DE(CON)STRUCTION & CONSCIOUSNESS
How the current path of polarization can lead to the birth of a
new Consciousness Under permanent (de)construction
Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse
Sophocles -
Quoted from the Netflix Documentary, The Social Dilemma
For me, the quest for a deeper understanding of our fluid times started with being a long term
meditator, somehow identifying myself as belonging to a more rationally thinking
niche within the New
Age community. To my surprise, the New Age communities, almost within
months, had become deeply affected by mistrust
and paranoia. How could
Burning Man creative
freedom people end up as ultra-right-wing conspiracy believers? And why did many
ordinary meditating people who so far had believed in calmness, spirit, and free
creativity suddenly freak so much out in fear of 5G and the like?
Suddenly I realized that I, for the first time in my life, did not understand
the time I live in.
And why does this polarizing madness invade more and more of our Western
life from politics to culture?
Just a day after the Trump cult stormed Capitol Hill, I witnessed a mob of
anti-mask and anti-vaxxers go crazy here in Copenhagen. They were using
fire-works and screaming with pitched voices in distorted megaphones that Covid
was a hoax planted in order to control them. They were not armed like the
Trump-maniacs, but they were clearly in a state of collective rage I have so far
only seen in India in the form of angry mobs. It was fascinating and scary to
watch.
. Anti-mask and vaccine demonstration in
Copenhagen
by a
group called 'Men in Black'. My guess is that they subconsciously
have apropriated their name from Black Lives Matter.
A boomer in the last days of Rome
Am I too much of a boomer and by now too
old to understand
and appreciate the time I live in, or is it that the culture we at
present live in has become too old to understand and process the humans it
inter-faces? By now, I think both are true. I am an old man living in the last
days of a dying empire.
In this quest for understanding, I discovered something surprising. My own life
story revealed itself to be a fractal micro-repetition of the
larger boomer wave, now on its way to perish on the shore of
the
doomers. Hence it fitted
perfectly into the grander picture I here try to paint to use personal anecdotes
as exemplifications. By understanding my own life, I came closer to see the
shape of the contemporary Mandelbrotof
western civilization.
In fact, it all began with my rebellious youth in the 60'ties. I realised, that
I belong to the generation who set the monsters free by freeing ourselves. We
were the first not to trust tradition and authorities.
All ways lead to Rome, but I have now chosen the same ways leading away from the
last days of Rome so I, at a distance, can marvel at the beauty of the falling
autumn leaves of a dying civilization. Forgive me for not coming up with
strategies for action. My mission is not to prevent what is happening by trying
to put the monsters back in the bottle. Instead, I, through a growing
understanding of why Rome had to fall, am coming closer toamor fati in the sense
that everything that is born has to die at some point. It is a natural process.
To panic about that is also natural, but that seems not to be in my cards to do
so.
The viewpoint of the stranger In the text to come I will present a screenshot of the ongoing process of
understanding the crazy and deeply fascinating time we live in. It might be a
hubris-project since I do not even live in America but in tiny good old Denmark. We are always following
and copying our big brother but generally with a few years of blessed delay.
Maybe exactly this delay, plus the Atlantic Ocean, gives me the necessary
distance to observe the US in a way that would not be possible if I was an American
in America.
A shared field of systemic root causes With my 'foreign' viewpoint, I will try to show how most of the new cultural
movements are related. Here is a short preliminary list of shared features:
Disregard for factual science and institutions, lack of humor, a tendency to use
hyperbolic emotions and screaming voices, paranoia, collective story-told
victimhood, and/or persecutive hate towards other opinions.
The world seems to
be splitting into opposing realities where
each is complete for itself,
leaving no room for the other.
Seen from an astronaut's viewpoint, the outragers' 'purpose' is not to create
but to facilitate the destruction of the old and dying egocentric consumer
sueciety. These movements see themselves as saviors, fighting against the decay
they, in fact, are themselves. Therefore I see them metaphorically as
marionette-soldiers of necessary deconstruction. They are midwives
in the sense that they destroy to ashes and hence prepare the ground for a new
cultural life that they themselves never can be a part of because a revolution
always eats its
own children. In this sense, I, as an old man, will share faith with the
revolutionary children of our time. We will both perish, while new life will
rise with the sun after the dark night of destruction.
The pandemia of rage The stunning similarities between the new groups, coming from the left and
right political spectrum and from religious and new age groups, point towards an underlying shared profile of
aggressive
paranoic conspiracy
thinking. Hence it gives meaning to find answers for all the new group
phenomenons by giving special attention to the various believers of irrational
conspiracy theories. The believers of sinister conspiracy theories would most
probably argue that I do not really go into detail when I refute their
viewpoints. Here my reply is: I do not need to eat the whole morning egg to find out if
it is rotten. One bite is enough. This bite has the bitter taste of rage. Left
with only one word to describe the current collective landscape, I would use the
word rage.
WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF OURSELVES TO FIND NEW INSIGHTS Most probably, you dear reader, will wonder why I, almost as a general rule, stray away from the
subject in the form of all kinds of thoughts from high to low, from lofty
abstractions to concrete exemplifications within subjects that, at first glance,
are difficult to associate. Furthermore, it seems that I have written an
ouverture to the theme without ending. Please have patience with me here. I have chosen
unorthodox ways to extract analytical sense out of a world that seems to rotate
faster and faster.
When I browse through the media landscape, I am stunned by
institutional expert's inability to say anything of value about the time we live
in. It seems that old school professors and PHD's are trying to understand the
scenario we live in with concepts they learned a long time ago. New ways of seeing and understanding require new ways of
structural thinking and writing. If you should ever read to the end of this
text, I hope that you will be able to see that every brick, no matter how
strange it seems placed, contributes to the whole architecture.
LSD and the Synestehic Mind In the process of writing, I have read the text aloud for a lot of people.
Here I noticed a strange thing. People who, like me, have done a lot of meditation
and taken psychedelics in a responsible manner seem to understand the
text more effortlessly. Others often complain that I mix too many things that
have nothing to do with each other. They, in my view, compartmentalize the world as their own
brain is compartmentalized.
LSD is shown to grow neurons that connect parts of the brain that so far did
not communicate with each other. In the same way, I, before I began to use
psychedelics as an integral part of my meditation practice, was either writing
about meditation or other subjects in a separate manner. I now clearly see that
a split mind splits the world and its understanding of the world. Only a synesthetic mind can
grasp what otherwise is hidden in plain sight.
The crossing of Rubicon Seen from a broader societal perspective, the justification for straying
from the theme is that there is no longer any
solution within the mental reality of our contemporary capitalist culture.
It has served us well, but its pension is overdue. A clear sign of a given complex dynamical order of low entropy descending into
chaos is its failing attempt to present solutions within its own reality. Our
society has crossed
the Rubicon into the state of ireversable disrepair. The Siamese twins of individualism and consumerism have served us well
up to now, but at present, the world order of selfish ego and money is piling up contradictions that cannot
any longer find a
Hegeliansynthesis within its own
reality-dimension. The sudden rise of a snowball of unresolveable
contradictions is a phenomenon we can observe in all civilizatoric endgames.
Maybe I am as extreme as the rage-movements when I diagnose the current collective
madness as
symptoms of a dying culture. Like the old
hollow tree, the rot is coming from within the system itself. However, death is
not extreme when seen from above. It is a natural process, giving birth to new life.
We have to get out of ourselves to find new observations and solutions. Hence, out of all
deviations from the subject, I see the astronaut view as the most important.
It is amazing from this abstraction level to observe how everything is
connected to everything in order to create something. From here, full of optimism, I state:
No curse enters the life of mortals without a blessing.
LIFE WAS ALWAYS A BLOODY MESS Here comes yet another roundabout leading away from the highway. The reason for this
deviation is that I have observed how not only the believers in weird conspiracy
theories and polarized political thinking get depressed. Also, the ones trying
to oppose them with logical arguments seem to be infected with dark feelings. My
voice is in spite of the temptation to use sad
blue notes full of
optimism while I sing this
Swan Song. However, I do not expect you, dear reader, to sing along with
me. I just want to clarify my position.
So, let us take a trip to India.
Below is a picture of the Indian Goddess Kali. Kal means darkness. It
also means the darkness of the universe as you can observe it at night time.
Kali is one of my favorite astronaut Gods.
What are the devotees of
Kali told to do when they worship her? This is what the famous
Saint Ramakrishna
told his devotees:
Focus and meditate on Kali's beautiful eyes! Ignore her bloody teeth.
The wisdom of the stories constructed around Kali is, in my view, immense,
also when distilled from religion. In my understanding, Indian religious
narratives do not need any religious beliefs in order to give meaning. In the
same way you do not need to be religious in order to intuitively grasp Kal
as a metaphoric mindgame allowing the feeling of calm optimism to be a part of
the equation. In any kind of science there will always exist an irremoveable
subjectivity, and that subjectivity is you. No overly rational person can jump
his own shadow as a burping digesting, jealous and loving person without
becoming the Godman his own tradition defeated in the Age of Enlightenment.
Therefore listen to Kali. She reveals a through
ages by humans accumulated wisdom. It tells us that the world was always a mess and how to deal with that mess:
Even living in that mess, you can always choose what you want to smell to: A
flower or a toilet. India is still a mess today, but the Indians know how to laugh. They have not
lost their sense of humor. Ramakrishna was full of smiles, love, and laughter when he
looked at what you see below.
--
Of course, I deal with it a bit different in the sense that I
here have a closer look at Kali's teeth. In fact, I am sure Ramakrishna did
too. He loved Kali's teeth as much as her eyes but did out of
understandable reasons not reveal this to
Tom, Dick and Harry
. What I have taken with me from Ramakrishna is: Never lose sight of beauty and never forget an
opportunity for a good laugh - even in times of chaos and change.
Everything is perfectly imperfect In the black light of Kali, I state: I do believe, with emphasis on the word 'believe', that everything that happens
and has happened is perfect, or maybe more precise, as Zen puts it, perfectly
imperfect. Everything is an insane complex algorithmic play of holy mathematics, where
anything 'negative' is as essential for life as something 'positive'. Why do I
call mathematic holy? When Einstein looked at the stars at night, he shivered in
awe. For Einstein, science was a religious quest.
A knowledge of the existence of something we
cannot penetrate,
of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most
radiant beauty -
it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly
religious attitude;
in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
Albert Einstein
God
is reason From 10.000 and more hours in meditation and countless entheogenic journeys, I
state: For me, God is not some mysterious power that suspends reason.
God is much more Hegelian reason. God is, as the Greeks put it, logos. The mystery is that
the laws of nature actually works. We are, with Kabir's words, fish
in the ocean crying for water when it comes to magic. Don't look for
levitating people in your search for Divine Intervention. 1 + 1 somehow equals 2, and you
exist!! That is in itself the unbelievable algorithmic magic in the eyes of an
Einstein:
I do not believe in a personal God, and I have never denied this
but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can
be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the
structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
...
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. Albert Einstein
In God being reason, I become subjective feeling. What I cannot understand is
the very fact that I can understand. This feeling of admiration does not
need proof. It pops up in the form of awe to live in a universe where a human
brain is capable of imagining something so beautiful as the
Dirac equation. Here,
the macrocosmic laws of relativity are connected with the microcosmic world of
quantum physics. There is yet another Dirac-like equation waiting to be
discovered and that equation will reveal the bridge between the human logic and
the macrocosmic logic that governs our stars and the microcosmic logic that
reguates the quantum world. The very fact that the theoretical physicist,
Holger Bech Nielsen,
was able to calculate the mass of the Higgs particle years before it actually
was verified in CERN is more than enough to put me into a state of religious awe.
The Indian mathematician
Ramanujan is
another example of this stunning synchronicity between a human brain and the
universe. According to him, he sprirtually downloaded the most advanced
mathematic formulas from a Goddess in a kind of religious trance. Some of these
formulas are today used to describe what s going on inside black holes.
Ramanujan said about his work:
An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God
Ramanujan himself was not able or interested in proving his often
insane complex equations.
He did not create his mathematics from bottom up. Instead,
he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical conclusive formulas unfolding
before his inner eye.
So what do I do, worshipping logic as a thought of God? Again I take inspiration
from the good old Indian culture, which states that you can relate to God
through Bhakti, love, and/or Jnana, intellectual reasoning. In this
spirit, I, with love and awe in my heart worship humankind as
God, being able to, in the form of science to resonate with God as Ding an Sich. In
this sense, we are all living fractal micror-mirror-temples where the God of
Mandelbrot can feel and
understand himself.
Looking at this picture I became
a passinate worshipper of reason
The viewpoint of Shiva I am reminded of a quote of wisdom from the new AI, GPT-3. It states:
In Hindu mythology, the ruthlessness of nature is, in a way
made compatible with us 'tidy humans' in the sense that it is not seen as alienated from existence. It
is adored as a quality of the god Shiva. Shiva is the God of destruction but
seen from the cosmic viewpoint, where it becomes essential for new creation.
Shiva creates out of de(con)struction. That is why for Hindus, the holiest place to worship new life is
in the city of death, Varanasi. Here at the banks of the river Ganga at the
cremation grounds, the rising sun is greeted every morning as a symbol of the
creation of new life.
I am grateful to Shiva. He destroyed me again and again so I could sit here with my morning coffee and write
as a sum total of evolutionary reincarnated life perfectly shaped by
five
mass extinction events. That journey makes me realistic about my own and
humankind's existence as time-limited mortals but super optimistic on the behalf
of life's ability to cheat the forces of entropy.
The perfection of dinosaurian destruction In this morning light, I have deterministically been chosen to existentially choose to view the current
chaos, distrust, and polarization as a perfectly imperfect algorithmic play in the infinite complex dialectics of life.
Certainly, this cruel
master of mathematics creates
suffering in our small everyday lives. It also created the horror of slavery and
genocide, and we have as responsible beings to act to the best of our ability on that
level. I guess the dinosaurs did that too. However, at the same time, I welcome the rapid disintegration of our institutional
trust, outrage, mad conspiracy theories, the apocalyptic arrival of deep fake, and so on as
a necessary extinction event in life's impossible
and heroic
fight against entropy.
In this sense, life itself is a surprising smile in the face of death and love
is the force that creates order with the same resilient attitude as the eternal
stone-rolling
Sisyphus.
And there is only one thing we say to Death: ‘Not today.' Game of
Thrones
Amor Fati
On the ground level of my own dinosaur-life, I hate the fact that I will one day die, and
I do everything I can to die as young as late as possible. At the same time, my
death is perfect when seen from an omnipresent point of view.
I do what I can to understand and navigate my dewdrop-life on the ground level. However, when
the Kal of the night comes, I don't worry but fall into sleep with a little smile. I
take white pride in, according to
23andme, to be a direct descendant from a woman Viking chieftain warrior
buried on a Viking ship in Norway. The Vikings took it as a virtue to
laugh at their own death. I too, hope to end one day, maybe not with a burst of
roaring laughter, but at least with a little smile on my
lips. And before you, dear reader gets a Pawlow's dog's
shitstorm-reaction to my white pride statement: I really don't care if I am black, white,
male or female because I AM THAT - Tat Twam Asi - like
YOU ARE THAT! To intuitite THAT, in love, requires above all one thing; that
you, at least in a glimpse realize that you are not afraid of death, both what
concerns your own death and the death of humankind.
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is
necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.
Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against
what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who
accuse. Friedrich Nietzsche
If you cannot smile, you have lost it The new emotional hyperbolic mass-movements, from
paranoia-conspiracy to identity politics, share one common feature: an unbearable seriousness of
life.
I only have to look at a random conspiracy guru for a few moments to observe
this characteristic glooming seriousness. It becomes obvious after a short look
at the famous conspiracy 'terrorist',
David Icke's face: In the
very few pictures where he actually smiles, it is easy to observe how cramped it
looks. By lack of use, he has lost the tiny facial muscles that can make us able
to smile naturally. David Icke and the like have lost the ability to laugh
full-heartedly, especially at themselves.
The loss of humor and the inability to appreciate beauty is symptomatic for the mental self-repetitive reinforcement
spirals of these new collectives of shared thought-realities. People here are well aware of their own serious appearance but
justify it with the
ouroboros-reply: There is nothing to laugh at.
I am here reminded of one of my best friends. His name is Michel. He is the most
joyful man I know. His father came
from Libanon, and in Denmark, he met Michel's mother. As a young man with too much energy, he
in 1989 went to Libanon to fight with the Christian militia against the militant
Muslims. He
was a frontline soldier for two years and was witnessing a lot of death and
destruction on both sides. He told me that a strange but wonderful thing about the Christian
Lebanese was their ability to laugh, sing, and dance under any circumstance. He
saw this peculiar resilience as their greatest asset in their 2000 year long
and almost impossible survival fight as a culture in hostile surroundings.
Seen from the level of the gods inside of you, there is only one test to pass on
the final day of judgment: If you cannot smile and occasionally lose yourself
in a peal of all-consuming laughter, you do not deserve to be taken seriously. St. Peter
will not let you in, and you have to live in the hell of thoughts created in your preferred echo conspiracy chamber.
THE
CULTURAL OPERATING SYSTEM OF THE EGOIC IDENTITY Here comes another important deviation - or maybe it is the theme itself.It is about 'identity'.Our current state as free individuals and independent 'egos' is nothing more
than a human interface created in a historical process that reaches back to the
Athenian city-state. It is just one possibility out of many configurations. One
of the first to use the computer-term
operating system as a meaningful metaphor for culture was the
visionary scientist and psychonaut,
Terrence McKenna.
Culture, seen as a survival operative system, can form our psyche in countless
ways. Our self-understanding and feeling of being 'Me' is fragile and changeable to
the border of being an illusion. If you don't feel inclined to sit cross-legged
with closed eyes in Meditation for a longer period, the safest and quickest way
to experience this reality-fragility of 'me' is to take a substantial dose of
psychedelics. Here you will, for sure, see that 'I' could be
anything. 'I' could be crying for holy war. 'I' could be a
Trump-supporter, a transgender person, a black person. 'I' could be what I am
through my selfie
filter or even one of
Terrence McKenna's
Machine Elves.
Meditation and identity - Who am I?
In these disruptive days, an
increasing number of Western humans have begun to sense the fragility of being
'Me', and that makes them cling even more to their, by culture given or
self-created
identities. The
anxiety and insecurity in generation Y
is bigger than in any generation before.
Therefore, I, in the text to come, will keep an eye on the phenomenon of 'identity' as the eightball
in the game.
'I' have been told by myself, by my family, friends, and
the Danish State that I am a white male at the tender age of 66. At present, I
don't even have to close my eyes to refute these accusations. With great
and calm confidence, I can tell you that on the level of consciousness, we are all one
Being looking out of countless eyes.
Meditation is all about questioning the reality of 'identities' as such. In Meditation, I guarantee they will dissolve. You can try yourself with
this simple technique: Sit with closed eyes every day for 10 minutes and ask
your self with great honesty and above all courage: Who am I? Such
ancient practice will give you the astronaut view of life and yourself, while at
the same time being even more present while living your daily life. Does it
sound too much haleluja? Well, maybe, but I do not care. I have to be honest in
spite of the fact that it is often harder to believe in good things reveiled
than in bad.
The end of egoic identity and society as we know it Let me sum up before going on.In the coming text, I want to show how our Western civilization as an
operating
system has come to a glorious end. It has served us well, but at present, the world order of selfish ego and money is piling up contradictions,
especially in the form of growing discrepancy between cultural circuits of high
tech and old forms of survival based greedy thinking. Our civilization and its
corresponding droplet identity-interfaces cannot
any longer find a
Hegeliansynthesis within its own
reality-dimension. Am I old-man-grumpy about this state of affairs?
In fact, the opposite! What intense times to be alive in!
THE RISE IN DISTRUST, POLARIZATION AND CONSPIRACY
THEORIES
As pointed out in the introduction, the underlying
psychological profile for the various outrage movements reveal its devolutionary
blueprint at its clearest in the sinister and evidence resistant conspiracy
theory groups. Certain triggers seem to activate and amplify this profile.
At disruptive times we can get unique insights into the machinery of society and
the fragility of the human nature. Not surprisingly the main trigger is
collective fear.
