Key Points:
- History renews itself when opaque, deceitful, self-absorbed, hypnotic, unsustainable power structures control a country’s central narrative (i.e., overreaching elites not subject to the consequences of their ideologies)
- The future of hyper-partisanship and hyper-polarization: psy-ops and mass manipulation splinter the population to win asymmetrical 21st century battles (a.k.a., fourth and fifth generation warfare)
- A mental illness pandemic followed the viral pandemic as exponentially-accelerated digital contact reinforced how, elementally, nothing is actually equal, fair or free
- Withdrawing power from the imperious, inept, nonsensical and destructive parts of the community used to be a thing
- Prescribed “broadcast burn” at the edge of a forest fire: bringing the temperature down via practical hierarchies and substance beyond the drive for self-preservation (e.g., equipoise and knowing who your real friends are)
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[ all images ©BEEPLE unless stated otherwise ]
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The great philosophers and statesmen often discussed concepts around self-poise in an age of rage and confusion. This might be a good time to revisit their meditations for our modern applications. We perceive how individuals who do a great deal of critical, apolitical thinking are not suited to blind allegiance toward any person or party. They are decisive and adroit in self-tuning, and won’t cower or rearrange their lives around ideological polarity. They build necessary boundaries against such bonds, not out of fear but assertiveness. A power-disconnect from the codependent dance between oppressive governments and the chaos of the commons. They found that there is a way of living authentically, constructively, against the false self.
In ancient Rome, the cognoscenti thought their way through “the party” and out the other side too swiftly to be inculcated or captured by groupthink. With their train of thought on another rail, they leveraged stoicism to stave off the regime’s cynical, gas-lighting, predatory form of political mind control and moral lecturing—the kind of mass psychosis that fuels totalitarian systems, cold wars, civil wars and all sorts of other classically Darwinian (but socially regressive) activities. A huge experiment in functional transcendence, basically. Their process combined know-how, raw data, the wisdom of experience, and the spirit into a cohesive sanctuary that repels opponents or any viewpoint that might be force-fed as mandatory.
Nothing is actually equal, fair or free. The dream of equality is a will-o’-the-wisp—retreating ever farther as it is followed into the marsh of hypothesis. Those who are not arrested or placated by convenient delusions already know this from the core ruling faculty that governs our awareness and reaction to whatever’s unfolding around us. When the conversation gets drowned out by unskilled attention seekers, we are being coerced to tacitly accept dubious political premises that warrant radical plans amid low accountability. There’s almost no way to win mutually in this situation. For example, by disparaging coronavirus lock-downs on the grounds that 99.8% of people infected with the virus survive, it inadvertently grants that a lower rate of survival would merit the unprecedented upheaval of our political system. There are unqualified “leaders” who crave such step-wise regression with magical thinking. This, in turn, grants automatic consent to authoritarian, dictatorial types who, corrupted by power and/or money, abetted by technology, want to run your life and limit your sovereignty. They will do it through myriad “executive orders” and do not care what you voted for in the first place.
The scale of their betrayal is awe-inspiring. Our maladaptive elite power factions, when we see them now, living beyond restraint, it’s not loyalty these people want—they demand dependency, in a world without checks and balances, driven by those who manipulate a temporary illusion of checks and balances. It gets non-stop coverage on cable and internet media because its spin cycle wants things, it sells failures as “wins” and wants to ensure the citizenry also sells out, and it wants to live rent-free in some hive-mind with zero challenge. Secretive, deceptive, and in terms of organizations there needs to be individual diversity, checks and balances.
Otherwise, how would you even know if you were under mind control?
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Real, or Hologram?
Even with maximum clarity from the individual, there’s a void of mastery when you’re drowning in the sea of conditioned responses, trapped in the Monkey Maze, the Skinner Box, the Crab Bucket—whatever repugnant analogy works best in rebuffing maladaptive conditioning while pushing toward the introduction of order into chaos. Most people want to extract a lesson, and ascend to the higher ground of healthy consciousness. Here’s an analogy in miniature: When you’re stuck in traffic, complaining about traffic, it’s driving you mad… and then it’s easy to forget that you are traffic! That’s the blasé nature of routine selfishness and hypocrisy. The same disorderly “mental sub-channels” are deftly, subtly exploited via mass media effects, organized government propaganda, and other arms of disinformation. Their programmed messaging will insist you could not level-out the “traffic trauma” alone because it was a cherished yet repressed token of some other disconnected grief or anxiety you were having. They’ll say you grieve, they know why you grieve, and they have a tempting solution you never envisioned. It’s a conditioned loop that doesn’t solve anything for the individual. Sharing road rage is the off-kilter distraction.
