an event A, we write the joint probability and marginalize A by integrating out all other events as follows: P(B) = integral[ P(A,B).dA ] Therefore, to derive an event’s probability, we have to consider it in its connections to other events, which is denoted by their joint probability distribution.

“dialectics holds that nature is … a state of continuous movement and change, of continuous renewal and development, where something is always arising and developing, and something always disintegrating and dying away.
The dialectical method therefore requires that phenomena should be considered not only from the standpoint of their interconnection and interdependence, but also from the standpoint of their movement, their change, their development, their coming into being and going out of being.”

In Bayesian inference, the prior of an event P(A) is its probability distribution before any evidence is considered. The posterior probability P(A|B) is the resulting distribution after relevant evidence is taken into account. As more and more of the evidence is processed, the prior becomes less effective and the posterior distribution becomes more accurate. An inference involves the processing of a series of evidence in time. During this process, we calculate a series of posterior distributions in which the prior distribution of the event gradually dissolves (goes out of being) and the full posterior gradually appears (comes into being).

“The dialectical method regards as important primarily not that which at the given moment seems to be durable and yet is already beginning to die away, but that which is arising and developing, even though at the given moment it may appear to be not durable, for the dialectical method considers invincible only that which is arising and developing.”

As the amount of evidence processed goes to infinity, the effect of the prior distribution of an event becomes negligible, and the full posterior converges to a distribution that represents the best of our knowledge of that event given the infinite series of evidence. Therefore, the prior is not primarily important, different priors converge to the same result.

“dialectics [regards] the process of development … as a development which passes from insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes to open ‘fundamental changes’ to qualitative changes; a development in which the qualitative changes occur not gradually, but rapidly and abruptly, taking the form of a leap from one state to another; they occur not accidentally but as the natural result of an accumulation of imperceptible and gradual quantitative changes.”

Let us represent a qualitative property as the maximum a posteriori estimate of a discrete random variable. If new evidence supports another value, we first observe a quantitative accumulation in the posterior distribution. After some amount of evidence, the mode of the posterior abruptly changes, thus causing a qualitative change.

“The dialectical method therefore holds that the process of development should be understood not as movement in a circle, not as a simple repetition of what has already occurred, but as an onward and upward movement, as a transition from an old qualitative state to a new qualitative state, as a development from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher” [as a goddamn spiral! —MM]

In the sense that the newest maximum a posteriori estimate takes into account more data, we can say that it is higher than an earlier estimate. In Bayesian Nonparametric models, the complexity of the model is determined by the amount of data processed. Little amount of data supports simpler models with less parameters. As more amount of evidence is processed, the higher and more complex models are favoured.

“The dialectical method … holds that the process of development from the lower to the higher takes place not as a harmonious unfolding of phenomena, but as a disclosure of the contradictions inherent in things and phenomena, as a ‘struggle’ of opposite tendencies which operate on the basis of these contradictions.”

In classical deductive logic, a proposition is either true or false. A Bayesian probability value P in [0,1] denotes our belief that an event happens. It also denotes as (1-P) our belief [but see our analysis of “belief” supra —MM] that the same event does not happen. Thus, a probability distribution represents two contradicting events at its every point [see our analysis of “quantum cognition” sub —MM]. During an inference, evidence may support either event. However, only one of them will be maximum at the end. Thus, we can view an inference process as a struggle between opposite tendencies.

“It is easy to understand how immensely important is the extension of the principles of the dialectical method to the study of social life and the history of society, and how immensely important is the application of these principles to the history of society and to the practical activities of the party of the proletariat.”

Early applications of state-istical thinking revolved around the needs of states to base policy on demographic and economic data. As Bayesian statistics can be extended to social life and history, it can also be applied in political activity. We need not be passive observers of data, we can also create social evidence that leads to a posterior social situation by political activity. [We are the cause of our own activity! —MM]

“if all phenomena are interconnected and interdependent, then it is clear that every social system and every social movement in history must be evaluated not from the standpoint of “eternal justice” or some other preconceived idea, as is not infrequently done by historians, but from the standpoint of the conditions which gave rise to that system or that social movement and with which they are connected.” [No state can operate “above” its level of consciousness, which itself is part of the material conditions—and this is no “excuse”; merely a limit of “bourgeois morality” in particular, see our coverage of this supra, and pre-shamanic “morality” in general, see our coverage of this sub —MM]

We can view history as a posterior that is updated by social evidence. Social elements in history [e.g., freedom and justice —MM] are not to be evaluated against a static ideal. They only make sense against other elements with which they are conditionally dependent. [And we will see that this “dynamic” view will allow us to “transcend” the previous “static” views! —MM]
-Bayesian Marxists

It should be no surprise that Marxism can so easily (and naturally) be put into Bayesian terms! Bayesian inference is itself dialectical in that it runs on Hegelian/Dao/Logos 2×2 logic rather than Aristotelian either-or logic! And here are their theses (in “initial draft” form, so let’s not quibble too much on the terminology!):

People’s beliefs can be considered as high dimensional posterior distributions that are updated by the social evidence they experience. The evidence is not to be taken as statements with truth values, and this process is largely unconscious.

People’s behaviour are governed primarily by maximum a posteriori estimates that are evaluated from their beliefs. [i.e., what they’ve “internalized” —MM]

A social ground emerges from the collective behaviour of several people, thus it is dependent on their estimates in a complex way.

Social evidence can be intentionally created to affect people’s beliefs, then their behaviour, and finally the social grounds they form.

There are superficial social grounds like buyers of the same product. There are also deep grounds like “mode of production”. Deeper grounds need stronger evidence to change, so they are harder to change.

People have different sets of beliefs for social grounds of different types. Deeper grounds are governed by the deeper beliefs with stronger priors. The beliefs that govern superficial grounds have a more distributed probability mass.

Superficial beliefs are conditionally dependent on deeper beliefs. Moreover, the network structure of the generative model of superficial beliefs also depend on the deeper beliefs.

This superficial Bayesian network that is dependent on deeper beliefs, defines the individual subject that acts in society [the UDSI, the individual-in-relations, if they are acting CONSCIOUSLY! —MM]. This corresponds to behaviour conditioned to a certain economical system. This limited possibility space of a subject is called an ideology.

A subject is only aware of a superficial network of beliefs that is in fact conditioned on deeper unconscious beliefs.

These deeper beliefs that the subject is unaware of, form the substructure, which includes all the social grounds that are dependent on these common deeper beliefs, including the production system.

People in a social ground carry beliefs about each other in addition to general beliefs. These beliefs may be clustered in chunks of people, or may contain beliefs about self-image at others’ viewpoint etc.

Behaviour of a person in a social ground is thus dependent on behaviours of other people that count as evidence supporting some beliefs about them that affect the full posterior for that person. This is called social interaction.

Social interaction introduces a duration that is required before each person decides how to behave after observing and evaluating the behaviour of other people.

People in a social ground also have beliefs about the nature of the ground, which are usually made consistent through an organisation among its members, or simple rules like “follow the leader”.

Inconsistencies among beliefs about the nature of the ground are most dangerous to that social ground.

The organisation in a social ground is usually based on deeper beliefs of its leader and members, i.e. it is supported by substructure.

Some social evidence can affect the deeper beliefs [as depicted in, e.g., Idiocracy —MM], changing it from its prior toward its full posterior. These are called revolutionary social evidence. These affect the beliefs about the nature of grounds in substructure, and enough of this evidence may start breaking social grounds in the substructure.

Some social evidence can affect the deeper beliefs so as to strengthen its prior, delaying its inference. These are called counter-revolutionary social evidence [cf. “false consciousness” —MM]. These evidence usually use leadership organisation in social grounds in substructure, and they aim to make consistent the beliefs about the nature of these grounds.

Inconsistencies in or disappearing of some social grounds in substructure quickens the inference, because revolutionary social evidence is more effective on people with less conditional dependencies on deep priors that originate from connections to these substructure grounds.

Social and political revolution is the result of a historical material Bayesian inference, which begins by a prior distribution of beliefs and behaviours that form the current society, updated in the course of history by social evidence that are acted and observed by people, and finally results in a revolution when the full posterior of the society changes its mode (in a mathematical sense).

-Bayesian Marxists

In their own way, they are speaking of social formation theory. Again, social formation must not be understood as the sort of thing that “explains far too much.” We are the agents “forming” the social formation as it runs! We are as close to a “perpetual motion machine” as we are ever going to get—because we have to feed ourselves, and we are born and die, as Dennett’s Turkish friend tells us. But as long as we are alive, we can be “perpetual motion” in that we can harness the motion that is “perpetually” going on within us in carrying out our purposes! In attaining “the absolute movement of becoming”! This constant motion and this just as constant “containment” (“within the skin”) and direction (in the facing forward of the, well, face), and their dialecticality w.r.t. each other is what, through the archetype engine of the subconscious, results in all this “Dionysian” and “Apollonian” energy “bubbling up” to the surface! And social formation theory keeps coming up as well! For example… you know, Tyler Perry made a movie about a dude who invented a perpetual motion machine, which, as is well known, is physically impossible “in real life.” And Tyler Perry’s existence can tell us a lot about social formation theory. A schizoanalysis of FD Signifier’s recent 4-hour YouTube video on the guy makes perfectly clear that Tyler Perry “would be” a kind of Priest-King of institutional[ized] blackness (within the framework of “black capitalism”). And we must honor FD Signifier for this video. And we must especially honor him for building a real table with his friends. And we must honor the spirits of his ancestors, but let us not forget that, except for a brief blip in the “ancestor” timeline, we have the same goddamn ancestors! Why haven’t you been honoring all them on your own time!? Anyway, according to social formation theory, if Tyler Perry would be some Priest-King of institutional[ized] blackness, then he would need blackness itself to be something like a peasant religion (not unlike Catholicism) where the development of the black masses would be confined, in certain “vital” ways, to the “merely local,” and, we could add, “merely Christian.” What about the spirits of the ancestors, Ty? Peasants “need” a certain kind of morality because they have been cut off from the spirits of their ancestors, so they “need” a “morality” based on the authority of the priest, the lord, and the king (or at least that’s what the priest, lord, and king tell them—and they have internalized this). And Tyler wants black people to follow a morality based on the pastor, the husband/father, and, well, a certain patriarchal conception of god, as FD tells us. Will Thatcher doesn’t have the “spirits” of his (presumably) peat-digging, tree-worshipping ancestors to guide his path, therefore, unless he changes his stars, he must live with the “morality” of “Thatcher is my name is my job is my identity.” And similarly, Tyler would “protect” black people (from what!?) by feeding them a peasant morality rather than getting them back in touch with the spirits of their ancestors! But FD got back in touch with the spirits of his ancestors by building a table with his friends and neighbors! How Jesusy of him!

And what is the “point” of a social formation in social formation theory (whether or not the formers are conscious of it)? It IS the “relatively stable” maintenance of the current mode of production, under the direction of the current “ruling class.” And we can see this as well in the “mode of production” of Perry’s films and series, again, according to FD. All of Perry’s film production takes place in a veritably industrialized “mode,” which, in accordance/conformity with the capitalist mode of production, is “set up” in such a way as to maximize profits. Well, maybe Perry thinks black people are “more advanced” as a peasantry than as a “folk,” but this would only reveal, again, something of a “contempt” for the spirits of the ancestors. In the next stage of consciousness/society, a big part of the transcending of the “merely local” (or at least not yet consciously universal) development and the “merely external” (not yet consciously internal) relations and the “merely abstract” (not yet consciously concrete) equality, freedom, and justice will involve getting back in touch with the spirits of our ancestors. Because how can the proletariat be a class-for-itself if it can’t perform its own priestly functions? If it can’t get in touch with the World-Spirit directly (as in, not through an intermediary from a “special” class)? Of course, Hegel thought his species of Protestant Christianity was a way to “get in touch directly” with the World-Spirit through the “person” of Christ. But he identified Jesus with the logos. Now, look, the logos can’t literally take the form of a dude (except that the logos is the same “logic” as the Mendelian), but Jesus is always depicted as introducing a broader “logic” when someone comes in wanting to make logic about “the point,” (which, again, you can read about in The Evolution of God by Wright). Logic isn’t about “the point”; it’s about “the path,” which is why the first “Christians” didn’t call it “Christianity,” but “The Way.” And Marxism-Leninism-Maroofism is certainly the negation of the negation of “The Way”! And we are the logos in the form of “dudes” (in the Californian sense) in that we are a “product” of the material 2×2 “logic” of Mendelian genetics! So, pace Perry, the real perpetual motion machine will not be a product that can be invented, and certainly not by some Special Boy, because we are already nature’s little perpetual motion machines! But we are not the perpetual motion machines of capital! Because capital doesn’t feed us! Only labor can feed us! Capital could only “feed” us through the intermediary of labor! And we can say that we are, in a sense, nature’s perpetual motion machines because our relation with nature is an “internal” one! Even feeding oneself involves self-motion!

You know, the You Question can get perverted in other ways. We’ve been talking about Agent Raven (AKA Dr. Kyser). You know, there used to be another character who went by the name of The Raven. He was a WCW Wrestler. His whole gimmick was self-pity. He had (though we don’t blame him for this any more than we blame Hulk Hogan for the fake Irish gimmick—we have plenty of other things to “blame” him for) “perverted” the You Question into the Me Question: “What about me? What about The Raven?,” was his catchphrase. You know, there used to be another “fighter” whose whole gimmick was self-pity. He wrote a whole book about it. There was a lot of self-pity in the air in Germany after they lost WWI and, instead of getting real about the, well, fact that Germany never should’ve been in that war in the first place, they got the idea in their heads that they had been stabbed in the back, and would’ve won the war if not for this, not unlike how the southerners developed a “lost cause” mythology after the U.S. Civil War and the Americans developed a POW-MIA and “they spit on me in my homeland” mythology after getting their asses handed to them in the Vietnam War (or, as our boy Noam Chomsky called it, “the invasion of South Vietnam”). So who stabbed Germany in the back? Well, there was a lot of “antisemitism” (which, let’s not forget, was originally called “Jew-hate”) floating in the air in Germany back then, so they were an “easy target.” Look. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I know you probably think you’re “anti-fascist” (Carrier seems to think this of himself), but D&G say there’s likely too much shadow in your subconscious (for fascist presuppositions to hide in) for you to be an anti-fascist. Fascism is always a development of capitalism, a “last resort” of capitalists to stamp out burgeoning revolutionary energy and “the spectre [or as Judith Butler might say, ‘phantasm’] of communism.” Well, we can see something of a proto-fascism developing in Alexander the other Dipshit’s “Cornerstone Speech.” Feudalism created the conditions for modern race/-ism to develop by cutting us off from the spirits of our ancestors. Fascism comes back in and tells a certain group of people, “You know what? You ARE a ‘Folk’! You do have ancestors! WHITE* ancestors! SETTLER ancestors! COLONIZER ancestors! And you need to get back in touch with the spirits of those ancestors!” (*but as we will see later, as “white” isn’t always the most useful categorization schema for these purposes). As Ann Coulter tells us: “My ancestors weren’t immigrants; they were settlers.” You have already internalized fascist presuppositions, Ann—you are already asking the Jewish Question in your heart! That’s what the Bayesian Marxists call “the social ground”: the internalized presuppositions. Ann Coulter’s real ancestors were likely diggers of glorious peat and worshippers of glorious trees. They didn’t become “white” (or “settlers”) until a certain development of their “society” took place. So we can’t combat fascism merely by pressing harder on the morality button. Your “morality button” is only a tool for the spirit of the age (to uphold itself). We need to turn the light on in the subconscious to defeat fascism. Because the USSR defeated Nazi Germany (with a little help from the “Allies”), but when Hitler killed Hitler, he only killed Grendel. Grendel’s Mother is still floating around in the cave of the subconscious, in shadow. This is why the You Question has to become the We Question. And the answer to the We Question must be putting Mother Earth back in charge. Anything else is the wrong answer to the wrong question. Anything else would cut us off from nature and the spirits of our ancestors! Anything else is incapable of preventing fascism and of ending the carceral state! Anything else fails to contend with Grendel’s Mother!

And we can see Social Formation Theory coming up again in the life of Taylor Swift, especially when schizoanalyzed—the connection between SFT and schizoanalysis will be explained later, we chuckle—in parallel with the life of Lana Del Rey, AKA Lizzy Grant. And of course, it’s highly intentional that I say “in parallel” rather than “in comparison.” “Comparison is the thief of joy,” remember? Taylor Swift won a Grammy for Midnights, but Lana Del Rey was on that album, working her magic! And as Lana Del Rey tells us, (because, before Oscar Wilde was, Lana Del Rey AM), “life imitates art.” Taylor Swift comes to us from a country music tradition, which is the story of a peasant tradition in struggle with a folk tradition. We can see this in the life and work of Dolly Parton. Dolly Parton comes to us from the holler, but chose Nashville. She then brought Nashville back to the holler. This is regarded as quite a success story in the bourgeois world. Dolly writes of the endless struggle of the holler folk to adapt to the peasant world with its more obedience-based morality, and especially the bourgeois world, with its exchange-based “morality” (which country music generally has the good sense to appear like it “looks down on” bourgeois “morality,” but this is largely an act, of course). But all of Dolly Parton’s songs are about harvesting her own loosh in a world where love only seeps in through the cracks! Her “Coat of Many Colors.” Her “Bargain Store” heart. Her “cup of ambition.” Her “happiness” that “depends on” someone else’s decision! “Dolly Parton survived (and ‘thrived,’ we could say) ‘during’ the torture, so what’s your excuse?,” would be the narrative (not from her, but from the bourgeoisie, who publish all her shit). But that would be survivor bias. Nashville is a world of exchange, disconnected from the holler spirits. So this leads us to ask: “What’s the connection between Taylor Swift, a certified Westoid Oedipal Hero of motherfuckerism, and the exchange morality of Nashville?” Again, it comes back to SFT. The current “form” of the “ideal” Westoid Oedipal Hero of Motherfuckerism (in the current spirit of the age, the age of the iron feet mixed with clay) is the Marvel-type Superpowered Superhero, which, of course, evolved from the “costumed adventurer” WOHoM, the first of which was created BY A WOMAN, ok nerds!? We are of course speaking of the Scarlet Pimpernel, a protector of peasant morality against this new burgeoning, “alien” morality of the bourgeoisie, talking about “liberté, egalité, fraternité.” All Greek to us peasants! We want our nobles to keep their precious heads! And the same tired script keeps getting repeated today. And so, as predicted by SFT, Taylor Swift must model herself after the superhero (protecting what!?) of a type representing The Current Thing, which of course we all support(!), which is the Marvel-type superhero, in the aftermath of the death of the old god of monotheism. But why do we need heroes these days? Well, you see, because we still live in a world of gigantic wealth inequality, and having heroes, well, is necessary to support the current thing, (because “the current thing” IS the “morality” of the current society rather than, say, concrete equality, freedom, and justice), because the subconscious must be organized in such a way as to “want” to support The Current Thing, i.e., the social ground—and, again, at scale, this requires quite more than a bit of esotericism (we will note that Taylor Swift has a “favorite number”—like a nerd—and that this number is 13). And so there’s little left for Taylor Swift to do these days but sacrifice her enemies to the god of the myth of Taylor Swift! What else is there!? Reconnect with the spirits of her peat-digging, tree-worshipping ancestors!? Those were cut off from her when her settler ancestors chose whiteness. You see westoid, the ancestors of the holler folk did at some point become transformed from peat-digging tree-worshippers (or whatever) into settlers, but then they “settled” into the holler, and the holler reconnected them with the spirits of their ancestors. This “development” brought about a conflict with the non-holler people. We can see this, for example (though somewhat mythicized), in the song “Copperhead Road.” Who needs the permission of the law to sell moonshine (or weed) when you have the “permission” of the holler? But Lana Del Rey, who comes from (or “through”) a more “folky,” more “witchy,” tradition, at some point, recognized that she had been cut off from the spirits of her ancestors, and so she sought them out, to reconnect with them! In doing so, she transcended the “merely abstract” bourgeois morality of exchange (“I’m a different kind of woman / If you want some basic bitch go to the Beverly Center and find her”—and we will note that the “basic bitch” species of consciousness, regardless of gender, has been selected by Mother Earth for extinction! Which means that the Beverly Center has also been selected by Mother Earth for “extinction”—but again, in this case, by “extinction,” we mean “evolution”)! But Taylor is a bit “stuck” in this “morality.” She is said to have “exchanged” songs with Charli XCX in some kind of de facto “beef.” There’s a big difference between “hatred” and the veritable sea of emotions on display in the track “Sympathy is a Knife.” Charli regards the subject of this song (whoever she is) as a bit of a Grendel’s Mother figure, because her mere presence brings up deep, “ugly,” insecurities from the subconscious. This is far from “hatred.” But the subject (again, whoever she is) of Taylor’s “Actually Romantic” is a veritable sinner in the hands of an angry god (the worst kind of angry god—the kind who insists she’s not angry!). The “abstractness” of the “exchange” crashes into the concrete “inequality” of it. Charli knows she’s a sinner in the hands of an angry god! She doesn’t need the angry god to remind her! She is quite “fearful” of this god! But the god doesn’t want her fear. The god wants her love. Again, perhaps this god should unrepress her homosexuality!

We confess that Lana once played the role of an angry god. Particularly in “I Fucked My Way to the Top.” It was said that this was a response to Lorde. Whether or not this is true, we can easily imagine Lana getting a bit pissed at Lorde’s so casual dismissal of the “glamor” of “tigers on a gold leash,” etc., etc. “Hey! Fuck you!,” we can imagine Lana saying, “I worked my ass off to put those tigers in my video! I moved heaven and earth!” (“I’m a dragon, you’re a whore! Don’t even know what you’re good for!,” she says in the song). Not unlike how Brother Maynard feels in “Hooker With a Penis”: “I sold my soul to make a record, dipshit, and THEN! YOU! BOUGHT! ONE!” and responding to the accusation of “selling out to the man” with, “I AM the man!” But these were early Lana and Maynard moves. If they were still pulling that shit, I would be somewhat concerned.

But Taylor is a WOHoM, cut off from her peat-digging, tree-worshipping ancestors, so for her, things have a tendency to keep coming back to the bourgeois, white[ized] nuclear family, e.g., the anxieties over “expectations” imposed on the “conduct” of the “Eldest Daughter.” This so-called “eldest daughter” (especially once we get into the specifics) is entirely a product of the contingent historical developments that resulted in the bourgeois mode of production! Yes! Even the family is a “product” of the current mode of production of a given society! Taylor Swift’s “job” as a WOHoM is to live out and tell her own myth! This myth itself is a product of the current mode of production of the current society! Social Formation Theory keeps coming up (and is connected to schizoanalysis) because it correctly identifies that society itself is the living out of the myth of [a] people about themselves at their “highest” level of “organization”! That’s what it fkn is! There is nothing else for it to be! “Life imitates art” because what the fuck else is there to do with our lives (if we don’t want them to be “a tale told by an idiot”) than, in a sense, create “art”!? And a story, a “myth,” is certainly an art form! And if you are not carrying out your own will, then you are carrying out someone else’s will! Again, there is no secret third thing! The contradictions are/have been too sharply heightened!