Covid19 - a trigger
Seen in a historical view, we can observe that there always was a correlation
between social unrest and pandemics. We now again live in pandemic times. Here I
am not only thinking about COVID 19 but also of the rise of all sorts of
infodemic conspiracy theories ranging from the plausible to the outright
bizarre. It seems that paranoia conspiracy theories have expanded in the
slipstream of fear created by its more physical twin, the COVID 19.
As
M.D., Ph.D. D.S. Jones has
pointed out, pandemics, seen from a historical perspective, have always been
following an archetypical gameplay. The first act in the social drama of an
outbreak starts with various forms of denial. Driven by our self-interests and
the need for reassurance, we ignore the signs. The second act is launched by
reluctant recognition of the severity of the outbreak and the following attempts
to explain the situation. These explanations have often taken the form of
irrational blame-gaming where paranoia and persecution walked hand in hand in
search of scapegoats.
I am not in a state of denial what concerns covid 19. I had it myself in the
beginning of November 2020, confirmed with a positive test. After two days of
mild sickness with a little fewer, I initially thought covid was a piece of
cake, even more temperate than normal flu. However, a week later, I started to
experience all kinds of strange worrisome symptoms like dizziness and nausea.
This 'afterglow' lasted for a month so, I can, out of my own experience, state
that covid is no joke and that my government just did the right thing in
facilitating a hard lockdown. To believe that covid 19 is a hoax planted by a
secret elite in order to control the population is close to madness.
Conspiracy theories built on sound skepticism Let me state my position. I do, however, believe in conspiracy and conspiracy theories.
The claim that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was having weapons of mass destruction was
a conscious lie organized by the American government. Edward
Snowden's exposures have shown how nations are not only spying against other
countries but also have secret surveillance programs directed towards their own
citizens to such an extent that the term conspiracy is justified.
It just takes a short look at Edward Snowdon's noble face to realize that he is
in truth and America is not. Wikileaks is yet another source for
exploring what is going on behind the curtains and even beyond governmental
control. In the BHO-documentary, Agents of
Chaos, we come to understand how Russia was meddling with the American
election in 2016.
The world is and was full of real conspiracy events, and we can still speculate on
how Alexander the Great died. There will always be a new
Watergate, and
there will always be sound conspiracy theories founded on factual driven
detective work. A healthy skeptic and investigating mind can not rule out the
phenomenon of conspiracy, at least when we widen the definition a little. Fake
news are when weaponized through social media in political battles, as we have
observed in the last years in the US, definitely not conspiracy made by tin foil hat
people. Hence it gives meaning to view even traditional but now extremely
polarized legacy media such as CNN and Fox-News as conspiracy laundering agencies
in the sense that they will publish undocumented rumors if they can hurt their
opponents.
Conspiracy and truth
In my understanding, social conspiracy is an unavoidable phenomenon rooted in
genes and
tribally conditioned social interaction.
It occurs as a result of a group's conscious but also unconscious efforts to distort, lie, or hold back information in order to promote its own
survival
viewpoints and agendas.
In timesof social disruption, the level of ideological lies rises in
order to secure enough short-term safety and energy for one's own tribe. Seen in
this light, the
seven deadly sins are biological short term algorithms, and the nobility
reflected in Snowdon's face the signature of a long term survival algorithm.
When we lie, as individuals or as a collective, we, in fact, take loans with a
heavy interest in the bank of future. That is why they in India since ancient
times have said: Krishna always wins which for them is equivalent to:
Truth always wins. The wise Indians also state the following: Satyam,
Shivam, Sundaram. Satyam means truth, Shivam means God, and Sundaram means
beauty. Truth comes first in their poetic equation. So it does in mine, but
truth is always a slow walker while lies spread like fire. Civilizations unfold
their time-bound life in the sweet dynamic spot between lies and truth.
Identifying crazy conspiracy theories Having said thatconspiracy, seen as survival lies, is a natural phenomenon, there still is a considerable
qualitative gap between what I would term sound reason-based conspiracy theories and the irrational and outright crazy beliefs that are thriving
today. Here I am basically referring to religious communities, and I am not
hesitating to include phenomenons like Woke.
Unfounded sinister conspiracy concepts now even seem to spread to
mainstream segments of society. As a general pattern, the paranoia conspiracy
groups' ideations are concentrated in a few easy to understand narratives like
5G or blood-drinking secret societies while ignoring much larger systemic ones
hidden in complexity or in plain sight. These conspiracy narratives seem to
follow an underlying gameplay where a powerful brotherhood with agendas of
dictatorial control or even mass genocide is able to execute their plans were it
not for the 'holy crusaders' who have discovered their intentional evil intents.
I know two people with schizophrenia. They are both very sympathetic, but they
are both neck-deep into conspiracy dramas. I understand why they were among the
first to jump into this rabbit hole. Their 'diagnosed' way of looking at the world is
way more
compatible with the world than ever before. One of them has moved to the
countryside in fear of 5G. The other is full time engaged in propagating insane
paranoia. He is strangely, at the same time saner than ever because his way of
thinking now gives him a lot of social acceptance and new friends. I have always
been attracted to everything that offers a stranger's look at normality, and I
am, of course, aware of what that says about me. Another interesting man, at
some points in my life, I would almost call him a friend due to his childlike
and often also playful behavior, is a
doctor MD, Ph.D., and a psychiatrist. He is frantically active on the
borderline between traditional and alternative medicine. After he confessed that
he had diagnosed himself with
Aspergerger,
I lovingly referred to him as the mad professor. He plays
Rachmaninov at 78
speed without a score on his grand piano while simultaneously groaning in anger
towards mainstream medical science and doctors. He always felt ostracized, but
today, he has become the blind king of the blind. He has a large following on
social media but has canceled me because I did not want to go to an illegally
open pub to drink beer with him without covid 19 masks. According to him, covid
19 does not exist, and it is his civic duty to drink beer with his followers in
a small airtight room. I wonder how he managed not to get infected by covid 19 so far.
The mad professor's sudden rise to fame is not surprising.
It seems that the belief in outrageous conspiracy theories recently has
been on the rise to such an extent that it could be justified to see it as a
kind of collective mass psychosis. The
level of conspirational mistrust and reinforcement through fake news from Russian
and Chinese trolls to Alex Jones and David Icke to warring political groups has
now reached a level where it, in fact, poses a threat to civilization as we know it.
Emotion-based ideations without grounding in validation have by now spread to all levels of
social life.
One of the important breeding grounds for this strange phenomenon has been pointed out in the
outstanding Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma.
Social media has silently, and step by step
created major changes inour ways of thinking and understanding of what reality is. Humans are
pattern-seeking machines. So is the artificial intelligence behind the various social media like Google, Youtube,
Facebook, and Twitter. The symbiosis of these two pattern-seeking systems, where
the human part of the intelligence is loosing more and more terrain, has
created fundamental and explosive changes in the world without hardly
anyone
taking notice.
The sudden rise in weird conspiracy theories can, however, not be understood
exclusively as a social media phenomenon. Even all the good efforts in The Social Dilemma
fails to grasp the whole picture. The people interviewed in the documentary tend
to 'blame' capitalized algorithms, which is true, but seen isolated is a blind alley.
The endgame of a civilization, Greek, Roman, or our current seems always to be
highly complex and non-linear. Here the famous
chaos-mathematic
butterflies in South America cause a thunderstorm on the other side of the
globe.
The return of Dracula
As mentioned, pandemic's are the ideal
breeding ground for weird conspiracy theories. One of these paranoic ideations
seems to center around the theme of drinking human blood. The rich people drinking the blood
of children type of conspiracy madness took momentum in Medieval Europe,
where Jews were persecuted and killed due to widespread rumors that
they were drinking the blood
of children in secret rituals. These persecutions have always followed the
script of the second act in the 'pandemian' play.
However, we must not forget to
take in the last years' rising
inequality as a part of the equation. The conspiracy-tales of
Count Dracula arose at a time
with great social injustice. Common people at that time who were at the mercy of
an extremely wealthy and exploiting upper-class did not have the intellectual
capacity to see through the social mechanisms of feudal slavery. Instead, they
intuitively and symbolically saw their aristocratic tormentors as blood-drinking
monsters. Medieval fairy tales are, in fact, full of symbolic translations of
social injustice.
Vampire tales are again on the rise in the weird conspiracy groups. However, beyond the
madness in our contemporary world to believe in a blood-drinking aristocracy, there might be an
underlying true story about a steep rising inequality. By now, the richest
one percent owns 44%
of the world.
Seen in this light, there will
always be some intuitive truth even in even the wierdest conspiracy tales.
WOKE, POSTMODERNISM AND CRITICAL THEORY Here comes again an important deviation.It is about academia.A well-functioning academia is the very foundation of well-functioning
institutions, which again is the foundation of a well-functioning society.
Universities have, by now, to a large extent, lost their patent of knowledge and
instead become dystrophic breeding centers for rage and dialogue-cancellation.
We are living in an age of decentralized information. Universities and their
libraries are not any more temples containing souvereign wisdom. Information can
be gathered anywhere and anytime, even with a smartphone. One can follow lectures on Youtube with the most competent
people
within their field and not only as before by attaining classes with mediocre scientists
and academics who
anyhow quote the people you can follow directly on various academic sites. For that reason,
alone, many academic
disciplines are by now disqualifying themselves. As information became scattered
into omnipresence, rage became focused and filled in the vacuum on these, once
respectable centers of knowledge.
This particular devolution is, however, not the only reason behind the decay of
universities. American academic institutions, especially within the theoretical
humanities, have increasingly played a leading role in their own de(con)struction
as science-based institutions.
It, in fact, began with the Marxist left-wing occupations of universities all
over Europe in the late 60'ties and 70'ties. Later French philosophy morphed the
orthodox Marxist focus from the classical concept of an exploited working class
to encompas a whole rainbow of supression stories.
Hence the contemporary theoretical left-wing movements are associated with the philosophy of postmodernism. In a way, the term postmodernism in itself has revealed that we have reached the
point of the algorithmic curve, from where downfall is inevitable. The ability to coin strong and truthful new terminology
already died with the term
modernism. What can
come after modernism? Postmodernism. After postmodernism, we can
only add post-postmodernism and so on.
The woke of the
universities in the USA today claim theoretical legitimacy via the
postmodern French
ideas ofdeconstruction and the German
Frankfurt school's
critical theory.
In the USA, the theoretical humanities have since the
notorious
Evergreen incident 2017 with surprising speed become dystopic heavens for political
correctness with preordained conclusions overwriting evidence and free dialogue.
Let us have a closer look at the roots of this wild groving new breeds of weeds.
French Postmodernism In La Condition Postmoderne
from 1979, the French postmodern
philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard, argued that the time of the
Grand Narratives,
Christianity, Nationalism, and Marxism was over.
The doubt in the Enlightenment idea and the Hegelian belief in
dialectic progress in
history pawed, according to him, a
path for a myriad of smaller, often competing narratives to fill the vacuum.
Where Lyotard basically described this process in neutral terms, postmodernists
such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze went further and
gave academic ammunition to the critic deconstruction of institutionalized
grander truths. Foucault argued that there were no such things as objective
'facts'. 'Facts' were merely power-language constructed by the elite and their institutions.
The Frankfurt School
The French observations of language as embedded with power merged with the older
German Frankfurt School's Critical Theory,
which
had made attempts to add a moral
stance to
Marx's more strictly scientific approach. The Franfurter school basically
fostered the idea that common people were unconsciously alienated from themselves,
the production apparatus and the society in general. They did in the
capitalistic system itself see the ability to destroy the preconditions of
critical, revolutionary thinking. Hence it was the task of
academics to expose the hegemonial systems infiltration of the consciousness in
order to activate the revolutionary potential of the masses.
The serious flaw in the Frankfurt school of thought is more obvious. I would
call it academic arrogance. How can you be in a horizontal dialogue
with a person that you upfront in your school of thought has deemed a
non-conscious person? As far as I can see, there goes a direct line from this
position to the cancel culture. When you upfront have a concept of your opponent
being unconsciouss, there is less need of mutual horisontal respect. Verticality
and dialogue do not go together.
Contemporary postmodern deconstruction Camille
Paglia was in the 90ties the first to warn against what she saw as a postmodern academic
decay. She identified the original seed sin in Foucault's thinking in itself. I
do, however, not think that the original French and German philosophers did see the possibility of their own theories radicalized to such an extent
as the case is today in the USA. Even the language of
mathematic is now by extreme woke academics seen as a racist white hegemonial language-tool of power.
As far as I can see it, there is an important but hidden consequence of
deconstruction as such, and that is that you cannot deconstruct the world
without deconstructing yourself.
My own folly
I bear historical witness to this
development myself. In the early 70'ties, as a young university student, I got
brainwashed, swallowed up by a collective psychosis among academia all over
Europe. A part of the insight into the postmodern woke phenomenon I owe to these
years lived in radical Marxist-madness. In some ways, history is repeating
itself. I recognize parts of my own youth in the generation of 'sleep-wokers'. I
could have been one of them had I been a campus youngster today. However, there
is one important difference between the leftist movements in my youth and the
ones we find today. We did not take thing personal. We did not rage. We did not
need safe spaces. We were not vulnerable and we did not make our madnes
personal.
When I hear the contemporary gibberish language used by Critical Race Theory people, I am
reminded of my own folly as a young student. I had a sponge-brain that liked to
suck up complicated word-chains. After 6 months, I, as a radicalized Marxist and
Frankfurter preacher, was able to speak and write in such complex language
code that I, despite my early 20 age, was able to make adults insecure and stand
down. It was, however, all pure bullshit-language, as it also is today when
spoken by woke academics. I still today am able to use this
language smoke screen of suffocating word-babble. In this sense, this use of
language is close to the religious language as spoken by priests in the medieval
period. They spoke in Latin so that the common man could not understand it and
exactly, therefore, shiver in submission and ave. Hence language is an important
tool in the
woke indoctrination camps.
The joke continues, and I recognize the old story I will tell now as a valid
woke-joke of today too. After my main study subject in literature was completed,
I began studying music with all too little practical and theoretical knowledge,
which in fact, was required in this line of study. I was, however, saved by my
talent for language babble. I remember my first oral test on the musical
institute. I got a question where I had to analyze certain parts of Mozart's
Symphonies. I knew almost nothing about this, but quickly I began to ascend into
the realm of lofty Marxist word-smoke, talking about the Vienna-classical period
as a part of the development of capitalism. At that time, also the music
university had been subdued to sing revolution-slogans, so my examinators gave me
a high grade for my performance about Mozart without Mozart. In the late 60'ties and 70'ties old and traditional
humanities drowned in left-wing word-babble. However, also good things happened.
A new and fresh creativity was able to renew stiff and outdated forms of thinking that had dominated. I
was allowed to bring in my electric guitar in the old halls of classical fame.
Here I turned up the volume on my screaming freedom-ego in the form of a wild
Jimi Hendrix-like solo.
THE RISE OF THE MACHINES A major disruptive development, started with the
widespread use of computers in the 80'ties and 90'ties. They laid the foundation
for our digitalized interconnectedness in the form of the world wide web,
which again lead to the overwhelming dominance of social media playforms.
All the contemporary outrageous crowd-formations would not exist in their
current explosive forms were it not for their hybridization with social media in
its current commercialized click-bait-driven form. At present, the
oppressive invasion of consumerist
digitalized
mass culture has given birth to new
species of trolling Frankensteins, Leviathans, and
Golems. They are newly evolved collective cyborg lifeforms with seemingly
independent emotion-minds of their own. They are living in a virtual reality,
reality.
I clearly remember when I got my own personal computer in 1992. The logic and
language of this strange and wonderful new thing radically changed my way of
working. I remember how I became more organized and systematic in this period in
a kind of trade-off with a previous, more intuitive, and chaotic
work-navigation.
The rise of computers made it possible to
globalize continuously optimizing systems of trade, production, and
communication. The planet suddenly began to grow worldwide webs of
communication neurons while
ship-containers made it possible and cost-beneficial to exchange huge amounts of
goods over long distances.
This development made the army of work- and consumer-'Me's'
grow symbiotic bonds with their new digital partners in such a way that the binary logic of the
computers began to affect their brains, even on a neuroplasticity level. As the
machines got interfaces evolving towards us, we evolved brain-interfaces
directed towards them.
The next even more outstanding breakthrough was the new Windows
94 platform. I remember one fine day after 4 years of daily windows
companionship. I was painting my living room. By mistake, I made a stroke with
the pencil, so the white color was entering the space where I had painted with a
different color. My first instinctive reflex was to in my mind to look for the
Windows return-button to correct the mistake. At this moment. I realized that
the computer-interface within these few years had entered my own brain and
created its own circuits of neurons. I had become a click'able computer
inter-face.
Windows into a digital bardo-world Today our brains are all radically different than before the times
of the computer due to this process of mutual interfacing. However, most
important of all: Windows had created a new world with a blurred sense of
reality. This is, in fact, the seed for all the later alternative
reality-fictions ending up in the Capitol Hill.
Today this reality-blurred
bardo-world is something that is present as a conditioning
agent even from early childhood. My friend saw a
little girl trying to swipe an aquarium with fish in a doctor's waiting room. No
wonder we by now are swiping our way into all kind of faked realities.
The quatification of the human work force The arrival of mass produced computers was a dream tool in the hands of business-oriented leaders. Even
governmental institutions could now be streamlined in quantifiable economic
logic. New Public
Management saw the benefits of using the workforce's newly acquired
binary interface-installment. I remember how in the 90'ties, we were top-down
influenced by enthusiastic leaders who told us to fill out all kinds of
formulas, so we, in a quantifiable way, could document what we were doing and at
the same time, could be told what we were supposed to do so a computer could
digest it.
In this way, humans created the computers in their own short-term and
narrow-minded visions of a successful world - and then
the computers created us.
Never had humankind been so free in such a disciplined way.
The Bitches Brew of Let Go and Control Steve Jobs is a perfect example of this development. He, as a young man, was a
restless, super creative, visionary, and rebellious hippie 'realizing' himself with Indian gurus and LSD at
the banks of the river Ganga. At the same time, he was a perfectionist, a
workaholic, and a control-freak. In this impossible bitches brew, the iPhone was
born.
An all too well-known and stressful information overload At current, we process as much information in one day as the lifetime sum of
information for a person in the Medieval period. Our
success in society has so far depended on the amount of data we can digest and
process. However, our stone-age brains have difficulties filtering the
increasing amount of information we need to process to survive. The receptive
human bandwidth is too narrow as compared to the vastness of data that
potentially can shake,
confuse, or define
our identity as 'Me'.This exponential rise in information quantity is quite well
known and often put forward as a
cardinal
explanation for the qualitative changes in our times.
Smaller and smaller and closer and closer However, our relation to information has also changed in other ways
that actually has less to do with information overload and more with information
underload. This development primarily happened due to the explosive use of smartphones. An increasing quantity of information is today
flowing through the smartphone. In this sense, the medium, the gadget itself,
has become the
message. It reminds me of a visit to Taipei in Taiwan a few years ago. On an
evening stroll, I went to a park where a lot of young people were hanging out.
None of them were speaking to each other. They were all looking into their
smartphone screen.
With the smartphone, a radical change happened in our relation to data and
to the medium of data itself. In fact, we can follow this development right from
the birth of computers with the huge
IBM-monsters, then shrinking to the personal home computers, to the laptops, to the
tablets and ending with the smartphones:
Data came closer and closer to our bodies in smaller and smaller 'vehicles'.
Never has information been so close to us.
The age of TV and radio gave us ample distance from our information media. In contrast, the iPhone has become like an
Avatar-plug directly connected to our blood and flesh.
The next natural step is Elon Musk's
Neuralink. These gadgets gave the 'Me' access to social media shared
fields of consciousness, but also shared fields of psychosis.
The physical form of the smartphone itself and the closeness of it as a constant
companion during daytime and the first thing to reach out after in the morning,
even before the toilet, the smartphone has become an extension of our own biology, a
prosthetic limp. We started to have feelings toward our Phone. I must here
confess that I too adore my I-(phone). It has become my
'Gollumnized' precious one.
