“It was like a spider’s web: The more we tried to avoid politics, the more we became entangled in them.”
—Kobo Abé, Inter Ice Age 4
“Political power in America is media power. It’s the power to shape consciousness. Violence works when you have media power. It fails when you don’t. The protest Wednesday was an example of “hyperreality.” There was no attempted coup by President Trump, nor by people wandering around the Capitol. The media created a story about an ‘armed insurrection,’ a putsch, and they seem to believe it.” —Gregory Hood
“The actor’s mask becomes his face.”
—Plato (William T. Vollman, Europe Central)
“Leftism as practiced today, is aggressive. It is rapacious and rests on the idea that no one can exist outside their preferred outcome lest anyone see their world for the nightmare it truly is… The Mythology of America is just that, mythology, worth using as the basis for the new story rather than a shackle keeping us chained down, staring at the Abyss and despairing at what was lost.”
—Tom Luongo, https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/end-great-american-myth-secession-not-revolution
“This is the unbridgeable gap of modern politics. It is the infinite gulf between surrender and negotiating with terrorists… The realization is fast dawning on the people across the West that the terrorists don’t wear odd clothes, carry Ak-47s and speak in foreign tongues… They are the ones telling you to let Grandma die of loneliness in a nursing home, forbidding you from buying a Turkey for Christmas that can feed more than 6 people and spitting on people for not wearing a mask in public.” —Tom Luongo, https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/hungary-and-poland-create-unbridgeable-gap-great-reset
Cutting the threads
—from: James Lindsay, Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism
“What, then, could possibly be the answer to this perilous and perennial tangle? Fortunately, the first step, at the least, is very simple. It’s mere awareness. It is learning to recognize the constructed pseudo-reality for what it is—a fabricated simulation of reality that is unfit for human societies—and beginning to reject unapologetically any demand to participate in it. This means refusing the analysis of the paralogic (by seeing its contradictions) and being held to account by the paramorality (by recognizing its caprice, malice, and evil) that sustain the lie. (An old word for this is “secularism,” in the non-specific sense.) In the exact instant one becomes competent at spotting the lie—or, the network of lies—held in service of a constructed pseudo-reality and its social enforcement, one already possesses the necessary perspective to break the spell of the pseudo-reality in its entirety. This, knowing the cheat for what it is, more than any other thing, is how the strings of paralogic and paramorality are cut, and with them cut pseudo-reality will come crashing down.
“This can only be done by learning enough to see the games, telling the truth, and refusing to be coerced or forced to participate in the increasingly hegemonic pseudo-reality before it claims totalitarian power. Speaking practically, there are two straightforward ways this can be done. One is to refute the pseudo-reality, and the other is to reject it.
“For most people, the latter of these is easier than the former, and it requires less of someone. Strength of will and character will suffice. Simply refusing to participate in the pseudo-reality, utilize its paralogic, or bow to its paramorality—and to live one’s life as though it is utterly irrelevant to yours—is a powerful act of defiance against an ideological pseudo-reality. It requires nothing more of a person than a convicted statement that says, ‘This does not apply to me because it is not me’ (or, ‘not even real’), a refusal to make decisions based in socially constructed fear and intimidation, and a willingness to live one’s life on the most normal terms possible. This is a powerful and peaceful act of defiance that many other normal people (those outside the pseudo-reality) will recognize for strength, and while it may cost you in the short term and in some ways, it will reap rewards in the long term and in others, at least up until the point that the paramoral totalitarian trap is fully sprung on a sufficiently broken and demoralized society. Just keep your head up and refuse to live your life on someone else’s (psychopathic) terms, and you will do much against such budding regimes.
“Refuting pseudo-reality is harder, as it requires much more specific knowledge along with skill, strength of character, and courage. It also must be done, at least by someone, if an ideological pseudo-reality has already taken root. Such a pseudo-reality has to be shown to be a false reality, which is to say a pernicious fiction, to as many people as possible. To do it, its distortions of reality, the contradictions of its paralogic, and the evils and harms of its paramorality must all be exposed and explained as a first step. These objectives require devoting, which is in some sense wasting, a great deal of time and expending a great deal of effort intentionally learning something one knows is false and therefore (if one is successful) useless. It is also demoralizing to learn, given the psychopathic nature of the material. It’s not for the faint of heart, even if all goes well.
“Commonly, also, this process will not be comfortable and requires tremendous courage of precisely the kind that ideological demoralization is very effective at eroding and containing. The paralogic will interpret direct dissent as stupid or crazy, and the paramorality will characterize it as evil (or motivated by evil intentions, even if unconscious ones outside of the dissenter’s awareness). The courage to bear these outrageous insults and slander, and to bear its unjust social consequences, is therefore a necessary precondition to putting a halt to totalitarianism. It is understandable why most will not choose this path, but be warned: the longer one waits, the worse this gets.
“For those who will take up the task, the approach is a combination of being informed, being courageous, being forthright, and being subversively funny. Being informed is necessary to identify, expose, and explain the distortions of the pseudo-reality and juxtapose them with reality. It is also necessary to make use of the most decisive tool that exists against ideological pseudo-realities, which is the law of non-contradiction. Pseudo-realities and their paralogical structures always contradict reality and themselves, and exposing these contradictions exposes their lies. Being courageous and forthright is necessary to believe in oneself and one’s (real) values and thus to withstand the paramoralizing attacks and social pressure they will generate, but they inspire more of the same and restore moral authority to those who are drained of it by these distortions. Being subversive and funny undermines the psychopathy and will to power that characterize the entire ideological pseudo-realist enterprise.