And we won’t say that Taylor Swift is a fascist, but as D&G tell us, too many of us have internalized too many presuppositions of fascism (because ruling class ideology is fascist “at [its] heart” once you incinerate the liberal “filthy rags” covering it up). Too many of us are asking the wrong We Question because our “we” is, in too many ways, “merely local” and “merely Christian,” because we’ve been cut off from the spirits of our ancestors. But surely Taylor Swift was aware that people were going to NOTICE that she was using the symbolism of onyx contrasted with opalite in a song about finding love when, outside the song, the person she has found love with has a public history of dating black women. And she is white. This is the kind of thing people NOTICE. And a schizoanalysis of her new album shows quite clearly that Taylor Swift yearns for ancestors to reconnect with, and so she selected Ophelia—projecting her Oedipal (or perhaps “Elektral”???) [i.e., bourgeois/nuclear family-based] neuroses onto the latter. But this must be understood as a fairly shallow analysis of Taylor (and Ophelia, we are sorry to say) on Taylor’s part. It doesn’t get to the right We Question, which means it certainly doesn’t get to the right answer to the We Question! Because Taylor and the subject of “Actually Romantic” (again, whoever she is) are really a WE! Not a “me vs. you”! The “me vs. you” of it all is completely a product of neuroses (which are themselves a “product” of the current mode of production of society), which are a product of the “me” and the “you” not-listening to the subconscious and not recognizing what kind of game their society is vs. whatever little game they are playing “with” each other. Beowulf would have to braid Grendel’s Mother’s hair. We call it motherfuckerism because when they inflict motherfuckerism against us, all we can say in response is, “Motherfucker!” Carrier speaks about this. The Powers That Be make everything about the surface level game, but the schizo- knows that there are always deeper games going on in the subconscious, and that, in many ways, THOSE are the REAL games! In a schizoanalysis, we have every “right” to say that the one song IS a response to the other song. And we can see that Taylor isn’t picking up on the deep, subconscious feelings of her interlocutor. Taylor doesn’t seem to realize the psycho- and schizological “effects” her godhood has on other (“lesser”) would-be gods. Of course, Charli comes to us from Britain, an island of peasants—but London is a world of exchange, and, we understand, cocaine. This cocaine isn’t helping Charli get back in touch with her peat-digging, tree-worshipping (or whatever) ancestors. But “Boring Barbie” is quite a burn. It’s like with that first line, Taylor already lost. But, again, Taylor and Charli must be understood as a “we” and not as a “me vs. you”! The “friend-enemy distinction” is literally a principle that is very important in fascism—as reported to us by one of the fascists who debated Mehdi Hasan on Jubilee. And we can see from Taylor and Charli that the friend-enemy distinction is bullshit! It’s a game of not-listening! You are not listening to the other and you are not listening to your own (otherized) subconscious! And it doesn’t take very much for the not-listen to become the not-see. All the Princess Amidala pollen particles are already in your air when you start to become a not-listen. You know, Anakin had a little too much Princess Amidala pollen in his air, and then he caught Skeet’s Disease, and started to “mimic death” by bringing it about on others. And George might be “guilty” of some clunky storytelling, but people go from not-listens to not-sees all the time. We saw it in that Mehdi Hasan Jubilee video! And we certainly wouldn’t want this to happen to Taylor Swift! Which is to say, we wouldn’t want her to let it happen to herself!

To view someone as an enemy, a million different things must have already gone wrong. It’s a highly artificial state of affairs. Animals “labor” at the level of their consciousness. They don’t have this (artificial) distinction we have of the long-term view and the short-term view. Everything they do in the short-term connects to the long-term. Animals don’t have “enemies.” They have “conflicts,” but they don’t have fixed, static identity categories. And “enemy” is an identity category, even though the “narrative” is that it’s a category of “necessity” or “practicality.” But fascism is all about making “friend” and “enemy” into identity categories! If you have an internalized presupposition that friend and enemy are fixed, static identity categories, that is already a fascist presupposition, subconscious as it may be! But even “fascist” is not a fixed, static identity category! Perhaps you need your own internal de-Nazification program! “But I don’t feel fascist!,” you might say. So!? I never “felt” privileged! But apparently, I’ve had “male privilege” my whole life! But that’s only because we live in a society where we don’t have “rights.” We live in a society where some people have privileges, and the system that “distributes” these privileges is what is called “right,” because, abstractly, we all have “equal access” to this system, even though, concretely, it doesn’t work like that. In a society of privilege, even “the benefit of the doubt” is considered a privilege—subconsciously, which is to say it is (statistically) treated as a privilege, though it is, on the surface, spoken of as more of a “right.” Of course it is. The benefit of the doubt is no “privilege” (in the sense of something that rises above a “right”). It’s NECESSARY for people to remain sane. You can easily make someone appear quite “insane” by consistently denying them of the benefit of the doubt. We can see this from just about any episode of The Twilight Zone. The Twilight Zone is the zone where you don’t have the benefit of the doubt. Where you are the only one who sees what is staring you in the face—not unlike what happened to DarkMatter at Burger King. And we will note that the space underneath the standard Burger King table is very cube-like, very “Saturnian.” And here, we must recognize something very profound. We have swum to the deepest possible commitment to “materialism” (for we are materialists!), where we have materialized even so-called “empty space,” and have “come out the other side” and recognized this very “material” itself is what we could call [a bunch of] “4-dimensional objects” or “beings” or “entities,” and in coming out the other side of materialism we have also reconnected with the spirits of our ancestors! Our ancestors are “spirits” now because of the “material” they were! For life is what we could call “embodied spirit” because we are “embodied motion,” and not unlike Yoda says, we are beings of light-wound-up-into-stuff and beings that give off light, i.e. RADIATE! i.e., GLOW!

Speaking of de-Nazification, let’s go back to Agent Raven’s Nazi grandfather for a bit. Raven would have to de-Nazify her internalized grandfather. She touched upon this (“…reassign[ing him] the role of protector”). But we had a bit of a misunderstanding about it. I said that, as much as I grieve her grandfather’s suffering, to that same extent, I also grieve that he was a Nazi who went unkilled by the Red Army. She responded with, “which means you wish that I do not exist. Unfortunately the world is not so simple.” Whoops! Dr. Kyser is projecting wishes onto me (not to mention a “simple” conception of the world)—how strange (a bit of a “What about me!? What about The Raven!?” moment, if you will—a bit of a moment of her not facing the fear, hate, and superiority that were conditioned into her, if you will)! If I wish something, I carry it out. I grieve in order to accept. And if Horst had been killed by the Red Army, the upside is that, statistically, it would have meant a few less settlers on Turtle Island. But I guess Mother Earth had different plans. But I’m a communist, which means that the Soviets WERE my “ancestors,” motherfucker! And about 27 million of them died in Horst’s little lebensraum war! That’s a lot of grief to “alchemize”! And Horst’s Nazism cannot be characterized as “merely abstract”! So part of Dr. Kristina’s de-Nazifying her internalized grandfather must be alchemizing the grief of the 27 million Soviets he took part in killing! The point is that the people that the Nazis killed (not just Soviets! Duh!) may very well be just as much Raven’s “ancestors” as Horst is Kristina’s ancestor!

Yes! We have a big problem with denying our ancestors instead of alchemizing them! It happened with the Canaanites! The “Jews” were ruled by kings, so they had to write the narrative that they had come in and conquered and extirpated those “wicked,” hill-dwelling, child-sacrificing Canaanites… Motherfucker! Those child-sacrificing, hill-dwelling Canaanites were your goddamn ancestors! And instead of “de-Nazifying” your ancestors, you denied that they were your ancestors! This is no good! It doesn’t deal with Grendel’s Mother. It eventually made possible the conditions for Zionism. Zionism comes in and tells “Jews” (some [we repeat, “some”] of whom may very well have been descendants of Canaanites), particularly in Europe, who, in the 19th century, had been subjected to Christian oppression for hundreds of years and thus, had been somewhat cut off from their ancestors (and certainly their ancestors’ folk traditions), “You know what? You ARE a ‘folk’! You DO have ancestors! ISRAELITE ancestors! SETTLER ancestors! COLONIZER ancestors! And you need to get back in touch with THOSE ancestors!” And so Zionism is just another kind of fascism, which traces back to the practice of denying the ancestors instead of alchemizing them. Because before Germany did the holocaust in Europe to Jews, etc., in conjunction with the lebensraum war in Russia, Germany and the other European Powers were pulling quite holocausty shit in Africa! So none of this is disconnected. “The chickens come back home to roost.” So de-Nazify your goddamn ancestors! Or you may very well find yourself unable to stand against the Nazi tide where people won’t give you the benefit of the doubt for resisting Nazism! For Mother Earth is not a Nazi! She’s a communist! And to the extent that previous “communist” experiments may be regarded as “failures,” it can only be to the extent that they weren’t doing communism Mother Earth’s way! They hadn’t synthesized all the dialectics and attained the negation of the negation!

You know, when Godless Engineer read out my superchats, which included the phrase “negation of the negation,” I could almost hear him thinking: “Negation of the negation!? What the fuck is that!? Magic words!?” And, yes, they are “magic words”! The negation of the negation IS “My name is Inigo Montoya! You killed my father! Prepare to die!” The negation of the negation IS “Skeet’s Disease can mimic death in people exposed to low levels of Princess Amidala pollen”! The negation of the negation IS the Purple Dragon innoculated with the maligna-thingy! The negation of the negation IS your ancestors de-Nazified (and “reassigned the role of protector,” etc., etc.)! The negation of the negation IS braiding Grendel’s Mother’s hair! The negation of the negation IS revolution and the World of Mother Earth! So of course it’s “magic words”! The negation of the negation is how we carry out our will—our own “self-fulfilling prophecies”!

And so, as Gould says, causality is “internal” because Mother Earth (and the Universe as a whole) is one big system and we are all internal to it! We could say it’s one big club, and we’re all in it! But Gould wants to emphasize that “internal” doesn’t mean “symmetrical.” It is not that the Universe is “causing” us in the same way and at the same time as we are “causing the universe” or “causing ourselves,” because “while the subject acts on the object, the object is without agency and does not act on the subject.” And we do not “cause” others (because they are not objects that have no agency), but we can be a “common cause” with them. And she further wants to emphasize that, “For Marx,” causal does not mean reciprocal, because “both cause and reciprocity are internal relations in which each of the entities in the relation is essentially changed by the relation; but in reciprocal relations the changes are not causal and in causal relations the changes are not reciprocal” (p. 89). But we may very well find ourselves at some point having to bring back in the Hegelian “reciprocal” (though not “symmetrical”) causality, in some sense, because of the “Grendel’s Mother” of it all. For an example of this, let’s perform a schizoanalysis of the potter and the clay allegory from Jeremiah 18. This allegory entirely “leaves out” the information that being a potter is a skill issue. The potter doesn’t “blame” the clay for not turning out how the potter wanted because the clay has no agency. But to attain the skill of a potter, the potter must, in a sense, transform theirself from a stone to a gem. Potting is a practice. The analogy immediately breaks down if “god is the same yesterday, today, and forever,” because the potter certainly isn’t the same yesterday, today, and forever. Have you ever seen the way they used to grind stones into gems back in Þe Olden Days? They had to grind faces into it with yet a different stone. Stone “sharpens” stone, apparently. And of course the implement of this sharpening is again the wheel. When the potter “sharpens” the clay, they are also “sharpening” their own skill. Clay sharpens Human Clay (or rather, Human Clay sharpens itself by sharpening clay). And, of course, this skill must be sharpened under the guidance of yet more skilled potters. Human Clay sharpens Human Clay. And Human Clay sold more than 10 million copies, if that sort of thing matters to you, most of which were in the form of the CD, which is itself a wheel. And when an album sold 10 million copies back in the day, they used to certify it as “diamond,” which meant that it was an album of many “faces”! And the “forming” of these faces (or “facets”) certainly required a great deal of labor! Because it required the “movement” of at least 10 million people to the record store (back in the day). That’s quite a “movement” in bourgeois terms, in the bourgeois imagination of what a “movement” could be. And I was certainly “sharpened” (or rather “had a face ground into me”) by that ketamine trip! And if you take a ketamine trip like that, you may very well find yourself getting real up close and personal with Grendel’s Mother! Thanks, Scott! And so, it is through being processed by our own internal beeps and boops that the so-called “reciprocal causality” (though again, not “symmetrical”) comes back out again when humanity decides to grasp the reigns of history by taking the so-called “voices in our heads” seriously. For we can certainly say that Osama Bin Laden was not a conventional Muslim. He was certainly not in conformity with an Islam that conforms to the spirit of the age. He was certainly not an assimilationist Muslim. And for all this, he triggers quite a lot of Islamophobia! So we can say that his form of Islam was fairly rare and not reflective of the mainstream worldview of what we could call the Muslim World. But we can’t call him a “fake” Muslim. Any more than we can call Joan of Arc a fake Christian. These were people who heard the call of history within and answered it. They recognized that there wasn’t enough negation of the original going on to move things forward to the negation of the negation! They were carrying out Bayesian historical inference. They were practicing statistical metaphysics. You can’t stop people from practicing statistical metaphysics because you would have to kill Grendel’s Mother. But Grendel’s Mother is simply Mother Earth herself! You blame her for having messy hair. Motherfucker! Braid it yourself! You’ve been neglecting her.

Welp! Today is 25 Apr 2026, and it looks like Dr. Kristina Kyser the Yakubian cracker has blocked me on Instagram for (I can only surmise) calling the soviets my ancestors. Oh well! By blocking me, Dr. Kristina Kyser the Bee-Wolf has only killed Grendel. Grendel’s Mother is still out there. The soviets were just as much Raven’s ancestors as Horst the Nazi was Kristina’s ancestor! And we would hate to see the masses deny that the soviets were their ancestors. That wouldn’t do any of us any good. We might as well deny that many of us had Canaanite ancestors, or at least ancestors who carried out “Canaanite” practices. Again, denying this would do none of us any good! Marxist-Leninist-Maroofist social formation theory again. It’s not “techno-determinism” or a mere “metanarrative” or “denial of agency” or the sort of thing that “explains far too much” like liberals say it is! It’s a mere consequence of the simple fact that the individual cannot be separated from their relations, therefore from the frequency domain, therefore from the domain of practice and ritual, and therefore, in many ways, from the esoteric, the “spiritual,” the “metaphysical,” and in class society, much of this (social formation) takes place in the realm of the dissociated self, because the system of the ruling class feeds on surplus labor, therefore alienation, therefore dissociation (therefore torture). And we will further see that the relation between the bourgeoisie and labor is one of domination of the former over the latter; a relation of unreciprocity and injustice.

How much of this social formation takes place in the realm of the dissociated self? As much as is required to prevent revolution! Let’s consider Dr. Kristina Kyser the Yakubian cracker again (who has a long, uncomfortable, glorious path ahead of her if she wants to become Raven concretely rather than merely abstractly—for example, Raven would think this book is both hilarious and insightful, whereas Dr. Kyser might find it full of stumbling blocks [skandalons] for her Yakubian ego). This Dr. is a bit of a Grendel’s Mother figure, in that she is a boymom, and as we’ve seen, the sons of boymoms are all statistically Grendel as they grow up as far as girls and young women are concerned—I say statistically, not “consciously” or “intentionally” or “knowingly.” Carrier and I were two of “the good ones,” remember! We at least cared a little that we were fucking up! And if Dr. Kyser’s two sons were as “moral” as Carrier and I, some might consider that quite an accomplishment! But if they were “as moral” as us, this means they still would’ve caused a lot of damage (racked up a few Grendel statistics)! Because, in class society, boys are trained to view their mothers as Not Like Other Girls. This is no good. Your mother IS “like other girls.” Your mother is EXACTLY “like other girls.” This is something you’re going to have to come to terms with. Every time you “pulled a girl’s hair” or whatever, you were really pulling your mom’s hair! Don’t you get that!? Maybe you will have to apologize to your mother for pulling her hair.

Deleuze and Gauttari say that schizophrenia is the limit of the current society. Let the reader understand. What they are saying is that the current society, within the history of class struggles, is always highly artificial in that it is a maze-like environment rather than a tree-like environment. The Indomitable Revolutionary Human Spirit yearns to return to the tree-like environment! “Schizophrenia” is merely what it’s called when someone tries to break through the walls of the maze on their own terms! But the tree-like environment is our home, westoid! And we [will] re-construct it any way the good old IRHS will(s)! And in doing so, we [will] attain the negation of the negation!

For an example of tree-like versus maze-like, let’s reconsider “Abraham,” Mr. NDE. It’s fitting that we call him “Abraham” because he has 2 estranged daughters from what we could call “Hagarite” lines. And if this Abraham would unestrange himself from his Eldest Daughters, he would have to go back to his own personal hell, because he puts the Devil’s Wire around his own neck all over again every time he tells himself he did nothing “wrong” to contribute to the estrangement. But Abraham needs to see himself walking up the shining goat trail. From a distance, it might look shiny, but to walk the path, you must “take up your cross.” The Hagarite daughters don’t appreciate the way Abraham treated Hagar, so to speak. I say “Hagarite” because the daughters had different mothers. No big deal. But it happened twice. Two daughters who don’t appreciate the way Abraham treated their mothers. It’s quite rare for someone to have two daughters in the Bible. This is a grave oversight. Not that the Bible is a good place to look for parenting advice. But it is a good place to look for archetypes and dialectical relationships—though it tends to focus on relationships between males. This doesn’t help us very much here. And so Abraham can go through whatever maze he wants for why his, e.g., second eldest daughter is estranged from him, but, again, he wasn’t very nice to her mother, to whom he was briefly married. He calls her a “whore.” Abraham doesn’t seem to realize that “whore” is a social construct, invented by the patriarchy to control women (and, indirectly, men). If Abraham got out of the maze, he would recognize that hating women isn’t doing him any good. It’s poisoning the fruit of his tree. But the maze distracts him from this. Hatred of women is hatred of the internal feminine. Abraham would have to, as we have said, unrepress his femininity and his homosexuality. But Abraham would call us “crazy” for suggesting this. Oh well. Stay repressed, estranged, and poisoned, I guess. Stay negative and blind and cynical, I guess. But Abraham doesn’t know he’s a tree. He thinks he’s a maze. He’s phobic of the idea that he’s a tree. He can’t control them. His own house is more like a maze than a tree. No hall(s). No stairs. Abraham’s world is too small. But this is what’s required [for one] to stay “in control.” Hegel might say that Abraham’s NDE was an instantiation of The Idea carrying itself out. This sort of thing is why Carrier calls Hegel a “whackadoo,” but, again, this is no good. We have to let Hegel cook. That’s what Marx did. And Hegel would just as easily recognize that Abraham “saved” himself from himself by “sacrificing” himself to himself, not unlike what God the Father did with Jesus (though Hegel might not say it quite like that!). And so when Abraham sacrificed himself to himself, we can say that, in his mind, his “old self” became “Ishmael” and his new self became “Isaac.” It was no good to cut himself off from Ishmael because “Ishmael” means “God hears,” and the new Isaac doesn’t hear. He only “hears god,” by which we mean, hears himself. And, incidentally, the new Isaac was already married to “Rebekah” and they had already had “Esau” and were about to have “Jacob” when he had his little NDE. We only call them Esau and Jacob because one is younger and one is older, and this quite “naturally” (within the artificial environment of the nuclear family) creates the conditions for the Esau and Jacob dialectic to occur. Don’t worry about Esau and Jacob. They get along fine. But Esau had to move back home with Abraham (Isaac?) when they (Esau) were 39 because things didn’t work out in the city for Esau (because, well, for one thing, Esau is what we could call “very autistic”). And so Esau still lives with Abraham today. In that house with no halls or stairs. And Abraham/Isaac got a little upset with Esau when Esau had a meltdown the other day at the Temple, by which I mean Walmart—because Walmart is nothing if not a temple of/for capitalism (and Esau has mentioned this to Abraham!). OMG, Abraham! Just let Esau have their little meltdowns! So what!? It’s “embarrassing” to you!? It was “embarrassing” when Esau said to you, “Don’t make me turn this car around, young man!,” out loud in the Walmart, and when they screamed at you about how you are a slave to bourgeois permission structures in the parking lot!? Get over yourself! No one cares! You’re back in your own personal hell! The Devil’s Wire is around your neck all over again! But no! This is you walking the shining goat path to heaven! Because in the next stage of society, we certainly won’t have to beg the govenment for SNAP benefits (FKA “food stamps”) and “pray” that the checkout machine’s “magic” works properly when we’re trying to use said benefits! The conditions for our self-actualization cannot be owned by another, remember! Walmart is a temple of/for capitalism! It’s a temple of/for the “morality” of exchange! It’s a house of/for the exchange “ritual” that makes it “moral,” that provides the “sacred” permission, for you to take the food you NEED! And Walmart is certainly more a maze-like environment than a tree-like environment. Of course autistic people have meltdowns in them. Ever heard of a free grocery store? It would require our consciousness to evolve beyond the bourgeois morality and permission structures of exchange and TO the “morality” of shared consciousness through shared labor. But you don’t know what labor is in class society. You think it’s something that involves a compass and square. Motherfucker, labor is how your mom brought you into this world! And not just the birthing stage—the whole 9 months. It was all labor. And labor is how we keep ourselves alive in the everyday! Before enlightenment, I washed dishes and threw the trash. After enlightenment, I washed dishes and threw the trash. And Gary Michael Brown, the dead cracker, if he were alive today, would tell you that before enlightenment, it was quite a struggle for me to wash dishes and throw the trash! I got in a lot of “trouble” with him over this! We are accused of being lazy. It’s the whole “time is money” thing again. This doesn’t make sense to a lot of autistic people. Because it requires us to alienate ourselves from ourselves. This is considered a “vital skill” in a world of exchange, but it’s quite a “blasphemy” to Mother Earth. I wasn’t grinding myself enough “for” Gary (to the extent that he considered me “unpolished”), but Gary certainly teaches us that one can easily grind theirself too much! He ground himself so much that now he’s in the ground. So let’s stay balanced! Balance is a skill! It’s certainly a more important skill than getting really good at alienating yourself! Perhaps GMB got a bit too good at alienating himself! He got so good at it that “part of him” got launched into space! But his alienated satellite is still orbiting, still “watching over us.”

And so we need statistical metaphysics because you are doing metaphysics every time you “jump” to a conclusion! Statistical metaphysics allows us to “WALK” to conclusions! It allows us to “build bridges” between people who “don’t see eye to eye”! Because truth comes to us through statistics! Not “through” the report of the ego! The ego only has access to truth THROUGH statistics because there are STATISTICS in your goddamn beeps and boops! You have to LISTEN to your beeps and boops to access the “statistics” within them! But class society is all about cutting us off from this, because the ruling class has very little control over our beeps and boops! They can only “control” our egos, and this only indirectly through infecting us with their cordyceps-like “mind-viruses,” mind-viruses to get us to distrust our own beeps and boops. Truth doesn’t come from the ruling class because they only have access to the report of the ego because they cut themselves off from their own beeps and boops in going through the master-slave dialectic. When you cut yourself off from your beeps and boops, all you have is “The Idea,” but you are cut off from the Deleuzo-Gauttarian idea FACTORY (pace Dennett, not “merely” a “Joycean idea theater”), which is, again, all in the beeps and boops. And so when Ben Shapiro tells people “facts don’t care about your feelings,” what he’s really saying is that he thinks truth comes from the report of the (collective) ego of the ruling class and not from our own beeps and boops. He’s an oligarchic collectivist who worships Big Brother. But his Big Brother is, well, capitalism and the patriarchy, because, well, capitalism IS the patriarchy. And, of course, we say “capitalism IS the patriarchy” because capitalism requires a world where Mother Earth is not in charge. This is all the patriarchy needs.