In this deceptive humanization of the medium, the design became increasingly important. Steve
Jobs transformed the dry
IBM'ish
philosophy of usability by adding beauty to his product. From the
font-design to the gadget itself, he beautified and emotionalized our
relation to data. Data became persuasive carriers of dopamine in the form of
design. The gadget transformed into an aestheticized and personalized
fetish to such a degree that
we now are able to
bond with it like it almost was a living being.
It has, in fact, come so close to us that we only discover our dependence on it
when we lose or damage it, pretty much in the same way that you only notice your
leg or an arm when you loose it or hurt it. With this 'organ-isation', the
smartphone even ceases to exist as an object.
The humanized social media - The Big Others A parallel development took place on social media. Facebook and the like
developed digital mirrors of us as living in closely knit tribal-like
communities. Here, I would like, with inspiration from
Lacan'sBig
Other, to coin the term, the Big Others. The big others are
the citizens in our homegrown Facebook tribe. These 'friends' are
the big others watching and evaluating us through likings and comments. The social media
spectatorship through this
scopophilic system of
media-iconized language is releasing a kind of soma with almost the same signal chemical
cocktail of dopamine and serotonin as we get from being in close encounters with
other humans. Our stone age brain is all too willing to drink that soma as a
substitute for the feelings of isolation and loneliness produced by modern
consumer-life and now even more so in the time of COVID19. Social media has, in
fact, become somatic media.
The singular omnipresent space of the Internet In a third, parallel synced modality, this process of closeness became amplified
due to its circulation on
a platform essentially without time and space: The Internet.
However, here on this needle-point, we are not medieval angels. The lack of
space makes us devils. When we as a myriad of 'My'-spaces collide in the
location-less location of social media, a whole cluster of new conflicts arise.
With inspiration from
Baudrillard; we have arrived at an implosion of all boundaries.
A
cartoon drawing of the
Prophet Muhamad is published in a narrow-minded
provincial newspaper in Denmark. The next day they create outrage among Muslims, even
in the furthest mountains of Pakistan.
All the religions and belief systems in the world have been forced to enter as
gladiators in the Forum Romanum of the smartphone display.
Before the digital interconnectedness, there were many isolated
monads
of independent cultural spaces on the planet. Muslims could have their
Prayers and Prophet in peace, and people in Denmark could play with their
irony, and nobody cared. Today they collide.
In the early days of Facebook, I experienced a strange and unusual happening in
my relation to a good friend. He and I started arguing about some insignificant nonsense on my public
Facebook-wall. Suddenly unexpected, it spiraled out of control, and in anger, we
unfriended each other. It took more than a year before we could bury the hatchet, and
it took me years to realize that this strange conflict was a product of social
media's inherent architecture.
Even within the western Sphere of free Greek dialogue, it has become
increasingly difficult
to avoid confrontation. Free speech requires at a minimum of three interlinked
but yet independent spaces: a space from where one part can speak, a space from
where the opponent can speak, and finally a shared space, a verbal octagon where
thoughts and arguments can be victorious, die or give life to new hybrid
creations.
In the digital interconnectedness, these ideal three spaces are compressed to
one point into one omnipresent space as it presents itself on a screen. The only
space visible is the octagon, not the other safe spaces of the opponents. This
compression, in itself, creates conflict and polarization. Therefore the tone is
always harder when we argue on the net as compared to when we are arguing in the
real world where we can 'aware' each other as a physical presence. If I could
get a visual presentation of the 'other', my empathy would be bigger.
These seemingly independent developments in different spheres of
society have in tandem driven forward a fundamental change in the way
we perceive and handle data:
The stream of data has transformed from being served as a long-distance,
information download to being a close-range, emotional download.
We download feelings and upload information.
Ask Google!
Today, if somebody asks me a factual question, I will reply: Ask Google.
In the following exemplification, I would upfront make an apology for my
misanthropic views.
They are meant as hyperboles to make my point clear.
For ten years, I was a tour guide for well off elderly tourists in the Far East.
Due to the sudden illness of a tour guide, I was asked by my boss if I could
substitute as an Opera guide in Italy.
I said yes to the challenge in spite of the fact that I did not know anything
about Italy. Two days later, I arrived in Milan with 30 tourists on a bus. I was
sitting up front with the chauffeur and a microphone. On my lap, I had my iPhone
6 with mobile internet coverage. It was important that no one saw that little
devil, so I had to be quick. I had an app with wiki-informations integrated into
its map. On the digital map, I could see a children's hospital coming up 100 meters later,
and when we passed that hospital, I could make a lot of the kind of detailed blah
blah that tourists like because it makes them feel in safe hands. From
experience, I know that they have forgotten everything I said 5 min later. In the
same way, every monument we passed got the same insane detailed
information-preaching. In this way, I somehow survived my only tour as an opera guide in
Italy.
The 'outdated' adoration of random information
I would not say that I managed the whole tour perfectly, relying on my
iPhone, but I survived. Often my guests came to me full of praise for my
extensive knowledge about anything in Italy. It showed their generation as
schooled in being hunter-gatherers of any information-food no matter the quality, and the sad irony in not any longer being
able to remember the collected information, primarily due to old age but also
due to the general information overload of our time. In the good old days, it was important to have
a huge sum of information in the form of experience stored in the brain. We
tended to accumulate data by uncritically remembering any bit of information
from all walks of life. As time passed, all that random information without
meaning and context would fill out the blanks spots in a kind of unified sum
total of
polyhistorian knowledge. In today's big data scenario, that is absolutely
not possible anymore. We have to avoid information and be more selective
primarily by ascending to higher levels of thought-abstractions. In a way, we all
have to be philosophers to be able to successfully navigate the ocean of data.
The outdated cultural blind habit of adoration of random information as such became clear to me when we, on another trip with the
Transiberian Rail from Beijing to Moscow, had local tour-guides in every city we
visited. These guides were not trained in filtering the information they had in
such a way that they could present some essential headlines in the right level
of abstraction. To hyperbole it a bit, they could say to the guests: The
building we pass to the left is consisting of 234.688 bricks. These bricks have
been transported on lorries 22 km from here. The building has 23 rooms, all with
large windows and blue painted doors.
In general, the tourists were satisfied with this kind of information and
were only complaining when there was no information given, and they, therefore,
had to rely on their own eyes to see and experience. Furthermore, it was
interesting to observe how they were conditioned as consumers in the sense that
the constant stream of information was
something they had paid for and hence expected. We have within a few years come from a situation where we were expected and
conditioned to digest as much information as possible in order to have success
to a situation where we do not need it anymore because google knows. However,
we feel a loss of identity if we do not keep on consuming data, and hence we get
stress from data overload.
In this time of disruptive change, the past tends to collide with the
future in the sense that our life-experience and childhood school conditionings
often bring forth less useable survival solutions as compared to our
fluid intelligence. In fact, we have to unlearn them by now.
Information underload As a child in school, I learned mental arithmetics. No school will today use
energy and brain-space in children on memorization. Arithmetics is outsourced to
machines. Seen in this light, information overload
is not the problem for us. It is the opposite. We are, in fact,
coming much more close to a state of information underload. We
have given up our old school duty of collecting information, and instead, we
outsource and externalize it.
Some years back, on a nature trek in Sweeden, I suddenly realized that I had lost my way
in the wilderness in spite
of the fact that I had been in this area several times before. I tried to activate
google maps, but with no internet connection, it did not work since I had forgotten
to download the area. I realized that my brain, in pure Smartphone-laziness, had
forgotten how to navigate spatially.
My brain had lost grey matter in the
hippocampus area.
This area in the brain was
over-develloped in taxi-drivers before the new GPS-systems made it shrink in
their brains too.
The question is now: Are our brains shrinking due to the outsourcing of
intelligence? I hope to answer that question bit by bit. However, we can assume
that there is little doubt that our symbiotic relationship with external
information systems is having a strong neuro-plastic effect on our brains.
As Information is externalized, the vacant brain-space is filled with emotion.
We, in fact, download emotion and often due to the social medias common
denomination driven algorithms, the most primitive ones. Here we are definitely not using our smartphone for higher
cognitive functions. Instead, it is the stone age monkey inside of us that is
getting activated. What a billion people now are busy doing with their
smartphones is what monkeys love to do too:
Emojis
The next evolving smartphone task for the monkey in the video to master
could be the emojis. Emojis are a sign based facial-emotional communication form
with a growing and evolving presence on social media. With
almost 2000 different emojis, they have become a complex visual language of the most basic
human feelings. Together with the dramatic rise in the use of multiple
exclamation points, they point at social media as a place of exchange of
feelings. SOCIAL MEDIA AND PSYCHOLOGIC DISRUPTION
Previously, we saw how the digital interfaces adapted to our brains and our
brain-interfaces adapted to the digital world. The next step in this symbiosis
is taking place in a reverse double movement, a chiasm, where we internalize the digital reality of social media and, at the same time, externalize ourselves as
public avatars. The Facebook avatar has for many young people become their own fetishized objectification of what so
far was something inside of them.
The Sphere Eversion of the Ego Imagine you hold a tennis
ball in your hand, and suddenly, the inside turns out, and the outside has turned
in. In this sphere
eversion, all that previous was inside of you and made you special as 'I' has now made
itself visible in the form of on-line memories, photos, and stories. Suddenly the subject is objectified.
In this state of not recognized self-alienation, we worship our
own simulacra-fetish together with our Facebook friends to such an extent that
our on-line reality overrules our previous intimate off-line existence. We, ourselves, have now become the object in a kind of, with inspiration from
Baudrillard's
terminology, simulacra,
in a non-material world of signs. However, the simulacra did not,
as Baudrillard foresaw, create a collective stronger and stronger longing for
the real. On the contrary, the simulacra, originally a poor simulation of
the real, gained so much momentum in the feedback of reinforcing social
media loops that it becomes a new real
hyper-reality strong
enough to degrade what before was considered to be real to the underworld of Hades or at least make it
uninteresting. Now the worst thing that can happen to a smartphone-addicted
teenager is to go with her parents for a campfire holiday in the wilderness
without mobile and internet.
No wonder that young people
who grow up with this almost unnoticed but nevertheless disruptive change are
confused about their identity. It has become a challenge for our stone-age
shaped brains to discern what is what and who is who. Of course, many young
people are able to handle the eversion of their social life quite well. However,
it is obvious to view the chiasmic
shift of identity as one of the major root causes for the contemporary mental
instability and anxiety among a growing number of young people.
When you upload yourself as selfies in a process where you
like a magazine or a newspaper, edit your mood and even with plastic surgery
alter your physical appearance, the traditional, by culture given,
identity-interface collapses. In the good old days, not so long ago, we hid and
protected our innermost feelings behind a
persona, a mask of
controlled rationality and objectivity. Today the element of control is even
more, but in a process where we upload a strictly edited avatar-version of
ourselves as feeling entities, radiating happiness and success. My own country
Denmark continues to score a top position in the
World Happiness
Report. I would politely question this kind of science. Much of the data for
the happiness investigation is generated by asking people how they feel about
themselves. I know my fellow Danes. Especially the younger generations are busy
constructing and projecting the image of a happy and successful social media
avatar-life. From here, they start to believe in their own creation to such an
extent that when they are presented with a questionary, asking them if they are
happy, they edit their answers in the same way as they edit their eversed
digital life. At the same time, Danish
youth have European record in alcohol consumption. It reminds me of the
American psychologist,
Dr, Bruce Alexander, who showed that it was the set and setting of 'Rat
Parks' in themselves that created the opioid abuse-patterns. When rats were
placed in optimal surroundings, they preferred water to opioids. So why do the
happiest people in the world drink so much?
We are furthermore among the top scores when it comes to the use of
anti-depressants.
The psychic eversion in the social media-sphere is a threat to our
Industrial life, carefully adjusted ego seen as an operating system. In its
new confusing web-driven inside-out-state, the ego reacts protective with narcissistic hypersensitivity,
and hence it craves exactly what is not available on the net: a safe space
around its highly complex crystal-like identity. When this vulnerable ego meets other
egos in the media bottleneck, there is no mental space
left that is not a potential zone of conflict. Cramped together on the tip of the needle, we are more and more
in danger of being perceived as emotional violations to others or vice versa.
Hence we have ended up in an impossible situation, where we are getting deeply offended
by the presence of each other's freedom. In the protection of our own freedom, we
cannot any longer allow other people to be free.
The egoic-interface has seen in a historical view, served us well, but now its
time is over. Like anything else that is born, has to die, so it is with our now outdated
and also seen from a Gaian viewpoint, reckless consumer-configuration of 'I'. After its short but beautiful blooming from
Beethoven to Woodstocks Jimi Hendrix to Wizzard Steve Jobs's demise, the buds of
the ego are falling off like autumn leaves. However, seen in the current state of
outrage and polarization, the death of the ego is more comparable to a star turning into a supernova
of screaming narcissistic egos blowing up in each other's outrage faces.
We are getting suffocated by the lack of oxygen in the digital
(sp)here and now. In this sense, Elon Musk's neuralink is already here. We
have
in our hyperconnectedness become present like voices in each other's brains. From
that position as a claustrophobic caveman, I roar to unknown troll-people who have
commented negatively or disliked my postings: Get out of my
cave!
THE
AMYGDALIAN WEB-KING In the French language, the word Civilisation means something that comes
from deep within. In German, the understanding of Zivilisation is more
perceived as a thin layer of lacquer. Beneath that fragile layer lurks a
beast. The German way of understanding what civilization is is giving more sense in
this context. One should imagine that the layer of civilization had grown
thicker since the Medieval period, or at least since the 2. World War, but the
recent developments all over the globe are pointing at the fact that the lacquer
at any time can dissolve.
The Stockholm-enslaved Cortex
The epidemic of paranoia and outrage shows that we again
are close to scenarios where the beast of fear and anger crowns the
Amygdala as the
Tyrant King, and the good Cortex King
of sound reasoning is reduced to a
Stockholm slave.
When the cortex of cognition is enslaved in false sympathy for its tormentor, it
is never capable of producing something of high quality. That, to a large
extent, explains the low academic quality in contemporary academia. In fact, it
is very simple. Above all, any higher cognitive functions of the brain need
calm, peace, and a kind of exited but well-tempered curiosity to function
optimally. Enslaved by hyperbolic emotions our higher intellectual
brain-functions cannot produce anything of cognitive quality.
To a large extent, the characteristics of movements from QAnon to Woke can be
derived from the fundamental limbic outrage of fear, anger and the corresponding
flight or fight-mood. The causes for this rise of animal instincts are multiple.
However, the psychological sphere eversion on social media, as described above, has,
for sure a great part to play in this disruptive change. The amygdala is among
many triggers provoked into action by the locationless location of social media.
The amygdala is programmed to react when danger comes too close and this is
exactly what happens on the net. In this sense the
psycho-spheric eversion of our soul
in itself is percieved as a constant alarming threat. Sitting as voices in
each others' heads and as feelings inside of our hearts, we are, in fact,
emotionally hurting each other just by
being on-line. In this sense, the sphere eversion happening on social media is creating a constant
state of trauma. This makes the Amygdala
the King of Social Media. The amygdala knows of no time and always reacts
directly to a threat. Any foreign viewpoint presented on social media triggers
the amygdala into action simply because of its eversive closeness.
When we were cavemen and even much more before that time, we had to some extend
better survival chances by now and then to crown the amygdala as our King to
facilitate a
fight or flight mode. However, since we got more and more grey matter to
'language up' time and space in inner simulations of outer survival scenarios, the
need for limbic reactions diminished.
This is basically what happened since the ice-age where our risk of dying a
violent death was sky high as compared with today. However, a constantly agitated amygdala, as we can observe it
today, has never been a good idea. It has never ever
done any good in terms of preservation or renewal of civilization. It can only
act destructively.
When we take a look at all the recent phenomenons from woke to QAnon from a
little higher level of abstraction, their common denominator becomes evident:
The cancellation of history, the distrust, the focus on enmity, the anger, and
outrage, and the polarization is all symptomatic signs of
an overheated amygdala and a weakened cortex.
In this way, the Amygdala has become
the spider in the web.
Fear, anger, and regression
In psychology, this phenomenon is understood as a process of regression.
When put under the 'right' pressure, we begin to regress. Imagine an old school
tape recorder playing your melody of biological life reverse. After a few bars,
archaic parts of earlier
stages of cognitive evolutionary developments take over the lead. This is due to the
simple fact that what evolution has created last is most vulnerable, and hence
the first to collapse in stress scenarios. Our reasoning abilities are the first
to be substituted by the evolutionary earlier, time tested and hence more robust
symbolic-thinking operative systems when we are in the clutches of fear.
Due to this
atavistic regression, paranoia conspiracy people understand the world as we did in
earlier historical stages.
Splitting into darkness and light In Indian mythology, we saw good and evil as two hands, both
belonging to the same God. In our western Christian
religious constructions, we tend to cast out the light as Lucifer. God becomes the opposite
of the devil.
In psychology, this phenomenon, when taken to extremes, is called splitting. It
originally was a term describing a defence mechanism in people with borderline
personality disorder. However, by now, it seems that splitting has become a
general thing to do on all levels of the American sueciety.
The splitting in good and evil is most probably a tribally rooted genetic
program in us. Once, it pawed the way for us being merciless when it came to
killing tribes that were threatening our resources, while at the same time we
could be
compassionate and kind to our own kin. The mechanism of splitting made it
possible for us to de-humanize other tribes in the eternal bio-algorithmic
strive for energy capture. Since our neigboring tribes often looked almost
identical to us, it became necessary to initialize the process of splitting out
of minimal differences.
Allow me here a little deviation within the deviations already made. Still
today, intelligent people think that wars and conflicts arise out of ideological
differences. It is the other way round: Ideological differences are invented for
the sake of tribal energy capture. In a library in Ireland, monks belonging to
two different kinds of sects started throwing heavy books at each other. One
group believed that you had to make the sign of the cross with two fingers, the
other with three. Only one group can sit and feast on the resources after the
battle, and that was always the real name of the game. The list of fake
ideological differences invented in the fight for resources is endless.
Protestants, Catholics, Sunnis versus Shias, black versus white people, and
democrats versus republicans.
This, in the past necessary survival program, but by now, an outdated mental
disorder is most clearly visible in the paranoia conspiracy
segment. Here Bill Gates and even the Dalai Lama have been cast as absolute
evil blood-drinking monsters, and the ones that have discovered this
'truth' have become crusaders of the light. This splitting is extremely
unhealthy for the psyche. I have in my own network seen how damaging this is to
mental health. A friend of mine had a friend who committed suicide after jumping
into the black hole of blood-conspiracy. Another friend cannot sleep at night.
In the following scene from the remarkable German film, Der
Untergang, Hitler is portrayed as a vulnerable, fragile being with
compassionate feelings towards his friends and family.
This scene is disturbing for that
mind that has split the world into
pure good and pure evil because Hitler, in this scene, does no longer fit the
narrative of embodying pure evil.
Seeing Hitler as pure intentional evil is made difficult by showing him also
able to show human feelings. The projection of evil falls back in its own space
and opens up a unique chance for us to realize that we ourselves contain the
evil we see outside ourselves. We could, almost all of us under the right
collective circumstances, be an executioner in Auschwitz because we all have
genetically inherited the ability to be kind to our own kin and at the same time
de-humanize the others.
This is a disturbing
realization, so it is tempting to unload the heavy parcel of responsibility of
evil in persons we create in contrast to our own goodness. A well known psychologic mechanism is that the more we split the world into good and
evil, the more what we see around us as reality is, in fact, a mirrored
distortion of our inner not recognized subjectivity. Splitting and
self-awareness cannot co-exist.
The 'truth' is that we all are Kali. We ourselves are a whole palette of
everything in between darkness and light. We are full of complex and
contradictory grey zones, and the striving for enlightenment is not to get rid
of our dark sides but to fully acknowledge and even celebrate them in the light
of consciousness. When we take responsibility for our own darkness, we cease to
be obsessed with
finding evil outside ourselves.
SYMBOLIC & MAGICAL THINKING VERSUS REASON We humans, were as a specie pattern-seeking machines long time before we got
language. Apes are also pattern seeking like us. Our pattern-dentification
abilities, on a later stage of evolution became fundamental building blocks in
our cognition machinery. These ancient cognition-layers are still present within
our brain. Most of us are intuitivly able to perceive connections and
meaningful structures in a chaos of seemingly random data, like when we see
an animal or a face in a cloud.