In an inverted, attention-seeking, socially-mediated society the weak-minded become stronger when they learn that complaining about meaningless crap is rewarded by attention. The takeover of a willing mind begins with frustration. Truth is, most people you’ve met don’t even want to know your last name. It might feel like root canal at first, but get over yourself to preserve yourself from unwanted outside influence. It’s essential to remain grounded to a deeper cause beyond the complaints, or else others may begin to mind your business. When you become the embodiment of a series of complaints without solutions, your mind becomes a fertile environment for detachment and groupthink, which leads to the “selling of false hope.” This minding of other people’s business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and cultural/racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor’s shoulder or fly at his throat. To the frustrated, a mass movement offers substitutes either for the whole self or for the elements which make life bearable and which they cannot evoke out of their individual resources.
In parts of Europe there exists an unspoken, utilitarian rule akin to “no route talk,” a noble and sublime courtesy—because no one actually cares if you were stuck in traffic, or how you got to the party; they want to hear “smooth sailing” or some other contribution to the vibe, they certainly don’t care enough to hear you complain and get wound-up, and you’re only going to recreate the stress by rehashing. Now you might have to think about how everyone in the room interpreted the story. This creates obsession, which leads to latency in conviction and action. None of it has a purpose. Resisting the impulse is but one small step in joining the drive toward self-poise in the indoctrination age of mediated rage.
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Cratering sensibilities, uncorrected, have a strange analog effect similar to what’s portrayed in the film Blade Runner 2049, where citizens of the future are assimilated by a Borg-like power structure and take no precautions to stop themselves from caring whether the life unfolding around them was real or a hologram. All they wanted was the dopamine hit, imbued by nostalgia, and the base-level “autopilot” comfort of living in a fancy hamster cage. And that is the contemptible enemy—anything that dismantles the human connection and stifles the upper echelon of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
There is a destabilizing force throughout history, in times of scarcity and abundance, which we tend to overlook. Humanity is perpetually bombarded by the binary magic of misunderstanding and manipulation mixing itself over the basic function of survival… or, as François Garagnon observed: “Between what I think I want to say, what I believe I’m saying, what I say, what you want to hear, what you believe you understand, and what you understood, there are at least nine possibilities for misunderstanding.” Or as the Beastie Boys summed up in free verse: “Listen all y’all, it’s sabotage.”
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[ [ [ CHAOS BLOX ©DEM ] ] ]
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Image junkies exploit the gaps in their attempt to run the narrative, and they rule through deception. At the root, they serve to reinforce the idea that we are succumbing to moral predation and a new form of euphemism-laced anarcho-fascism (enabled and magnified by the internet). It has become fashionable and high-key Orwellian to misuse the label “fascist” and many other words that once carried set meanings according to the dictionary. These people simply hijack words to sow confusion and obtain compliance, insofar as it is useful to trick the unaware with euphemisms and doublespeak. I am now guilty of wrongthink for pointing out this blatant abuse of the language. The image junkies obliterate all sorts of words into cognitive dissonance traps that engender a herd mentality among the uninitiated.
We need to live in a world where the original meanings of words matter. It’s not a “vaccine” if you still caught the virus twice and passed it on to others, and we all know it; at best it’s a “treatment.” The ultimate result was that the “vaxxed + boosted” pumped up Pfizer’s profits four times in a row.
“Safety” now means “We’ll be hijacking your freedom for a little imaginary parcel of safety… stay scared.” Similar sentiments have surfaced throughout human history and in unexpected places. Susan Sontag’s 1977 essay “On Photography” summed it up in a way that rings truer now, in a 21st century technocracy, than ever before: “Industrial societies turn their citizens into image junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”
When you look at what disinformation, propaganda and social media hype have wrought, it’s the breakdown of norms, the breakdown of family, the hollowing-out of individualism, and the spread of disorder that results from a pretentious narrative.
Never let image junkies run the show.
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[ [ RUN ] ]
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Despite the Technology, We are Getting Provably Dumber
Do you believe we’re sophisticated and processing information at a higher level in the 21st century? We are not. Humans are getting collectively stupider. As a species, we’re not as smart as we used to be, which sounds counter-intuitive when you consider all of our academic, scientific and technological advances. Human intelligence started to decline when civilization made life easier and allowed dimmer individuals to survive and pass on their genes. If an average citizen from Athens of 1000 B.C. were to appear suddenly in our midst circa 2022, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions.
Human beings may have reached their intellectual peak 2,000 to 6,000 years ago, when life was so harsh and individualistic that bad judgment generally led to death. Farming progressively led to denser communities where people could collectively ensure one another’s welfare. As a result, evolutionary pressure—the hunt for prey, the avoidance of predators—no longer culls the slow-witted the way it once did. A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food, shelter or protection in the wild probably died. In contrast, Elon Musk or any modern Wall Street executive that has made similar conceptual mistakes would receive a substantial bonus and be a more attractive mate. “Extreme selection” is a thing of the past.