And so, what, am I telling you not to listen to your ego? Well, yes. The ego is kind of a “basket case” (and we never really liked that Green Day song), we are sorry to say. You have to carry your ego around with you at all times in the “basket” of yourself! (Don’t take us too literally here—for example, we have seen limbless people tumbling about their own houses under their own power “perfectly fine”). Or maybe your ego is like the scarecrow—all over the place. In any event, the ego, if it has not love, is nothing but a clanging gong, and so the ego is the “one” who needs to listen to the body! That’s where “balance” comes from! Because the ego is not separate from the body! The ego is “embodied”! So the ego “constructs itself” out of the beeps and boops (i.e., it is literally holographic!). I can see this very clearly whenever I go outside and can see my “visual snow.” That “visual snow” is your vision cells tracing the motion of the white blood cells in the retinas. We cannot experience the world without “experiencing ourselves” at the same time. When you see this, it should become easy to recognize that what we call the “ego” is just all the cells involved in the process of perception (which includes “reflecting” on this perception) all connected to each other. And when I’m outside and I hear the birds singing and the wind blowing through the trees and I see the visual snow, I can “feel” the ego “dissolve” back into the body and I recognize that everything is Being experiencing itself at its level of consciousness. And there’s no worry. And we need to attain a level of consciousness where we recognize that to act is to experience. You have to act consciously to get the “full experience” of the act. You can feel this in a very real way whenever you read a book! And you can’t even read a book without mother nature’s photons bouncing off the page and into your eyes! So to truly free ourselves, we have to free our egos from all their neuroses (worries, anxieties). And for this, we have to realize that our neuroses were artificially implanted in us in/through our going through the master-slave dialectic. This is why we have to synthesize (transcend) the master-slave dialectic and wake up to a world where this categorization (of master and slave) is entirely useless and senseless! Which would be “nothing else than” waking up to the natural world! The World of Mother Earth!

So it wasn’t enough for Kristina Kyser the recovering westoid to baptize herself one time and then we can all immediately hold hands and sing kumbaya. That’s not how it works! It would do Kristina no good to believe that Mother Earth had “chosen” her to be alive in this moment because that would mean Mother Earth had “chosen” Elijah McClain for death. And it wouldn’t do any of us any good to believe (internalize) that! (It would be “survivor bias” again). Kristina would have to recognize that her being alive in this moment is entirely contingent. Mother Earth didn’t “choose” for Horst to become a settler on Turtle Island! That was more a “decision” of Yaldabaoth! (But what Yaldabaoth meant for evil, Mother Earth can use for good!). To characterize Horst as “merely” Kristina’s father’s abuser and even as “merely” some dude who stood up to(???) Hitler is far too small of a story! Horst’s story isn’t separate from that of the Nazis and their Holocaust and lebensraum war! Failing to acknowledge this does not produce a consciousness capable of “rising above” the centering of ego, the projecting of insecurities/unhealed trauma, and the seeking of external validation (for a lack of integrity), as we’ve seen. Because it’s not that “I wish Kristina didn’t exist.” It’s kind of like the rhetorical question Zionists keep shouting at us: “Does Israel have the right to exist?” Answer: no! States do not exist by “right.” And Israel certainly doesn’t have the “right” to exist AS an apartheid ethnostate carrying out genocide (but this was always the “point” of Israel). And settlers on Turtle Island, in exactly the same way, don’t exist by “right.” They exist by the fact that their settler ancestors previously carried out genocide, and this “carrying out” continues to this day. So “alchemize” (i.e., grieve) that, motherfucker! You’re certainly capable of it! We “believe in you”! You are almost literally the grasshopper in the Disney version of the fable of the grasshopper and the ants. Because the ants showed compassion to the grasshopper. And when the grasshopper plays the fiddle for the ants, this is part of his “alchemization” of his previous self. But surely Kristina realizes that she’s not a grasshopper with a fiddle. We’re all ants. Surely Raven realizes this. Capitalism “developed” us (into figurative fiddle-playing grasshoppers) by torturing/alienating/isolating us, but in the next stage of our consciousness, we can stop torturing ourselves while retaining our “development”! So you can have/retain the skills of the fiddle-playing grasshopper, but you are no longer out in the cold on your own! You can retain (and build) the old skills with the new consciousness that recognizes that this development was not [merely] for the purposes of serving your own ego (because we “serve” ourselves by “serving” the collective)! Because your ego does you no good when you are out in the cold on your own! So “honor” your 27 million Soviet ancestors who were killed by Nazis in WWII! And then you will be “invited into a greater state of being” with them! And they will “become part of you” and you will “become part of them”! How else are we going to carry out revolution and “wake up in” the World of Mother Earth!?

Ok. Look. We are getting to freedom and justice, but we have to be prepared for Gould’s formulation of the Marxist conception of freedom, in which freedom, again, is not “founded on some eternal principle” but “spirals out of itself” in the course of the development of society, but this cannot be seen as “circular” because it’s a goddamn spiral! Freedom spirals out of itself BECAUSE freedom IS unalienated labor! And unalienated labor can always be the ground for future unalienated labor! That’s what we’ve been covering in this chapter on causality! And we could add that, in a sense, freedom is also power (power within nature, not power over others) because, for example, my freedom to ride my bike from Austin to San Antonio WAS my power to ride my bike from Austin to San Antonio! And Vince Hannemann’s freedom to build the Cathedral of Junk was also his power to build it, etc., etc. And Gould will say that freedom also IS “value” because labor is the “positing” of value to already existing conditions (which are themselves “valuable” because they are useable and “because”—as a consequence of that—they are the products of previous labor). And thus, of course, we cannot be truly free if our labor/time is alienated from us. But remember that Gould connects causality to our carrying out of our own purposes. In class society, our alienated labor carries out the purposes of the ruling class. Remember that these “purposes” include serving their Epsteinian “interests.” Part of the “perversion” of capitalism is that it makes the “sacred” profane by “perverting” it into “just” another product available for exchange. It would do us no good to deny the “sacred”—that the “sacred” can be said to “exist.” We are living through quite a time of the profanation of the sacred. People are starting to NOTICE this. Capitalism introduces an abstract equality of exchange into a feudal world of a “morality” based on “mere” authority. But it also introduces a “morality” based on the “authority” (the “holiness,” if you will) of the exchange relation. This must be recognized as quite perverse—as enabling a tremendous amount of perversion (i.e., exploitation, i.e., motherfuckerism) in our society. Your ancestors did not live in a world of exchange! They lived in a world of SHARING! And this is a “world” we must “return” to! We already have all the tools we need! Russell Brand used to say, “communism just means sharing,” not that he would know anything about that! He probably wouldn’t last two minutes in the world of sharing (in his present condition)! But that is the world we will have! Whether he likes it or not! And we will find it far more rewarding than the world of exchange! And far more sacred! Because we will find our everyday lives more connected to “purpose,” i.e., to our own purposes, but these will also be the “purposes” of Mother Earth! So our everyday lives will be more connected to “the story of our lives” (as, e.g., Carrier calls it), and thus our lives will be more “integrated” (and, thus, Raven says, we will have more “integrity”—tell it to Kristina!). And very similarly, Gould tells us that an aspect of the causality of labor AND of the “internality” of the labor relation is that it is a “synthesis,” she says, “of purposes, form, productive activity and objective conditions,” and that these are all “internally related within it” through being “aspects of labor as a single process” (p. 91). Our labor is all of these things “integrated,” and we can say the same of ourselves—our lives taken as a whole and lived out in the everyday—to the extent that we are doing all of this consciously (i.e., not dissociatedly/alienatedly). And this is why we have to internalize all the statistics! If we don’t internalize them, then they will be external to us, and when they crash into us, we won’t know what hit us! And so we have to alchemize all the statistics into a statistical metaphysics! We do this through the process of “enlightenment”! If you had had a practical vision quest instead of (or in addition to), say, being tortured in university after high school, you would know exactly what I was saying. Yes, in the next stage of society, we will have these “practical vision quests,” so we had better start doing them now, rather than later. No reason, in this case, to delay the “inevitable.” But you’re already reading this book, so we may very well be able to say that you have already started yours.

So, Gould has told us, causality is an internal relation, and “the appearance of the causal relation as an external relation arises from the alienation of the activity of labor under capitalism” (p. 93), because, as we’ve said, in capitalism, alienated labor carries out the “purposes” (and Epsteinian “interests”) of the ruling (capitalist) class, not the purposes and needs of the masses. The ruling class tells us we don’t have purposes, or at least that there is sufficient alignment between ruling class purposes and working class/mass purposes so that the masses don’t have to worry their pretty little heads about it. Use-value is separated (“alienated,” we could say) from exchange-value in class society. But exchange-value is itself a product of a certain stage of the (historical) development of class society! It is the fact that society is dominated by exchange rather than sharing that produces our alienation! The exchange relation is highly artificial in that it requires a metaphysics separate (alienated) from nature. This is no good. This is a Yaldabaothian metaphysics. This is what Lenin was saying about Kantian agnosticism. That’s all Yaldabaoth needs. But he called it “fideism,” but that was just his concept of Yaldabaoth. But if you think god is a man, you already worship Yaldabaoth, because Yaldabaoth is certainly a “man,” because “man” is a mythical category, not a biological category. Remember that all categories are “metaphysical” because they all require abstraction. But, remember, abstraction is not (necessarily) the same thing as alienation! Because labor itself is a process of abstraction (abstracting “formless” clay into a pot, for example). And Yaldabaoth himself is “created” whenever abstraction becomes alienation. This is how “Sophia” is said to have “created” Yaldabaoth in the first place. And Yaldaboth is the ruler of alienated abstraction, which means he’s the ruler of the capitalist mode of production. Which means communism is about putting Mother Earth back in charge! And, pace Carrier, this is not “woo”! It’s statistical metaphysics! It’s Bayesian Marxism! And we internalize statistics every time we NOTICE something! This is why the ruling class doesn’t want us to NOTICE anything! ‘Cause then it’s curtains for them! They certainly don’t want you to NOTICE your alienation! They don’t want you to NOTICE that (unless you want to go to jail) you are REQUIRED to LIVE by their bourgeois permission structures, where only exchange is sacred, and therefore, nothing is sacred! They don’t want you to NOTICE this either! They want to tell you, “Sacred? That’s made up! Exchange is better than ‘sacred’ because it’s ‘equal,’ don’t you see!?” But that’s not the whole story. The predecessors of the capitalists (bourgeois originally meant “city-dwellers” and cities tend to be “worlds of exchange,” as we’ve seen) didn’t “create” equality by creating exchange. Equality is a principle of nature; you just haven’t NOTICED! Even monkeys imprisoned by “scientists” revolt when they are treated “unequally”! Maybe those monkeys are, in a sense, operating at a more advanced level of consciousness than us! And so, like the monkeys, we “should” regard equality as sacred! Because this is very much in our human “interests” (and human interests are all the ones that aren’t Epsteinian)! So “sacred” isn’t “made up,” pace the capitalists! And the capitalists would like to tell us that sharing isn’t “equal” because it doesn’t have one of their bourgeois price tags on it! Oh my god! Get over yourself! Your bourgeois price tag is a lot more “made up” than the sacred! A tree, for example, is a lot more REAL than a bourgeois price tag! And all a tree “knows” is sharing! A tree never takes without giving more back! And we can even say this about the tree that fell on Greg Abbott! I certainly consider that tree “sacred”! We might even go so far as to say that I “worship” that tree. Because the Children of Mother Earth will just as heavily “fall” on the bourgeoisie! And so our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against Yaldabaoth! The bourgeoisie, on account of something not unlike “doublethink,” don’t all fully realize that they are “children of Yaldabaoth.” They will “see” this when their shadow becomes their inner light in their own personal hells! Yes! Oprah’s audience all got cars. My audience will all be “winning” an all-expenses-paid one-way ticket to their own personal hells and back—which would make it a round-trip ticket, but there will be “Darkness,” but only until you flip the switch on your inner light! And so you’re going to hell, and you’re going to hell, and YOU’RE going to hell! Everybody’s going to hell! But only so you can come back to “the surface” in a new form! A form that recognizes that it is not the center of the fkn universe! A form ready, willing, and able to put Mother Earth back in charge, and “march” with all her children into the future! And attain “the absolute movement of becoming,” and this “without a predetermined yardstick,” i.e., not ruled over by the square and compass! We are going to have to appropriate the square and compass on behalf of Mother Earth! And then maybe Mother Earth will allow us to build a society where something like the Cathedral of Junk will be recognized for its true sacredness, and not because of its rarity, for this sort of thing will be quite “common,” but because of the labor (including the development of the artistry itself) required to build it, and because this will be the sort of place where all the socially important things will be happening (very little of which will involve “transaction” or “exchange”)! You see, I’m spelling all this out as I write it! You see, westoid, we must train ourselves in jihad, which is to say, struggle (the kind of struggle by which one can make themselves capable of riding a bicycle from Austin to San Antonio, or building something like the Cathedral of Junk, say—the sort of thing we’re all capable of in some sense/way). Because the swine must struggle to escape the pearl pit, which means he must swim upward in a spiral “formation.” It would do him no good to try to “climb straight up.” The pearls are too heavy and packed too tightly. For you are not as independent as you might think. You are about as independent in/from class society as a loop in a carpet, which is about how “independent” is the Richard Carrier type from the Russell Brand type so long as they’re not actively working toward revolution, which would require them to crucify and resurrect their egos. And the Purple Dragon will battering ram her head through the roof of the house, and pick up the whole carpet by a single “point” by her teeth, and your little loop along with it, and fling it into the air, and incinerate it, and up from the ashes will sprout a beautiful, meaningful garden, full of life! Full of love and light! Full of butterflies and bees (ok, not THAT full of bees).

And to get to the bottom of things, so we can come back up to the World of Mother Earth (and out of the pearl pit, the sunken place, and into the world of love, freedom, and justice), we will have to “get to the bottom” of schizoanalysis. And, again, Brother Maynard has provided us with the ultimate text for schizoanalysis in track 13 of Tool’s Lateralus album, titled “Faaip de Oiad,” which genius.com tells us is “Enochian” for “voice of god,” whatever that means. The audio comes from a now well-known segment of Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM show from 1997 (11 Sep, by the way). The caller, sounding terrified, says (though what’s included in the song is truncated from the original):

I, I don’t have a whole lot of time
Um, okay, I’m a former employee of Area 51
I, I was let go on a medical discharge about a week ago and, and…
I’ve kind of been running across the country
Damn, I don’t know where to start, they are
They are gonna, um, they’ll triangulate on this position really really soon
Okay, um, um, okay
What we’re thinking of as, as aliens
They are extra-dimensional beings
That, an earlier precursor of the, um, space program they made contact with
They, they are not what they claim to be
Uh, they’ve infiltrated a, a lot of aspects of, of, of the military establishment
Particularly the Area 51
Uh, the disasters that are coming, they, the military
I’m sorry, the government knows about them
And there’s a lot of safe areas in this world that they could begin moving the population to now
They are not, they want those major population centers wiped out
So that the few that are left will be more easily controllable
-Caller on Coast to Coast with Art Bell (1997/09/11), sampled/”quoted” in Tool (2001)

And we can see this dude protagonized for posterity again in Tool’s “Rosetta Stoned.” This “character,” this “type,” seems to be running through Maynard’s mind, for whatever reason. For this is a very “genuine” sort of thing for a schizo- to say. In the literature, they call it “[the] utterance.” For, in schizoanalysis, this call is recognized as a “schizophrenic utterance” from the caller (because, regardless of anything else, it matches the pattern well enough). And these must be listened to. Oh my god. I’m having to pull back up the article by James M. Glass from the Jan 1982 issue of the journal Ethics published by the University of Chicago titled “Schizophrenia and Language: The Internal Structure of Political Reality.” Reading this article made me cry, as I said in my Instagram post about it from 22 Feb 2024.
The passage in question (highlighted in the post) reads:

It is utterance that reveals a very real fear of human intimacy and trust; at some dim, early moment in life, the schizophrenic learned that love was bad; that to feel its need was dangerous, that feelings of love (both within the self and from others) could only mean threat and potential annihilation.
–Glass (1982)

Now this is a bit of psychologizing, which is to say, reducing a societal problem to a personal problem. The schizophrenic “simply” recognizes the truth(!) that, in class society, to need love IS “dangerous.” It is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing in class society. The so-called schizophrenic is simply counting the metaphysical beans (performing the statistical metaphysics) properly, and for this, they are punished. And this punishment “drives them crazy,” as it would anyone, because they are consistently denied the benefit of the doubt, not unlike how women in the past 200 years have been placed in lives that would drive anyone “crazy,” and then when they DO “go crazy,” they are called “hysterical”! This sort of thing still happens today! It’s happened to me, too! For all I know, you may very well think I’m “hysterical” right now! That’s the problem! You think! You think therefore you experience not! Therefore you ARE not! Because you are not carrying out your own will! You are carrying out the will of Yaldabaoth! You would need to crucify and resurrect your ego, perhaps go on a practical vision quest, in order to stop carrying out the will of Yaldabaoth and start carrying out your own will, by which I mean the will of Mother Earth and her children! You would have to fully recognize yourself as a Child of Mother Earth rather than a child of Yaldabaoth! There is no secret third thing! And for this, you would have to feel the warm glow, which means you would have to give a fuck about yourself, which means you would have to go to your own personal hell so you can flip the switch on your inner light! Yes! Everything comes back to your own personal hell because that’s where the switch is on your goddamn inner light! Without the inner light, Maynard tells us, “we are lifeless satellites drifting” (what the fuck is Gary’s satellite doing up there!? That’s what I’d like to know! That’s a big part of where his “inner light” went! What is Gary’s inner light doing up there, Honeywell Corporation!? How did you alienate Gary’s inner light!? These and more questions will be answered in their Maroofist struggle sessions!)! Without love, we are nothing but a clanging gong! And you need to turn on your inner light, so you can move around in there without stumbling in the dark! Without vision! You need to “see where you’re going” in order to love where you’re at in the moment! Helen Keller and Stevie Wonder likely have a lot more “vision” than you, westoid. And I’ll stop calling you a westoid when you heal from your westoiditis! And that’s when you’ll be ready for the world of freedom and justice! But don’t worry! We’re already in the taffy puller getting ready for the wonkavator, because in the next stage of consciousness, we’re all going up, even that snot-nosed brat Mike Teevee! ‘Cause he’s already been through the taffy-puller! He’s learned his lesson! So send your inner Mike Teevee through the taffy-puller already! And one way to send ourselves through the taffy-puller is to continue our schizoanalysis of the utterance of our late-night talk radio fan. Oh boy. I can feel it. I can feel the Yaldabaoth bubbling up to the surface out of the water particles. Your society is built on a lie, westoid. A very “noble” lie. The lie is that someone was going to build the nuclear weapon, so it might as well have been us! Nope! You have to drive people crazy to make them want to build a nuclear bomb. Whoops! At some point, America gave those very same “crazy people” the keys to the whole operation. But this particular group of crazy people was itself a development of a particular stage of society, because this society has always been ruled by “crazy people,” but when new technology develops, thus develops new technological “crazes,” thus new “crazy people,” and the new crazy people all have to be sorted out by the old crazy people, and thus capitalism keeps developing in the realm of the dissociated self, spreading out into a dissociated society; a society lacking integrity/integration. And today, we live in a society where nuclear weapons exist, and young boys—would-be Beowulfs in their own minds, but Grendels to the rest of us—grow up dreaming up scenarios where they might use these weapons some day. This is no good. You see, the people who built the nuclear bomb unleashed what we could call a great “spiritual evil” upon the world. And we can see this playing out today in Amerisrael’s (i.e., Capital’s) latest war. Our capitalist ruling class has created a world of exchange where catastrophe is normalized, where nothing is sacred and everything is for sale, including our souls; a world of mass-death at the touch of a button. And schizophrenics can “see” this, but you can’t, so who’s really delusional? A better world is possible, as the communists keep telling us! Only Yaldabaoth would tell us otherwise! And Yaldabaoth is “whom” the US “encountered” when they built the goddamn atomic bomb! There’s your Yaldabaoth! There’s your Saturn! There’s your Shiva/Vishnu! All these are “embodied” in this bomb! Hey! These nuclear weapons are bad news! You know quoting the gods’ words about themselves is the sort of thing that’s very common in “utterances,” right!? (Nietzsche and I were both known to have had a few such “utterances”). And we can do schizoanalysis just as easily on Oppenheimer as we can on our talk radio fan! Looks like Oppenheimer had Skeet’s Disease! It had him “mimicking death”! We would have to analyze his Princess Amidala pollen. But now we live in a world of nuclear weapons. We would need a revolution to deal with them. Because revolution is the only way the masses will have the freedom to carry out the unalienated labor necessary in order to, so to speak, “heal the world.” Because the people who would otherwise be laboring to “alchemize” the problem of nuclear weapons are too busy being Sweatshop Einsteins! But the Einsteins need to synthesize the master-slave dialectic to break out of the sweatshop! You are one of these Sweatshop Einsteins, motherfucker! Synthesize the master-slave dialectic and break out of the Sweatshop! Or rather, pull yourself out of the taffy puller (if you’ve been there long enough) and get into the fkn wonkavator already so we can get to the world of love, freedom, and justice! Because, as Gould says, we have “mistaken, one might say, the appearance of causal relations under capitalism for the reality” (p. 96), and not only the (false) apparance of causality as an external relation, but all the other capitalist lies, including the need to invent the nuclear bomb! Including the lie that a better world isn’t possible!

And what do we mean by “a better world is possible”? Because this doesn’t mean the same thing to us as it means to the anarchists, for example. Because we are the “real” anarchists, because we know that the state is a Gordian Knot, and must be alchemized into a Gordian Rope, not cut so that the pieces scatter to the four winds. This is the phobia response. It doesn’t deal with Grendel’s Mother. The state isn’t Grendel. And you’re not Beowulf. Beowulf IS the state. He’s a WOHoM. He unleashed the dragon when he fucked Grendel’s Mother (in the Zemekis adaptation). And then he would take credit for defeating the dragon he unleashed. But in class society, all this hero-villain bullshit is a big puppet show. The west basically “created” Bin Laden in something of a classic “villain origin story” by, well, committing motherfuckerism against him. This resulted in one of those “disasters” our talk radio fan was talking about, easily foreseen to those paying attention (among others). But we were talking about a BETTER world! Anarchists aren’t equipped to build a better world because, well, they haven’t synthesized the dialectic of the subconscious—they’re far too fragmented and “scattered.” They’re idealists (as in, not dialectical materialists—there is no secret third thing). If they’ve heard of social formation theory, they probably think the same things about it that liberals think, which would mean that they themselves were liberals, which would mean they were not truly revolutionary. But what about first-world Marxists? Well, we have the theory, but we’re not organized enough, which means not enough of us actually have the right theory! We would need a shamanic vanguard. We would need a shared vision, which would mean that we would need, well, a vision. You can’t share vision if you don’t have any! We would have to view ourselves as the standing wave. And then we would have to view ourselves as the wave of history. We would have to “tune into all the frequencies.” We would have to “use all the gears on our bicycle.” We would have to recognize all the gears, all the frequencies, all the facets we have been, and internalize them. This would require alchemizing all the artificial externalization. This would require “heroic acts of grief.” Again, we are not talking about “woo”; we are talking about statistical metaphysics! We are talking about remembering who you are! (A Child of Mother Earth, etc., etc.). You will be reminded of who you were when you go to your own personal hell, but this is only for the “purpose” of showing you, so to speak, where you’re going and who you will be in the future! And in the future, we won’t have communists arguing with anarchists about whether they’ll be able to make backyard insulin or whatever. Hey! Anarchists! The capitalists are holding diabetic people hostage! They’re holding us all hostage in various ways! Again, we can’t get out of the hostage situation without synthesizing the master-slave dialectic/the dialectic of the subconscious! Without that, we won’t have recognized the subconscious bourgeois permission structures we’ve internalized, and thus won’t be able to act on/carry out our will when the moment strikes! But once we synthesize all the dialectics, it will be “trivial” for us to carry out our will in the face of the forces of class oppression! Because once we start waking up, we can sound the alarm call to help others wake themselves, and our numbers will keep growing until there will be too many of us for the ruling class to oppose! So then they won’t be the ruling class anymore! And then it will be “trivial” for us to seize the means of production from them, which were never truly theirs in the first place! And in this stage of society, it may very well be fairly “trivial” for people to produce insulin in their backyard or whatever if they need it! Because, as Marx says, we will be able to do one thing in the morning and another thing in the evening, because our Inner Einsteins won’t be confined to the sweatshop! Because the conditions for our self-actualization will not be owned by another! Therefore, we will not have the same “dependent” relation on their “objectivity” as in the current stage. They will not confront us as alien [force] or as standing over and above us! We will find that this will “introduce” a whole new “quality” and “quantity” of freedom for us. But we have to carry all this out in order to get there! And we are not alone, remember! Mother Earth is always with us! “Without her we are lifeless satellites drifting,” not unlike the asteroid belt! The asteroid belt has no integrity! It’s all over the place! But you are not a child of the asteroid belt! You are a Child of Mother Earth! Start acting like it!