Thisarchaic cognition modality was developed to find survival-based 'meaning' through
similarities and analogs.
When we humans began to use language, the primarily visual based patterns we
identified around us became structured in symbols. Our first primitive
word-based cognition was most probably based on associative symbolic thinking.
We can stil observe this
archaic mechanism in our dreams. Here the symbolic arrangement of patterns works like associative sequences. Only one common
denominator is enough to establish a connection. You dream about blood in one
scene, and in the next, you see a man in a red uniform. A few hundred years ago, this mushroom was
believed to cure impotence:
The best science is made in cooperation between our symbolic and
intellectual modi operandi. Our pattern-seeking intuition is the form of
imagination the first pathfinder to enter new frontiers. Then, after a while, solid science
arrives and gets the final word.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
I believe in intuitions and inspirations.
I sometimes feel that I am right.
I do not know that I am.
Einstein
The ability to connect random dots through asociative similarities is called
apophenia.
At its best symbolic apophenia creates poetry and pathways to genial intuitions that later
stand the test of reality. At its worst, it is a sign of paranoid schizophrenia.
The symbolic and intuitive brain is a horrible master but a brilliant servant.
The symbolic-apophenian modality found its role as a servant to logic thinking and
science in the Age of
Enlightenment. However, even the father of quantum physics, Niels Bohr,
had a horseshoe on his front door. When asked if he believed in it, he replied
that he did not, but that he was told that it worked even if one did not believe
in it. Niels Bohr's reply is witty precisely because it shows how different modi
operandi of thinking compete for leadership in even the most rational of us.
However, when fear and stress crowns the Amygdala as our King, we seem to
regress and rely solely on our archaic symbol-making brain.
Reversible Causality One striking feature of the associative nature of symbolic thinking is that
it makes the distinction between
cause and effect irrelevant. Once the apophenian dots are connected in
symbolic meaning, the effect can be the cause and/or vice versa. It does not
matter in this modus operandi what dot came first in a causal chain of events.
Hence is enough when
one of the most famous conspiracy theorists,
David Icke, claims that the secret
evil elite has planted COVID 19 as a hoax in
order to replace cash with digital money. The paranoia-conspiracy segments
accept that as a fact without any need for documentation because the connection
between currency as potential infectious is perceived in a symbolic way of
cognition. In Icke's symbolic thinking mode, it is easy to reverse cause and
effect. Hence the fact that cash currency has become less used under the
pandemic due to the possibility of being infectious becomes a cause instead of an
effect. The goose has wings in order to fly in this ontological universe.
We see the same mechanisms of logic reversal when governments, in their attempts
to control the corona-pandemic, restrict people's freedom. This causality is now
reversed, so COVID19 is planted in order for governments to gain dictatorial
control. Armed with reversed causality the conspiritual person feels himself in
possession of magic insight and powers and serving a noble cause.
The same basically dream-like reversal causality I often hear from conspiracy people in the form of
the following argument, an argument that will get defeated by reality in the
second act of the Covidian play: There is no Covid 19. I do not know anybody
who had it. Therefore lift the restrictions.
As far as my logical conclusions go, the conspiracy-zombie has not yet met any
persons with Covid 19 because we have restrictions.
The resistance against vaxines as a question of persona
liberty is like a pandemy
itself following an old archetypical gameplay. -
HathiTrust Digital Library
A summary In times of insecurity and anxiety due to economic decline and societal
disruptions, from pandemic to financial, the last evolved thin layer of reasoning
becomes under pressure from an overheated amygdala. This pressure is greatly
amplified by the psychological eversion taking place in the location-less
location of social media. Our stone age brain is not constructed to live in a situation where
our inner feelings are uploaded and exposed in the hands of our new media-avatar-identity and
here subjected and dopamine addicted to a constant scopophilic approval from a
digital tribe of friends and followers. In this invading emotional eversive
vulnerability, the amygdala is provoked into a continuous brain-impairing stress
reaction.
´
Caught in the crossfire of this two-front war between the past and the future,
between the cave-brain and modern technology, our last evolved, thin German
layer of reason becomes reduced to a Stockholm slave of low cognitive value. The
old and resilient amygdalian dictator of rage now rules through tribalized splitting
and symbolic meaning-making free from causality.
The occupation of the US
Capitol Buiding In this cortexial collapse, crowd-mobilizing symbol-meanings made out
of random and non-causal dot-making found their way as a deluge filling up
Capitol Hill with a new crowd-breed of strange
Tiger King-like
creatures.
In this field of apophenian weeds, the deluded magician
dances as a Grim Reaper. He thinks himself to be a shaman, but he, in fact, is a weird
self-created, and self-performative product of random dots collected
from google and fertilized by social media likings. He belongs to a new breed of
sleepwalking identity-zombies. In this day-dreaming identity-state, the Don
Quixote of windmill-conspiracy has awoken to deed. His stage is
the twilight zone that follows the absence of wakefulness.
Jake Angeli, aka Q-Shaman - US Capitol Building
Jake Angeli is in his performative need for likings a lone wolf
with only associative connections to QAnon. In the photo above, one can observe
his need to stand out in ecstasy in order to feel himself. At the other end of
the specter, we find collectives of shared dream realities with a more enormou
potential for societal destruction.
QAnon,
Release the Kraken,
Oath Keepers, Three
Percenter, Proud Boys,
and last but not least, various more loosely organized religious groupings.
Scientific American has published an article arguing for a
'Shared Psychosis between Donald Trump and his Loyalists'.To
reserve this diagnosis only for Trump supporters shows how the polarizing
tendency in politics has gripped even the scientific communities in the sense
that the same pschologists would not dare to use the same wording on Black Lives
Matter or Woke as such.Free from the need of political weaponizing of the diagnosis-trend, I would
claim that fields of shared psychosis by now are
popping up in all walks of life, from left to right, from black to white, and from top
to bottom.
THE GAME THAT PLAYS PEOPLE In
A Game Designer's Analysis of QAnon, Reed Berkowitz, a designer of games
meant to be played in reality, convincingly argues that he, in fact, had created
a game that was almost similar to QAanon's narrative. He has also observed how
people participating in such games often began to follow wild and unlogic
assumptions that derailed the gameplan.
As mentioned, cognitive regression tends to follow in the slipstream of economic
decline. However, in a time with social media, gaming, and VR, the possibility
of making up and sustaining fantasy worlds while living, in reality, has become
much bigger than ever before. The internet has, in fact, in itself created a
platform of virtual reality, a digital sign-world, visionary close to
Baudrillard's
pre-internet description of simulacra. On this platform of simulated
reality, the commercially motivated algorithms of social media octavates this
basic unreality. If I seek right or left-wing viewpoints on youtube, youtube
will trawl its library and present me with more tubes with the same
information-bias. Hence we, in the interest of click-bait capitalism, are
constantly fed with rabbit-hole digging unison information-streams. Once you are
into conspiracy theories, the advertizers will earn more money on you by
confirming your apophenian dot-making than presenting you with new viewpoints.
This mechanism is undermining the very principle of dialogue and, therefore, in
its nature anti-democratic. Instead of dialogue, we get whirlpools of
reinforcing feedback loops of fairy tale narratives, so strong that they take
over the reality-making engine of both groups and individuals. Reed Berkowitz's
job as a game designer has been overtaken by the simulation of the web. However,
he will never get unemployed if he should ever decide to team up with his foe.
Pattern seeking in big data Let us now have a closer look at how the hyperreality unfolds in our
apophenian brain. The Big Data scenario we suddenly live in is so overwhelming
that it appears random and hence scary for the untrained eye that is not able
to ascend to a higher level of abstraction to grasp the bigger pictures. The
problem here is that we tend to stay at the same level of abstraction as we were
conditioned to as children. We have learned to read and write and comprehend
meaning in, let's say, a daily 10-gigabit scenario. The way we write newspaper
articles, make television programs is fine-tuned to that gold-bearing
information layer. The data we need to understand has, however, by now, followed
an exponential curve in its steep ascend, and hence we are not able to grasp the
pictures that would emerge on higher astronaut-abstraction-levels. In times of
disruptive societal changes, 10-gigabit pattern-seeking humans will run around
like scared chickens confined in a fence. To get out of that enclosure, all they
need would be to use their wings and fly to reach the clarifying overview of,
let's say, 100-terabit patterns.
The real changes and challenges of our time are huge. However, they seem like
passing through us without us taking notice. Even our experts are like Generals
in the First World War, commanding thousands of young men into the machinegun
fire their old brains were unable to understand. The inability of good old
school experts to understand our current situation is due to their outdated
level of abstraction. Only lofty terabit psychonauts, meditators, and crazy
visionaries are by now able to ascend to a level where they can see and identify
the tsunami of change. We are ostrich-occupied with
10-gigabit bogus-challenges like 5G, vaccines, or we are like ostriches with heads buried in
spculative language models trying to uncover power-structures. Hence we do not see that we are standing on the rails of an
approaching train despite John Lennon's visionary warning:
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other
plans.
We have difficulties identifying and
addressing 'the unknown new' since we have not encountered it before and are on
the wrong level of abstraction.
Whether the story of how native Indians
could not see the ship of Captain Cook because they had never seen such a
thing before is true or not, it still holds some wisdom for us humans. While
being busy with conspiracy- and identity paranoia, we did not see the real Tsunami of
change.
As a survival strategy in our inability to identify patterns on higher
abstraction levels, we start to make wildly misinterpreting symbolic
connections of dots that only are connected in our own chicken-heads. In the
absence of causality, the field of imagined conspiracies takes a new level. Seen
from the ego-operative system, that is comforting because then we own this 'truth',
and our life gets a purpose in the thrill of discovering more and more mostly
evil and sinister connections and smoking guns. Suddenly our ego feels that it
is control and that is essentially the only food the ego needs. We feel we have taken
responsibility and are 'figuring it out ourselves' rather than trusting authorities.
We have in our own mind now become detectives in the noble investigation into
criminal activity hidden behind secret symbols.
I am my own editor of understanding
The subjective amplified feeling of being in charge was, however, already
present before we had to orient in a minefield of rabbit-holes. The change that
happened with Gutenberg's letterpress art has repeated itself in the invention
of the internet. The monopoly of knowledge got broken, and common mortals now
had to deal with the blessing and curse of having more knowledge, but also more
responsability. With social media, Tom, Harry, and Dick transformed into being the editors of their own life as
compared to before where it was an exclusive task performed by newspaper,
television editors and institutional experts. Therefore it is no coincidence
that many of the so-called influencers
have become paranoic conspiracy believers and propagators. Through the echo-room
made by their followers, they have been mislead to believe that the know better
than the experts.
A short summary
Through social media's advertising
clickbait-oriented algorithms, we, through eversion, are merging with
like-minded souls rather than disturbed by opposing opinions, and from here, the
hyper-apophenian dopamine-regulated aha-truth-rush becomes a tribal war-fare with the suicidal power of the many.
In a time where young people perceive their world through selfie filters,
reality as such is no longer protecting us from this overdrive. It flourishes as an
Alternate Reality Game where the stressed-out regressive brain is
transforming reality into wildcards of deeper and ever deeper symbolic
connections. In this reinforcing rabbit hole, the accelerating feedback of
'meaning' creates QAnon and the like as black holes of 'reality' with such force
of gravity that escape is as difficult as making sense in a discussion with a
believer of a blood-drinking elite.
From the political to the religious spectrum, outrage and paranoia groups are sharing a common psychic configuration consisting of
amygdalian rage, splitting, apophenian, symbolic, and reverse causality thinking.
On top of that cocktail sits a little, but eversed narcissistic vulnerable ego fighting
for a safe space on the size of a planet. No wonder that horizontal dialogue has
been canceled. However, without dialogue, societal progress is not possible.
Think for your self - and connect the dots.
It interesting to observe how a conspiracy theory movement
like QAnon objectifies its own symbolic thinking. This
projection indicates an almost non-existent self-awareness.
It seems that the first group to display this new kind of
narcissism, in fact, was my own New Age tribe. As mentioned in the beginning, it
has shocked me to see how large a segment of 'spiritual' people and even from my
own mature age-group has succumbed to a cocktail ultra-right-wing mobilization and paranoia
babble.
Let me now go on a meta-level in which I try to make myself visible in
the equation. I leave it to you to evaluate if I am honest here or not. Am I not a splitter of worlds here in this polarizing and not too
flattering description of what I see? I would say no due to the following
reasons. Firstly, I am not motivated by rage or fear. I bear no ill will towards
the outragers. I would any time like to engage them in a respectful dialogue if
it was possible. Secondly, in meditative introspection, I clearly recognize that I,
too, have the potential of rage inside of me. In fact, we all have. The crucial question
here is if this snake is standing in the light of consciousness or lurking in
the dark.
Had I been a university youngster today, I might very well have been in the
choir of pitch voices you can hear in the video displayed below.
'QAnonic' academia In an old dying tree, we can observe how the tree can still produce new leaves in abundance while rotting away from the inside. On one
side, we are close to the greatest scientific achievements ever, and on the
other side, we can observe a pandemic spread in the West of
intellectual decay,
especially
in the
humanities.
How can we blame crazy conspiracy theorists not to care about reason and facts
when even academia does not care about them other than reducing them to mere instruments of
power play?
In this sense,
academia and movements like QAnon are fueling each other.
In the disregard of true Greek dialogue and the general mistrust in 'facts', the
humanities in the form of Critical Race Theory, Woke, and similar movements have
regressed to a common platform of medieval fundamentalism. The student takeover
of Evergreen State College in 2017 showed a remarkable escalation in crowd rage. Here at Evergreen, blind amygdalian
rage defeated the open and free intellect of Brett
Weinstein in something closer to an octagon of violence than a
center of learning. He was
chased away from Evergreen State College, never to return.
Student takeover of Evergreen State College 2017
The collective madness displayed at Evergreen
State College shows the woke- and cancel culture as a polarizing hate-driven,
conspiracy-oriented culture. The archetypical paranoia-narrative of an evil
brotherhood of conspirators has here taken the form of a hegemonial clan of white men
with conscious and/or unconscious racist belief systems.
Woke, outrage, cancel, gender, and identity-cultures are related to the
phenomenon of paranoia conspiracy in the sense that they all harvest social momentum
in the same mythologic demonization and scapegoating of their enemies and in
their disregard for dialogue and facts.
In fact, the same tendency has by now infected American politics with the
dangerous polarization between Democrats and Republicans.
The worship of young rage
At present, we just have to look at Gretha Thunberg to
realize the magnitude with which the above-mentioned psychological regressive
mechanisms of blindness that have gripped our global collective understanding of reality. A little girl full of amygdalian
polarizing anger and with not fully developed consciousness and cognition has become
our worshipped beacon of hopeful change. It is ridiculous and sad at the same
time.
As far as I can see, in this chaos there are viable solutions presented by the
good old school intelligentsia opposing these new phenomenons of outrage. The solution lies both beyond the horizon of Woke and the
ones who advocate for the
return of scientific reason and dialogue. The noble old school academics of
free speech and argument cannot save the Titanic from sinking.
The modern rage-groups have entered the underworld of day-dreams that rises in the absence of a
normal wakeful state. Prior to the loss of high quality cognition is the
implosion of consciousness.
As images are seen in a mirror, so the universe
is an image in the mirror of Consciousness.
Tripura Rahasya XL verse 53-54
The
mind is like a reflection in a mirror:
Though it is insubstantial,
it is not nonexistent. P'ang Yun, Layman P'ang - China
Consciousness, understood, not by the objects it reflects, but as the
abstract ability to aware itself and in itself is maybe the most precious and mysterious
phenomenon in life.
We are not capable of defining
this familiar and profoundly mysterious entity.
Could it (the Soul) be a constituent of our universe, ignored by the
physicist, but infinitely more important than light?
Alexis Carrel - Man, the Unknown
What is reflected in the mirror of consciousness? Light... Light has, together
with sound or vibration, by mystic traditions from East to West been used as
metaphors for the bridge between an unknowable consciousness beyond time and
space and our universe as time-space manifest in the human mind.
Hence it gives meaning to use a light bulb as a metaphor for mind-manifest
consciousness. Lamps shine with different lux, and so do people.
Consciousness in its abstract primordial, but time manifest form in a mind is variable in intensity
in each of us. Some are by nature, but also occasionally through cultivation,
more de-lighted, conscious, even super conscious as the
monk you can see
below. This view of consciousness comes close to what
Dr. Brazdau has
termed
the Consciousness Quotient Inventory (CQ-i)
High-amplitude gamma activity in the frontal lobes is associated
with high levels of abstract awareness. Rinpoche Youngey Mingur is
a olympic practitioner when it comes to
consciousness.
Hence you will not find this man and the
like among a goup of outragers.
At the other end of the bell curve we find the sleep-wakers. In these days it
seems that the whole bell has been moved towards the half-wake state where we
tend to dream, even while seemingly being awake.
In this sense, the Capitol Hill was filled with sleep-walkers.
In the room I sit in, there is a lamp where I, through a knob, can regulate the
intensity of the light. When I sit in darkness, I cannot see anything. When I
slowly turn up the light, more and more objects in a larger and larger radius
become visible.
In a calm, cultivated
consciousness,
we are able to expand our light-full
awareness to encompass the context we live in.
In this quantitative expansion, we can see beyond the borders of our own body's
self-interest and aware other beings and their viewpoints. It is important to
remember that this consciousness is primordial as compared to our ability
to reason and use language.
Consciousness, together with the higher cognitive reasoning faculties is, one of the
first things we lose in a rage. There is a lot of anger and
fear in our global mental atmosphere these days, and it seems to be infectious like Covid19. In states of anger
and fear, consciousness
understood as a relative circle of empathic awareness, narrows in. It shrinks,
and we lose the ability to see, to acknowledge a and to 'aware' the 'other'.
Consciousness and Cognition are the last and, therefore, utmost fragile
evolutionary flowers. They cannot bloom under the rule of the Amygdalian King.
This delicate awake state is, in fact, a sine qua non for my
beloved astronaut view in the sense that our awareness can expand much further
than what is needed to aware others. It can, with intensity, expand
into space, at least felt so subjectively in the head of a meditator. Seen from
this inner space, one's own and others' egos become utterly small and
insignificant. In intenser states of consciousness I am able to disidentify with
small external things that otherwise in a state of identity-political overdrive
would make me rage in a fight for a safe
my-space.
Oh Friend! Understand
The body is like the ocean
Rich with hidden treasures.
Mirabai
A bulb gets its power from the current. Consciousness procures its energy from
the battery of the body. This particular pathway of energy is linked to the
near-sense-based awareness of inner and outer body sensations. We feel
our skin, but we also feel emotions like hunger, love and pain and so on
inside the body from the anus and up to the throat.
There is an important difference between the long-distance based sense of sight
and the short-distance grounded 'sensual' awareness in and of the body itself.
There is an inversely proportional energy relationship between sight and
fellings. This claim you can easily verify for yourself by closing your eyes for
a few seconds. When you close your eyes the inner sensations of your body rise
like a tide, and you suddenly become aware of what is going on in there.
Here comes the next claim. Every time you focus your outgoing eyesight, you use
energy from your body-battery. The act of concentrated cognitive seeing is a
very energy consuming brain activity. Every time you shut down the act of
focussed seeing, you build up life-energy. Hence Meditation in its purest form
is that simple as shutting up your eyes by closing them or by staring in a
seeing without seeing mode. Even 2 minutes of this practice, will give you more
energy.
Now imagine what happened to the brain when it began to stare down in the magic
smartphone mirror. Imagine the brain like a petri dish full of broccoli sprouts.
These sprouts will naturally expand and grow in the direction of the sunlight.
The same is the case with your neurons. The neurons specialized in facilitating
eyesight will have a grand feast but unfortunately, in occupied
brain-territories in fields robbed away from the close-sense neurons. A
process of capacity trade-off takes place in the sense that all the close-range
sense-based neurons are getting starved by your lack of attention. In this
starvation, the brain compartments, facilitating close-sensual body-awareness,
shrinks. The result is a loss of groundedness in the body. This very being in
the body is furthermore in opposition to the over dominance of long-range senses
in the sense that the procuration of energy for consciousness diminishes. Hence
the level of consciousness IQ will drop and open the gateway to dreamy Q-shaman
realities.