As if that weren’t enough, there’s an algorithm that exceeds human intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI), like nuclear fission, may be more powerful than its inventors anticipated. When machine intelligence gets better than us at making (programming) AI, then AI sets the pace of intelligence growth, not humans. We are no longer at the top of the totem pole.
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[ PRIVACY ]
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Image Junkies Live on Dead Time
There’s a new language of emotion some will never attempt or employ. After a nuclear reaction, there is a moment where no information can be recorded. A sensory void ensues. Energy cannot be repurposed or redirected. The universe in that specific state at that specific time is dead. This physical phenomenon is called “dead time.” For some societies this nuclear moment has become a social pathology. For some people this void has become a lifetime. We can learn to live without dead time by moving with and beyond rigid, dogmatic rationality and loose emotionalism alike. A new language of reactive emotion is rising:
- Limerence: The ability to search for transcendence, revealing the true self as separated from the noise of society’s foundational superstructure.
- Attunement: The ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.
- Equipoise: The ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.
- Metis: The ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.
- Sympathy: The ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.
Constructive energies, tempered by an archaic reason and wisdom, require nuking the critics. Ignore them, or the value of your work will be divided, your popularity will wane and you will inevitably become an “image junkie.” Image junkies are often fragile “emotional mushroom clouds” who hate the karma of the critics. They are so self-obsessed and desperate they forgot to separate themselves from their critics, because… screw the critics. Be attuned to feedback, but screw the base-level ego of the critic. Those critics are idiots. Those critics are bitter and jealous. Critics want you to fail, so they are pouring out their wishful thinking. Critics are usually dead wrong about everything. That’s why they’re critics. They can’t accomplish anything themselves, so they guess (often for a living). If it is to be, it is up to you. This is one area where the ego—renowned as the most controversial personality trait—can aspire to rule in balance.
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[ IRRADIANCE CACHE ]
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On the way to individualized success there exist rambling influencers and critics—and even those “passionately certain” modern mentors and professors—who know essentially nothing. They know nothing because they have not competed in the real world. They’ve lived a sheltered, coddled life like those in academia’s ivory tower. They never get embarrassed, but they ought to. They know little or nothing beyond theory about money, entrepreneurship or business risk, since they have always had a secure job and safe paycheck (plus pension). That’s why so many lessons taught in school and college lead to failure in the business world.
If we need another example, then Greta Thunberg is the perfect symbol of passionate certainty in the absence of evidence. She knows what she has been taught—and she accepts it without reserve. As is typical with the young, their lack of experience allows them to be idealists. An idealist—untroubled by reality—is always certain.
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[ CHAOTRIX SPLASHDOWN ]
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So what are we left with? Quintessentially “dumb” people peddling cheap, ineffective solutions that benefit themselves in a silo. Without stringent tests on a level proving ground, these window shoppers become adjudicated as your so-called leaders and your children’s teachers. As a result of their oversight, the impressionable are taught to be humble and compliant while getting further and further away from the truth.
On the subject of suffering the righteous mimics and unruly “authorities” who admire themselves, the ancient Greeks isolated those who behaved like Aristophanes—whose language was that of a wretched quack, full of the lowest and most disagreeable points and quirks. He could not raise a laugh among the very vulgar, and to people of judgment and honor he was quite unsupportable. His arrogance was beyond all bearing, and all good people detested his malignity.
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Tapping the Élan Vitale
Like the sun’s vital force emanating to all living creatures on Earth’s surface, there is an element which keeps us in touch with a feeling of life, and is worth the bother to pursue. True, some may see no “life force” other than the organizational matrix contained in the genes themselves, but beyond those developments humans prefer and thrive when life and society make sense. In general, the earnestness of Ralph Waldo Emerson conveys a pastoral, timeless ideal: “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest criticism… to appreciate beauty and find the best in others… to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—this is to have succeeded.”
Voltaire and other rationalist-humanist Lumières (interested in metaphysics, classical liberalism, science and religion) keyed-in to humanity’s tendency to bury its collective ego in the guise of God as a chimera. Promoting the idea that, somehow, faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. This pathway parallels the modern, self-absorbed power structure that controls discourse in America. As a newer way to separate church and state, it’s convenient as it helps lesser men and women to elevate themselves, and quench their need for power over lives they can barely control (yet it is exactly this type who thinks they have enough left over to go around, to control others at will).