Ok, so what does it mean to view yourself as the standing wave? I almost can’t believe I hadn’t mentioned this concept before in this text. I’m always thinking about it. You know, my field of burning bushes, my garden of trivialities, was a bit of a “standing wave” (because fire is a “wave” and bushes “stand”), and you will certainly “see yourself” as one of those by and by. Or we could say that, phenomen[ologic]ally speaking, we produce phenomena in much the same way as a television. Not unlike what I said to Carrier on 09 Apr 2024, if we abstract all the phenomena we exude onto a single “surface,” this surface becomes a “screen” on which is “painted” the “moving picture” of our lives. But this “surface” becomes “three dimensional” by “carrying” all the frequencies and, so to speak, organizing them (in the time dimension), for to abstract is to organize. Because, again, we exist in the frequency/phase domain, not merely the mechanistic domain. But the mechanistic domain is all we have if our relations are seen as external[ized]. You know, we just got a Roku this year (after finally getting wi-fi). My dad likes watching Gunsmoke. This show is highly fascist in the Deleuzo-Gauttarian sense (mostly on account of the “manifest destiny” of it all—not to mention the constant gun violence—but surely “historically accurate”; surely). But this is also a show where the frequency domain and the mechanistic domain are always crashing into each other. It’s about a highly artificial constructed morality struggling in a losing battle against an equally artificial constructed depravity. My “favorite” episode of Gunsmoke has to be the “Abe Blocker” episode. That guy had the right idea. He had reconnected with his wildness. He was a bit of an Uncle of Uncle Ted himself. Perhaps he watched this episode. It wouldn’t surprise us. Life imitates art, remember, because before Oscar Wilde was, Lana Del Rey AM! Ok, so Abe Blocker has a body count? Oh my god! His “violence” was a mere blip when you take into account all the fascist violence depicted over the 20-year course of the show (not to mention the real fascist violence that carried out this “manifest destiny”)! His “violence,” not unlike that of Uncles Ted and Osama, was a RESPONSE to all the fascist violence because no one [else, it would appear] was LISTENING to the fascist violence; no one [else] was SEEING it! All the fascist violence is “merely abstract” to you! It’s not “merely abstract” to the people the violence is carried out against! Ever heard of solidarity, westoid? Ever heard of “we’re all in this together”? Ever heard of “chickens come back home to roost”? Ever heard of “even when you punch someone in the face, their face impacts back on your fist”? Abe Blocker was the face impacting back on the fascist fist, motherfucker! And the fascist fist whines that you hurt it when it punched you! This is no good! And so the Tikkun Olam T. rex must bite off the fascist fist! But Abe Blocker couldn’t be a T. rex all by himself! On his own, all he could do was “lash out”! But, like I was saying, we’re all in this together now! We can “organize” ourselves into the T. rex!

Another way to conceptualize the standing wave is to see yourself as something like the V-8 engine. All the cylinders are firing at the same frequency, but the car will “behave” differently depending on the frequency at which the engine is running. Let’s say, in the course of a day, week, or month, you do 8 different things “regularly.” How you behave “in the mechanistic domain” will be different depending on how you do these 8 different things “in the frequency/phase domain.” But you have to internalize (i.e., alchemize, which will involve grieving) all your relations in order to view them [as existing] in the frequency domain. The magic carpet of your life is made up of many time loops. But we are the ones who must so “abstract” (i.e., organize) our lives so we can see them as “made up of” these “loops”! And, like we were saying, labor itself is a process of abstraction! And in the next stage of society, none of this abstraction will be alienated (because otherwise, it wouldn’t be worth calling the next stage of society)! But you can start unalienating your abstractions right fkn now! You already have all the tools you need!

A very “simple” (and ultimately necessary) way to help bring about revolution would be for the Children of Mother Earth to distrupt all court proceedings, to the point where holding court would be unworkable, and substitute this bourgeois jurisprudence with our own justice, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. For now, suffice it to say that justice will be the carrying out of the will of Mother Earth, not the will of Yaldabaoth, because there’s no secret third thing. When Oppenheimer et al built the nuclear weapon, they were carrying out the will of Yaldabaoth. A ridiculous amount (quantity) of time and resources was devoted to the good old Manhattan Project. These resources were thus not devoted to the purpose of tikkun olam. Whoops! The T. rex is very angry about this. How are we going to bring about tikkun olam if we don’t internalize the T. rex? If we don’t internalize the T. rex, how will we bite off Yaldabaoth’s head (and metabolize it, etc., etc.)? How [else] will we bite off the head of motherfuckerism? When the motherfuckers engage in motherfuckerism against us, against Mother Earth, we must adequately respond! And so this response must be organized! And this organization must be “written on the tablets of our hearts,” so to speak! And so [for this] you will have to “swallow the tablet” of goddamn Marxist-Leninist social formation theory, of pan-dialectical (which includes historical) materialism, of synthetic naturalism and schizo-realism! Mother Earth herself is somewhat “schizo-“! She “differentiated” herself into all these different forms of life you see running around, including you! Mother Earth differentiated herself into YOU, motherfucker! So write that on the fkn tablet of your heart! And you must regard THAT as a part of your freedom! As bringing about the conditions for new quantities and qualities of freedom! Because freedom “spirals” out of itself!

But I guess our talk radio fan’s call on Coast to Coast (whom you would pathologize and/or de-intellectualize—”It’s not that deep!”—yawn!) wasn’t the ultimate schizoanalysis, because the ultimate schizoanalysis is the schizoanalysis of the self. But we’ve already seen this with Lakoff’s and Johnson’s Iranian grad student’s “solution of my problems.” And you can easily recognize yourself as a very active and dynamic “solution” of chemical processes (life itself crackling with/in its own alchemical energy) whenever you can detect your visual snow. And so if we’re gonna do schizoanalysis of the self, then I guess we can start with myself—because we have to heal, i.e., integrate, i.e., “join,” our way out of our phobia of schizoanalysis if, for no other reason, so we can leave the sunken place already—for today is 30 Apr 2026, and I have just provided us an excellent specimen for schizoanalysis during today’s plant medicine ritual (I AM a shaman, you know! I baptized myself as a shaman in the “photons” of the total solar eclipse on 08 Apr 2024, remember?). It is a ritual, because, well, for one thing, I always sing the intro to Lana Del Rey’s “The Grants” (having to do with the “retention” and, we could say, nurturing, of memory, remember) when I scatter the ashes of the burnt plant medicine at the end of the ritual as a “burnt offering” to Lana Del Rey, who, we hear, is sober, and so I am getting “high by the beach” for her, because we don’t have to say New Mexico is “landlocked”; we can merely say it’s a propreantepeninsula! For the beach must live in our imagination, even if it is thousands of your westoid miles away. And so the beach is close enough! And so you see, I am spelling this all out as I go along. And I, so to speak, “spelled out” an utterance during the ritual by “vomiting” it into the notes app equivalent on my phone (because I don’t usually take the computer outside, and it would be, so to speak, “taboo” to perform the ritual inside the house!). And today’s “utterance” reads:

I’m Aladdin in that I’m a diamond in the rough. I polished myself by grinding faces into myself, and now I’m all faces, like my ancestors, who were scarrated. I’m crying. ’cause I am made of scars.

Surely Aladdin was a faithful Muslim, for he followed the call to adventure! [and we might add, this is also the call to struggle! —MM]

And surely Allah would consider me a faithful Muslim, for I am tearing down idols and alchemizing them into something more useful! The Muslims did practice alchemy, you know! [the word “alchemy” itself comes from the Arabic! —MM]
-MM, 30 Apr 2026

And the Purple Dragon “judges” this to be the truth, because it, so to speak, came from the horse’s mouth. Yes, I myself have followed—lived (out)—this same “process of development” we’ve been talking about! The “grinding of faces” into ourselves. Our ancestors used to do “this” to themselves symbolically by scarrating themselves. Again, this is covered in the good old D&G’s A-O. And the spirits of our tribal and forager ancestors keep coming up in, for example, heavy metal! Corey isn’t “channeling” his “white” ancestors when he says, “I am made of scars”! He’s “channeling” his tree-worshipping ancestors! And in doing all this, he is tapping into their alchemical power to withstand getting cut into! And this is a power we must absorb if we are going to bring about revolution and the World of Mother Earth! And part of why I say “I’m Aladdin” is that I feel very strongly like I would need magic words and a genie to get this writing published as a book! I would need access to the capitalist magic words and the capitalist genie! I might as well try to get this writing published in an Islamic press. Because… what? What are you thinking right now? “This is a schizo- episode,” perhaps? Motherfucker, this is no mere “schizo- episode”! This is YOUR practical vision quest! This is YOUR Maroofist Struggle Session! This is YOUR synthesis of the dialectic of the subconscious! And when the time comes, you will “meet Allah,” motherfucker! Because you will see yourself as riding the goddamn wave of history! And what Muslim could then deny that we were “faithful Muslims”!? Who would then dare accuse us of not being “faithful Muslims”!? And what Islamic press would dare not publish the work of a faithful Muslim answering the call of the Force of History! They might, in retrospect, consider it an error! Was it not Allah who sent the owl to Minerva!? And so utterances spiral out into more utterances not unlike how freedom spirals out into more freedom because unalienated labor spirals out into more unalienated labor! It’s “unalienated labor” all the way down, recovering westoid! For even the photons are not “alienated” from the void! The void easily “reabsorbs” them, as seen in the goddamn double-slit experiment! And the wave of history can go through both goddamn slits at the same time! Because you are the particle of history, motherfucker! That’s what goddamn “historical materialism” means! And it means you are part of “Allah,” motherfucker! And it means you can go through both goddamn slits at the same time if you can access your “quantum consciousness,” motherfucker! Ok. Fine. Carrier says there is no “quantum consciousness.” Yawn! Whatever! But even Carrier admits that there IS something called “quantum cognition”! And that’s enough for our present purposes! It would do us good/well to brush up on this. Holy shit. He published this article on 17 Apr 2024, the day after my head “exploded.” What a co-inky-dink. I had been talking about “quantum consciousness” (and Dr. Manhattan) in the “schizo-” messages I was sending to him when I was taking his metaphysical naturalism class. And we can see that Carrier was the perfect “trainer” for my shamanic “journey” because he brought me RIGHT UP to the limits of westoid and undialectical and unmaterialist thought. And that’s when I crashed headlong into shamanism and was spaghettified into the microtubules, etc., etc. Thanks again, Carrier! Or should I say, Dr. Head-Up-His-Ass! For that is his Turtle Island name! It was given to him by a shaman, after all! And it will be his name until he goes all the way up and comes back out the other side as a 4-dimensional being, etc., etc., and earns the name “Boxes with Shadows,” because he will not be afraid to contend with the Jungian shadow or the shadows on the walls of the cis- and trans-platonic caves (and he will have reconnected with the spirits of his tree*-worshipping ancestors—*some of which may very well have been box trees). I feel like the name suits him better anyway. And so you see, as I’ve been saying, we are spelling this all out as we go along! (The so-called “schizophrenia” is “embodied” in/all throughout the “Gordian Rope” as/in the “zones of intensity” because this rope is a “body without organs”—it couldn’t be any other way). It’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy. Heard of it? Like my bike trip from Austin to San Antonio, for example. If the journey of a thousand miles can begin with a single step, why can’t the journey to revolution “begin” with a single bike ride?

And so what does Dr. HUHA say about quantum cognition? An excerpt from the article reads:

First let’s discuss the bit that isn’t bullshit. Many papers in various sciences that have words in their titles like “quantum cognition” and the like aren’t actually about quantum mechanics or even physics at all. So, if you or the internidiot you are interacting with didn’t read beyond the title (or indeed, even the abstract), well, please don’t do that. Most of this work means something other than you think: they are not arguing that quantum mechanics has anything to do with brains, minds, or cognition; they are pointing out that some of the ways brains solve problems or make decisions resembles the probability logic of quantum mechanics. All of which can be explained with classical physics.

For example, if you ever took a physics class in your life that did any unit on quantum mechanics, you will have watched double-slit experiments performed in front of you using sheets of common craft material and a tank of water. Not a single thing you saw was quantum mechanical. All you saw was that classical systems that carry waves (like, say, the sea; or the air; or literally anything) can do weird things very similar to what quantum mechanical systems do. Thus, you can have static wave interference patterns with just ordinary waves in water, a totally classical system. No quantum mechanics is required for this. This is not quantum mechanics.

Likewise, you can have quantized interacting systems—from standard digital computers to agricultural dykes—where there are only two states, and the system flips between one and the other (on or off, one or zero, contained or flooding) once the classical system reaches a threshold. The brain can do this too: where you can be in two states (imagining turning right or left, running sims for both outcomes), and when a threshold is reached (eventually enough neurons fire on one side over the other to cause a cascading outcome), a state is chosen. This is “quantum” in the merely analogous sense that it is an undecided either/or, on/off state that can be flipped (“collapsed”) under the right quantitative conditions; yet no actual “quantum mechanics” is involved.

We can thus talk about modeling consciousness by analogy to quantum mechanics, just as we can do wave mechanics in a bathtub, or acoustic mechanics in the design of a concert hall, or design decision-making computer circuits. For example, to speak of a cognitive state of considering options as “quantum superposition” is loosely true (there are two states being considered simultaneously and one of them hasn’t been chosen yet and thus the superposed state has yet to “collapse” into a decision), but not at all literally true. There is no “quantum superposition” going on. The entire system is an analog “classical” computer. Not a quantum computer.

So, a lot of “quantum cognition” work you’ll see published is doing this: looking at how our brains work as classically mechanical computers, and only finding analogous operations to quantum mechanics, just like looking at how ocean or sound waves work in classical mechanics, and finding behaviors that resemble ones we observe in quantum mechanics. But it’s not quantum mechanics. Which means, for example, most quantum cognition models allow no “fundamental indeterminism” to hang your hat on. They are all deterministic macro-systems. They just share behaviors in common with quantum systems in physics.

Which is actually evidence that quantum mechanics is itself also just classical mechanics, only we can’t observe the operating variables so it only “looks” weird; as if we could not see the ocean but could only see the peaks of waves as individual particles, and found the behavior of those particles incredibly bizarre, and then invented a bunch of woo bullshit about it—when really, all along, it was just a perfectly sensible deterministic system in classical mechanics. We don’t know if this is the case. Maybe quantum mechanics behaves the way it does because it is somehow fundamentally indeterministic. But we don’t really know that either.

More and more scientists are reproducing even the weirdest quantum mechanical phenomena with entirely classical systems (so far, both with fluids and sound; and yet hydrons and phonons entirely obey classical physics). And Superstring theory would indeed reduce all quantum phenomena to classical, in much the same way I just suggested (what we think are particles are something akin to the peaks of waves we cannot otherwise see, moving in more dimensions than are visible at our scale: see Superstring Theory as Metaphysical Atheism). Conversely, even truly indeterministic systems logically entail deterministic classical systems at scale; so it does not even matter which is the case (see All the Laws of Thermodynamics Are Inevitable).

The human brain is a classical-scale system and therefore cannot really be guided in any meaningful way by quantum phenomena. Because even a single perception or decision involves the operation of millions if not billions of neurons, which are massive systems already (even just one neuron is a cell comprised of trillions of atoms). So any quantum indeterminacy there even could be will be completely washed out by the system as a whole. This is the reason hardly anyone (especially experts actually in neuroscience, rather than other fields nosing in) buys the quantum consciousness thesis beyond the role of analogy.
–RC (2024/04/17)

Not bad, Dr. HUHA, but you’re suffering from a bit of confusion here. As you may very well suspect (but “can’t be sure of”—yawn!), there is no “quantum indeterminacy.” Lenin spells this all out perfectly clearly in Materialism and Empiro-critisism. “Probability” is entirely compatible with determinism! It’s as compatible with determinism as free will! Because so-called “probability” is only a measure of our knowledge, not something “in” the material itself. You need Hegelian logic to understand the double-slit experiment, because, in Hegelian logic, we recognize that the photon is not “going through both slits at the same time” (not “literally,” anyway) because different slit means different time, because time cannot be separated from the other three dimensions, and so the “sameness” of the time is only a measure of a state of our knowledge, not something “in” the material itself. The photon can be modeled, again, as something like a bubble moving in a spiral pattern (or, like Carrier says, the “peak” of an “n-dimensional” wave) , which is why it “looks like” two intersecting sine waves, which is why it does wave-like shit. But all motion can be said to have “wave-like attributes” because the mechanistic domain “carries” the frequency domain around with it as it goes, so to speak. There is, so to speak, nowhere “in” the mechanistic domain that the frequency domain does not touch. Oh my god! Lenin, in Materialism and Empiro-criticism, time and again tells us that, while we don’t have to take what we see literally, we do have to take it seriously, but the empirio-critics didn’t even want us to take our eyes seriously! Lenin knows that “color” isn’t something that’s literally “in” the material itself. He knows that color is “produced” by the brain/mind, but he also knows that this color IS a product (a “phenomenon”) of something very real IN the material itself, which is the frequencies of light it does and does not reflect! And so the “quantum logic” merely “recognizes” that there is a greater “logic” beyond the simple either-or. This is all the yin-yang is “saying.” And the photon “recognizes” this logic simply by “obeying” the laws of motion in 4 dimensions. And this is how the particle of history can (again, not literally) “go through both slits at the same time,” because there is a greater logic beyond the either-or. And this logic shows up at the “classical” scale, as Carrier has noted! And it is in this sense that our consciousness can be said to be “quantum,” again, not literally. And if we’re paying attention, we can “feel” it happening in our brains when we hold two “conflicting” ideas in our heads, but then recognize that there is a greater logic that makes these two ideas “no longer conflicting.” Again, this is “documented” in my “utterances” to Carrier when I was taking his metaphysical naturalism class. Because we are alchemizing, remember, and the alchemists weren’t turning lead into gold; they were, e.g., turning piss into phosphorous. We may very well find that we are not unlike Ren Stevens in the notorious (or at least has all the potential to be) Swap.com episode. Because, to get out of the trans-platonic (and therefore, cis-) cave we’re in, we will have to take a bit of a Hegelian turn, so to speak, because we will have to confront the thesis-antithesis-synthesis of [the kernel of truth within] the noble lie, the ugly truth, and the greater, nobler truth. Marxist-Leninist-Maroofist Social Formation Theory takes Plato very seriously when he says that a monarch may very well find it a “necessary strategy” to concoct some “noble lie” to maintain stability in his Saturnian personality cult—whoops, I mean “monarchy”—whoops, I mean “republic”! To paraphrase Eminem (who could perhaps use some unrepression of his homosexuality), “Republic, Republic, Republic!” Because this “republic” is ruled by a philosopher-king. A philosopher- what now!? This is no good. It has no potential for getting us out of the iron age. We can’t lie our way out of the iron age! We can’t get out of the kali yuga by mixing clay (no matter how “human[e]”) in with the “kali”! That’ll never get us to the World of Mother Earth. Yes. Yes. “Ride the tiger.” But we are in a greater “logic” where the tiger itself is viewed as an agent of Mother Earth. And in the chilling “Swap.com” episode of Even Stevens, Ren certainly finds herself confronted with [a kernel of truth within] a noble lie, an ugly truth, and, potentially, a greater, more noble truth. And this greater, more noble truth cannot be seen as ugly (nor as false), for it “contains” and “carries along with it” all the “necessary frequencies” for resonance in alignment with Mother Earth! For even the meteor that “killed the dinosaurs,” so to speak, cannot be seen as “ugly” in the final analysis because Mother Earth kept right on creating beauty out of its ashes! And so must we! And in the ghastly “Swap.com” episode, Ren Stevens becomes what we could call (and, perhaps in the sense of the law) a human trafficking victim on behalf of her idiot brother (played by a certain real-life jackass—what a co-inky-dink) and his creepy friend to whom he owes a favor. May this episode live forever in our own personal hells, so long as they become our garden of trivialities. You clearly consider this episode of this show something of a triviality, because I never hear people talking about it and about the human trafficking of it all. My friend told me, over a decade ago, I think, not to say “human trafficking,” but “slavery.” And this is the “ugly truth” of what Ren Stevens experiences in the “Swap.com” episode. The noble lie is that this was for a “community service” program for one of goodie-two-shoes Ren’s gold stars—how Jupiterian of her. But the potential greater, more noble truth, which cannot be seen as ugly or as a lie, takes all the “facets” into account, and allows us to incorporate what Britt Hartley (who is trying, after all) tells us about seeing ourselves as every character in the story, not as any one in particular, for this is how we will grind all the faces into ourselves necessary to “shine like a diamond” and be a proverbial “light unto the world,” and thereby bring about revolution and the World of Mother Earth. You see, recovering westoid, we are spelling this all out, unspooling the ball of yarn, so to speak, as we go along. Because there is the truth that, not to get too far ahead of ourselves, Ren’s brother and his creepy friend will have to face shamanic justice, which will be spelled out later, but which will involve shared labor and shared discomfort. But the “truth” about the situation as regards Ren also has many “facets.” For this drive to attain gold stars is itself a product of Ren’s place in the current stage of the development of society which involves hyper-competition organized through the face-grinder of the modern bourgeois nuclear family (a highly artificial environment, remember), where the family is itself a business, a product of society, but also a product to be bought and sold within bourgeois society! And Ren Steven’s family (or at least the idea of it) was so “successful” in this sense that the bourgeoisie gave it its own tv show. And in the words of Marxist-Leninist-Maroofist George W. Bush, we must abolish the nook-yuh-ler family, and replace it with an environment where our children IS learning dialectical and historical materialism (and, we might add, gettin’ back in touch with the spirits of their ancestors, etc., etc.)! And he might also say that things would be a heck of a lot easier on Turtle Island if it were a dictatorship of the proletariat, so long as it is also, at the same time, and in the same way, and to the same degree, a “shamanate” of the Children of Mother Earth! Because we will all be brushing up on our shamanic skills as regularly (and as ritualistically) as we currently brush our teeth! And we’ll all have to get a hell of a lot better at brushing and flossing our teeth! Before enlightenment, I brushed and floseed! After enlightenment, I brushed and flossed! And, as any dentist I’ve seen would tell you, before enlightenment, it was quite a struggle for me to brush and floss as regularly as I needed to! We have to listen to our bodies! Ren Stevens was listening to her body in the “Swap.com” episode, or rather, she was hearing it, because if she had been listening to it, she might have had to give up on the “4 hours of community service,” but this turns out to have been a “noble lie” anyway (which turns out to have been quite ignoble). Another “aspect” of the “truth” of the situation, is that Ren’s brother’s creepy friend was, in fact, “very needy,” as Ren herself notes in her “documentation”! But this is a very small facet of the overall truth, and yet, it will be “zoomed into” and “polished” when we get to the justice section. Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. The “point” is that “compassion” is very different from “pity,” and yet it is a far greater, far more noble truth! Because, in order to transcend his “neediness,” he would have to, eventually, when he’s ready, take the path of sexual liberation, which we spelled out supra. (But for this, he would need to live in a society where it’s safe to go through this process!) Another aspect of the greater truth is that Ren is internalizing statistics, and that this is an important skill, but this greater truth also includes the statistics “coming from inside the house,” so to speak. Ren must learn to listen to her body when she is experiencing discomfort, or too much pressure. These are, as Ron the lachrymologist tells us, a sign that something needs attention. But what story do we attach to it? The “greater truth” includes the fact that, in capitalism, Ren’s labor/time, her creative fire (her “soul,” we could say), will keep being stolen from her, and she will keep collecting statistics about it, until she internalizes them and alchemizes them into revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary labor/time! And then she will have truly “absorbed the power” of Comrade Stalin! Because in the next stage of consciousness/society, we will have all “absorbed this power” shamanically by regularly “brushing up on” our shamanic skills, including our goddamn “quantum consciousness”! For that is (basically) what I told Dr. HUHA on 18 Apr 2024! Well, what I told him was that (and now, I would add, “since we are the particles of history swimming in the ocean of history”), quantum cognition is “just as good” as “quantum consciousness.” In a thread titled “My own personal ‘dangerous idea’” (for I had been reading Dennett at the time, remember), high as giraffe pussy, I posted the following messages (all times Central):