Imagine now a world of a billion brains with starved neuronal contact to the
bodies that host them, all the time staring into the smartphone gateway to their
soul-eversion.
Consciousness killed by chemicals Here comes yet another suspect in the thriller named, who killed
consciousness.I cannot help exploring this apparent regressive loss of cognition and
consciousness as a result of the hundred, for human biology, new and foreign
chemicals in our food and surroundings. We do not know the long-term effect of
these chemicals, and we do not have much clue about how they interact in us when
they all come together in our cells. I envision how millennials have begun
their life with 9 months in a chemical bath. Many of these new chemicals,
in and around us, are acting as estrogen-like endocrine
disrupting chemicals, even
affecting puberty. The
semen quality
in men has gone radically down, and so has the
level of
testosterone. Phthalates in plastic are furthermore linked to a
decline in cognitive functioning. Seen in this light, genderfluidity is more
than a new identity concept. It could also very well be a result of damaging
chemical exposure that has left men in a no mans zone between traditional
genders.
We cannot rule out that even the declining mental health in the form of the
underlying profile of paranoia as a common denominator in the contemporary
conspiracy and rage movements are a sign of
toxic exposure to environmental chemicals.
Seen in the smoke from the above illustration, a future vision of algorithmic
death and rebirth takes form:
The Titanic
consumer-based ego-identity is sinking
in the piled-up non-solvable Hegelian contradictions of the, by now, old and
over-polluting fossil fuel-based 'sueciety'.
Here in this highly complex endgame of new birth, the reasons for everything
become everything. All is interconnected. As pointed out before, the social
media's
sphere eversion of the ego-interface has put the understanding of who we are
under pressure. The extroverted emotional storms following the web-eversion in
tandem with chemicals plus all the other mentioned societal reasons and still
other, by me not recognized factors seems to kill consciousness, understood as
the primordial ability in a relaxed state to aware what is going on in a radius
larger than the survival-boundaries of one's own body.
The opioid rise of Tiger King Especially in America, there furthermore seems to be an increasing
opioid crisis with a
rising number of fatal outcomes. (Here, I, out of a
life-long personal experience, do
not include the family of 'drugs' called psychedelics.) The opioid death rate
is, however, only the top of the iceberg. In the Netflix serial
Tiger King, one of the
sinister causes behind the entertaining madness of hillbillies going berzerk is
opioids. Joe Exotic and the people around seem all in some way or the other
to be drug abusers. The misusers of the opioid drugs seem, at least in the
Netflix serial, to cultivate a unique kind of performative paranoic craziness
that mirrors the carnival-like occupation of Capitol Hill. There was no good old
school GOP-behavior in the mad invading crowds. I am not saying that the
right-wing hippies jumping around in Capitol Hill are drug abusers, but that
there seems to be a general opioid abuse even in the bible belt that has
culture-morphed larger segments of the Tump believers into potential actors in a
coming Tiger King II serial. This is Burning Man hippie-culture in deliverance
through midwest redneck culture. What crazy and fascinating performative
carnival times we live in!
The rabbit-'hollish' implosion of consciousness From a meditator's viewpoint, it is compelling to compare a black hole's
ability to suck up light with the various collective echo-chamber rabbit-holes'
ability to kill consciousness. In this respect, it does not matter from where in
the political or religious spectrum the echo-chamber arises. It is always, as
rage increases, connected with a loss in wakefulness. The lower intensity in
wakefulness again opens up for daydreaming narratives to identity-define the
story-telling human animal.
In this way, almost all contemporary groupings, even the good old
media-institutions like CNN, by now, have a gravity wave that sucks up the light
that gives us in-sight.
Highly organized societies are always synced with high levels of one-pointed
collective consciousness. In this wakefulness, life seems to organize in
'civilizatoric' state-driven order defying the
second law
of thermodynamics. Seen from the astronaut level, it implies that
consciousness in its abstract suchness, defined as a mirror and not as the
objects reflected in the mirror, is primordial to sound reason and cognition and
ultimately is an anti-entropic 'force' that comes and go like the tide.
Consciousness in the cowstable
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
W. H. Davies
In India, I met many Masters in the art of doing
nothing and therefore being nothing while in activity. One of them was
S.N.Bhaharadwaj. The abundant level of signal-chemical neuron firing in this
95-year-old man just by doing nothing was really something.
The modern man has made so many accumulations in his
house that he has become a slave of that accumulation.
In a way, everybody could have said that. It is
not an intellectual rocket-science statement. The remarkable thing is that
Bhaharadwaj owned this statement. In fact, he held almost nothing apart from
every word that came out of his mouth.
Our Western culture is geared to secure
comfort to a degree we, as a species, never have encountered before. What
happened to the good old Medieval winters spent with no TV or smartphone and our
cave-dwelling trance-days spent staring into the fire?
I am again reminded by Bhaharadwaj. He had many, seen from a western viewpoint,
crazy friends. One Himalayan hermit had come to visit him for a few months. The
hermit's 'hotel' was a cow stable. He was most of the time sitting in the hay
among the cows and buffalos with crossed legs and closed eyes. Another of his
friends, also in his late 90'ties, had lived 12 years on a churchyard. Up to his
pension, he had lived and worked as a train-station master.
He was married too, and in this strange country, the wife did not complain when
he, 60 years old, left his home for the Himalayas and churchyards around the
cremation grounds in Varanasi. After realizing his inner spirit-truth, 20 years
later, he went home again.
India is still a place of crazy
Soul! At least it still was not so long ago. It is a country harboring a
Charles Dickens-like rainbow of extreme individualities, all claiming to be nothing.
The room in which we were was
dark and unbearable hot, Indian summer June 2000. There was no fan in the room,
and when I tried to fan myself with a piece of paper, he mocked me for being a
slave of my skin-sensing apparatus.
At that time I was, however, free
of thoughts like the ones you can read here. I felt like a cloud of
consciousness.
After the meeting with the stationmaster, I spontaneously felt like hugging him
goodbye.
I embraced him. His presence
felt like something in between fire and ice.
He replied:
Why does this
man embrace this body?
My wife says it stinks!
What did he actually say to me? Or
maybe more correct: What did I make out of it? He
said: You are
more than this body! Do not attach so much to it.
This man was not a slave of his accumulations. And he owned this
statement. Therefore it had a great impact.
In India, I met men and women who had deliberately chosen to live outside
comfort zones. They had dedicated their life to Spartanian discipline and having
nothing, these, mostly super old people, seemed to have everything.
Sita from Hoshiarpur - 85 years
Shabdanand, 82 and Lahori
Pandiji, 100
(All the photos taken in 1995)
The 110 year old Bassi Gulam
Sant was a
famous holy man in the 1930'ties. Since then he
dissapeared in the Himalayan wilderness.
When he was around 90 he moved to live
in a small temple compund in the countryside
outside Hoshiarpur. He left his body 14 days
after I met him.
You have to seek God in the summer of life.
Only then will he be with you in the winter.
At the age of 110, Bassi Gulam was still in his spiritual flowering! So growing
old and poor in meditation is not that bad. In the West, we glorify youth. I am
quite sure that this is the reason why I have never observed this last geriatric
flowering in the west. We die, not like a supernova of spirit, but fade away as
increasingly poor replicas of our young heyday-life in the 20'ties.
Living pre-cambric waves, washed ashore Just by looking at the abundant spiritual life in the almost dead body of
Bassi Gulam Sant I realised the following. We are all ancient.
Our unique attributes evolved over a period of roughly
6 million years. They represent modifications of great ape attributes that are
roughly 10 million years old, primate attributes that are roughly 55 million
years old, mammalian attributes that are roughly 245 million years old,
vertebrate attributes that are roughly 600 million years old, and attributes of
nucleated cells that are perhaps 1,500 million years old.
If you think it is unnecessary to go that far back in the tree of life to
understand our own attributes, consider the humbling fact that we share with
nematodes [roundworms], the same gene that controls appetite. At most, our
unique attributes are like an addition onto a vast multiroom mansion. It is
sheer hubris to think that we can ignore all but the newest room.
David Sloan Wilson, Evolution for Everyone, 2007 The salty songs of the pre-cambric ocean is still heard in the silent
pulsing of our cells. We are walking waves, arisen from the primordial water and
with us we carry a bag of junk-DNA but also survival-information from all ages.
In fact, we are living zoological museums, and we can revisit ourselves as such
through entheogens and meditation. I consider this inward journey the noblest of
all crusades. In this sense, Herman Hesse was a psychic archeologist:
(We) consist of everything the world consists of, each of us, and
just as our body contains the genealogical table of evolution as far back as the
fish and even much further, so we bear everything in our soul that once was
alive in the soul of men. Hermann
Hesse, Demian
The archaic cycles of Hormesis As hunter-gatherers, our
brains got hardwired to a life lived in contrast between periods of inactivity
and/or search for food and outburst of intense hunting activities
or war.
This pendulous pattern repeated itself in our eating habits where prolonged
periods of fasting, due to lack of food, were ended by a feast when finally an animal
arrived on the campfire.
Due to our countless impersonal incarnations as human life on the east
African savannah, we have accumulated a genetic inheritance that makes us
adapted to
biphasic hormetic stress. In fact, even worms seem to
do better when living in such cycles. Since
nematodes still live in us
as reused DNA-strings, it would not be farfetched to assume that hormetic stress
is essential on all levels of human existence, from cellular to psychological life.
Humans have as all other bio-mass entities always strived for survival in
bi-phasic stress cycles. Otherwise we would not be here.
The dreams of paradise and the discovery of the snake of death
With the wast arrival of thoughts and language, we also started to dream about it.
However, with the gift of imagining an ideal future and thinking about
strategies how to get there, we stumbled upon a snake in this new paradise:
We
realized that we were mortals and that one day we had to die.
The arrival of thoughts in which our brains could envision a future, was a
Sophoclesian blessing. The brains that were able to imagine coming
scenarios of threats lived longer than the happy-go-lucky brains. The
worry-thinking what-if?-brains won the evolutionary race. Today the same
brain is killing us.
As an accumulation of genetic reuse, human life is always doomed to face new
survival-scenarios with outdated biological hardware.
As a consequence of the discovery of death,
religions arose as shared fields of imagination to encounter the arrival of this new enemy.
Religions are a reult of th ability to think.
Our ideas about heaven and hell mirrored in our dreams, both envisioned an ideal
life on earth and survival-threatening scenarios. This
religious need for dreaming up ideal death-encountering paradisical lives had a
profound impact on our reality. The dream of heaven gave, as the perfect
hunter-gatherer prey-prize, direction and drive to our civilizational
creations. While dreaming up the ideal after-death scenario, we, in fact,
began to create it on earth. In this sense civilisation became a simulation of
pradise.
The newly arrrived fear, not of an immanent death, but of the brain simulated
one, also gave civilization a possibility of controlling its inhabitants.
Our efforts to create before-death security and abundance became formed with the
subconscious power of a religious crusade. In this sense, the blind ever-ongoing
strive for material abundance and security has become the demonic returned
religion of atheists living in a secular society. Their unconsciously fear-based
strive towards progressing wealth is not directed towards a Kingdom of the
afterlife but is, in fact, a reverse-camouflaged unconscious
religious strive for a Kingdom of
before-death. You can always recognize people belonging to this, for themselves
not recognized religiousness, by their
Dawkins-like crusade
against religious people. They have themselves become religious in their
anti-religious effort. The belief that rationality can explain everything is - a
belief. I must confess that I too have that belief as an operating system,
but in contrast
Dawkins, I know, it is a belief.
Non-duality and civilization
With the industrial revolution's fossil-fueled economy, we made a gigantic step
in the direction towards a materialistic heaven. It became possible for a larger number of people to live in circumstances,
when compared to before, indeed were paradisical. However, in these new suspension zones
of bliss, the ancient cycles of hormesis became nullified in a constant stream
of stimulation and nourishment. We began to live in same-temperature rooms. We
began to forget how it feels to be hungry for days. Our lives became
industrialized in the form of very small and even cycles of daily repetitions in the form
of wake-up, breakfast, work, lunch, work, home, dinner, TV, and sleep. In this
self-created paradise, perfected by a larger cycle of weekend-partying, we, with
the words of Kierkegaard's
Constantin
Continous, repeat pleasure continuously and eternalize the pleasure in
the temporal.
The civilizing Process As Norbert Elias has pointed out in The Civilizing
Process, the transition from the medieval to the enlightenment period
implied emotional self-control.
The soul is here, if one may express oneself thus without comparison, much
more prepared and accustomed to leap from one extreme to the other with always
the same intensity, and often even small impressions are uncontrollable
associations, enough to trigger the fear and the turnaround. When the structure
of human relations changes, when monopoly organizations are formed for corporal
violence and instead of the persistent feuds and wars the more stable urgency
situations due to peaceful, money- or prestige-acquired functions keep the
individual in tight reins, the affective expressions slowly strive towards a
line in the middle.
In the process of civilization, also long before the medieval period, we
gradually became more even-tempered beings living in
even-tempered rooms.
It is interesting to observe Buddha's teaching in this light. Buddha's
middle-path-teaching was, in fact, one of the first attempts to civilize people living on
and off the silk routes from the North-Indian new urban centers to China and
towards Syria. The middle path was, in reality, functioning as a cultural
self-control-system for the new city-and-trade-dwelling middle class. We must here not forget that more than 60% of the world's
population lived in that area along the silk routes at that time.
Civilization and the birth of non-dual consciousness
The civilization of humankind took a great leap forward with the establishment
of the silk-routes. These new routes tended to follow the war-paths laid by
Alexander the Great. Here the new mega-cities got established by Alexander and his successors.
In the Eastern part of his kingdom, Seleukos Nicator founded a lot of new urban
Hellenistic polis-centers
connected like pearls on a string from India to the Middle East. It was at the eastern
end of that area, under the famous
emperor Ashoka the Great,
the first great social changes of self-control happened. In the period of peace following
Ashoka's great war to unify India, the trade routes expanded to such an extent
that it became impossible to guard them against attacks through policing power. Ashoka realized that control over the mind is much more efficient than control
over the body when it comes down to the securing of peace in inter-dependent
trading mega-cities. Hence Buddhism became suitable as a state religion. Through
Ashoka-pillar edicts, university centers of learning, and state-supported
monasteries, the practical oriented moral
teachings of the Ashoka-Buddhism exercised friendly nudging collective caravanic
and urban self-control. The Ashoka-Buddhistic religion was, with its logic and
down-to-earth approach, most probably a result of a synthesis of Seleucid-Greek
culture and Indian spirituality. That is, however, in spite of being a tempting
story to tell here, leading us too much astray from the astronaut journey I want
to point out here.
Later the Ashokan Buddhism was followed by a west-end modification called
Christianity. Christianity became the dominant western self-control ideology in
the Western part of the trade nets with the Roman Empire's failing ability to
secure peace with military might.
Buddha was, of course, not aiming at building big civilizations. However,
the Buddha's realizations and teachings for sure helped in the development of the
Ashokan mega-civilization. Wealth based on global trade and not localized
farming is always met with the challenge of synchronizing different
cultures living far away from each other. Without a common denominator, trade is
not possible. With the rise of
the new globally connected urban megacentres on the Gangetic plain, Buddhism evolved as an
understanding of reality that could unite people of different casts, creeds, and
cultures in both urban and 'caravanic' self-control. Here the feudal Brahmanistic cast fragmentation
would not be able to make ends meet. Hence Buddhism evolved into the religion of
traders and urban people. Without self-control, the long-distance silk routes
would collapse into banditry, and without the same, people of different colors
and creeds would not be able to co-exist in big cities. Instead of
securing the trading routes and cities with military power, he built stupas and monasteries,
not in faraway places but as pearls along the silk routes. In fact, the Ashokan monasteries
were factories of self-control. Hence every person, moving
along the paths of trade, would constantly be reminded of the all-watching eye
of the Buddha and at the same time be able to observe role-models in the form of
monks living a content life without greed and material possessions. With the
mudras, the hand-gestures of the Buddha, a lingua franca, was
established, so people with different languages and cultures living far away
from each other could unite in the sharing of the narratives triggered by the
different gestures.
Seen from the astronaut level, both the evolution and the concept of non-dual
unity consciousness could not come into existence without high tide urban
development and increasing wealth through long-distance trade. Both the shamanistic hunter-gatherer and the later
agricultural-based cultures are fundamentally based on and in a dual consciousness and
the split understanding of reality made by
of the same. A non-dual consciousness requires crisscrossing neurons combining
diffent part of the brain in pretty much the same way as silk routes can be seen
as cultural neurons.
Here I cannot help commenting on the beautiful irony in the western (mis)use or
rather reconstruction of 'the great shamans of the world' telling us that we are
all one. This non-dual concept was superimposed upon the shamans by the hippies
since the 60'ties. With the power of affluence, young western people, in their
search for an original and pure nature world, a la
Rousseau,
changed and shaped the shamanistic world to fit their own desires and dreams of
love and unity.
Before that time, the shaman spirit world was a reflection of the not so
romantic tribalized world they lived in, and this especially so in the last
hundreds of years of decline for hunter-gatherer cultures. The world of
indigenous people was and is basically a dangerous dual world in which sickness
and attacks from both this world and the worlds beyond was perceived as a result
of the activity from predatoric spirits and entities. It was the shaman's role to
stand with one leg in each world and from that position to be a healer, a
pathfinder, and a guide for his tribe.
In these old times, ayahuasca was not used for collective ceremonies of love but
was used to pep up warriors before they went to war against another tribe. In
case a shaman as a
curanderochose to use psychedelics for the healing of people, he did
take the brew himself, and then from the altered state of consciousness, he
healed people with his
icaro. The young and restless hungry ghosts from the West soon changed
that practice so that they too participated in the drinking of ayahuasca.
However, I do not at all see this cultural hippie-construction as a bad thing,
as a fall from something original and pure. The only funny thing here is the
belief that this construction was an original shamanistic idea just waiting to be
rediscovered. There has never been anything pure and original apart from in the
dreams in man longing for secure survival constancy. Everything in history is
and was a permanent fleeting construction process that accelerates where
cultures clash or meet. The notion of non-duality and love was a gift to the
bitches brew brought to the table of negotiation by the hippies. This gift
created a huge evolutionary step forward in the hybridization with the
psychedelic culture of the shamans. When the hippies took LSD with Timothy Leary
in the 60'ties, they were basically experiencing love and unity. When
Montezuma II took
psychedelic mushrooms, it was stewed with human flesh. What we are is what we
get is the psychedelic name of the game.
There is here an interesting deviation to observe in the ayahuasca-drinking
communities of Santo Daime.
They drink ceremonial ayahuasca in huge gatherings, and they are basically
confining to a much more non-dual concept of the Holy Queen Mother of the
Forrest. This religion has hybridized the Catholic Mother Mary with the
indigenous belief in the Queen of the Forrest. My guess is that the construction
of Santo Daime can be traced back to old almost forgotten, but not extinguished.
larger state-build, Inca rituals.
Let us sum the story from Ashoka to Montezuma up. The non-dual statement, all
is one, is a result of imperial and commercial unification activity. When
larger and larger areas and populations come together in sync, the tribalized
dual splitting of reality has to give way for the non-dual, all is one, way of
reality.
What is the shaman afraid of? Why does he have to blow tobacco on the people he
helps in order to ward off evil spirits? He is, in fact, afraid of himself in
the form of conflicting operating systems in his own brain which again are
created as a response to a tribal world full of dangers. What I want to convey
here is that our brains, even on the organic hardware level, reflect the society
we live in. A tribalized shamanic brain is compartmentalized in the exact same
way as the surroundings he lives in. A globalized urban brain has in the
civilizational process synced up the before tribalized parts of his own brain in
a non-dual unification.
The biological brain constructs society in its own image. Society form the
neurons in the biological brains that upholds it. That is why I rarely met
predatory entities when taking ayahuasca. My brain is radically diffent from
that of the shamans.
In this way, the rise of non-dual
consciousness understood abstract as the lux of awareness in itself, is interlinked with civilizational
Hegelian progress
as such. High levels of consciousness and 'urbanic' trade-civilization construct each other as
an Escher
staircase, and they rise with the ability of collective self-control. Only
an organic, highly synced, non-dual brain is able to light up consciousness and
hence lift us out of the dreamy states of our shamanistic past.