“Resisting effectively and with sufficient knowledge (refuting) is, of course, best, but resisting at all, even by mere refusal to participate in any obvious lie (rejecting), is also effective. This is because revealing the ideological pseudo-reality for what it is—false and irrelevant to actual reality—undermines the pseudo-reality and encourages more people to refute and reject it. Even more powerful, however, is that revealing the underlying nature of the ideological pseudo-reality—that it is psychopathic—to normal people (including those partially ensnared) ranks highly among the ways the paralogical and paramoral threads can be severed. And, a psychopathic reaction is precisely what will result from effectively resisting a psychopathic ideology. The challenging part is that you, who dares resist their games and who eludes their trap, becomes the target of their psychopathic ire, and many sympathizers who you would usually count as friends will take sides against you (there is no neutral in the paramorality). The earlier one enters this fight, the more courage it takes and yet the more valuable it is.
“Some of the requisite courage to resist can be found by remembering that the pseudo-reality is not real, its paralogic is not logical, and its paramorality is not moral. That is, it’s not you; it’s them. Some more backbone can be dredged up by realizing that once the pseudo-real begins displacing the real for even a few percent of the population, the question is no longer whether things will go bad but how bad they will go before the bubble bursts. Reality will always win, and calamity comes in proportion to the size of the lie between us and it, so it is better to act sooner than later. Still more heart resides in grasping that it gets worse right up until a real resistance mounts, and then, after a rocky transition, it starts getting better. The time to act is therefore now.
“The way resistance—just plain resistance—works is by restoring to the normal person the epistemic and moral authority necessary to resist the ideologue’s illegitimate demands to participate in a pseudo-real fraud. That is, it restores confidence in normality to the normal. No one feels ashamed of resisting a con, whatever form it takes, and this is the real phenomenon we face with any growing ideological pseudo-reality. Its paralogic and paramorality work to drain us of our sense of authority to know what is and is not true and what is and is not right. One’s authority only lacks under the assumptions of the paralogical and paramoral systems, however—that is, inside pseudo-reality—and it can be reclaimed by anyone who simply refuses to participate in the lie. Step outside of the pseudo-reality (take the ‘red pill,’ as depicted in The Matrix), and you’ll see.”
We have succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome, where the inmates come to love and mimic their jailers, and “hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors as a survival strategy during captivity.” Identifying with the sociopaths at the helm, we have no remorse. Our former selves, our innate human kindless, is put on hold, buried under dogma, held back in fear, kept in check by cognitive dissonance… invisible.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”–Edmund Burke
A prayer to the gods of literature
We invoke the old gods of literature, of sacred art, to wash away the stink of politics even as it threatens the world, again, idiots in the matchbox. Washing them away like Shiva with a storm upon the world, kirtan frenzy of passion of truth of love of something real, beyond these paper words of diplomatic obfuscation. Bring us to the heartsongs of real earth and real speech and real love between all people.
In my own skin I am but a lay witness to the crimes of humanity against nature and our own. Leaving these aside, I come to the fictive realms but grudgingly, still enraptured with the versification of our tongue as I was first awakened in my ripening youth, saved from an earlier war by that very calling.
Now it has saved me, but I only return to it grudgingly, as to an old memory, a time bygone, of dusty tomes and paens to the past, while the train of the future pulls away ever remotely to a future manned by neither beast nor human, but a creature of our own imagining, leaving us behind as man left god and woman, to mind the children and the crops. Our screens and gizmos have obliterated the sky and the rain, and we are none the wiser. It is but a fond recall to go numbly down the lane of library lore once again, as though to visit memory, in a darkling time of forgetfulness, while new synthetic weather takes our days away and milks our mornings into perpetual shadow, the oneness of thunder, the clatter of slave chains, the calls of monkey dreams.
There can be no coherence now from the tomes of the past, they cohered only to themselves, dragging themselves into irrelevant oblivion, while the Rovian future unfolds even faster than we can cling. We are left in a limbo of a past now discarded, a future forsaken to the self-appointed masters.
Art left to witness, not to engage enough mass to matter. Politics left to debate but never sway, since the levers are removed and operating on technologies far advanced past common reach. We the mass of humanity are left to swim in a swimming pool we have built in a compound walled from nature; but it has no refreshment, nor hope from the spreading cracks, the stagnant growth of slime, our own befouling. The masters have left us and nature to our own demise, while they go preparing their flight back to the stars.
The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency. —Jung
Healing the planet, and our species, and our bodies and our personal lives, begins with detoxification. On the cultural level, it is necessary and urgent to do a major cleanse now, purging our beliefs and conversations, our concepts and opinions, our habits and limitations, from the programming that has infected us from birth and accelerated in the age of covert ops, fake news psyops, false flags and monopoly media, mass education, subliminal advertising, Hollywood storymaking, repetion of lies that have become our truths.
Behold the red pill, to help us purge and cleanse, preparing the way for nature’s reboot, winter storms and spring floods, new light to burn away the tangled webs, send spiders scurrying, reset to what we are born for.