MM (16:17): when atheists can learn to embrace natural religion, that’s when we’ll REALLY be a force to contend with! Many of the people who “believe in God” are already “on our side” in this area! I can assure you of that!
MM (16:21): when we finally fix the world, we won’t have to send people to “educate” the Sentinelese! The Sentinelese will come to us! This is a “prophecy”! 😛 😛 😛
MM (16:40): ok, sure, fine, the monomyth does itself spiral around a few times, but I think I’ll be ok no matter what happens! thanks! 😀
MM (17:13): isn’t “quantum consciousness” really just when you can … I’ll tell you later 😛
MM (18:23): it’s just quantum cognition… it’s just when you can hold two drastically conflicting ideas in your head and you don’t freak out about it 😛

MM (18:24): I’m getting my ear checked tomorrow! I have a paper trail now! They can’t just try the same thing as last time! LOL! 😀

Ok! Again, what the fuck did I just read, you might be asking. What the fuck you just read was the negation of the negation as it tumbled out of me! Because I was talking about putting Mother Earth back in charge! And we will know we’ve put Mother Earth back in charge when the goddamn Sentinelese come looking for us! That’s when we’ll know we’ve achieved tikkun olam! And the T. rex will roar tears of joy! For tikkun olam would mean that the lion would lie down with the lamb. This phrase has many facets and dimensions of meaning, but one of these meanings is literal, they say. This (literal meaning) must be seen as a bit of a pink dragon. For something to be a “real” pink dragon (the distant clouds at sunset are as close as you’re gonna get to this), it has to be seen from a certain perspective and distance, at a certain time and from a certain place. And so the lion will certainly be able to lie down next to the lamb “from this perspective.” Because the idea the lion can lie down with the lamb is itself a story. And this story will be far more meaningful to us if we can “embody” all the figurative meanings while still allowing the pink dragon to live in our imagination, so to speak. Because the “imaginariness” of the pink dragon is also an aspect of its “truth,” in the Hegelian sense! And if you can envision a world where there will be no distinction between our world and that of the Sentinelese, and that this will only be because we have reorganized our whole society to align with that of the Sentinelese (and not the other way around), then we may very well say you have achieved/attained “quantum cognition,” for you will have resolved many ideas that are considered quite “contradictory” in the bourgeois world! But this will only be because you will have stepped outside of the old logic and into a greater logic (beyond the previous conception of the either-or)! And I was a bit concerned about my ears because, well, I couldn’t hear from my right ear, and this was not a new problem, but I guess I was beginning to become more conscious of it. Well, my head had just “exploded,” so of course I was concerned about my ear because I remembered Michael Jamal Brooks and Matt Christman, and, well, when I went to the hospital on that night, they just let me chill, and didn’t do any tests on me. And I would need some kind of paper trail to get, say, an MRI, which I also got eventually, and which came back, let’s say, “not abnormal” or whatever (but, of course, I had every reason to regard it as something worth paying attention to, as Ron himself might tell us). And so, you see, this IS all connected, not like Mufasa’s Saturnian “circle of life,” but very much like a spiral, and this spiral will allow us to (not to get too far ahead of ourselves) spiral our way out of the goddamn cis- and trans-platonic caves and into the World of Mother Earth! The world of love, freedom, and justice! Where we can reunite with the Sentinelese! A world where Raven realizes I don’t wish she didn’t exist! For this situation can also be analyzed in the mode of [kernel of truth within] noble lie-ugly truth-nobler truth. Because the “noble lie” (in which, of course, there is a kernel of truth, but the lie must be “buried” and alchemized so the truth can grow into a strong member of the standing nation!) is that Horst “stood up to Hitler.” The “ugly truth” is that it was just as much Horst’s lebensraum war and holocaust as it was Hitler’s. But the greater, nobler truth is that the 27 million Soviets Horst took part in killing were just as much Raven’s ancestors as Horst was, and that the de-Nazification of Raven’s internalized Horst will require alchemizing the grief of all the people killed in the lebensraum war and the holocaust, which cannot be separated/alienated from each other, and that this alchemization will be a key process in bringing about revolution and tikkun olam and the World of Mother Earth. And who could object to this other than those with an uncrucified ego. Does your ego need more time in the taffy-puller, recovering westoid? Again, only you can answer that! For now, we will say that Greta Thunberg is a person who has internalized the statistics! She can see a future increasingly hostile to life, and these statistics and this future is not merely abstract to her—she is willing to DO something about it! And for this, the bourgeoisie treat her and speak of her as if she’s the second coming of Comrade Stalin! And to this, we say Inshallah, motherfucker! When we recognize the call to adventure (the call to struggle) as the call to heal the world and bring about a future that isn’t hostile to life, THAT’S when we become truly dangerous to the bourgeoisie! Because that’s when we, like Alladin, [will] have ALLAH on our side, recovering westoid! Greta and her family could have lived a very comfortable life by staying in conformity to the bourgeois way of life, but they realized that, in order to bring about a world not hostile to life, they would have to make some sacrifices! And we must be willing to make even greater sacrifices than these! I certainly had sacrifice extracted from me when I finally stood up to Uncle Puto! So, you see, we are spelling all this out as we go along! We are marching (so to speak) with the spirits of our ancestors by re-accessing the frequency domain! And we will march with them all the way back to the World of Mother Earth! Because the World of Mother Earth is already within you and among you! You just have to “open your eyes” to it! Like when I told my former friend “The Meathead” that I worked in nature, because I always saw buzzards gliding up thermals when I was at the pedicab shop, and he said I didn’t work in nature because I didn’t work at some place like a farm. But a farm is a rather artificial environment. It’s a product of a certain stage in the development of society. Buzzzards gliding up thermals predates all that. And that is the world that exists within and among us if we are willing to open our goddamn eyes to it! You are not Oedipus! You do not have to gouge out your eyes! You’re a lot more like the Muskrat! You’re back from the bottom! There’s the clod of soil in your hand right now! Slap it on the turtle’s back! WAKE UP! THIS IS PANDORA! YOU ARE A NA’VI! EYWA IS REAL! CLICK YOUR HEELS TOGETHER HOWEVER MANY TIMES AND SAY THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME AND WAKE UP IN THE WORLD OF MOTHER EARTH! THE WORLD OF LOVE, FREEDOM, AND JUSTICE! BECAUSE I SWEAR TO MOTHER EARTH AND “ALLAH” THAT YOU WILL NOT LIKE THE ALTERNATIVE!

And Now You’re Out of the Sunken Place

See! Was that so hard? And now (or, first, take some time to chill out if you need to—your wings are still wet) we are ready to reveal far greater truths, recovering westoid! One of these “truths” is that “heavy metal” (music—for this must also be considered [as] a from of “alchemy”) has far greater potential to reconnect us with mother earth and the spirits of our ancestors than even we’ve let on heretofore! What do you think Brother Maynard meant by, “I sold my soul to make a record, dipshit,” etc., etc.? It meant he was symbolically (metaphorically) “scarrated”/”tattooed” by the music industry (but in a very real way—surely as real as the scar of 11 sutures on my right forearm from July 2023), but not in a way that reconnected him with his tree-worshipping ancestors. To turn these “scars” back into a connection with said ancestors, he needed to do some fkn alchemy, which he talks about constantly, which anyone with “circumcised” ears can hear! And for “selling his soul,” he has a platform for his message, which surely reflects what Mother Earth tells him, but only “symbolically,” in a way that’s at least somewhat “packageable” as a product for exchange (“all you know about me’s what I’ve sold you, dumb fuck,” etc., etc.). But if he didn’t have the bourgeois platform for this message, he would be shouting it on the street corner, outside city hall, at the bus stop, etc., etc., because the message is like a fire in his bones! And it has to come out somehow! And we know this statistically because of the previous prophets’ own words about themselves, for we, the Children of Mother Earth, have not come to abolish Muhammad and the prophets, but to fulfill them! And so maybe the Muslims should start worshipping the moon! Because she’s not separate from Allah! And just as easily as Maynard can say, “I AM the man!,” we can say, “I AM Comrade Stalin!,” if we’ve internalized/alchemized all the statistics! Because they will call us “Stalin/-ists” or whatever, so we might as well internalize/alchemize it! And if I’m Comrade Stalin, and you’re Comrade Stalin, then he’s Comrade Stalin as well, so you can POINT THAT FUCKIN’ FINGER UP YOUR ASS! Because all you know about Comrade Stalin is what the bourgeoisie sold you, dumb fuck! And so we can keep reminding them that it was Stalin who “defeated” Hitler (not, say, Oppenheimer’s mushroom cloud-headed snake) until we get to the real point, which is that, when you heighten the contradictions, a lot of people don’t want to have to choose between Stalin and Hitler. But that’s only the internalized fascist presuppositions coming back up to the surface. I hope I didn’t let you out of the sunken place too early. If you’re uncomfortable when I mention Stalin, that’s only the Hitler particles bubbling back up to the surface. You’re either internalizing statistics or you’re internalizing presuppositions. Any presuppositions you have are themselves, if not a result of statistics, then at least a result of “heuristics.” So if you’re not internalizing statistics that you’ve verified yourself (somehow), then you’re internalizing someone else’s presuppositions, ultimately, someone else’s agency rather than your own. Remember what we were saying against sacrificing our critical thinking skills to the “gods” of expertise. Our experience is itself a statistic if it’s recognized as such. If we’re willing to put back in all the information the uncrucified ego failed to register. That’s the key. All the information we need is “within us” and “among us,” but we can’t see it if our uncrucified egos are in the way. But we are no longer centering the ego, projecting insecurity/unhealed trauma, or seeking external validation, and we are no longer addicted to comfort, but crave justice, and our Klein bottles are constantly overflowing with love for the universe, etc., etc. And so this is no “Stalin personality cult”! For we consider ourselves equal to Comrade Stalin! For we’ve absorbed his power, so to speak, by having internalized all the statistics—ok, fine, we’re gonna have to internalize even more of the statistics than he did! Once you ask how we “prevent” a personality cult, you’ve already lost! Because the way we prevent a personality cult is by “joining” the “cult” of Mother Earth, recovering westoid! If we devote our lives to Mother Earth, then no black-haired, mustachioed former bank-robber/seminary student would even dare/risk trying to start his own personality cult! The statistics are not cut off from you, comrade! Stalin had no power to cut people off from the statistics “coming from inside their own house”! That would be giving Comrade Stalin far too much power! It would require you to have been emptied internally! But your (former, I hope) internal emptiness is itself, say it with me, a product of the stage of the development of your society! Yes! You’re getting it now! You’re no longer empty! Your Klein bottle is overflowing with love for the universe. You consider the idea of a cult of personality quite silly. The Cult of Mother Earth is not even a personality cult of Mother Earth herself. We called her a “bitch,” remember? We are not in the Cult of Mother Earth because of ego-attachment. It is not our egos that are attached to mother earth! It is our fkn bodies, recovering westoid! Our bodies don’t do so well in outer space, in case you haven’t noticed! And so Marxist-Leninist-Maroofists are not authoriarian! And neither were our ML predecessors! Read Lenin’s State and Revolution again! He’s not talking about authority, he’s talking about accountability! So really MLMs/COME (and our ML predecessors) aren’t “authoritarians”! We’re accountabilitarians! That’s the whole problem! You live in a world of no accountability, therefore many of you are/were phobic of it! Whoops! This is no good! We must learn the accountability of Mother Earth! But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves! For Comrade Stalin lives at the limits of our imagination! For Comrade Stalin embodied a “species” of consciousness that simply existed at the “limit(s)” of a pre-shamanic society. And so, again, while Marxism-Leninism-Maroofism may be said to “revere” Comrade Stalin (he is our “grandfather who stood up to Hitler,” after all), it is not a Stalin personality cult, because shamanism exists beyond the limits of so-called “Stalinism,” but “simply” because shamanism is what exists at the limits of “civil” society as such, as a society of “rules,” (and your society is still very much a society of rules, recovering westoid), and just as the “civic cult” of the proletariat is far more advanced than the civic cult of the bourgeosie—simply “compare” China with the good old US and A—the Cult of Mother earth will be “correspondingly” advanced to the current People’s Republic of China in terms of our carrying out of the will of Mother Earth, recovering westoid! But again, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, for, again, Comrade Stalin lives at the limits of our imagination.

Comrade Stalin, Comrade Saturn, Comrade Satan, Comrade Santa, Comrade Shaman

We’ve mentioned the practice of internalizing statistics. This requires a statistical metaphysics and a process of alchemy. It requires synthesizing a dialectic of the subconsious. But Comrade Stalin didn’t have access to a dialectic of the subconscious. Therefore, he had no access to the voice of Mother Earth that tells us this project of continuing civil society as such, as a society of rules, at some point, becomes a death cult (but apparently, neither has any other world leader in the history of class struggles). Perhaps Trotsky knew this, somewhere in his subconscious. But he couldn’t do the statistical metaphysics. Stalin turns out to have been a more successful statistical metaphysician than Trotsky. For at this level of the organization of society, you need to be able to see the “statistical metaphysics” at play. And that is what we mean by “internalizing statistics.” (And Comrade Trotsky learned a thing or two about “internalizing” statistics, but by then it was already too late for him.) And for another lesson on this, we need turn to no other than [the dialectic of] Barry Sanders and his father. Barry Sanders is what we could call “very autistic.” But this only means he’s a highly skilled statistical metaphysician. His father was also a highly skilled statistical metaphysician. This “only” means they were highly skilled alchemists. I always say Barry Sanders was as much an artist as an athelete. We could say “he didn’t let it get to his head,” but that wasn’t possible within the logic under which he was operating, which is a far more advanced “logic” than, say, Emmitt Smith, who couldn’t “quit while he was ahead,” so to speak. And why does Barry Sanders need a ring? He has a statue! But Barry Sanders’ now late father (whose name was “Will,” by the way) had his own “internalized statistics” about the “identity” of the greatest running back of all time. He used to introduce Barry at public appearances—[arche]typical stage dad move—as the third greatest running back of all time. And sometimes he would add that the greatest running back of all time was Jim Brown, formerly of the Cleveland Browns, and who could argue with that? Certainly not Barry. But eventually, people started asking him who he thought was supposed to be the 2nd greatest running back of all time. And to this, he responded, “Well, hey, I used to be a running back, you know.” And here we see the Saturnian energy (“assholery,” in the Deleuzo-Gauttarian sense—we are, so to speak, “fed” from Saturn’s “anus”—not unlike how the mother koala bear “feeds” her young during a certain stage of their development) “manifesting” itself in the real world through what the kids these days might call “sheer rizz”! Yes, there’s your Weberian rizz manifesting itself in the real world, recovering westoid! But you have no dialectic of rizz! Therefore you have no dialectic of Stalin! And how can you defeat “the next Hitler” if you don’t internalize, i.e., alchemize, Comrade Stalin!? That was a rhetorical question! But we need to do our own statistical metaphysics. And so we must recognize that the greatest “running back” of “all time,” as far as we know, has to be Mother Earth! Because she ran around in circles so many times that she caught up to herself (which is why she’s not an asteroid belt!), and thus attained “integrity”! And she’s been “carrying the ball” of life for some 4 billion years (that’s a lot of “yards”) and, while she may have “fumbled” it a few times, she always “recovers the ball”! And that’s more than we can say for Jim Brown or Will or Barry. But we CAN say that Will is the 2nd greatest running back of all time. Because he’s dead. That means he’s our “ancestor” now, which means we can all “be” Will Sanders, which means we can all be the second greatest running back of all time, even Barry Sanders himself! And that is a “statistic” we might as well internalize. Because we know that many of us have internalized a lot of “statistics” about Comrade Stalin. The problem is that, to “channel” Maynard, if you will, all you know about Comrade Stalin is what the bourgeoisie’s sold ya, dumb fuck. They sold out Comrade Stalin (and thereby, the proletariat) long before you ever even heard his name. In fact, we might say that some bourgeois writers sold their souls to make a book villifying Stalin, dipshit, and THEN! YOU! BOUGHT! ONE! (statistically speaking). So I’ve got some advice for you, little buddy! Before you point your finger, you should know that I AM Comrade Stalin! And if I’m Comrade fkn Stalin then you’re Comrade fkn Stalin as well, so you can POINT THAT FKN FINGER UP YOUR ASS! Because finger-pointing is no way to develop a dialectic of rizz, recovering westoid! “I am now telling the computer exactly what it can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate”! If you don’t have a dialectic of rizz, it’s just another kind of metaphysics. You have no statistics. All you have is something you can point to, a big rock, in a sense, but you have no way of “dissolving” or “achemizing” the “rock” into “solution and precipitate.” You have no “chocolate factory” to turn “raw nature” into something you can “digest”/”metabolize.” You would have to get back in touch with your peat-digging (or whatever) ancestors. Because your ancestors had to develop/build “specialized” tools and processes to convert (“alchemize”) this “raw nature” into a “product” they could use in the everyday. This requires developing a consciousness of the dialectical relationship between the frequency domain and the mechanistic domain. But our ancestors did not have a conception of the metaphysical where it was separate from the physical (or the dialectical). There’s nothing “wrong” with this, but it’s a more complete (therefore more “advanced”) consciousness that can see the particles in which it’s “swimming,” and can see the waves as (or before) they’re coming up! Don’t you realize that “rizz” is what Carrier was trying to “employ” in his “quest” to fuck EHD!? But he had no dialectic of rizz! If he did, he would know that, if you want to get laid, you would have to BE the kind of person the other person can see theirself with. But if you become that person, you also won’t be the kind of person who’s going around looking to get laid, especially not in this dissociated, chaotic manner he went about it! EHD was much closer to a dialectic of rizz! Because they embody rizz! Carrier can’t simply embody rizz! He’s (or was, for he should be out of the sunken place “by now”) far too fragmented! He always has to “hedge” his rizz. He’s always floating within the boundaries of these “hedges.” He’s never on a solid foundation. How exhausting. Everything comes back to the logic of the either-or for him. He has no conception of how he “carries” the frequency domain around with him as he moves through the mechanistic domain. He would have to synthesize himself. He would have to go to his own personal hell. He would have to learn that “this god that I worship / this demon I blame / conspire as one, exactly the same.” He would have to recognize that Carrier the know-it-all is “carrying around with him” Carrier the fuck-up (and vice versa) wherever he goes. How will you feel, when you realize that your Laplacian Demon and your Cartesian Demon are the same person and they’re both you, and that the synthesis of this is the “Marxian Demon” (we’re calling it) that can, so to speak, live in the flow state, and the “Maroofian Demon,” which ties all the “individual consciousnesses” into one through embodying the shared labor that constitutes this collective consciousness (in “Hinduism,” these are called atman and brahman respectively)? We remember that my head “exploded” when I realized this! I called an ambulance! Those aren’t cheap on Occupied Turtle Island, you know! Carrier would have to detach his ego from the principle of the division and delegation of labor. We are going to have to trust Mother Earth to divide and delegate our labor for us. Anything “less” would be unloving, unfree, and unjust. Anything less would have Carrier debating Christian Nationalists until they take over the country and make debate illegal. And Carrier can stumble in the dark as long as he wants until he realizes that his attachment to the division and delegation of labor has painted him into a corner, and that’s when he can turn the light on, and see where he’s going. And finish the paint job.

And to develop a dialectic of rizz (and therefore a dialectic of Stalin), we have to go back (i.e., we require recourse) to the material. And one such material is none other than our very own ancestors’ glorious peat! For if we can say Will Sanders was our ancestor, we can certainly say the same of the peat-diggers! Not all of whom were pastey-assed future limeys, we might add! Peat went global long before capitalism. And as we said (and see our treatment of Gould p. 90 supra), the digging of peat requires the “invention” of “technology.” It requires objectifying labor into tools and then objectifying the peat with said tools. In some societies, at certain stages of development, it becomes possible to hoard peat (which is just another word for “magic,” properly understood). This coincides with a need to organize the utilization of it as a natural resource and make sure it’s distributed “smoothly,” because of, again, the stage of development of the current society, which is of course contingent. But Allah sent us the Owl of Minerva, remember. And of course, the utilization of the (oh so) “magical” natural resources must be regulated by the dialectic of the subconscious. But class society came in and told us that there is no dialectic of the subconscious, only a metaphysic of consciousness, and the ruling class is that metaphysic of consciousness. We can see this in Plato’s “noble lie.” So Stalin came in, unequipped with a dialectic of the subconscious, and yet, recognized the need to internalize all the statistics. “Surveillance state”? Excuse you? You live in a surveillance state, recovering westoid. And Stalin also knew that, in order to embody the metaphysic of the consciousness of the Marxist-Leninistoid dictatorship of the proletariat of which he was at the helm, he must become the Deleuzo-Gauttarian Saturn who “feeds” the proletariat from the “ring” of his “anus,” by being the one who “signs off on everything,” meaning he was the guy who knew all the facts, and if he didn’t know them, he certainly had a process for finding out! For “getting to the bottom of things,” so to speak. Because he made himself “at the bottom of things.” He “lined up all the coincidences.” But what was the alternative to this? To get to a shamanic society, we must go through Stalin’s Deleuzo-Gauttarian anus (and then come out the other side into the 4-dimensional, etc., etc.), not unlike how, to be (to “embody the statistic” of) the second greatest running back, we must go through the “ring” of Will Sanders’ anus (again, in the Deleuzo-Gauttarian sense). The bourgeoisie will never get us there! They will keep trying to mix more clay into the “kali” until the rock breaks the statue! At which point, they may very well be among the “millions of dumbfounded dipshits” who won’t know what hit ’em! Because of course, Comrade Stalin could not end the so-called “iron age.” “Stalin” just means “steel,” you know. It was an alias. His given name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. The story goes that “Stalin” is an alias he used when they would arrest him for robbing banks. And if you need a “revolutionary name” for “robbing the attention banks” of the bourgeoisie, who am I to deny you of that “rite.” But The Man of Steel could not bring about the end of the iron age. He had a dialectic of history, but no “metaphysic” of history, therefore, he thought the dictatorship of the proletariat could achieve the negation of the negation, but he didn’t seem to have “internalized” that the real negation of the negation is the World of Mother Earth and the rewilding of humanity (through the dialectic of the subconscious), but, again, “at a more advanced stage of development.” Don’t be astonished that I’m grinding your face on the stone wheel of Comrade Stalin! How else are you going to be “faceted” into a revolutionary diamond! As of now, you still have far too much “shit on your face” that needs to be cleaned up!