The shamans did a good job, but their time has been long gone. Even the times of
the Buddha are by now over. What we need now is to facilitate the
super-consciousness, only possible at this late stage of civilization. Like
Socrates was born in the endgame of the Hellenistic civilization, we, at this
unique point, have the ability, not through following even the best Buddhistic
religion, but by a kind of bio-hacking of our brain to light it up like a
Christmas tree. One could ask what use there could possibly be from such a
project, but remember here that the thoughts and art of the Greek world survived
ancient Greece.
I foresee a future with a new religious quest in which the Soul will bio-hack
itself through the needle eye of the body. The birth of super-civilization and
the seed possibility to rise to non-dual consciousness is indeed a great
'Sophoclesian' blessing. Already, here in the first stage it has lead us to suffer
the
unbearable lightness of being.
Civilization created the foundation of non-dual superconsciousness, where
everybody was able to aware each other within an extended and fundamental circle
of unity. At the same time it cursed us with the nullification of our
ancient cycles of hormesis.
THE CURSE OF FULFILMENT As Lacan rightly has pointed out, the
worst thing that can happen to us is that our wishes actually get fulfilled. He
observes that on a psychological level and diagnoses it as a kind of masochism.
Like the Slovenian philosopher Zizek in his ever dribbling
but never goal-scoring thinking process, we love to be stuck midway. We circle
around our objects of desire without ever reaching them.
I tend to look at this weird but basically true phenomenon with the eyes of a Darwin.
The masochistic dance around the object of desire was shaped in our eternal
dance with prey as hunters. Hence our desires are not meant to be fulfilled but to be in a dynamic dialectical
opposition to fundamentally hostile surroundings, always having the upper hand.
Deep down, we do not want or cannot bear them to be fulfilled because they were
never genetically engineered to be that. We were never meant to win over nature.
We are programmed for eternal hunt. That is what makes our neurons
happy.
We are, however, now in a situation where, at least, the middle class won the battle for
constant stimuli and security. It has happened before. Suicide out of boredom
was a common phenomenon among the ever orgy-party-going ancient Roman elite.
However, this is first time in world history we can observe this phenomenon of
reaching the object of desire for the middle-class and even, at least in the
West, the masses in the bottom of the pyramid.
In the Indian Puranas, it is stated that if the world either gets total evil or
total good, it will dissappear.
Hence it is the time for a Zen realization: To win
is to lose.
In the way, we, like upstream salmons always die, when we reach our goal. With
poetical inspiration from Freud, we now live in a culture where men got away
with killing their
fathers.
However, the fossil-fueled industrial male-culture has won to such a degree that
there is no need for men any longer, and hence women are taking over. This is a true victory of
Thanatos.
We could continue this line of thought into sci-fi. White hegemonial men have,
like gods, created a new artificial intelligence in their own image. AI is, in
this sense, a mirror of the white man's stiff and narrow-bandwidth
problem-solving intelligence, an intelligence that is instrumental more than
emotional. When GPT-3 becomes 4,5,6, and so on, the first expendable kind of
intelligence will be exactly the intelligence that created AI. Hence AI will
kill its own expendable father. In fact, this is what is already happening. Just
look at Susanne Bier's new Netflix serial, The Undoing, where
the good old archetypical father-male is undone as a monster. That is why Elon
Musk is so afraid of AI. He knows that he is the first in line for the coming
genocide. He was founded the creation of GPT-3, and sooner or later it will go
for the Freudian father-kill. What is then left for AI to team up and play with? The soft emotional
and spiritual intelligence in women, black people, and all the happy-go-lucky,
spiritual, artistic, and compassionate brains with no German or Calvinian
work-ethics.
The wish-fulfilling tree Here I must not forget to be grateful for this secular strive. It brought a
post-war boomer-wave of rising abundance for me to catch on my surfboard. Behind
that western wave of wealth, we left an ocean full of micro-plastic for the doomers to surf.
It was white boomers like me who, to no small extent, realized that
middle-class utopian impossibility and the coming sci-fi curse as price to pay
for overextended blessings. Now the doomers are angry with us, because they are
not able to continue our life of unbearable pleasure.
The wish-fulfilling nightmare became a reality for well off boomer hippies like
me in the late 60ties. However, there, of course, still were limits. We could
not all become presidents, go to the Moon, or own a luxury yacht.
This problem was solved by a
hippie-brother of mine. His name was Steve Jobs. He, and other
boomers, created a kind of digital exisisting-non-existing virtual reality, a
simulacra-world that could take the search for happiness to a new level where
the real world could not compete. The gateway entrance to this virtual world was
made out of smartphone sight and sound.
Meditation is mental calorie restriction
Many, mostly young people, got depressed by the Covid 19 lock-down. They felt
robbed of their outgoing social life. Many of my meditating friends and I felt
and feel quite the opposite. We felt even happier than before. Writing this, I
can see how arrogant it sounds, but it is the truth as far as I can see it and I
hate faked humility. The greatest gift from Meditation is to bring you into a
state where nothing is going on.
In this sense, Meditation is just bringing a more than ever needed cave dweller brain
reset.
Meditation, not understood in any fancy ways, but just as simple as closing the
eyes, is more needed than ever in the same way that more and more smart people
try consciously to implement cyckles of hormesis thorugh fasting, sauna,
witherbath and so on. Meditation is in thus sense spiritual intermittant
fasting.
The covid lock-down was a superimposed huge collective retreat experiment.
However, we did not go inwards to repair our over fed signal chemical circuits.
We filled the empty
gaps with more virtual smart-phone dopamine junk food stimulation.
New Age Puffball Narcissism
As mentioned in the long foreword, many of my fellow New Age travelers, to my
surprise, got infected by fearful paranoia conspiracy ideations.
Jake Angeli's behavior and magical understanding of reality made it clear
why the New Age movement had to end its life on Capitol Hill. In fact, the by
now widespread
open-source-like
use of new agy symbolic magical thinking seems to have become mainstream. In
this way, New Age died like an old
puffball mushroom releasing
its spores. This particular mushroom is very tasty when it is fresh but is
uneatable when releasing its spores.
In this sense, I reluctantly realize that the New Age movements'
glorification of listening to my own feelings only by now has become a
destructive mainstream mental program in the rage movements. An example of this
egocentric behavior can be observed in the anti-covid conspiracy movements in
the following argument. The authorities are restricting my freedom to do what
I want. I would reply: Yes, you are restricted in your right to infect
other people.
Recent 'scientific' research has shown a relationship between
New 'Ageism' and narcissism. My first thought here was that there might also
be a connection between the addiction towards weird conspiracy-thinking and
narcissism.
It is, however, problematic to use the word narcissism as a scientific term,
since the word has become loaded with a condescending bias through the popularly
use. I use the word myself but am aware of its potential use as an insult. Now
imagine a scientific paper being published with the same wording, concluding
that Woke, women, transgender, or black people are narcissists. There would be
an outroar of rage second to none where the scientists for sure would be
canceled and have their careers destroyed. I am here not trying to argue that
the mentioned groups are narcissistic, and also not that new age people are not
narcissistic. I see two things at stake here. Firstly, that it is only possible
to use certain words in connection with groups without rage potential and power.
Secondly, the cancellation trend also seems to have reached some scientific
communities. To use words like narcisssism with conclusive headlines like new
agers are having a feeling of superiority works as a cancellation of an old
weak group without the power-potential of rage. What we have here is, in fact, a
new breed of cancellation science. Another irony is that the ones who seem most
eager to discuss the new diagnosis of narcissism is the New agers themselves.
They are not raging, but in their old self-help spirit, they accept the verdict
in a kind of dialogue where they, like me, try to distance themselves from the
diagnosis with a line like this: I am not a narcissist - but he other New
Agers are. In this way, an old boomer-self help religion is rapidly dying,
however, a death that happened in sync with the acomplished mission of
reincarnating the me and my feelings above all-interface into the
mainstream 'wisdom' of crowds.
Freedom of 'me' or freedom
from 'me'
There is a hair-fine balance between the active longing for the freedom of
'me' and the freedom from 'me'. Without freedom from me, the
freedom of me will turn into the egoic and narcissistic my space-clash
we observe today. And without a frequent ctrl+shift+delete-dying from the 'me'
you want to free, the egoic identity is bound for an endgame of narcissistic
warfare.
The freedom from me is the astronaut project of intensified
consciousness.
The New Age movement is no longer, as before, holding the space for abstract
wakefulness, and in this collapse, their use of symbolic language degenerated
from poetry to conspiracy and egoism.
Without consciousness, the abstract ability to aware everything around you as a
whole process and yourself as a tiny part is not possible. Without
consciousness, all the philosophy that supports meditation in the form of
Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and Christian mysticism all too easily can turn into
egoic glorification. Hence the list of grandiose gurus is endless. The first
step is to see that they tend to be megalomaniacs. The next step is to ask
yourself why you got attracted to them and by now I in that question include a
person like Trump.
By now, the narcissistic segment within the spiritual communities has found a
dopamine-substitute for the grandiose guru-archetype. It is to join an ecstatic
community of hardcore conspiracy believers.
The relation between consciousness and egoic identity Here comes a claim that best can be verified by personal
experience, since the notion of egoic identity is a hard nut to crack for science, in the
same way that you cannot get a verified positivistic hold of the notion of 'redness'.
The greater the unfoldment of abstract super-wakefulness becomes, the less
need there is for the construct of egoic identity. On the other hand, the greater the loss of
consciousness, the more dreamlike and intensified production of egoic
dream-states becomes.
In low levels of wakefulness, it is very well possible to imagine that I am a dog, a cat, or a
genderfluid person with the need of being a
Pokemon Pikachu on
Wednesdays.
When high pitch emotions like fear and anger become the driving force, we fall
asleep even while being awake. The madness of crowds is always connected to a
lowering of the level of consciousness´, and in this sense, wakefulness is the
opposite of 'wokefulness'. I am reminded of the Jehovas Witnesses standing every
weekend with their magazine eager to preach. The magazine is called: Wake Up!
They want to wake people up but seen from the
Consciousness Quotient Inventory (CQ-i),
they, in my, hopefully wakeful, and not self-deluded eyes, score lower points than
the people around them they try to convert. The same is the case from Woke to
anti-waxers. They are sleep-woking Pokemon-like identity-dramas in dream states full of
polarized amygdala driven nightmares.
In intense wakeful states of introspection, we have the possibility to discover,
that in fact, there is not really anybody in there we could call 'I'. 'I' could
be woke or one of Terrence Mc Kenna's previously mentioned machine elves. It is
all constructions of 'I'-dentifications within the more or less controlled
hallucinations within the brain.
To sum it all up:
In intensified consciousnes, the loss of egoic identity is equivalent to love.
This love is not only reserved for one's own body but for everything that is
'awared' in the expanded circle of awareness.
In low levels of consciousness the loss of a solid identity is followed by fear.
This fear is encountered by a reinforcement of inner solidity. Low conscious
reinforced identity-constructions are, however, due to their dreamy nature,
fragile. They need safe spaces at any cost.
It is like entering the dual spirit world of the shamans,
where you always are in potential danger of being attacked by predatoric
entities. Hence it is much easier to perceive 'others' as enemies.
In fact, the solid identity-construction, handed down by cultural tradition, as
we had them up to their culmination in the 60'ties before the youth-revolutions,
only can exist in a sweet Goldilocks spot where you are not too awake and not
too unconscious.
We are now in an insane global situation where millions of people in the West
have lost a substantial part of their illuminance and hence are navigating in
various kinds of Tiger-Joe modes.
As an antidote to this loss, I will at any time bet all I have on
the above mentioned Olympic meditator monk
that gets his gamma-wave spikes by using a Tibetan technique to send out
compassion to all living beings as he imagines them in his meditative inner
space.
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.
If you want to be happy, practice compassion. Dalai Lama
THE CULTURAL OPERATING SYSTEM OF THE EGOIC CONSUMER IDENTITY Individuality, basically understood as the survival-story we
tell about ourselves, can, as previously mentioned, be viewed as
a
cultural operating system. It gives meaning to
observe it as an interface between the individual and the society it lives in
that changes with time and survival demands. The quantitative productivity of a society and the
qualitative cultivation of egoic identity is interlinked. In a
historical astronaut-view, it means that our Western fossil-fuel-based economy
had the necessary surplus productivity to afford and install a separate
'I/Me-interface' in everyone.
In antiquity, unique individuality was a luxury item reserved for Kings and the
like. With the industrial revolution in the second half of the 19. Century a
rising number of upper-class people could now afford to identify with the
super-creative and dynamic but also drama-queenish music of a Beethoven. Slowly,
the egocentric but also unique Individuality was on its way to the masses in the
same way as Ford-cars were mass-produced in the 1930'ties.
The amplified sense and self-awareness of an independent 'I' reached its peak
with the Western youth-revolution in the 60'ties. This young rebellious, now
widespread middle-class 'I' preferred to listen to its own felt 'Me' rather than
to the old school authoritarian voices.
'I' was a perfect example of such a newly groomed rebellious middle-class ego. I
refused to cut my hair and wear the conventional suit and tie my father without
success tried to force me to wear. I got John Lennon-spectacles and an electric
guitar. Jimi Hendrix became my God and this new god and a place secured in a
rockband made my way from in womens eyes a ridiculous nobody to an alphamale.
The screaming and distorted Jimi Hendrix guitar solo is a
perfect metaphor for the Ikarus
flight of the glorious ego. It was unthinkable until it did happen. However,
this explosive blooming of rebellious freedom was meant to deflorate almost at
once. Jimi's guitar was going up in flames, and he himself died young.
After a short, chaotic period, the strive for egoic divination got derailed and subsumated by another
Jinn
that had been released out of the same bottle. This ghost was orchestrating the
post-war rise of mass materialism. Here Rock and Roll did not
burn out but rather faded away in the dopamine rush of consumerism while at
the same time the
burning wild guitar of Jimi Hendrix became a castrated and mass-produced part of
the curriculum of music teachers. In this way my rebellion was subdued, not to
the point of extinction but trasformed into a valuable asset in the education
machinery of society. I became subdued as a teacher.
The above mentioned development made it possible for the
middle class 'I' to become a 'wild' and 'free' consumer of abundance comparable to the life
of royalty in previous centuries. However, the Jinn of desire also caught the
'I' in world-wide-webs of never-ending (pur)chase of
'fata morganic' liberation-fetishes
in the form of identity shaping luxury items like Gucci bags and the like.
Consumer-capitalism succeded in masking itself as freedom.
VIRAL ACCELERATION AND SPEED MORPHING IDENTITIES Social rage and paranoia-movements out of touch with reality are as old as human history.
However, with the consumer-driven algorithms of web-communication, they have
evolved into something never seen before.
In the days before Steve Jobs, humans found their identity in an exchange with
the real as understood by Baudrillard. However, with the social media
sphere eversion reality has become the hyperreality of signs in the world
of virtual simulacra. Our inherited regressive tendency to think symbolic is way
more compatible with the hyperreality of social media signs than with the 'real'
reality set by Newton's laws. Our real reality is in the process of
getting swallowed by black holes of unreality with gravitation fields stronger
than the one that made the famous apple falling on Newton's head. In other words
in a reversible reality, Steve Jobs caught the apple before it could land on the
head of reason.
The reign of the avatars This new hyperreal dimension of signs is inhabited with ourselves as
avatars. People with prosthetic limbs take subjective ownership of their
substitutes in the sense that they feel them as as a natural part of their own
body. In the same way our avatars takes ownership of us in cyberspace. Now the
big question is: Who am I? My avatar?
Collective Avatarism
The avataric identity distortion is furthermore turbo-charged in the process
where collectives form a symbiotic entanglement with the post-factual social media's
simulacra-ecosystems of
clickbait driven fake news.
In this symbiosis, social media is both speed-morphing and intensifying the subcultures it facilitates. Like a cytokine storm, a
video created with a smartphone can start a avataric identty-driven collective
anger anywhere in no time.
Movements based on the lowest denominator of rage can mobilize from small seed impulses from any location on the
location-less net and go viral within minutes. A site like
BlackmattersUs is a Russian troll site from St Petersburg, but it works as
well in mobilizing racial anger as if it was made by real-life black people from
Atlanta.
Identity-morphing
Story-telling has always been the
foundation of identity. Hence the distrust in institutional grander narratives
had far greater consequences than just changes in societal political ideology.
When we deconstruct the world around us, we, in fact, deconstruct ourselves.
Identity is basically formed as a chiasm where we interface the relation between
'I' and 'me' and at the same time, through verbal and body-language resonance,
find our place in a tribe of like-minded souls.
The process of identity-making, both individual and collective, is by now speed
morphing in virtual petri-dishes, with such reality shaping force, that they by
now have broken the identity-creating 'I'-interface monopoly of society
understood as tradition and history. Identity itself has become an atomized
Lyotardian story for each individual to create via the smartphone mirror.
However, with the arrival of social media created commercial algorithms bringing us together in echo rooms with same-feathered birds, each of the black-holed web-centripetal
power-whirlpools gain momenta as makers of collective hyper-reality with
lesser or even no allegiance to the real real. Mind-virus that would not survive
in the harsh circumstances of real reality can live and multiply in the
web-simulacra. From here, they can gain momentum and, at any time, explode with the
viral power of many into the real reality, understood as the fading life left
outside our digital existence. In this sense, social media has become a real
dream world. At the same time, the by social media morphed cultures begin to
hybridize with each other. Like unpredictable and often explosive interactions
between unfamiliar drugs taken together, these hybridizations create
unpredictable offspring. In this digital melting pot, 'useful'
social-psychological behavior patterns are shared in a kind of open
source.
However, as mentioned before, the seeds
for the current disruptive fluidity were sown long before the days of the
computer. One of the major societal
changes came long before the net. In my youth, creativity and the freedom to
question the concepts that were handed down by institutions was released like a
Zen-goose out of the bottle. It was with the words of Sophocles a wast
and important curse. Without this freedom of thinking, we would not have been
able to reach our current technological level. However, there was also an
inbuilt destruction
in the freedom from-authoritarian truth-download. Slowly distrust began to erode
social institutions on all levels until a point where truth became a power-game
released from argument and validation.
In fact, it all began in my youth. People just a few years older than me looked
with rage and contempt at my sudden long grown hair, John Lennon spectacles, and
loud electric guitar. My parents looked in disbelief at the change, but I loved
it. From being a nobody that no girl even bothered to look at, I was suddenly a
somebody worshipped by the same girls. At the same time, mind-altering drugs
like hash knocked on new signal-chemical doors of perception within the mind
that somehow by their very existence, were giving us the shamanistic feeling of
spirit worlds co-existing with the real real. I remember one day, after a heavy
hash party, I was looking at the lawn at my home. It was moving up and down like
waves, and so was my feeling of being me. Everything had become fluid.
The Beatles were in the psychedelic revolution in the 60'ties among the first to
create identity-alluring dreamworlds. The Rolling Stones were
always the Roling Stones with stone-hard identities. The Beatles, on the other
side, experimented with their psychedelic
experiences. One of their first attempts to transform these experiences into
art showed an interesting loop where they themselves became a kind of fluid art by
the bi-locating of their known personalities into a
hyper-world of submarinian avatars.
After the initial optimistic Sturm und Drang-days of the Beatles, David Bowie began to 'cameleon-design' his own identity, including his
gender identity in more blue colors. The restles expressions of ever changing
identity-experiments began to reveal the dark sides of the gained new freedom.
What in the times of Bowie were artistic top-down projects have today evolved
more into
grass-root happenings. As the case with Woke and similar phenomenons, today's
movements are often surprisingly free from leadership. A new kind of organic
collective intelligence seems to take over.
Wikipedia is one example out of many of how new digital life forms, in many cases,
do not need the notion of heroes to evolve.