Whether you look at God as “the real thing” or humankind’s superiority complex, it doesn’t matter for the sake of this argument. We came to understand God as the beginning and the end, the Father of both, in no need of either; eternal without existing in time; everywhere present without being in any place. To him there is neither past nor future, space nor time; the Creator and Governor of all things; immutable, infinite without parts; his power is his will. The spirit by which he is actuated is above all laws, so that his followers’ enthusiasm is the only law they are to regard.
Now we have inconsistent and deeply-flawed people in power who—galvanized by some cause or other—have deified themselves and believe they possess all of these godly traits, despite getting nothing of practical value done for society. They should be removed as ruthlessly as they abused the privileges bestowed upon them, quickly and before their agendas take hold.
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[ EMOJI INFESTATION ]
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If the majority succumbs to abstract opiates, they will eventually despise free thinking and talent. With this cohort, the mind will never be settled, because they are not in possession of their own minds. In a former Dark Age, he who wielded any secret skill in art or science ran great risk of being looked upon as a sorcerer by the obedient herd, which accused every new sect of sacrificing infants in the celebration of its mysteries. Today, it’s a repeat of the Salem witch trials of binary woke versus non-woke, with all its venal wrath and nebulous moral boundaries.
What can be answered to a person who tells you that he had rather obey and idea, or god, than men, and who, in consequence of that choice, is certain of gaining heaven by cutting your throat? They are paranoid and they have hijacked the concept of “god” and “good” for personal gain. To them, to compose the soul, fanaticism is tranquility, even though we know those two ideas are usually not compatible. These are the same frivolous people who will, through the superiority of a spiritualized narcissism, twist your words, put a malicious construction on every ambiguous phrase, misrepresent innocent expressions, and seek to cancel your access to the dominion of public discourse. You sought the solace of a tranquil forest, only to be drowned out by a cacophonous murder of noisy crows.
The politically indoctrinated ideologues of today inadvertently summon the spirit of the Italian intellectual libertine Lucilio Vanini, who lived in a dual state of fragmented thinking and paradox in his pursuit of nomological determinism, God as a vital force in nature (pantheism), and proto-Darwinism. In his miscellaneous thoughts, from tales repeated over and over, the journals and historical tomes have been sullied with modern interpretations; and the public, who are fond of extraordinary things, have eagerly swallowed it. “Inadvertently” summon because the current state of modern political power possesses an apocalypse mentality fueled by exceedingly narrow or cherry-picked historical contexts as inspiration to draw from, and shun the fuller spectrum of history and relatable natural (or even supernatural) phenomena.
Nothing is gained from rigidly fearing the truth, or failing to change ones mind when given the proper evidence to do so. Paradoxically, you may be ostracized—or worse—for not towing the lowest common denominator. In a totalitarian state, nobody wants to be the first to stop applauding the commands of their oppressors; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says it so well it becomes tragi-comedy. And as for high-browed Vanini… during November 1618, he was arrested for trying to teach his discoveries and, after a prolonged trial, was condemned to have his tongue cut out, to be strangled at the stake and to have his body burned to ashes.
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[ TRANSLATION LOST ]
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The human timeline shows a natural rise and collapse of societies, inhaling and exhaling in cycles as a coterie of skeptics often rises to replace other types of ideologues. Most of these people don’t want to distinguish themselves as atheists (classic PR/deception maneuver), but they are—they are “true believers” of a movement, or of political change; if the church serves that purpose, then the church is useful as a distancing tool from the corruption of human endeavors. For example, atheism is the established religion in China, and they cannot be contained. They require no church to sublimate their aims and make the stars align. They live under a different kind of restraint (the authoritarian cudgel), just as religion was established in part to address the idea that men under no powerful restraint could never live together; that laws avail nothing against secret crimes; and that there must be an avenging God, punishing in this world or the next those delinquents who have escaped human justice. In China everything happens now, in real time, and decisively (for better or worse)… the state is their God. If a songbird flew by whistling “it ain’t so…” then they will rip the song out of that bird’s throat and silence it. Et tu, Ai Weiwei.
Those who established China’s state-mandated atheism sometimes looked to the West as they recalled the great orators like Caesar and Cicero, who said to a packed senate: “What hurt does death do to the atheist? All the idle tales about hell none of us have any evidence of; then what has death deprived him of? Nothing but the feeling of pain.” At this point we’re just trading one deception for another, and getting silenced on a global scale.
Bottom line: the old-fashioned hierarchies never go out of style; choose all allegiances, friends and collaborators wisely. To get us beyond the sheer simplicity of that cliché, the incomparable Voltaire said it best and it still holds true to this day: “Friendship is a tacit contract between two sensible and virtuous people—virtuous because the wicked only have accomplices; the voluptuous have companions; the designing have associates, the men of business have partners, the politicians form a factious band; the bulk of idle men have connections; princes and wealthy debutantes have courtiers and sycophants… but virtuous men alone have friends.”
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