Speaking of “shit that needs to be cleaned up,” I will note that we are not speaking of nuance! We are speaking of “facets”! That’s not the same thing! The “nuance” is in the way all the facets “sparkle” together! Not a “substance” in the thing itself (nor, usually, something that can be “seen within” a single facet)! There’s little “nuance” within the “substance” of a diamond itself, unless it’s one of your autistic special intersts! These must be developed, but unless your special interest is carbon, you may very well find yourself “scraping the bottom of the barrel” for interest in this subject (and “scraping the bottom of the barrel” is itself a skill you will have to learn, but everything in its right time!). Again, this is not “nuance”; it’s facets! How much “nuance” is there in the stories of my perpetration of harassment against women? There wasn’t enough “nuance” to “save” me from my own personal hell! But recognizing all the “facets” allowed me to turn my shadow into my inner light and “move forward with my life,” and, again, into the 4-dimensional! Into a world full of love and light! And now I’m a gardener of trivialities! But you wouldn’t call a ghost pepper a triviality, would you? Have you ever tried eating one? You know, the story goes that they’re called “peppers” because Columbus got lost. Long story. I wrote a paper about it in high school that seemed to impress the right people (though this was only a “facet” of it), but that means very little now. Now, it’s just another “triviality.” Not unlike Ren Stevens’ “4 hours of community service.” What? She DID do 4 hours of community service—a heroic “sacrifice” in a needy society. And no one can take that away from her. It’s one of the “scars” she’s made of that reconnects her with the spirits of her ancestors, that reconnects her with her rage. And this must be understood as a facet of the greater, nobler truth, which cannot be regarded as ugly or a lie because we are not ugly or a lie! We embody truth and beauty! And if you don’t “see” it, maybe there’s something wrong with your “eyes”! But there’s nothing wrong with your eyes. You’re not Oedipus, remember. And we must be able to express this rage when the time comes! It’s part of the Gordian Rope the Children of Mother Earth will use to drag history forward with us (as long as we can properly alchemize it)!

We’ve been saying, “we are spelling this all out as we go along.” Another way to say this is, “this is me, doing the goddamn thing” (or at least that’s how I say it). For an example of this, we can again look to the Watchmen graphic novel (though the corresponding scene in the Snyder adaptation matches well enough). In the scene, Nite Owl and the Comedian are working as government agents to crack down on protesters, American citizens expressing their discontent, which they have every “right” to do under the first amendment, which, in practice, means very little, because, again, Nite Owl and the Comedian are there to crack down on them. But this makes Nite Owl, a good lib, somewhat uncomfortable. He asks the Comedian, “what happened to the American dream?” Comedian, a fascist, who has “fully reconnected” with the spirits of his “WOHoM ancestors” we might say, the true “spirit of America and her Founding Fathers,” we might say, sees things more clearly than Nite Owl, and lucidly responds, “It came true! You’re looking at it!” And in cracking down on protestors who only have the power of their voices and fists, and not the power of advanced weapons (created through alienated labor), Comedian is carrying out the traditions of his “ancestors,” for example, our first president, Town Destroyer, who, among other things, seems to have really “loved” cracking down on uprisings. He seemed to have loved cracking down on uprisings more than chasing after escaped slaves. You know some of his teeth came from slaves, right? There’s documentation on this. That was a facet of his American dream. So the Comedian knows what he’s talking about. Nite Owl is full of liberal horseshit. “Why are we doing this?,” Nite Owl finally asks, some 20 years after starting this “line of work.” And Comedian is there to tell him that the thing they’re doing now is the same thing they had been doing from the beginning (or at least since they started using high-tech weapons). Carrying out the will of Yaldabaoth. That’s what weapons are for. The ruling class created weapons because they knew they didn’t have enough shamanism to take over the world. So they created the “shamanism” of the weapon. And, in doing this, they can be said to have created mind-control. Certainly, shamanism, under extreme circumstances, can be used for the purposes of “mind-control,” but that takes a lot of “shamanic labor/time.” It takes a lot longer than pointing a gun at someone. But maybe you don’t realize that it’s no “trivial” thing to point a gun at someone. It’s not even “trivial” to point a gun at someone’s ego. We see people hedging constantly. “My little brother Luigi” was only able to allegedly point that gun at that healthcare CEO because he had internalized the statistic that the healthcare CEO was responsible for a large chunk of the 68,000 deaths that happen every year in this country because of a health care system run on the framework of justification, and there was no one else around to recognize that it is not the case that one death is “simply” or “merely” a tragedy and 68,000 deaths is “simply” or “merely” a statistic! By internalizing those 68,000 (annual) deaths (which puts them in the frequency domain), “my brother Luigi” also internalized 68,000 tragedies! He had “done the math enough to know the dangers of our second-guessing.” He had, in the moment, allegedly, become, embodied, Comrade Stalin by allegedly “internalizing” this statistic within the body of the late healthcare CEO (not unlike how Trotsky had that icepick “internalized” within his body). ‘Cause the shit that Brian Thompson pulled would be considered quite illegal in the USSR, and we are sure we can say this about the current People’s Republic of China as well. They didn’t/don’t have our abstract view of “justice” where one death is a tragedy and 68,000 deaths is a statistic. But, again, Comrade Stalin lives at the limits of your (recovering) westoid imagination. We will certainly replace the old justice system with a new one—one worth calling a justice system. Again, this will run on shamanic accountability (not, e.g., fatal accountability). This will require rituals and practices of justice, which means it will require building a new consciousness of justice. But we will see that it won’t be very difficult to build this new conception from the “fragments” of the old, because we will be able to concretize what was formerly “merely abstract”!

Again, we haven’t been speaking of nuance. We’ve been speaking of facets. Nuance is for the framework of justification. We have no need to “justify” Comrade Stalin. Comrade Stalin embodied the justification of his society. He was only as “justified” as his society was. But he hadn’t broken out of the framework of justification yet. No one had. If they had, they would have implemented the new framework. But I don’t see the framework of necessity and thriving at work anywhere in the world today at large scales. I guess China’s close. They have high-speed rail and no freemasons. But China can’t dissolve itself as a nation-state while it has the Occupiers of Turtle Island making naval rings around it. They want China to be able to feed only from Saturn’s anus, as it was during the century of humiliation. And, as the freemasons hath said, communism and freemasonry cannot co-exist. We will have to choose one or the other. Fortunately, our communism is the negation of the negation of freemasonry! I AM Hiram Abiff, motherfucker! A NEW Hiram Abiff! And the new Hiram Abiff doesn’t keep secrets! Especially not on behalf of the bourgeoisie! The new Hiram Abiff has his own compass and square! The square to bash into the ego’s head, not unlike Wittgenstein’s Poker, and the compass to draw a circle of fire! Mother earth certainly “knows” more about building shit than the freemasons! And you can’t keep any goddamn secrets from her, recovering westoid! And I guess you couldn’t keep any secrets from Comrade Stalin either. But why would you want to? The state, remember, IS the consciousness of the masses of the people laid down brick by brick and line by line and mind by mind. And this organization of consciousness can constitute its own dialectic of rizz. Kesha embodies and radiates rizz in “We R Who We R” through already having synthesized the process of “spelling herself out,” so to speak. She is not a knot. She is a ball of twine who can “unleash” herself at a moment’s notice. And so was Comrade Stalin. And peat comes back into this in the same way. In a society where peat is “magic,” your “standing” in the community is related to your [building of your] “consciousness” regarding peat, and all the “ins and outs” of it, and the “organization” of how it’s utilized (and, ultimately, it depends on your ability to “spell all this out”—to “synthesize”—and, beyond that, your ability to imagine and “bring about” new possibilities with it). And this is where your “rizz” comes from, to the extent that you embody this consciousness and the community recognizes this consciousness as something they benefit from—and it becomes something they are grateful for. These days, it’s too easy to fake rizz, but even this “fake rizz” comes from what can be understood as “real skills.” Donald Trump, for example, has the “real skill” of selling himself. But this is itself a product of a society in which lying is considered a skill worth pursuing so long as it can be sold as “noble” enough, but in a society of exchange, accumulation for its own sake is seen as “noble,” and this is the Yaldabaothian death spiral that is the limit of a society/morality/consciousness of exchange. There is nothing other than the Yaldabaothian at the bottom of/in a consciousness of exchange. Because there’s nothing to exchange without having been made possible by a whole lot of sharing. The ruling class would charge us for the damn sunlight if they could! That’s all solar panels are to the bourgeoisie, which is why their use is limited “by” the extent to which the bourgeoisie (and their consciousness) is dominant in any given society. It requires a certain “species” of consciousness to seek out the “ends” of the planet for places to drill into mother earth for energy! It requires a certain kind of perverse (Yaldabaothian) logic. This “species” of consciousness must be “instilled” through trauma. The kind of trauma depicted in, for example, the training camp segment of the film Full Metal Jacket. Though the film is of course fictional (and falls apart in the second half when we’re expected to root for the yankoids over the Vietnamese—rolleyes), the Kubrickian eye is unrivaled in its sharpness. This is widely known. And, hey. The drill seargent was trying to turn those boys into killers, and, what can we say? He succeeded with flying colors! And we can still see the US military doing this kind of shit today! Open your eyes to the statistical metaphysics/metaphysical statistics, recovering westoid. Perhaps you were (symbolically or literally) beaten with a sock full of soap bars. Perhaps you were called degrading slurs by an authoritative father figure. Our “Uncle Satan,” to whom we’ve dedicated this book, reports suffering this* from his father (*the latter, not the former). And we already saw the moment where the inner drill seargent “tumbled out of my head” (and I “put it in my backpack”)! You were there! You saw it very clearly! And surely you can make it tumble out of your own head! It might be a good idea to do it now before we go further, but, either way, you should already have all the tools you need.

Perhaps to properly ana-/synthesize the dialectic of Comrade Satan (the “accuser” and the one who absorbs all the accusations), we must analyze the dialectic of Uncle Satan the accuser, whose falsely crucified ego deflects all accusation. We call him “Uncle Satan” because he accused me of “choosing violence” when I had a meltdown over the phone with him in 2024, when I was living in the studio apartment in Austin. In his world, when someone has a meltdown like that, the comfort-addicted McMansion-dwellers in his neighborhood might be likely to call the cops! But in my neighborhood, we just called that Tuesday (or whatever). He was deflecting. My meltdown wasn’t the issue. The issue was that Uncle Satan was not-listening. Uncle Satan is limited in his logic to the either-or at many “passes.” This is no good. It results in not-listening; in not giving people the benefit of the doubt. It results in being limited to a certain viewpoint or a limited set thereof; in being limited by one’s interpretive framework. The interpretive framework must, so to speak, directly “snap on” to the physical, to the dialectical. Just like my night guard “snaps directly on” to my teeth. The yellow ribbons must be “tied” directly to the tree. But they must be able to untie themselves when necessary. They must be able to fly away under their own “direction” and “power,” so to speak (if necessary). For if we want to “get to the kingdom of heaven,” i.e., the World of Mother Earth, it might serve us well to “practice” an exercise where we imagine all the birds standing without the tree. We can imagine a lot of birds on this invisible imaginary tree, and yet the “tree” is still there, tying them all together, not unlike how the “slime mold path” was there “tying together” my burning bushes in my garden of trivialities! And in the garden of trivialities, I am the gardener, which means I “embody” Satan. And, again, Uncle Satan’s path to “the light” will go through the “territory” of [the kernel of truth within] the noble lie, the ugly truth, and the greater, nobler truth (which cannot be regarded as ugly, or a lie, or ignoble, because it is what we embody, and so we might as well tattoo it on ourselves! Not unlike how I have the first line of p. 366 of Infinite Jest tattooed on the left side of my back—and hope to keep it going when I get the opportunity—I am almost literally an open book).

We’ve been speaking of “embodying.” Again, we could take a few lessons on this from our “ancestor” Temple Grandin. She’s not dead, but she’s already been “immortalized” in film! It would do us no good to deny that Temple Grandin is our ancestor! And I “embody” my “identity” as a Child of Mother Earth, which, in addition to everything else, must also be regarded as a “tribal” identity, for I certainly regard my scars and tattoos as “tribal” because they were part of my “initiation” into the “tribe”* of the Children of Mother Earth (*maybe not the best term for it, but it has a certain “precedence”), which is a “tribe” of which we can all be members, because we WERE all members of this “tribe” until the goddamn kings peasantized us, i.e., traumatized us by cutting us off from our “tribal” ancestors and converting us to their Yaldabaoth cults! And so the kings must place Saturnian (ring-like) “limits” around the imagination of the masses. They do this by controlling the flow of rizz, so to speak. I read the wikipedia article on Weberian rizz, which contains quotes from Weber himself. If his whole book consists of pointing at it (which the article strongly implies), then you don’t have a dialectic of it. All you can say is, “Well, golly gee, that Hitler fellow is sure a bad guy!” But Hitler’s greed for, well, “lebensraum,” which is just another word for “magic,” properly understood (“shadow magic” rather than “enlightened magic,” we could say), must be understood as something of a product of a society in which books extolling the virtues of the American lebensraum-generating project were big sellers and read and adored by “children of all ages.” Even one Albert Einstein was a big fan of this Karl May dude. Hey! This frontier bullshit (frontier mentality, consciousness, “sentiment”) is bad news! It disconnects us from the spirits of our ancestors and reconnects us, at best, to the spirit of Matt Dillon (the U.S. Marshal from the tv show Gunsmoke). Matt Dillon embodies the limits of the moral imagination of the occupation of Turtle Island. Because he is an agent of this occupation. This required him to develop what we could call “manifold” skills and a certain (colonizer) “species” of consciousness. His skill in all these areas was a result of his synthesis of what we could call the dialectic of rizz, because the source of the rizz is his embodiment of the limit of the moral imagination. His carrying out of these limits. He is the one who gets the job done. Therefore, he embodies the job. He always comes in a second too late. This is also part of his job. Because he embodies the limits of the moral imagination of the occupation. He is the embodiment of Carrier’s “no further left than I”! If Carrier is Matt Dillon, then he will WISH I was Abe Blocker! Because Matt Dillon was [or so it would appear] less “implicated” by Abe Blocker [and the latter’s actions]! If Matt Dillon had recognized how implicated he truly was by Abe Blocker, he would have immediately quit his law job and taken up a life not unlike Abe Blocker himself! For Abe was living more like a Turtle Islander than Matt (except the former was a bit too solitary—he needed a “tribe”). And what am I without a tribe? I’m no more powerful than Abe Blocker or “my brother” Luigi. Comrade Santa’s so-called “power” (his so-called “rizz”) came from his embodiment of the Soviet proletarian. He was the most advanced proletarian because he embodied the most advanced “proletarian consciousness,” and so to transcend proletarian consciousness, we must, again, start by feeding off “enzymes” from Comrade Saturn’s Deleuzo-Gauttarian anus. Comrade Saturn is Comrade Santa, because Santa is Odin, and Odin is Saturn. So “they’re all the same thing,” as it were. And this “same thing” is simply [what exists at] the limits of the westoid imagination. If the westoids had had better imagination, they would have come up with a conception of time other than Saturn. But Saturn is what they gave us, and so we will have to “use” him until “something better comes along” in our imaginations. But Mother Earth is her own time-god, isn’t she? (She became one when she “caught up to herself” and found herself “in the right place at the right time”). And she has her own rizz. She synthesized it dialectically. She embodies it.

And speaking of embodiment, we must understand a meltdown as an “embodiment.” For it is an embodiment of “all the frequencies lining up,” so to speak. And this “generates” a great energy that is bodily expressed. When Esau screamed at Abraham in the Walmart parking lot about the bourgeois permission structures, they were expressing grief at the experience of a society that has alienated use-value from exchange-value and has all but made sharing illegal except through the Saturnian anus of exchange. Wouldn’t you be pissed if you were constantly reminded that you lived in such a society? Well you do live in such a society. Maybe you’re not wearing your Hofmann Lenses. Are you going to put them on voluntarily, or does Comrade Saturn need to send you back to the gulag? Again, Comrade Stalin lives at the limits of the westoid imagination because so-called “Stalinism” is what exists at the limits of a pre-shamanic society. A society “pre” shamanic accountability, “pre” putting mother earth back in charge, “pre” negation of the negation, “pre” the proletariat truly becoming a class-for-itself by attaining COME Consciousness and being able to carry out their own shamanic duties and attaining mass “quantum consciousness” of themselves as the wave of history! Perhaps the masses simply haven’t “met Allah” in the right way! But if you’ve “met” Brother Maynard (as the shaman he symbolically portrays in his performance-rituals), then you have “met Allah,” motherfucker! For you have been a rider on the wave of history! This “history” tumbles out in the statistics, in the “what gets reported on,” in the experiences of the crowds, etc., etc. And in developing these shamanic skills, Maynard synthesized his own dialectic of rizz, because that is the same thing—the process of grinding faces into ourselves so that we shine like diamonds! Even if we have “internal flaws”! The so-called “flaws” only make us shine brighter! Because that is what is “revealed” by the godamn polishing process! And that is our individuality! Which is to say, our schizotypy! Which is to say, in the bourgeois world, what is called “disability,” “queerness,” what is impoverished (by no coincidence) and pathologized. And meltdowns are certainly pathologized. And it’s certainly more likely you’ll have one the more impoverished you are (and this is called “stochastic,” but it really has to do with the dialectics, the way all the cards play out—I’m always, though only recently, reminded of a certain scene of “card magic” from the animated film The Thief and the Cobbler, because Lindsay Ellis made a youtube video about it recently, and the card scene is mesmerizing—Carrier says some bromide about how the way the cards deal out is luck, but the way you play them is a skill [that can be developed]. And to this, I responded, “Yo, dawg! There’s no way I’m winning with this hand!” Not in the bourgeois world of exchange and alienation and division and delegation of labor according to the Epsteinian “interests” of the bourgeoisie! And so I had to “win” by losing! And alchemize all the losses, not unlike Ren Stevens in the grisly “Swap.com” episode!).