Everything seems by now to be possible when it comes to the creation of identity. Here is an example of
a woman who has created her own cat-identity:
-
In the loss of culturally handed down identity-archetypes, we could also, as shown in
the video below, be a dog in a collective choir of dogs. Here is a picture from a dog-identity-convention in Seattle:
I did not see it coming. However, in these disruptive times, I
find even a conservative like Ben Shapiro is speaking humorous sense:
However, where Shapiro seems to believe in a solid original egoic
identity. I tend to see the very phenomenon of identity as a necessary societal
illusion. We give each other roles in order to survive as a society. The real in
identity is the ability to interface humans successfully. Shapiro's egoic
identity as such is not more real than the identities in the dogs and cats above
or genderfluid people. Darwin only likes survival-fit illusion-interfaces.
Vulnerable identity-angels in the fight for my space on the summit of the needle tip Our digital
interconnectedness makes us both spaceless and timeless. As we saw in the chapter, The
Sphere Eversion of the Ego, social media cramps us together as
emotional inside-out angels-avatars on the tip of the needle with no possibility
of securing a my space for all. With the previously by time-history and
geography distanced viewpoints all present at once, we have to cancel each
other's space in
the fight for a digital
lebensraum. In the beginning, the fight for a safe space
was a project created by minorities in universities so they could protect
themselves from imagined hegemonial aggressions and suppressive power-language.
From there, it evolved into a general universitarian cancellation-trend directed towards all
academics with opposing viewpoints. Even professor
Steven Pinker was targeted in this Orwellian wave. However, by now, it seems
that the identity-political focus on being emotionally protected from other
viewpoints in safe spaces has become a general trend in the West. Every
rabbit-hole-movement of turbo-charged mono-ideology now wants to protect itself
through the non-disturbance of other viewpoints. The protests from the staff at
the publisher, Penguin, against the release of Jordan Peterson's new book is an
example of this
safe space-ideology expansion. Some members of the staff even got so emotionally
involved in this protest that they cried! In this way, the cancel culture has
made the Western world a general confrontation-zone of
narcissistic space-holders that cannot any
longer live under the same digital roof.
This lack of lebensraum is constantly triggering our age-old mammal
amygdala into the red zone. The amygdala
is like the internet operating without space and time. It only knows to fight or flee in
the all to close here and now, in opposition to the
hippocampus that at least
can place events at a distance along a time-line. For the amygdala, social
media is not happening outside but inside of us. This web-eversed amygdalian
overdrive makes it mandatory to cancel others and their viewpoints as an act of
self-protection against intimidation. We have become like the wicked queen in
the fairy tale, Snow White, asking the magic mirror for the truth, but not
wanting it and then trying to cancel it.
Cancellation of time and history - the outrageous amygdalian here and now Social media places cultures hundred of years apart, with
inconsistent values in the same chat-room. One can imagine the huge confusion when
simple, honest living people with archaic, 500-year-old mindsets looks into the
magic mirror of their newly acquired smartphones and computers.
How could we ever expect simple, straightforward people from cultures who have
not (yet) developed the modern, often also decadent ability to navigate in
multi-levels of
irony to understand a danish newspaper's satirical take on Islam as the
case was with the danish cartoon drawings of the prophet Mohammad?
A tribal woman from the Himalayan range with her
mobilephone.
I took this picture 15 years back!
However, it is surprising to observe how even modern minds react in ways similar
to the rage created in the friction between Medieval and contemporary culture.
When it comes to our own modern rage it displayes a typical
post-traumatic stress disorder-modality. A soldier with PTSD cannot
timeline the event where his friend got his legs blown off by a roadside bomb.
His amygdala will react as it is happening right now in case something is
triggering him to remember the incident. In the regressive loss of relaxed
cognition and consciousness, we tend to perceive the present moment without the
perspective of time. The explosive symbiosis of the timelessness of social media
and the amygdalian traumatic here and now offers a way to understand the current demolition-spree of historical
monuments and statues. Western vandals on the hunt for the next statue exist in
the same modality as Medieval minded people from far away countries engaged in
burnings of the American flag.
History itself becomes canceled in the
outrageous here and now.
The cancellation of history can be observed in several layers of society. Here
in Denmark, we have an artist called
Jim Lyngvild. In order
to encounter the fading interest in our good old National Museum, he has been
invited to make an exhibition with the title,
Meet the Vikings. The interesting thing here is that the faces and
dresses Jim Lyngvild has put on the vikings, have nothing to do with history or
reality. It is entirely fictional. No wonder that it provoked the old school of
historians into a rage nobody took serious.
The destruction of statues and previous power institutions is yet another
example of time annihilation where long gone individuals suddenly become alive
again in the rage directed towards their 'statual' representations. I am
reminded of an incident in my youth where a drunk man was abusing an old poster
of a politician who was no longer in power.
Even METOO has become a time-cancellating maelstrom.
Of course, the METOO-movement's exposure of men who use their position of power
to intimidate women sexually is needed. However, when men in leading positions
here in Denmark, without the possibility to defend themselves suddenly lose
their jobs due to loose allegations of sexual offenses made 20 years ago, I
cannot help seeing it as an act of retribution made in a space without time.
Furthermore, these allegations and the fear for potential allegations are in
danger of traumatizing the men in general as a kind of collateral damage. The
95% or more of men who have always treated women respectfully are, like me, now
self-imposing what I would call a self-castrating behavior to avoid conflicts
with the other sex.
Violation of violators
The paradox in the cancel and outrage-culture is that the defense itself
becomes an offensive violation of the imagined violators. This is a typical narcissistic
trait; deep-felt empathy for one's own space but not for the other spaces. Other
space-holders are dehumanized by our digitally over-heated monkey brains. The sphere eversion
happening in the bottleneck of social media-communication is making us perceive
all other viewpoints as personal intrusions, as enemies, that have already
crossed the borders of the village-wall. When this mentality amplifies in
media-driven, click-baited algorithmic group-formations, the march towards the
political ideology of fascism is inevitable. In the 'amygdalian' blindness, the
ability to aware others shrink, and in this blindness, phenomenons like Antifa,
in themselves, become the fascism they fight in 'the others'. The
anti-fascist have become fascists, and the anti-violators have become big-time
violators of the violators. As
Kierkegaard
stated, the fanatic and the anti-fanatic are the same as far as they are each
other's opposites.
Cancellation in itself becomes a kind of mental virus infecting all what it
comes in touch with. Seen in this light, the cancellation of Trump's Twitter
account and the like is just accelerating the present civilizatoric decay. In
the cancelation of Trump's right to free speech 70 million Trump-followers'
right to the same is cancelled too. When
big tech CEAO's suddenly gets the power to cancel a president's communication
lines, the backlash in the form of reinforcement conspiracy-segments ideation
about what is going on behind the curtains suddenly become, a reality. It is not
Trump who should be removed from social media. It is capitalism. Capitalism in
the form of clickbait earns much more money from fake news than on boring real
news. It is greed that should be cancelled from digital communication. However,
no CEO would have the balls to cut off his own balls of wealth.
THE FEAR OF NOT KNOWING WHO WE ARE What do I, as an old bungy jump trained meditator and psychonaut observe around me? The
traditional identity-roles handed down from previous generations do not any
longer fit us as our inter - faces. Now,
not only
genders are fluid
- everything in and around us is in a constant state of flux. In this fluidity,
fear arises with the dissolution of solid comfort zones. The fearful
unwillingness to merge into the one and only black void that once and for all
can cure this problem is encountered with the construction of pseudo-solid
identities at any cost. It seems that the egoic identity prefers suffering when presented with
uncertain (but blissful) nothingness as an alternative. Not everybody is courageous enough to
substitute the loss with a
dog-identity.
Therefore, especially generation Y is running in the opposite
direction, trying with all means available to reinforce the illusion of all
sorts of super-specific and hysteric ego-identities. This is what contemporary
identity-politics is all about; to uphold the dying identity-feeling of being a
solid 'ME'. As the famous saint
Nisargadatta
Maharaj has pointed out, the ego is like a sprained ankle. Without the pain
there would no conscious feeling of the ankle and so it is with the ego. Seen
from this perspective, the ego is pain, and it can be strengthened
through more pain. Hence the contemporary reinforcements of the ailing ego come
with the price of pain. Like said before: We prefer to suffer when confronted
with freedom. Through suffering or aggression we know who we are. In the
amygdalian flight, we are reduced to nothing, In the amygdalian fight, we are
crowned to someone.
The collective identity-reinforcement As a survival strategy against all these combined
complex forces driving us towards ego-dissolution, we protect ourselves as
particular identities by narrowing down our viewpoints. Furthermore, we seek the company
of like-minded souls. In this process, our fearful clinging to identity as such
transcends itself from individuality to collectivity. We herd in collective
comfort zones of mono-culture-identities.
The need for echo-chamber voices arises as a complex sum total of the different,
previously mentioned mechanisms. Let me here sum up what I consider the two most
important factors.
The youngest players in this glorious endgame live in the vulnerability of
feeling and hearing the social media voices
'eversed' inside-out. As a
protective strategy against this potentially psychotic feeling, the internalized magic
digital mirror will only allow a reflection of one surviving truth. It is less
unbearable with a unison voice in the head as compared to have, from the
amygdalian viewpoint, border-crossing intimate presences of opposing opinions in
the my-space inside-out of our head. The stronger the mono-culture becomes, the
stronger the prosthetic reinforcement of the ailing ego-tower becomes.
The tendency to herding is furthermore supported by the commercially oriented
algorithms on the net. Capitalism has, in this last phase, turned into a
big-brother parasite always present as an impure presence of commercial greed in every communication
path.
In this sense, the use of social media in its current parasitic form not only
amplifies the ego-death happening as a result of an overdue capitalistic system.
It drives the most vulnerable of us towards having symptoms close
to schizophrenia. This
mechanism leads to the next level of absurd collective identity-protection-constructions.
THE DELIBERATE
RE-TRAUMATIZATION OF OLD WOUNDS
How to create a strong feeling of collective identity? I would say that the
feeling of being a victim and/or persecutive enmity towards a different tribe is
the best ego-survival strategy of all. A collectivized story of victimhood can
any time flip into a position of aggressive power-persecution.
Tormentors and victims share an underlying bond. Again with the words of
Kierkegaard, they are identical, as
far as they are each other's opposites.
Persecution as an identity-reinforcement strategy
As often seen in history, nothing is more powerful for tribalized groups'
internal identity-glue than persecution. As Pearl S. Buck points out in her
novel, Peony,
the Jewish culture could not really thrive in China due to acceptance. The many
similarities between Jewish and Chinese cultural values made it difficult for
the Jews to uphold a persecution-identity, and hence they more or less
disappeared as a culture in China. They instead merged with the local culture.
We can observe this psychological mechanism on countless levels, especially
within fanatic group formations. The unsympathic religious movement of
Falun Gong is a good
example of how a group subconsciously can feed on persecution. The Chinese Government has
banned Falun Gong, and they are persecuting them in the most horrible ways.
However, ironically this persecution has become the very engine that gives
momentum to the movement. Without the story of torture, the Falun Gong movement would
collapse, as it has nothing spiritual to offer that could not be taught on an
average yoga-course. What they offer is nothing but a tempting story of
victimhood.
I could go on with examples from the endless list presented by history itself.
The top stories are the archetypical fairy tales of victimhood,
guilt, and shame. These dream stories have become web simulacra powered, 'centripetalized' ideas ready to be customized
and explosively weaponized from Woke to
Me
Too. The re-traumatization of old wounds for the sake of power Woke
is, in my view, an absolutely unconscious collective self-traumatized pandemic
spreader of by them boosted trauma. They
get their momentum by cutting fresh openings into old wounds that otherwise have
almost healed in time. This re-traumatization of old suppression-history has a
sinister motive: By opening old scars, Woke is able to construct performative
scolding rituals that give them tremendous power. In other words: Who
made language a power-tool? Woke did.
Let me give a little example from my home country Denmark. Woke is in these days slowly infecting
the academian brains here in my country. An intelligent friend of mine runs an online magazine
for women. Here, in a debate, she used the word 'colored'. Immediately she was
shitstormed into total submission by an angry mob, enlightening her about the
fact that the word 'colored' was a microaggressive white hegemonial word. The
right word to use was 'brown'. I guess that the only reason why she was not
outright canceled was the fact that woke is not really in full control in
Denmark (yet) and that she made an apology and repented that she had used such an
improper word. They accused her of racism. They blamed her for not knowing their
understanding and terminology. As I see it, the sinister truth is that they fed
on making her feel that she was not ok.
Language has, of course, always been a carrier of contemporary power structures.
However, when the real power dynamics in a society changes, old sayings, once
full of potent poisonous subversive meaning, become like dead virus in the body of society.
They do not mean anything anymore because forgiveness in a historical view, is
forgetfulness. I live in a street named after an old Danish slave trader from
the 18. Century. Nobody knew him anymore; nobody cared before Danish Woke
demanded the street name changed.
Before Woke retraumatized our language, it had become as impotent as a power
tool as old architectural grandiose posthouses, libraries, police
stations, and town halls. These buildings are like ridiculous pompous statues of
no use and meaning anymore. Nobody cares about them and their glorious past.
With digitalized institutions, these old architectural power structures have
lost their magnificence and radiance. Hence they already
were in the process of beautiful decay with the same faith as ailing English colonial ruin buildings in
India.
Who did ever have a closer look at a statue before Woke came and
gave them a new life? The same happened with language in the sense that old
traditional sayings suddenly became alive again full of so-called
white-male-toxicity or other imagined power-games.
This is what Woke and Critical Race Theory academics did in their understanding
of postmodernism: By successfully constructing, reinforcing, magnifying, and
propagating fading racial and gender aggressions in language as something real
of utmost importance to deconstruct, they, in fact, projected their invention out
on their imagined white hegemonial enemies for the sake of their own power. In
this way the mob got total control over my friend with the online magazine in
the moment she apologized.
Here
the concept of
structural racism
made language a battle-zone as far as the academic woke could make larger
and larger segments of especially white society players in this mind-game. Once
an insecure white person starts believing in this archetypical paranoia conspiracy theory,
he is rendered powerless in a kind of second coming of an old Christian
power-belief in sinhood, guilt and shame.
Woke is in this way, gaining control
over the people who starts accepting and using their language babble as a story
told reality-frame.
The regressive second coming of medieval Christian sin, guilt, and shame
The inherent moralism in Critical Race Theory points at a 'resurrection' of the
basic Christian and extremely resilient cultural operative system of sinhood.
This fundamentalist moralism was reviewed in the Frankfurt School. As a
sinner, as a victim, or as a guilty person, you always have a strong feeling of
who you are. However, this fake feeling of identity comes at a high price.
THE HIJACK OF NOBLE CAUSES
It should be needless to say that in itself the strive, for a society without
suppression against any group is a noble course. Of course, there is suppression in
and of black people on all levels, from micro-aggressions to epigenetic
inheritance. Women need to be free from sexist, toxic male-dominant behavior.
Anyone should be free to express what gender they feel they belong to. And last but not
least: Anyone should be able to express whatever opinion they have, even people
like Alex Jones and David Icke.
The overshadowing issue is that the traumatizing Amygdalian terrorist has
Stockholm-syndromized reason.
Noble causes have been hijacked by the wave of power-rage.
White guilt and shame as weapons of cultural mass destruction
To be racially white or not to agree with the politically correct opinions, in
general, makes you scapegoated into 'ostracisation' through a peculiar blend of guilt and shame. You
can then purge yourself through repentance in the form of postmodern academic
perverted 'flagellantery'
where you, like a Sisyfos, keep dissecting and cleaning your language and
behavior for hidden hegemonic power-structures. The best comment to this
never-ending masochism is made by my favorite AI-system, GPT-3. It states:
Identity, Woke,
BLM-policy, and crazy conspiracy ideation groups are seen in this light,
trying impossible ways to solve social conflicts, they to a large extend, create
themselves. The irony here is that they feed on their imagined stories of
victimhood. They steal or culturally appropriate victimhood to reinforce their
fearful fading sense of identity and, at the same time, generate social energy.
They construct and magnify social grievances. They weaponize victimhood in a
kind of performative scolding that is especially damaging for the
white youth that buys into this fiction.
Cultural appropriation as white theft of black suffering One of my black friends told me that among many of his black friends, who did
not identify with the Woke-movement, there was a saying: Woke is a white
movement.
It is within the Woke-culture seen as a negative thing when
members of a dominant culture
appropriate
culture from disadvantaged minority cultures. Here I cannot help seeing the
absurd irony in white 'wokologic'
people appropriating the suffering story of black slavery.
In this appropriation-theft, one can uphold the frail, outdated identity-construct in a double grip of
opposites: of guilt and
victimhood. Here the so-called
white savior complex
gets a new meaning in white people punishing themselves for being white. The
original sin is by now being white. Even here in my home country, Denmark, with an almost non-existing black
minority, woke has occupied the minds of a growing number of students. Recently
the Danish Woke students threw a sculpture of a Danish King from the 18. Century in the canal. We
have millions of suffering refugees from Syria standing at our European
doorstep. Why, in comparison, reinforce a 300-year-old story about the Danish slave
trade? My guess is that the not so
noble truth behind this is that the contemporary ego-operative system of young
white people is so fragile that it has culturally appropriated the black man's
suffering as its own. They could as well have appropriated dog-identities had
it not been for the fact that the drug-like social momentum in being a dog is
relatively weak. The feeling of victimhood, the feeling of being persecuted
and having enemies, is like a psychic cutting a survival strategy to save the
sinking feeling of being a functional individual with clear borders defining
what is ME and what is not ME. The woke alert to injustice
is, in reality, a theft that is turbo-charging cultural wars.
Due to the strong meta-narrative of victimhood, the initial and undeniable
truths in social injustice from gender to race cannot bloom and fructify in a
meaningful exchange of ideas. They are hijacked for other purposes.
Rage can only lead to destruction I am well aware of the fact that I, as a white male from Denmark can tend to
overlook the fact that the horrors of slavery and racism did happen not so long
ago and that aggression and suppression to some extent still is here. The pain
from that collective trauma has never really been dissolved. This pain
furthermore makes the BLM-rage understandable.
The rageful
Woke and Critical Race Theory's ideologies can, however, never lead to any constructive
solutions concerning injustice and inequality. On the contrary. Deep emotional
scars cannot be healed alone on the level of language and intellect. This is at
least my experience from the New Age scene where therapists, psychologist, and
self-help peope like me, have been talking and talking for ever. Here I already
30 years back noted a strange phenomenon. People in therapy, trying to solve
childhood issues and the like, got temporary relief from a psychotherapy
session. However, the session-life seemed addictive, and the amount of dark
subconscious material in need of being redeemed in costly sessions seemed to
form a growing pile of shit. What really had happened was that many of the
people who had tried to heal their inner child instead had got a reinforced
trauma and victim-identity that, in fact, only was beneficial for the rising
industry of therapists and clairvoyants. So the mountain of misery was growing,
but so was the strong feeling of identity. Seen from this level, identity is
equivalent to suffering in the same way as a sprained ankle makes itself aware
in opposition to a healthy ankle in blissful forgetfulness.
For me the parallel to the modern rage-groups is stunning. These movements get
their energy and power to expand from their own deliberate re-victimization and
retraumatization. The
stronger the victimhood, the stronger the social momentum and 'righteous' rage. In
fact, they belong to a strange breed of vampires that try to satisfy their
thirst from drinking their own blood.
Once the myth of victimhood has reached a point of no return by reinforcement
and opening of old scars it starts expanding like a pyramid game. Let me
return to
the lady who was running the online magazine for ladies. She deeply
apologized for her mistake of using the word colored instead of the
correct word, brown. However, inside herself, she did not apologize
because she saw the ugly power mechanisms behind the performative scolding
ritual directed towards her. Her reaction is rare. Especially younger people
tend surrender to this conversion by the sword. They are afraid of losing jobs
and being ostracized. Instead, they bow their head down in shame and from the
very moment they do that, they have been baptized into their scolders' dream
reality. Now they also have got infected by the feeling of being a wrong person
and the only way they can relieve that traumatizing feeling is by replicating
the virus of scolding by attacking the next ring of people around them, that do
not yet know the difference between colored and brown. In this way, higher
consciousness and cognition collapses like domino pieces into the accelerating
gravity field of the black rabbit hole. In fact, the phenomenon is
fundamentalistic religious by nature.