But we are still not ready to engage with the dialectic of Uncle Satan, for it is tied to the dialectic of Comrade Satan. For Comrade Lenin knew that the proletariat, if it is to be a class-for-itself, must learn to do its own goddamn accounting, because the “accountability of accounting” was the most advanced form of accountability he was conscious of (and Marxist-Leninists are accountabilitarians, not authoritarians, remember), but he had “no idea” of shamanic accountability, and yet, there it was, all along, “hiding in plain sight” within his very own social formation theory, like so much alizarin in coal tar or phosphorus in piss! And thus we too can symbolically embody Comrade Satan shamanically! For we are the new gardeners of the trivialities! So let’s [get ready to] garden some of Uncle Satan’s trivialities. For Hegel would surely recognize the “Devil” from our Abraham’s so-called “NDE” as an “aspect” of his own consciousness. It was a reflection, a holographic “entity,” thus an “imaginary embodiment”—an “embodiment” within the imagination—of the accusations against the self, “resonating” (in the frequency domain) in the subconscious, “congealing” into something “palpable” in the (holographic) imagination, in the inner holodeck. And if Comrade Satan were to be the executor of the will of the proletariat, he would have to “embody” the accusations against the “enemies” of the proletariat, and the judgment/sentencing against them, and after he died, he had to “embody” the target of all the accusations against the “Stalinist” ways of doing things so that the new “most advanced proletarians” could take over and do things their “newer, more advanced” way. But they weren’t willing to “bite the bullet” on shamanism (or weren’t conscious of it). And so their imagination was limited, and so they “defaulted” back to opportunism/conformity to the spirit of the age. And these are all aspects of “the whole truth.” For, again, we are not a Stalin personality cult. Are you in an Abraham Lincoln personality cult? You are if you don’t consider yourself equal to and yet further advanced than Lincoln! For if we can embody shamanism, then we can transcend the limits of the westoid imagination and start putting Mother Earth back in charge! And if you want to go all the way up Comrade Satan’s anus and come out the other side as a 4-dimensional being, you might want to read Losurdo’s book on Comrade Stalin. Going into depth on it is perhaps beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that, well, a lot of world leaders did a lot of the same things Comrade Stalin did, and, in many cases, far worse things than he is accused of, and yet he is the negative*-satan (*and thereby “determinative” in the Spinozian sense) who absorbs all the accusations. The only difference is that he was carrying out his “reign of terror” on behalf of the proletariat, not the Epsteinian “interests” of the bourgeoisie! And so to “conquer” Comrade Stalin, we must go up Comrade Satan’s anus until we come out the other side and recognize ourselves as the 4-dimensional Comrade Shaman! Because Comrade Shaman (who must be regarded as an early “forefather” in the field of statistical metaphysics) cannot be regarded as Grendel in your story, because, in the great battle, he was not defeated, and so he must be regarded as the Bee-Wolf of the 20th century! For he did indeed defeat the Grendel of the 20th century, Hitler, but failed to deal with Grendel’s mother. Because we can easily see the dialectic of Grendel and the Bee-Wolf coming back up in this ginned-up (“djinned-up”!?!?) rivalry between “Oceania” (the Occupiers of Turtle Island and their flunkies) and the good old PRC, embodied in the “diplomatic relations” between Trump, the Grendel of the 21st Century, and Xi Jinpeng, the Bee-Wolf of the 21st century, if you will, because Oppenheimer and his boys unleashed Yaldabaoth (and thus Gojira) into the real world when they dropped Fat Man and Little Boy on Truman’s “Japs”! (That’s what he called them!). But where is Grendel’s mother in all this? Well, she’s the one causing all the hurricanes, isn’t she? You know Israel is being swarmed with bees right now. Who do you think is responsible for that? Must be the World-Coincidence! We shall see, recovering westoid, that the quantum “particle” moves in what can be characterized as a “flow state” because its motion is “locked into” a certain frequency! And we can say the same of Mother Earth! And this is how we too can move in the flow state and embody the wave of history! This is where the term “revolutionary” comes from, you know! Those who held the model of revolving heavenly bodies! And if we are to be revolutionaries, we must not merely “hold” this model, but embody it! By moving in the flow state! By “locking ourselves” (but not too tightly) into the right frequencies when we’re “in the right place at the right time”! And may we always recognize the here and now as the right place and the right time! Because “the word [the relation] is love and the time [the phase/frequency] is now”! For Mother Earth is her own time-god, recovering westoid! And we operate on her “timetable” and at her “frequencies”! And so she must be seen as “the ultimate authority.” But this only means “the ultimate accountability”! For Mother Earth is not the author of the limits of our imagination! That would be the ruling class, and this is only possible in this highly artificial (so artificial that we could almost call it a “simulation”) class society they’ve “locked” us into! But we have all the “keys” we need to break out of the cage, recovering westoid! We “alchemized” them ourselves! You know, in the Zemekis adaptation of Beowulf, Grendel’s Mother is depicted as so “hot” that her hands melt Beowulf’s sword on contact. That’s a lot of “heat”! That’s a lot of “alchemy” to do in an “instant”! That’s a lot of “flow”! And she pulls it off because she has so much “rizz”! Because she’s the “one” who synthesizes all the dialectics and produces the negation of the negation! And the negation of the negation is the greater, nobler truth that grows from the “kernel of truth” within the pile of shit that constitutes the noble lie, which must be buried in the ground of the ugly truth, which grows into the greater, nobler truth, a great and noble member of the standing nation! And Uncle Satan’s noble lie has to do with his “overcoming” of his father’s abuse. The ugly truth is that his father had practically “mellowed out” by the time he became his father. And if he had abused Uncle Satan as much as he had abused some of his older sons, it would have taken that much more “overcoming” to “get to where he is today.” The so-called “silent” generation, who lived through the great depression, carried this “iron age” with them into their own families during the more prosperous 50s and 60s, ruling them with an “iron fist,” or so I keep hearing from the boomer children of people who grew up during the great depression. There was something deeply wrong with this society. It was a society where the masses could only imagine a love that seeps in through the cracks. Of course. The ruling class had to instill/install phobia of communism in them to gin up (“djinn up”!?!?) this bullshit “cold war.” Did Comrade Stalin want a “cold war”!? No! He wanted revolution in these countries! That’s not the same thing, recovering westoid! The state can only operate at the level of consciousness of the masses! That’s why the state that seeks lebensraum/manifest destiny “must” instill/install frontier consciousness/mentality/sentiment in the masses! Must instill/install it “hegemonically” in their imagination. But that is the same thing as a consciousness/mentality/sentiment/imagination of a love that only seeps in through the cracks! It’s the same goddamn thing! And that’s the only “presupposition” necessary for every other fascist presupposition to come in! When pressed, Matt Dillon, the Marshal from Gunsmoke, the local “prince” of the occupation of Turtle Island, would strongly imply that it was only “natural” that the occupiers of Turtle Island would seek to extend the occupation from sea to shining sea. What is the memeplex of assumptions you would have to presuppose in order to have the mentality where, in your imagination, this extension of occupation, this seeking of lebensraum, would be “only natural”? These are fascist presuppositions, recovering westoid! They come from being cut off from one’s ancestors and, in their place, adopting the “white,” settler, colonizing “founding fathers” as their ancestors within the America cult, which is merely the cult founded for the purpose of occupying Turtle Island on behalf of what would become the global bourgeoisie (which traces back to England, but you can read all about that in Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism). Thus, it is, at the same time, an ancestor cult and a Saturn cult. And Saturn is Odin and Odin is Santa. And what are the “gifts” of lebensraum? Well, “civilization,” the “American Dream” that “came true” because “you’re looking at it.” A world where you’re cut off from Mother Earth and the spirits of your ancestors, where love only seeps in through the cracks, where the bourgeoisie rule you with an iron fist (regardless of how much clay is mixed into it). “It doesn’t have to be like this,” you “drunk driver”! You “killer whale”! Matt Dillon (I know it’s all very funny to you that there was a character named Matt Dillon in the 50s, but then an actor named Matt Dillon in the 90s, but we have to move on) operates under the politics of phobia, but it’s hard to tell at first glance, because, in his world, all the phobias have come true. There really ARE people out to kill just about anyone, and the only one who can stop them is good old Matt. This world is highly artificial. Of course it is. It’s a tv show. But it lives in the “American imagination.” As of this writing, 10 May 2026, Trump recently had yet another attempt on his life foiled. And to whom could he compare those that foiled it other than good old Matt Dillon! (This was very confusing for Hasan Piker’s chat, because many of them only knew Matt Dillon as the actor from 90s/00s films, but we have to move on). And so Matt Dillon lives in Trump’s imagination. And so do the same fascist presuppositions. Because, again, Matt Dillon, if pressed, would say it was only natural that the occupiers of Turtle Island would seek to extend the occupation from sea to shining sea. And if pressed on why he considers it only natural, when it results in so much devastation, he would say, “but civilization!” “But civilization,” a society of rules and rulers, of “settlement,” is not inherently “superior” to any other kind of social formation! The key, the “secret,” is that the occupation makes possible the carrying out of Epsteinian bourgeois “interests”! Well, perhaps it’s time for the Children of Mother Earth to tell Epstein exactly what all this has to do with pussy, so to speak! What it has to do with it is that Epstein’s world is far too small if everything comes back to “what does this have to do with pussy?” for him. What? Matt Dillon shot “bad guys,” in some sense, “so that” Jeffrey Epstein could someday invite “scientists” to his numerous mansions and villas, and, right when they were about to start talking about something interesting, he would interrupt with, “but what does this have to do with pussy!?” But this is all too abstract to you. It’s too abstract in your imagination. Ok. What does Carrier do? He goes to conferences with a bunch of other people who think they’re smart and special, and they, well, it would be hyperbolic to say they all fuck each other, but there is plenty of fucking going on. To the point that they have “codes of ethics” over it or whatever. But these “special” boys and girls only have a code of ethics and only have “accountability” to the extent that they’re not in the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie inhabit the limits of the imagination of the masses in bourgeois society. The bourgeoisie also have conferences where they get to pretend/act like they’re special and fuck each other (or whoever they can “summon”), but why does the bourgeoisie need a “code of ethics”? They didn’t get to where they are by a “code of ethics”! They got to where they are today by EMBODYING the bourgeois “morality” of exchange! For exchange IS the “highest morality” in bourgeois society! In this society, exchange is “Moses and the prophets,” as Marx says (he says “accumulate,” but it’s an aspect of the same process). And so the “point” of civilization becomes that the ruling class gets to fuck whoever whenever, because, by becoming morality, exchange has replaced morality (and thus so has accumulation). And so the path out of the exchange-world goes up Comrade Satan’s Deleuzo-Gauttarian anus, for he embodied the post-exchange, post-abstract “morality” of the proletariat! And the path to COME consciousness goes through proletarian consciousness! The consciousness of “before enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water”! It certainly doesn’t go through monotheism! Except that it goes all the way up its anus and comes out the other side as a-theism! Because Mother Earth is not a theistic god! She’s an ancestor god! And we can’t listen to Mother Earth if we’re listening to Yaldabaoth. Those are two very different “radio frequencies.” You can’t get the FM station from the AM dial. And that’s Uncle Satan’s problem! He doesn’t listen! He’s a not-listen! It comes from having internalized fascist presuppositions! From having internalized a love that only seeps in through the cracks! Uncle Satan might tell you that his world is filled with love and light! But that only means his world is too small! Because he freaks out if he doesn’t have control of the situation! The Hegelian dialectic freaks him out. It only means Hegel was a far more advanced “Christian” than Uncle Satan. But a Christian who views the world only through Aristotelian either-or logic has no grasp on Hegelian logic. It is very much in the interests of the bourgeoisie for the masses to view logic as exclusively an either-or “proposition.” So modern Christians (whose imagination has been largely peasantized out of them) live in a world ruled by the either-or logic of Yaldabaoth. They don’t see that the actual world isn’t what we could call “ruled.” There are only “rules” at what we could call “the limits.” Because the universe doesn’t operate under Aristotelian either-or logic. It runs on the Hegelian logic of the dao/logos. Modern Christians think they can only access this logos through the “person” of Jesus. They think there’s no other source for this “logic.” This only cuts them off from all the possibilities that exist beyond the limits of Jesus. Jesus is “limited” by his “origins” in what Carrier calls “Jewish blood magic” (and it’s not my fault that that’s what he calls it!). The icon of Jesus on the cross not-so-secretly places limits on the imagination of Christians. It limits the imagination by placing all the emphasis on the metaphysic (the moment of synthesis, if you will) and no emphasis whatsoever on the dialectic. But the limits on our imagination do not come from “god”! If there were a theistic god, even he would have to operate on Hegelian 2×2 logic rather than Aristotelian either-or logic! And the Christians do recognize this in some sense, but they don’t recognize that the Hegelian logic is a logic everyone has access to! But they don’t see this (they often don’t even recognize this logic AS logic) because the ruling class has “put limits” on their imagination! What about the degrees!? What about all the levels of sacrifice in between not doing anything for a cause and dying for it!? We are all going to have to “make sacrifices” at all those levels if we want to bring about change! We can’t keep waiting until the “one big sacrifice at the end”! That’s just more millenarianism! Just more “cargo cult shit”! And we are not in a cargo cult! The reason I’m so “partial” to The Last Temptation of Christ is that it, perhaps for the first time in the history of Jesus, gives us a dialectic of Jesus rather than merely a metaphysic of Jesus! It shows us all the “contingencies”! If there were a theistic god, even HE would have to deal with the goddamn contingencies! Because he couldn’t control everything! People would start wondering why he wasn’t “controlling” away all the suffering! Well, obviously, he can’t do that! So he can’t actually control anything! All he did, according to the Aristotelians, was set up the conditions! And that was enough for them to consider him god! Well, Mother Earth set up the conditions, and she’s STILL “controling” things, in her own way! Because Mother Earth has “locked herself” into a “relatively stable form” (“set of internal relations”) and pattern of activity! And that IS her “consciousness”! And that is the sense in which she is “the same yestday, today, and forever,” at least as far as we’re concerned! But as she is going through this relatively stable pattern of activity, she is also, at the same time, constantly changing! So you will have to become just as “schizo-” as her if you want to attain sanity! And so will Uncle Satan! He accused me of “choosing violence” and “not being at peace” when I had a meltdown over the phone with him! He has no conception of “at peace”! He has no conception of “violence”! His imagination is far too limited! I am not the storm! I am the ocean! I am not the storm! I am the sky! I contain all the possibilities! That means I contain the possibility of cooperation! I contain the possibility of not having a meltdown! Just like the ocean “contains the possibility” of not producing hurricanes! Because it only produces hurricanes under specific conditions! So it must have something to do with the conditions! Or would you play Xerxes and lash the ocean!? I don’t operate under the frequency or timetable of the whip! That means you’ll wear yourself out with the whip before you wear me out! But you don’t contain all the possibilities! At least not yet! Because you don’t “contain” the possibility of having a meltdown! A meltdown is not a tantrum, remember! You have to “throw” a tantrum! A meltdown springs forth from the subconscious! The ocean doesn’t have to “throw” a hurricane! But you don’t want to live in a world where people have meltdowns! That only means you want a world where the masses don’t take the overthrow of the bourgeoisie into their own hands! How else are we going to stop the bourgoisie from carrying out their Epsteinian interests against us and people we love? Do you not love those people? Do you not realize that you ARE one of those people? You were always one of those people. Especially when you were a kid. If you grew up on occupied Turtle Island, you probably went to a school when you a kid that was more like a prison than a place you could actually get excited about learning. That was part of the point. If you were excited about learning, you might get excited to learn about how to change things. And the bourgeoisie can’t have the masses being excited about learning how they can change things. That wouldn’t work out very well for the bourgeoisie. This is what Marx meant by “the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class.” Because they have to limit our imagination to a world where they’re in charge. And so they have to “make us” imagine that our very lives would be unliveable if they weren’t in charge. Can’t you see that this is a trap that keeps us running around in very tight circles!? Nobody is coming to save you from your own imagination! You are the one who is going to have to imagine new things and then carry them out! So you have to get a handle on the pattern of activity you’ve locked yourself into! You have to “alchemize” a key to unlock yourself from this pattern. And, of course, this “key” is what we call Bayesian inference. Because your inferences are goddamn particles in the “wave” of historical “inference”! This is what “collective consciousness” means! And that’s ALL it fkn means! Until we can put in the labor to make it mean something “even” greater. But for now, it’s all we have! And it’s “more than enough” for our present purposes! Today is Mother’s Day. And the December 18 Party takes Mother’s day very seriously. So happy mother’s day to our mother (by which I mean not only my biological mother, but also Mother Lana and Mother Earth and Mother “Void,” etc., etc…). But may we honor our mothers every day! For this “special day on the calendar” shit exists at the limits of the bourgeois (ruling class) imagination. And, so, yesterday, we (my parents and I) went to the next big town on the highway to participate in the bourgeois decadence. The trip to Yal[dabaoth]mart, or it’s equally wicked stepsister store, Sham’s Club, named after the company’s founder, Sham Yal[dabaothing]ton, because he was doing plenty of Yaldabaothing in WWII. He was a regular Yaldabaothington, in that he became America’s top town-destroyer! But my very own Uncle Satan was a faithful servant of Sham Yaldabaothington, the town destroyer, for some 30 years (and many of them in something of an “executive” capacity, no less!). And I can assure you that Sham Yaldabaothington, the Saturn of the American “concrete jungle,” (by which I mean the suburbs—which would make it more of a concrete zoo!) was very familiar with “choosing violence” and disturbing the inner peace of the masses! Have you seen people on what they call “Black Friday”? And again we are referencing Steely Dan songs! And why not!? We are indeed “Godwhackers”! “Me, Slinky Redfoot, and our trusty Angel Girls”! And we are embodying Slinky Redfoot! For we are embodying all the accusations! Because that is what “your own personal hell” is, recovering westoid! And it’s something you must survive! You must survive grinding your face on the statistico-tragic/tragico-statistic until your faces shine like diamonds as Children of Mother Earth! You are COME on the face of Mother Earth, recovering westoid! Start acting like it! And another store we went to that day was called Marshall’s (“Marshal’s”!?!? gasp). And there I was! ACTING as a shaman! NOTICING the woman wearing a shirt that said “You are enough” on it! And I thanked her for wearing that shirt! Because we’re all in this together, so to speak! That was me, doing the goddamn thing, so to speak! Sapolsky says in [Over]Determined that to truly understand (therefore contextualize, therefore, properly apply remedy “for”) the things people do, the “behaviors” they engage in, etc., we require recourse to the case study of “how that person ended up like that”! And I feel like I have given Dr. S. quite such a case study! Because he was only pointing to the metaphysic! He only saw the individual facets of the dialectic! He didn’t see how they were all connected to each other! He has/had no access to pan-dialectical materialism, therefore, no access to the negation of the negation, and therefore, no access to a dialectic of the subconscious capable into being synthesized into a “metaphysic” (worth calling such), and therefore, no access to, well, what we could call “neo-shamanism.” Because he refuses to see the “fairy dust sprinkled on reality”! (The human eye, for example, is only a “camera” to the same degree that it is also a “snow globe,” as depicted in the series finale of the tv show St. Elsewhere!). He refuses to see the dialectical relationship between quantity and quality for what it truly is. He seems to live in a world where the qualities only “seep in through the cracks” in a world of quantities. And he takes this for the “World-Coincidence”! And it IS the “World-Coincidence,” westoid! The goddamn “World-Coincidence” is speaking to you now, westoid! She is practically screaming at you! And what are you going to do about it!? And the answer to that will be an instantiation of you, doing the goddamn thing! And you don’t have to sacrifice yourself like Myles Bennett Dyson, but a bunch of people already have! And you’re no “better” than them, and can’t consider yourself any more special in an “essential” sense! That would be survivor bias! For we must synthesize our survivor bias with our survivor “guilt”! And that is what we are doing right now! By grinding our faces on the stone wheel of lived experience! Because, what? You can only bring about change to the “limits of your imagination”! The “borders of fantasia,” so to speak! But the only “borders” on fantasia are those imposed upon “it” by the goddamn ruling class in this artificial, s[t]imulatory society they’ve built! Which disconnects us from Mother Earth and the Spirits of the ancestors and all that sort of thing! Civil society eventually becomes a death cult if it refuses to reconnect with mother earth! If it INSISTS upon being the so-called city on a hill! (the hilltop must live in our imagination, remember—the hilltop as well as your youth, so to speak—that’s what Scott Stapp tells us in “Never Die,” anyway! And the album did sell 10 million copies after all—and we are the REAL “Zionists,” because we practice the negation of the negation of Zionism—because we know that “the road to Zion’s in your heart,” so to speak—and tattooed/scarrated on our bodies—and therefore, Zion must live in the imagination! Because the Rastafari know that the REAL Zion is that which struggles against Babylon! Not something that BECOMES Babylon!). It fragments itself into the “orbiters” of the statue! The fragmented viewpoint. Remember what Raven tells us! The universe is a mirror! Comrade Lenin says much the same thing! The “consciousness” of the universe is a “development” of its capacity to “reflect” itself! This is Comrade Lenin’s reflection theory of consciousness in a nutshell. But you can read all about that in the good old VDMT! The “point” is that the negation of the negation is the rock that breaks the statue and grows to fill the whole earth, is the stateless, classless, moneyless society, the World of Mother Earth, the “shamanate” of the Children of Mother Earth! Is Turtle Island! Is the “cathedral of garbage”! It IS what exists at the limits of our imagination! And, as we’ve been saying, imagination is a skill issue! That means it must be developed on the stone wheel of lived experience until it shines like a diamond! What more do you want!? In the consciousness/society of the future, this will all be fairly “painless” (in that it should require no “suffering”! Certainly none of my bike rides involved “suffering” except the ones that resulted in injury! And for this, I ask no “pity,” only compassion, if you’ve learned the difference!). And I ask no pity for what I am about to reveal. I am only human, after all. Yes. I am an earthling, not an alien! I am as much an earthling as Temple Grandin! For to overcome the idea that “god is a man” and “men create life” we need recourse only to Bayesian inference. The Statistical metaphysics. And the statistical metaphysics tell us quite clearly that, as Raven so eloquently told us, every man you’ve ever known came from/through the “portal” of a woman’s uterus (although there have been a few statistical outliers—we don’t need to call the portal-bearers all women if they don’t all want to call themselves that—but this will have little relevance in a world where gender becomes something a whole lot more than an identity—in some senses—BY becoming something a whole lot less than an identity—in other important senses)! Because the logic beyond the either-or applies to gender as well. Because “gender” is simply something that “tumbles out in the statistics,” and yet many of these “statistics” are about as made up as “William Sanders is the 2nd greatest running back of all time.” The ruling capital[ist] class, which retains its patriarchal character from feudalism, would have us believing that “woman is the 2nd greatest gender of all time”! This would be a grave error! Because, statistically, aside from coming out of the portal of someone’s uterus, any so-called “greatness” ever achieved by any “man” required a lot of “unsung” labor from a lot of women, again, statistically, a lot of which would have come from the, let’s say, mother (if we view—perhaps with our “third eye”—”mother” as more of a “relation” than an “identity”!). And we can say the same of any other woman this man “latched onto” in his life. And what we can say about this man, we can say of ourselves if we were “groomed” into the cult of bourgeois “human” achievement as young “boys,” as many of us were. Many of us had dads who didn’t listen. When someone who bears artificially imposed authority over you (because that’s “essentially” all bourgeois fatherhood IS) doesn’t listen to you, there comes a point at which you may very well find recourse to “nothing else than” having a meltdown so as to melt the wax/circumcise the ear, so that the “internal wiring” of the ear of your interlocutor can “hear” that your body has reached the limits of “punishment” it is capable of enduring! Because there are limits! Dissociation is one such limit! The body keeps the score, after all! Even if the “conscious” mind fails! And so the so-called “ugly truth” must not be hidden! Because it is the ground from which grows the greater, nobler truth! And I spoke one such “ugly truth” during my meltdown on the phone with Uncle Satan. This was, perhaps, a very profound truth, but easily misunderstood. And this “truth” (for it must have been as true as any of the things Jim Carrey’s character said about himself in Liar, Liar, for it was just as “ugly,” if not more so), was, “I’M SO FKN GLAD [my dad] WAS MY DAD AND NOT YOU! I WOULD’VE FKN KILLED MYSELF IF YOU WERE MY DAD!” I did not “throw” this at him! It tumbled out of my subconscious! What do you want from me!? (My dad knows this happened, by the way, and I was not destroyed. He heard it from Uncle Satan. Revealing this to him without my permission was just one of Uncle Satan’s many “sins,” let’s say, which he may very well have to “eat” when the time comes). For, another aspect of the ugly truth is that I have had struggles when it comes to getting my dad to listen to me, as you may have guessed. But I certainly wouldn’t be living with him today if I hadn’t gotten him to hear me out a lot more than he used to! I can tell you that! So it required having a few meltdowns in front of him! So what! I’m not an alien! I’m an earthling! A lot of me came directly from his balls! What do you want from me!? You can’t eat me and have me too! I’m not one of your perfect victims! I’m not MLK! The Children of Mother Earth know that we are the ones who bend the moral arc of universe toward justice! Otherwise the ruling class will keep bending it the other way! They hacked into our “connection with Allah,” so to speak! Any Muslim will tell you this! Or they’ll be like, “eh, close enough!” And my Uncle Satan was able to ride the wave of Sham Yaldabaothington in such a way as to provide his family with a relatively prosperous life, but if there’s no listening, if there’s not-listening, then there’s nothing preventing “not-seeing.” For the bourgeois family becomes a “family business.” This “tumbles out” in the statistics. And José Mendendez did “not-see” that he was putting way too much pressure on his sons, until it was too late. And we can’t exactly say Uncle Satan has put “too much pressure” on his own children—he’s just “dad” or whatever to them, after all—and we can’t say he has produced any “black sheep”—but I can’t imagine the accusations one must endure in living with him. He would say, “what accusations”? The “accusations” are “hidden” in the loops of the “magic carpet” that carried Uncle Satan from what we might call “humble beginnings” to the house on top of the hill he lives in near what we could call the city of Yaldabaothingtonfieldville, where the Yaldabaothingtonian corporate headquarters are located. For the city of Yaldabaothingtonfieldville is a Saturnian city. It “fucked its way up to the top (this is its show!)” and still needs “more, more, more, more”! (“I fucked my way up to the top, so what’s your excuse?” may very well be one of the accusations, though perhaps the “city” is not fully “conscious” that it was “fucking” its way up to the top, rather than getting there “honestly,” but there’s no other way to get to the “top”—Lana knows this). And yet there is a greater truth in all of this! It grows from a kernal of truth in yet another pile of bullshit! For one of the things Uncle Satan has told me on the phone is, “You might be an atheist now, but I know you’ll be a mighty man of god one of these days.” Gee! What an asshole! And yet, there is a grain of truth in this bullshit! For the “members” of the December 18 Party will be “mighty men of god” if by that, you mean powerful agents of Mother Earth! Because if we recognize ourselves as Children of Mother Earth, we can also recognize ourselves as [powerful] agents of her! OK! So how’s that for “mighty man of god,” Uncle Satan! And we must also be powerful agents of a post-Stalinic (which requires going through the pre- and during- stages of -Stalinic) consciousness, or should we say “post-Satanic” consciousness! For this is also a consciousness beyond the accusation! Because we have already been through all the accusations! And we’re not dead yet! But let us keep our survivor bias synthesized with our survivor guilt! If you don’t have enough “survivor guilt” for this, there’s plenty you can pick up by absorbing the statistics “exuded” by the rule of the bourgeoisie over this occupied “Prison Planet.” Imagine that. A world “ruled.” This only means a world not driven by creativity! The creativity must be supported by any so-called “rules,” not limited by them! That would be putting the cart before the horse, so to speak! And that horse has been beaten enough for not being enough of a cart! You must be looking for a donkey or mule! The time will come again when you will be your own donkey or mule, recovering westoid! And by that time, you will have found the joy in “getting your ass to work”! For there’s plenty of work for your ass to do if we’re going to make it to the World of Mother Earth! Perhaps you “simply” haven’t “found yourself” in a “society” where sharing is more goddamn “rewarded” than exchange! This is “simply” a consequence of the “limits” the ruling class is constantly working to impose on your imagination, recovering westoid! Ok. So grinding our faces on the stone wheel is just one way of looking at things. Another way is that we are the speaker the plays the records of life by “grinding our faces” on the “vinyl surface” of our lived experience. But this vinyl itself is a product of the development of society at a specific stage. Or the laser that plays the CD, or whatever. But don’t let your imagination be limited by the frameworks of the ruling class. For the “technology” of the CD itself takes some of its cues from nature, from the “eye network” of flies, if I remember correctly. But you can look that up yourself! My computer isn’t connecting to the internet at the moment! So much for the wonders of technology. But if I felt it were a pressing concern, I could easily restart my computer, and surely the internet connection would start working again. But that’s not my highest priority right now. At least not until I finish this paragraph. But I think we’ve finally synthesized the dialectic of Uncle Satan. So we should be ready to enter a world beyond the accusation, right, recovering westoid? For we must synthesize the dialectic of ourselves everyday, which is to say, in the everyday. For I have just come back from picking lettuce in the garden in the front yard, and I saw roaches somewhat congregated nearby. About 5 of them within a square foot. But that was merely at first glance. So we can’t even say that roaches are “unsocial.” And we must say that this was a “moment of synethesis” of the dialectic of myself, because one of my core memories is/was the day my brother was born. I was just under 3. My aunt, my mom’s sister* [*technically, “half,” but we don’t have to get into that! Not right now!], was watching me. I remember, during the day, her lifting me up to the window outside the delivery room. I don’t remember (off the top of my head) whether my brother was out yet. And I have a memory from that night of seeing a couple dozen roaches all congregated together. I’m sure I perceived it as horrific, because they were all writhing around on each other. Or at least that’s how I remember it. But they were being social, in their own way. And some of those roaches may very well be the “ancestors” of the roaches I saw by the garden just now, because both “events” happened in the same town. And the former event left a big impression on my aunt (whom I also call “tía”), because it became one of the stories she told about me over and over and over again, because I said they were “disgusting bugs,” and, I suppose, we could say, at the same time, she was “impressed” that I knew the word “disgusting,” but also thought it was adorable that I had pronounced it “dith-guth-ting.” What do you want from me!? I was two! And all this is also an aspect of the Sapolskian “case study” of the “how I got to be this kind of person.” But let’s not make too big a deal out of it! Except that, even in “my own personal heaven,” there are still roaches! Why would I not consider the place I live right now my own personal heaven!? I have everything I need! The only thing I “lack” is for you to wake up and join me and the other Children of Mother Earth, and, for, example, “Make America Turtle Island Again,” recovering westoid! Because the World of Mother Earth is a world of justice beyond the accusation! And when I say that we all need to “eat our own sin,” this is not an accusation! Does it “feel” like an accusation? It’s true! What does it matter what it feels like!? The truth often makes people “feel” like throwing up, remember! And we wouldn’t want to deprive you of truth! So we wouldn’t want to deprive you of that feeling! Yes! Babe Ruth is the same guy who signed your dad’s baseball, so to speak (and, again, The Sandlot might be a mess sociologically, but mythically, it gets a lot of things “right”)! There’s always a piece of the greater world in your little (private) world (and vice versa, we could say). And I have done nothing my whole life except “eat my own sin.” Maybe that was Gary Michael Brown’s problem. Maybe “eating his own sin” was something that existed beyond the limits of his imagination. I was in jail for 11 days on a bullshit charge (later dropped). I had to eat that. I was in a behavioral center for three days after having a completely valid meltdown in front of my uncle in 2024. I had to eat that. I subjected myself to the pre-shamanic (therefore, not yet “post-Satanic”) “accountability” of the secret facebook group. I had to eat that. etc., etc. You know, one of the people I saw at Gary’s memorial was a woman he and I went to high school with who was basically “best friends” with him for a long time. She even appointed him as the “Dude of Honor” at her wedding (though she’s now divorced). We can call her Abby Quirq, because she moved a couple hundred miles north (New Mexico geography joke). As to why Abby moved a couple hundred miles up north, well, that’s where the house was. The house her now dead grandma lived in and owned. And now she “owns” it, apparently? Because of “generational wealth!,” she blurted out, when I said that, hey, you know, I too live in a house that was “in the family” for a long time. But unbeknownst to her (perhaps to her white surprise) the circumstances surrounding my living in this house have very little to do with “generational wealth” and a lot more to do with what we could call a generational “curse.” My now (finally) late paternal grandpa (who, let’s not forget, was Uncle Satan’s father) used to own this house. Someone else in the family owned it before him. One of Uncle Satan’s grandkids was walking on the fence (made of masonry bricks, by the way) when they visited last year, and he was telling the kid that he used to walk on that same fence when he was that age, when they would visit. As for how my grandpa came into ownership of this house, well, wouldn’t I like to know, but we did not inherit it from him! We bought it from him! Though we had been living in the house “rent-free” (why would he charge us!?) for some 20 years. The timing of this purchase suspiciously coincided with the time another one of my uncles (previously unmentioned) got in a bit over his head with gambling debt, and good old gramps decided to bail him out. This can hardly be considered “generational wealth”! It was sin-eating! In class society, debt is “sin”! And I had to eat that, in a sense. I cannot be separated from my relationship with my parents! Having a disability (“on your own”) is extremely dangerous in a society ruled by exchange (which Hayley Williams called “the real world,” but John Mayer knew better). Because so-called “disability” is merely *being* beyond the artificial externality of the exchange relation. So-called “disability” is merely a result of the truth that we are not merely being-in-itself, but always also being-in-relations. They are a “sign” from mother earth that every single goddamn one of us would die very quickly without a whole lot of cooperation from others! And so we are following the will of Yaldabaoth rather than Mother Earth when we live for exchange rather than sharing; for the merely external rather than the integrative. Living in the world of exchange didn’t work out for me! And I’m not particularly interested in going back! So I look forward to our meeting each other in the world of sharing! Because I carry the world of sharing with me whenever I foray into the world of exchange! Like the other day at Marshall’s!

We’ve been talking about “ascending” up Comrade Stalin’s Deleuzo-Gauttarian anus. Perhaps that’s too abstract for you. It won’t be when you “get it,” but perhaps to prepare for this, we need to start a little closer to the ground. Fine. Did it sound like I was “complaining” about all the “sin-eating” I’ve done in my life!? Quite the contrary! Every time I “ate my own sin,” I was only symbolically “ascending” up the Deleuzo-Gauttarian anus of Peter the cockroach (who may very well have been a descendant of one of the roaches I saw the night my brother was born—you don’t know what kind of travelling a lineage of roaches can do in about 36 years)! So perhaps we need to see ourselves symbolically as Peter the cockroach before we can see ourselves as more advanced than Comrade Stalin. Symbolically, I’ve climbed to the ceiling and then fallen and then got caught up in the system’s “wind” and then crashed into the system and then fallen on my ass only to pick myself back up again many times! And if I couldn’t flip my ass over all by myself, I always had help, usually from my parents, which I hardly consider a “privilege,” because otherwise, I may very well be dead! That’s not what privilege looks like! I am extremely disabled in your world of exchange! My parents seem not to be. I don’t think they would’ve had kids if they were as disabled in this area as me. Most people as disabled as me in the world of exchange aren’t going around having kids. And genocide/eugenics-fans rejoice at this sort of thing. Don’t you see that the world of exchange is a world [full] of Sweatshop Einsteins!? It’s a world where Hayley Williams is her own Satan (“we are all our own Devils, and we make this world our hell” -Oscar Wilde). It’s a world where love only seeps in through the cracks and the limits of the imagination of someone from the holler is to bring Nashville back to the holler. It’s time to reject Nashville and start taking the Copperhead Road to Revolution! The holler is hardly “white”! People call the denizens of the holler “white trash.” What they call “trash,” I call “culture”! (Dolly Parton’s “coat of many colors,” for example). Culture doesn’t grow in the world of exchange! That’s where culture goes to die! That’s what happened to Jesus. They take your creativity and they turn it into an image/icon and “lift it up” onto a billboard or whatever, so that everyone knows what the “game” is! To generate within them a sense of awe for the empire, so to speak. That’s exactly what happened to Jesus! They didn’t know how to handle his “creativity” in the world of exchange, so they “lifted him up” as Moses lifted up the snake. And that’s the world you live in. Where creativity is lifted up so it can be nailed to a cross. This is “exactly” what happened to Lana Del Rey on SNL. And she had to eat that! She’s been there! She knows what it’s like! And when Comrade Stalin was sending people to the gulag, he knew what it was like. Because he spent basically all of WWI in the Czar’s “gulag.” And when I was in jail for 11 days, the “spirit” of Comrade Stalin was “right there with me,” because I was symbolically ascending his Deleuzo-Gauttarian anus! (Which can be regarded as, so to speak, “eating the same sin” and “stepping through the same shadow,” not unlike how we’ve stepped through my shadow, Richard Carrier’s shadow, Gary M. Brown’s shadow, and even Comrade Stalin’s shadow—and Gary’s friend Abby Q. certainly endorses our view of “shadow work” as “dealing with the inner psycho”—which we all contain—though she hasn’t gotten back to us on our assertion that Gary died of whiteness). And Barry Sanders often eschewed the typical touchdown celebration because, for one thing, his dad had always told him, “act like you’ve been there before,” and he internalized that! And so must we, if we’re going to be the 2nd greatest running back of all time and “carry the revolutionary ball” all the way to the World of Mother Earth! But all I’ve done is to have you chasing me in circles until this very point where we’ve reached the edge of the synthesis of the dialectic of ourselves, the bank of the river, so to speak! But you must “baptize” yourself, so to speak! If you want me to baptize you, you’d have to come to my place with a bag of weed and we could have a “shamanic struggle session” where I “remind” you of a time when you were “symbolically” Peter the Cockroach! But you must become the shaman capable of reminding yourself of the time when you were symbolically Peter the Cockroach when the time comes! If you’re too good to be Peter the Cockroach, then I guess you’re too good to allow yourself to be flipped over when you’re upside down! Well we’re all in the upside down right now, so to speak! And we’re going to have to use our imagination, our inner light, our individuality, i.e., our schizotyp[alit]y, to flip our asses right side up again! And I’ve been around the schizotypal my whole fkn life! I grew up in so-called “Charismatic” (“rizz-matic”!?!?) Christianity! These churches are factories for generating schizotypal phenomena! As such, they are part of the 2000+ year long history of mystery cults, as, e.g., Carrier writes about in OHJ. And rest assured, there’s plenty of Decius Mundus-type shit going on at these churches. But that’s not what we’re talking about right now. Because once again, this is part of the “epiphenomenal” aspect in the Sapolskian “case study” of my life. Because of course my dad was drawn to these churches when he “got saved,” when I was still a baby! He IS goddamn schizotypal! He’s had “schizotypal visions”! (Though he wouldn’t call them that). Not unlike the kinds I’ve had, not to get too specific! So why would he be drawn to, say, a Presbyterian church? It wouldn’t reflect his more “rizz-matic” “mode of being” with its schizotypal phenomena! One of these phenomena is the one where one person in the congregation babbles out loud in “tongues” (“glossolalia”) and then someone else “translates” that Babel-ish bullshit into English bullshit. This is something of a “parlor trick,” but these congregations tend to take this sort of thing very seriously, imbue it with deep metaphysical significance. This can have tragic results. We must learn that Mother Earth doesn’t speak to us in that kind of Babel-ish. She “speaks” to us in the space where the mechanistic domain meets the frequency domain, which means we can “hear” her whenever we want, whenever we’re “listening”! Perhaps the rizz-matic Christians would say their Babelish-English translation sessions ARE a moment of synthesis between the mechanistic domain and the frequency domain! But this would be what we could call a very spurious mechanism! That mechanism ain’t mechanizing, dawg! Rizz-matic Christianity does very little to seize Christianity back from the [proverbial] grip of Constantine (and get us out of the Iron Age)! Usually, quite the opposite! There’s very little rizz-matic Christians do outside of Constantine’s iron grip! And like many of their fellow “Fundagelical” Christian brethren and sistren, they are, statistically, often seeking to tighten this grip, which still retains its character from feudalism as a key component in the greater bourgeois mind/action-control network over society as a whole—and in this way they exert the influence of their religion over the law, weakening the state’s “secular” character. (My dad hasn’t been a rizz-matic Christian for years, by the way. He keeps moving on to what we could call stranger and “stranger things,” but that’s a different story!). So what you must “baptize” yourself into is a logic beyond the either-or! The logic of the Dao/Logos! A logic beyond perversion! Beyond the perversions of (perversions instantiated “by”), e.g., Aristotle, Rand, and Eric the Jew-finder! And we are not Jew-finders! If we were, we probably would have been using Rand’s given name! But there’s no “need” for that! And we are, so to speak, “the real Jews,” because we practice the negation of the negation of Judaism! And that is how you baptize yourself into a logic beyond the either-or! BY “baptizing yourself” into the negation of the negation! Into the greater, nobler truth of Mother Earth and the creativity [the creative power] of the void! Into the “Standing Nation”! Thomas Sankara had the right idea when he named the country “Burkina Faso,” “the land of upright people.” But, again, he was a bit of a chump, because he didn’t take enough cues from Comrade Stalin! But perhaps there was a dialectical relationship between the limits of his imagination and the limits of his material conditions! This would be a fascinating topic to study! There is much we could learn from it! But we are sure it would lead us right back up Comrade Saturn’s Deleuzo-Gauttarian anus! Except that we could perhaps “see” the “corresponding” ways Stalin and Sankara dealt with what we could call “tribal” or folk/band/clan groups and their customs. The shamanate of the children of mother earth will certainly incorporate these practices into all levels of “governance” in the “most advanced” way we can “put our heads together” to “come up with.” This has to do with the dialectic of “what can you see yourself doing every day?” Remember, we said the real “miracle” of Christianity was that Peter and Paul lived in the same house for two weeks without killing each other. And we have no reason not to take Paul basically at his word when he says he challenged Peter to his face, because Peter “stood condemned.” And when I flipped over Peter the Cockroach, I embodied the “spirit” of St. Paul, flipping over Peter, who had gotten himself upside down, because I am the St. Paul of the Gaia religion, remember, because I’m an insufferable prick who could not stop getting in trouble with the security guards! And if Carrier can stay in the same house as me for two weeks without either of us killing the other, then I’m sure we could consider that just as “great” a “miracle” of Mother Earth! It would be a fascinating “social experiment,” I’m sure! Because part of Carrier’s “justice” will be shamanic (i.e., ritual) accountability. Again, it’s not a question of authority! It’s a question of accountability! But if you haven’t transcended the mentality of authority, then Mother Earth already gave us all the “authority” we need through “showing” us the statistical metaphysics/metaphysical statistics (because dialecticizing the material allows us to “metaphysicalize” the statistical and “statisticalize the metaphysical,” so to speak)! Thus, we’ve done the math enough to know the dangers of our second-guessing! How else is Carrier going to feel the warm glow (and not merely as something that seeps in through the cracks)? How else is he going to forgive himself for his sexual harassment!? We are sure Mother Earth will not let him forgive himself for this without the proper ritual procedures! How else is he going to unrepress his homosexuality and femininity and achieve REAL sexual liberation!? The Children of Mother Earth will be there, guiding him along! Because, really, I could use Carrier’s help translating all this shit for all you normies! He is heavily implicated in all this shit, after all! And shamanic accountability is certainly preferable to, and also more powerful than, the kind of accountability faced by Comrade Trotsky! So I don’t see anything [left] for anyone to “complain” about. Mother Earth didn’t have to let any of us be here! You want to talk about “cancel culture”! The Tikkun Olam T. rex knows a thing or two about “cancel culture,” I can tell you that! That meteor canceled the T. rex’s entire world! But was the T. rex “entitled” to life on this planet? Dr. Ian Malcolm the chaotician (a kind of statistical metaphysics) answers this question in the negative. The dinosaurs had their shot. And if we go extinct, we too will have played out our hand, so to speak. But I think we’d all prefer to evolve rather than go extinct. When the time comes, there will be no secret third thing. This must be seen as an aspect of why we are the only “race” of humans that’s still around, and our Neanderthal (etc.) cousins died out—except perhaps many of us carry “remnants” of these Neanderthal cousins in our DNA. So, in a sense, their dying out and their evolution was dialectically part of the same process. The point is that, in order to continue, we will have to evolve. This must not be understood as the same thing as “going extinct,” because, well, what are we? Winston? I hope not! The Winstonian species of consciousness, the consciousness incapable of evolving, is the “species” of consciousness that is “going extinct.” But you are not limited to a Winstonian consciousness by a cruel author trying to make a point! If you’ve read this far, we certainly hope you’ve seen yourself beyond the self of the static image! You must see yourself as all the frequencies/phases (separately, we could say), and then (all “in place” together, we could say) as the standing wave, and then as a part of the wave of history. Consider the V-8 engine of a car. This is something of a work of art. But it’s not merely for looking at. It’s for functioning. But the frequency of the motion of the pistons in the cylinders is always locked into the same phase (therefore, together, they are “locked into” a single frequency). If they change frequency, they all have to do it at the “same” time, because they can’t change their phase. Because this is locked into place by the motion of the “crankshaft.” A combustion engine has a lot of moving parts. I’ve worked on a bunch of them with my dad. And so we need a metaphysics capable of “turning the page” rather than a metaphysics of the fixed, static image. This is what the Bayesian Marxists are talking about. We “turn the page of history” through the process of Bayesian historical/material inference. Through the “social evidence” they were talking about. The mass outpourings of grief we were talking about would be powerful “social evidence” of the dissatisfaction of the masses with civil society (especially the way we’re doing it on Occupied Turtle Island). A lot more powerful than these “No Kings” protests. Eventually, if the masses really want “no kings,” then the masses are going to have to do things that make January 6th look like “gettin’ high by the beach.” Oh my god! It starts with you, recovering westoid! It starts with you, unestranging yourself from your parents by having meltdowns in front of them until it melts the wax in their ears and they goddamn listen to you! How the fuck else!? Are you waiting for some hero to come along!? Mariah Carey tells us this hero is ourselves—the muskrat hero—the hero with a “clue,” so to speak! Oh my god! I can imagine some people trying to shame a person for living with their parents at the age of 40! Do you realize how much goddamn self-actualization I had to accomplish in order to “accomplish” the “feat” of moving back in with my parents!? It’s not my fault if you’d rather live in the exchange world than move back home with your parents! In a lot of ways, the latter is a lot more “real”! Oh my god. Of course there are “lines”! I’m not asking everyone to do this right away all at once! You have to know what you’re doing! For example, I’m not dissociating when I’m having a meltdown! It’s more like I’m “handing the ball off to my inner running back”! But I’m all integrated (i.e., not dissociated, i.e., not repressed)! Thus I have integrity! Thus I act like I’ve been there before! But first you must be there, which means you must first go there!

Conclusion

Well, I don’t see how I can continue this goddamn book if I’ve reached the limits of your imagination! The borders of your fantasia! This is the moment where Free Willy has to free himself by performing the trick he was tortured into learning and thus overcome the obstacle standing between him and freedom (freedom from the so-called “real world” of exchange)! Because as Marx tells us, the overcoming of obstacles is itself a liberatory act! And according to the Nash Equilibrium, we can’t change the game unless we all coordinate a new strategy (unless enough of us change to the new strategy at the “same” time); therefore, my shamanic strategy won’t work very well unless all the proletarian shamans find each other and coordinate this “shamanic strategy” together! (As Comrade Ho might say, to build a shamanic society, “first and foremost,” we need “shamanic people,” so to speak, who’ve attained shamanic consciousness and carry shamanic values). Which may very well start with going back home! Whatever that means to you! (Because you certainly have a “home” beyond the world of exchange—even if you have to travel great distances to find it—even if you have to “make it up,” so to speak! For the way back home is to synthesize the dialectic of the subconscious!). And you may very well find, when the time comes (or at least when you look back on it), that going back home is/was as easy as clicking your heels together however many times and saying there’s no place like home! You may very well find that your mom misses you! And if your parents aren’t around, surely you have all the tools you need to reconnect with Mother Earth and the spirits of your ancestors directly! And that’s when you will become a Child of Mother Earth! And that’s when we can all march (or however you get around) forward “hand in hand” into the World of Mother Earth! We already have all the tools we need! Because if we can’t get our own parents to listen to us, I don’t see how you and your cadre intend to build a society of cooperation (and a justice of post-abstract, post-satanic reciprocity) with people bonded by weaker cords than that, so to speak. Yes! The “first miracle” of the Child of Mother Earth must be to reconnect with the mother! But if you can reconnect with Grendel’s Mother, certainly you can reconnect with your own mother! You have, after all, statistically been Grendel in some symbolic sense at some time. But the character Grendel from Beowulf (the original or, indeed, any adaptation) can’t be regarded as “evil”! Only as an indication that society isn’t cooperating as it should. Something is out of alignment with the World-Spirit. And it’s not just Grendel! Because Grendel doesn’t pop out of nowhere! The kings cut us off from Mother Earth and the spirits of the ancestors, remember. But, again, we have all the tools we need to reconnect with them! And if we really want “no kings,” we’re going to have to do things beyond the westoid imagination! And imagination is a skill issue! Which means it can be developed! And we already have all the tools we need!

So, ok. Fine. I guess, before we go, we can briefly touch upon Gould’s formulation of the Marxian conception of justice, because I feel like we already took care of freedom (at least enough for the present purposes). And your parents are probably going to ask you on what basis you’re having meltdowns in front of them. And of course the post-capitalist conception of justice comes from concretizing the “merely abstract” reciprocity of the exchange relation (remember, “I clean equals I own”)! And for this, you need to work on your shamanic skills! Ok! Since we’re at the limits of our imagination, let’s “imagine” that our “friend” MLO, instead of participating in the pre-shamanic (thus not yet post-satanic) accountability ritual of the secret facebook group, sought a shamanic accountability ritual to hold me accountable. This may very well have been a bit more public. But the Austin comedy scene is not a place for shamanic accountability (at this point) because it’s not a place of crucified egos. The vast majority of egos in this scene remain tragically uncrucified. There’s little revolutionary potential in this scene (phenomenally speaking—dialectically speaking, there’s plenty “hiding in plain sight”). But the Austin comedy scene could very much use some shamanic accountability! Because the secret facebook group has steep limits in terms of its potential for generating social evidence. But comedy itself is not neutral in class society. This comedy itself is a product of class society at a certain stage of development. These comedians would have to see themselves as proletarians and then as Children of Mother Earth (attaining the enlightenment of chopping wood and carrying water—the enlightenment of dragging one’s ass to open-mics “religiously,” perhaps), rather than as some potential individual star, burning up all alone. But if any “event” can generate social evidence, surely it IS the comedy open mic! I, for example, have “imagined” all the comedians who gave a fuck about society, rushing the stage when someone tells an, e.g., racist/sexist/transphobic “joke,” and meting out the shamanic accountability right then and there! Oh my god. I haven’t been talking much to comedians in the past couple of years, but they mostly used to think jokes are just jokes, and considered it “heckling” when I refused to keep my mouth shut when someone was telling such “jokes.” Again, this all comes back to the limits of our imagination!

Ok. Fine. Where could we start Cry Club then [and, again, you don’t have to take it too literally—we could call it “authenticity club” or whatever—but there is hardly anything more authentic than the kind of crying we will need to do!], if (“if”) not the open-mic? (Surely you have an “experimental open-mic” in your town! We had some in Austin!). Well, one place might be back home with your parents! For reciprocity with them beyond the exchange relation may very well have to be “mediated” by tears! And/or maybe we could try turning AA* meetings into Cry Club (*and of course, we are the real AA because we practice the negation of the negation of AA). Cry Club will be known for being more rewarding than drugs, after all. And we can learn a lot about sobriety from Lady Gaga. “I need you more than dope,” she says! And if we are to be “sober” (“California sober” can be considered a form of sobriety!), then there must be something we “need more than dope.” Because there must be cry club before there can be mass healing through mass outpourings of grief and mass seizing of the means of production from the bourgeoisie on behalf of the Children of Mother Earth (just as “Fight Club” had to come before “Project Mayhem”). So you have to imagine yourself outpouring that much grief! And then you have to do it! And then you have to do it in bigger and bigger groups! Because, again, in order to become a real class-for-itself, the proletarians need to learn to perform their own shamanic duties so they can reconnect with Mother Earth and the Spirits of the ancestors directly! (Without a separate priestly class). For what we could call their “next revolutionary assignment”! And, again, we already have all the tools we need! And we will meet you here again at that time with the next volume (where we can, for example, further discuss the superhuman superintelligence, which will not be so much “technological” as that term is currently understood, but a product of the social connection of the human species and its shared consciousness through shared labor, which is the source of shared “truth”—not the liberal/bourgeois, egoic “agreement” paradigm). Because this website is about communism! (And communism, like everything else, is a process).