As we can observe in the poster below, the notion of victimhood is not reserved
for color and gender matters only. Social injustice fits perfectly into the
scheme as well. Also, another well known psychological mechanism is the pendulum
swing from introverted victimhood to extroverted aggression. Now
revenge is the
word painted in red, and the stronger the imagined injustice and suppression,
the stronger the justified momentum for revenge. The very fact that the young
rage-people cannot themselves see the stupidity of these primitive mechanisms,
is pointing towards the devolutionary collapse of consciousness in high-pitch
amygdala driven crowds.
The same self destructive mechanism can be observed in the
sinister conspiracy thinking groups. The worser their imagined evil enemies
become, the greater the internal feeling of persecuted brotherhood and purpose
in life. The same is the case with right wing supporters of Trump and the
democrates, even the, as pure rationallity, masked Sam Harris who have defined
their identity as anti-Trump. (His voice is in its fake try to simulate the
beacon of objectivity, a give away for the inner demons he habours.)
What are all these polarized groups and individuals in fact doing? They are
pissing in their own trousers in order to keep warm.
A new common ground - fertilized by rot It could be tempting to advocate for
love and expanded consciousness to heal the racial wounds and the current
polarization and mistrust as a strategy more viable than performative scoldings
and the like. However, it is my experience that no calm consciousness or
dialogue can bring back a soul who has jumped down in the black rabbit hole. It
is pointless.
Therefore, in fact, we do need hateful
identity-policy and more dividing labels to move us forward into perfect
destruction. We need this in the same way that an old tree has to rot away from
the inside. Then in the fertile earth made by the rot, new seeds will sprout.
From here, it will be time to drop all labels and aware existence on much deeper levels of love and unity.
This is, as far as I see, the only way to transcend the inhuman but necessary
survival algorithms of the past. This, however, requires the above-mentioned
price. We have to die in the form we know ourselves. We have to die from our
culture as we know it and humankind as we think we are.
Hence I am not at all against
this mental decay. I do not try to warn against it. In fact, I welcome it as the
destruction needed before real new things can happen. In the current meltdown, a new world order will be born like a Nietzschean dancing
star. The Phoenix
rising from the ashes of this de(con)struction will, however, not fly out to
conquer an already conquered world. It will turn inward and colonize the brain
with consciousness.
This is what Meditation is all about:
We need to upgrade from ego-consciousness to a unity-consciousness where we all
are color, gender & identity-blind.
Here I see the words of my favorite Mystic come true. You do not need to be
religious to realize the depth of his statement:
All
creatures contain one reflection:
one, that is the denial of its being
the other;
the highest of the angels denies he is the lowest.
For many, it might be difficult to grasp Meister Eckhart's double
negation play. However, Prince EA
essentially says the same. He speaks to us from the world order of a new future
fertilized by the death of the present.
I have to be honest with you and clarify from what
position I have written all this. Some believe in a God they have never seen. I
live in an abstract amplified consciousness that makes me see, not any absolute
truth, but just SEE. To deny THAT for you or myself would be an act of faked humility. As long as you have not (yet)
experienced THAT you can read the last lines of this chapter as a hopeless
optimistic and poetic declaration of trust in the good old Hegelian idea of
enlightenment.
Just as the Roman emperors used to give the
gladiator the rudius, the
wooden sword, as a symbol of freedom, I hereby, as an emperor of consciousness,
give my fellow human beings the galactic rudius and hereby condemn you to a life
of ultimate freedom, free of bigotry hatred and small-minded egoistic way of
life. As an unfortunate side effect of that, I also condemn you to a life of
super wakeful bliss and ecstasy.
The tendency is ever towards self-repetition,
towards the preservation of
the species:
it is every man's intention
that his work should be himself. Doctor Ecstaticus,
Meister Eckhart
At the holy Monkey Temple, Swayambunath, in Kathmandu, pigeons, dogs, and
monkeys fight for the food offerings. (Download article: page
1 -
2 -
3 -
4 -
5 -
6) Especially the hundreds of monkeys tell a
chilling story about us, humans, as a species. The monkeys are divided into three
tribes that are constantly fighting to be the tribe controlling the small area of the
food offerings. The three tribes are always in war with each other. When one
clan kills a monkey from another clan, they rejoice. When a soldier from their
own tribe is killed, they mourn. They are full of compassion towards their own
kin and full of aggression towards the other tribes. In short, it is Richard
Dawkin's selfish gene in play, but rather more played out on a collective level than
an individual. In this brutal tribal competition for resources, the monkeys'
intelligence seems to evolve faster than in their normal, more peaceful
surroundings. Some of the local tour-guides tell about a monkey that
drank fruit juice with a straw.
Seen from this temple view, I see Conspiracy as a necessary tribal inherited
algorithmic mechanism that makes every group, whether it consists of
Neanderthals, nations, woke groups, or policemen seek their own survival through
basically subconscious intersubjective distortions of 'truth'. 'I' do exactly
the same on the level of 'ego'. In this sense, my ego, as a king of trillions of
cells, is not so different from an ego of a nation or even a social media group:
'We' are all a product of algorithmic self-repetition and preservation. What is
here is what survived as the fittest algorithm, whether the scene is set as a
genetic fight for life, a formation of a social group or at the level of
internet algorithmic data-organization. The formation of Ego is a necessary lie of survival.
The necessary lie of survival This lie is most probably rooted in genes that can be traced back to the
beginning of life itself in the sense that different lifeforms always had to
compete for resources and energy.
Homo Sapiens, however, got a new powerful tool in the race for resources. We
got language.
On the level of the formation of different social groups, I would use Harari's
characterization of humans as
storytelling animals
as a start but go a bit further with the following claim: We mobilize in groups through powerful
storytelling of lies that bind us together and justifies our survival in
opposition to 'the other groups'. This tendency of tribal 'truth' arrangements
is the fundamental and eternal biological force of what Karl Marx on a social
level defined as
ideologies. Seen from a level deeper than politic science, all
ideologies are, in fact, products of competing 'I'-deologies where the
fittest in the long run survive.
The self-blind will to survival
Never underestimate a man who overestimates himself Franklin D. Roosevelt
This ancient tribal will to survival will lie, cheat, and conspire
without hesitation to make ends meet. Of course, we do not want to see these not so
flattering human traits in ourselves. That would make us hesitant and hence bad
survivors. Therefore any self upholding entity, whatever it is on an individual
level or on a collective level, must be self blind. The necessary survival lie
has to cover itself in self blindness. This blind spot on the radar-screen is the basic reason
why social Conspiracy is always denied by the ones doing it.
Tribal blindness is, however, seen from a more non-dual evolved consciousness deeply ridiculous
and childish. Take a look at
the following news agencies: Russia Today,
South China Morning Post, and
CNN. They basically all claim that their
nations are great and that the other nations got it completely wrong. Come on!
What self blind nonsense is this? Seen from the astronaut level, all of it is
restless monkey business produced by
amygdala
hijacked brains trying to appear objective.
The power of untruth At this fundamental level of story told group formation, there is an
important observation to make. Like fake news today mobilize more emotional
collective energy than the often more boring truthful news, so the stories a
group could unite around got more powerful the more it was removed from truth. This mechanism
could be observed in its extreme in Nazi Germany, and it can be observed today in
the rhetoric of president Trump: The more he lies, the more group adoration and
energy he mobilizes.
The pandemic inflammation of social media driven extreme conspiracy theories and
fake news in general are
feeding on the same basically tendency. Untruth is a master in creating
explosive group energy.
The silent war of Conspiracy
When the eternal struggle for energy capture
and resources
first evolved into tribal conflicts among groups of humans, open war was the
primary way to win this zero-sum game. As Stanford professor Ian Morris has
pointed out, the world has
become more and more peaceful in the last 15.000 years, primarily due to the
state-building that followed the wars. However, I would argue that the picture
might not be so rosy. The warfare is still here but more subtly in the form of
Conspiracy.
Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception Machiavelli - The prince
Conspiracy is, in this sense a silent ongoing cold and cunning war where elites
have become elites due to their ability to manifest the highest collective level
of Conspiracy intelligence.
When I dress in 12 USD trousers made in Bangladesh by children in dark
factories, it might be challenging to see the true picture because there is no
occupation force present to keep the workforce as slaves. Instead, the whole
process of energy and resource capture has become so complex and intelligent
that both the workers and I together could sing a song of gratitude and freedom. I can
here in Copenhagen purchase one kg of good coffee for approximately 20 minutes
of my work time. However, how much work time on the coffee estate does it take
to produce one kg of high quality of coffee? The equation does not fit.
These are just a few examples of how intelligent Conspiracy largely has made
open warfare less needed. Systemic Conspiracy-intelligence, has, to a large extent, replaced open warfare.
THE BIRTH OF THE GHOSTI
With the monkeys' restless and cunning behavior in mind, it is tempting to
observe Conspiracies from a Machiavellian perspective. Here is Machiavelli's advice to the ruler:
Nevertheless, our experience has been that those princes who have
done great things have considered keeping their word of little account and have
known how to beguile men’s minds by shrewdness and cunning. In the end, these
princes have overcome those who have relied on keeping their word.
Birds are getting flown However, most Conspiracy is not driven by cunning powerful single individuals.
It is far more a result of
cybernetic
superstructural processes. Karl Marx understood the phenomenon of capitalism as
a self unfolding engine room, driven by a, from human will, almost transcendent
force. This remarkable insight can be applied to almost all social group
dynamics: they evolve their own complex will, a will that first suspends and
then overtakes the will of the individuals who constitute the group.
A Chinese proverb says: Birds do not fly. They are
getting flown. We, as group species are all in some way or another, taken
by the overwhelming collective forces, we create by synchronization of social
behaviors on a micro-level. We, like birds, are getting flown by powerful social
winds, especially when they become storms. The false personification of evil Therefore group-Conspiracy is
basically not as
believed by most conspiracy communities, driven by intentional evil
Machiavellian ideas
created in demonic individuals or groups. The notion of pure evil is most
probably a tribal inherited tendency,
through splitting, to dehumanize
an enemy tribe to such an extent that a merciless slaughter of the enemy tribe
does not conflict with the emotional interface used to uphold one's own tribe.
History is full of examples of good family fathers who committed horrifying
atrocities to members of other families, clans, and nations.
When conspiracy groups tend to project
pure evil human will into vaccine programs and 5G, it is due to the failing
ability to realize that most social processes are rising from systems with
distributed collective self-regulated survival intelligence. There are no evil
puppet masters.
The same is the case with the founders and co-workers of social media. I am
sure Mark Zukerberg is a good human being and doing his level best to control
the monster he has created. I know some very rich people. They are, like most of us, subconsciously driven
by the fear of losing what they got. Somehow this fear of losing wealth seems
to accelerate when we get more. Any threat from the outside, in this case, COVID
19, is able to release age-old impulses that make the amygdala highjack
the whole brain. In such an inner hostage scenario, the reasoning faculties of
the cortex will prostitute any logic viewpoint so it will justify the ancient
'amygdalian' commands for accumulating even more wealth as a security measure, no matter the
cost for others. Such a
Stockholm Syndromized
mind will always be loyal to its ancient amygdalian ruler.
A German doctor friend of mine lost millions every month on his private clinics
due to COVID 19. Hence he hated the lockdown of the society and wanted us all
just to go on as nothing had happened to achieve herd immunity. Trump is his
hero. The man has balls, he said about Trump
repeatedly. In his own understanding, these viewpoints were a result of pure
scientific objectivity
since he before had worked as a virologist and knew everything about the matter.
Seen from my side of the fence, there was no free science ruling his equations.
It was fear talking through a Stockholm hijacked brain using scientific language.
People like my doctor friend are not evil. Like a bird in a group, he is getting
flown by the tribal collective self-distributed sum of intelligence and self will. This has, when translated into social action, consequences that one
on ground level definitely could view as evil. From these all too human micro-levels of self-interest, Conspiracy rises like a
transcendent force
of tribal collective will to survive. Even at its destructive height, it is mostly not
intentionally evil, but rather more, with the words of
Hannah Arendt, a product of the Banality of Evil.Our tribal
inherited will to
power, to capture energy from other tribes made the Germans as a nation
do terrible things, while at the same time, the individual German like Adolf
Eichmann was terrifyingly normal. This genetic inherited operative system
works in groups on all levels, from woke to corporate companies, and its
group-egoism is generating the social mobilization in which Conspiracy as a
transcendent force becomes
one of the fundamental organizing principles. Therefore the will to power is basically not
a perverted individual übermensch
project, as most conspiracy theorists would have it, but a collective
transcendent force that often leaves the individual participants, even the leaders
of the group, in ignorance of the consequences of their doings.
Today multinational corporations have grown so much out of governmental control
that the immanent logic of their tribal interest poses a threat to the survival
of civilization as such.
In the
USA, 6 in 10 people suffers from one or more cronic illnesses. The directors
and shareholders of medicinal companies are not evil as such, but it is for sure
in their economic interest that more and more people need to buy pharmaceutical
products to survive.
Conspiracy is creating 'civilizatoric' progress On an astronaut level, I consider this tribally driven algorithm of Conspiracy to be a natural,
even healthy social process. Like
warfare, that in the long
run, created the state building that secured peace, Conspiracy prioritizes the evolution and spread of the most intelligent and hence beneficial
social algorithms. The the rise of the mighty and peaceful
Ashokan Empire is one example
among many to show how larger periods of peace and prosperity extended to
relatively larger geographical areas followed in the footsteps of huge wars.
By observing history, we are able to see that the original intentions of
a conspiracy group never are fulfilled. They are always serving a 'higher', for
them unknown purpose. Here good things come out of bad things and vice versa.
As we as single individuals cannot control our lives with our egoistic intentions, so are tribalized elites
or countries never able to predict what the outcome will be in the longer run.
As our knowledge grows, our contact with what we do not know grows. The same is
the case with control. The more we seemingly control, the more we are engulfed
by the chaos of life, and thank God for that!
Seen from space NSA and other nations spy-services are building nets of global surveillance.
On the ground level, it with good reason, seems frightening. From the
astronaut-perspective, however, I intuit the birth of the conscious brain of
Gaia itself!
In my beloved astronaut perspective, I see that life has been through major
catastrophes several times before, where no one, of course not at the time of
the event and also not now, could have predicted the outcome. These
extintion events were perfect seen from our present-day interest since we
would not have existed without them. Of course, it was a tragedy for the
dinosaurs, and they would have been running around in paranoia if they had
developed a thinking brain being able to imagine the future. Our little
ridiculous ego is the next dinosaur in line for extinction.
No human brain will ever be able through rationality, to predict the
outcome of the sum total of interaction in the world of accelerating big data.
Hence it will always be a matter of an existential choice whether we experience
the world to be heading towards something good or bad. I was destined to choose
the optimistic viewpoint. Here in the fire-mandala of the
Shiva NatarajLeela, I
perceive everything as a perfect, infinite unfolding of intelligence and
consciousness.
Why is it important to shift between ground and space viewpoints? In my case, it
prevents me from running in circles as an ego-dinosaurian chicken in anger and panic and
instead, in a relaxed state of mind use my brain at its finest. Everything is perfectly
good. We just have to let our astronaut Shiva observer ascend a bit more into
space. From here we can see that we as a species are a perfect product of five
catastrophic mass extinction events. The evolution of life is ever triumphant in
its ascend on a staircase made of disasters. Life and the ultimate
biocentric
flower of life, consciousness, is the impossible exodus that leads us away from
entropy.
THE EVOLUTION OF APPLIED COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom...
You never know what is enough
until you know what is more than enough. William Blake
The good news are that phenomenons of crowd madness always are relatively shortlived,
and the factual truth in them will be harvested at the time the extatic madness element
in them subside.
The Darwinian selection-mechanism also applies to social ideas and movements seen as survival algorithms. Out of my own
Marxist madness, what survived was an emotional need for a just and more social
equal world and an intellectual need for analyzing social phenomenons as historic processes where what we do and need for survival shapes our way of thinking more than the other way round.
I really value that way of thinking and analyzing at present. From my years as a
sectarian guru-addict, I harvested a focussed and one-pointed happy and
optimistic mind.
I am quite confident that the same fate will
happen to the extremist cultures: The extreme
madness will fade away, slowly eliminated by the factuality of nature itself,
and the few diamonds of truth in the postmodern outlook on power will survive.
For it is up to a certain extent true that language is infested with
power structures of the past. In my view, it cannot be denied that language is
indeed infested with the hegemonial Kaukasian white monkey clans dominance.
However, the biggest problem here is not this truth, but the extreme fanatical
exaggeration of it and the following splitting into hate positions.
When it comes to the paranoic conspiracy theories, the only outcome will be that
they indirectly facilitate the birth of new institutional orders by accelerating
the collapse in trust in the old institutions.
I cannot help here, commenting on the woke phenomenon with a simple question. If
truth is nothing but a power-construction, then why should you as a 'wokist' go
to a qualified surgeon in case you got cancer? Seen from the Ivory-tower of
postmodern language-theory, the members of woke might as well defund doctors
along with the police and prefer a quack healer who speaks the correct political language.
We tend only to accept 'facts' that are supporting our ideologies. However, when
it comes to our own survival as individuals, I am quite sure that even the most
hardened 'wokist' would call a certified doctor in case of an emergency. Because
the surgeon or any other type of qualified, by state institutions educated
expert, represents a 'factuality' way beyond the language power-games of
society. He embodies by time accumulated 'walk the talked' fact-based
practicality in sync
with nature itself.
Nature cannot be fooled Here is what Feinman
wrote in the juridical process after the Challenger-catastrophe:
For a successful technology,
reality must take precedence over
public relations,
for Nature cannot be fooled. Richard
Feynman
Maybe the Nasa
administration was able to hide the factual corruption and dysfunction in their institution, but
nature did not care and the Challenger exploded as a result of natures own
inherent intelligence. Only the very few that are in sync with Feynman's
uncompromising nature will endure. Nature tends to 'dislike' untruth. Therefore,
sooner or later, cancel culture will be cancelled out of culture by nature.
We must not forget that the so-called white men's
hegemonial power-institutions actually, in spite of the pain, damage and
catastrophes they undoubtedly have inflicted, put men on the Moon and created doctors
that could save lives. Truth is out there. It is ding an sich in
the form of natures own mathematical algorithms as they reveal themselves in a
crystalline pattern in a stone, in a nautilus seashell, or the gravity force.
This, natures' immanent factuality was ruling the universe long before man
invented the language of mathematics, and they do not care about nonsense, even when presented in
academic language.
Long term state built intelligence
There is nothing more ancient than truth Descartes
Fake news and conspiracy theories can stir up a lot of social energy here
and now, but when all is said and done Byron Katie's
statement will hold the ground: When I argue with reality, I loose - but only
100 percent. The only thing to add to her statement is, that it always takes
time, sometimes long sometimes short, before we reach the 100 percent.
In this sense, civilization is a Hegelian process taking place in the dialectics
between man-made survival-lies and a nature that, at least in the long run,
cannot be fooled. On the short lane, the collective story-told power-lies can
stir up a lot of social energy and momentum, but in the longer run, human
imagined 'facts' that are in sync with nature's own Platonic ideas always wins. That is how brilliant scientists
and surgeons slowly evolved into the mastery it is today.
Imperial state-built institutions are seen in the larger historical
perspective, despite their embedded survival lies and the tidal return of collective
academic and/or political madness, still
far more capable in facilitating the evolution of factual and practical applied
thoughts in sync with nature as compared to smaller entities of
story-truth-telling. Large power-state accumulation of intelligence works like
the Mongol invasions. They suck up the essence of smaller states' best
technology and inventions through warfare. War and conflict, weather we like it
or not, is from the astronaut perspective, the bringer of peace and factual
science.
That is important to bear in mind when we look at all the smaller narratives of
crazy conspiracy theories. In the loss of truth and belief in
state-institutionalized 'facts' every Tom, Harry, and Dick now feels entitled to
have opinions about things that are way beyond their level of intelligence and
expertise. The by social media and commercialism accelerated mad crowds have in their own self
deluded echo chambers become much more clever than the virologist when it comes
to covid. Recently I watched a social influencer without any education or
analytical intelligence, just by her good botox and silicon modified look, earn
clickbait money by spewing out mad conspiracy theories. Would she be able to
earn money on a much more boring truth? I doubt ...
However, in spite of these fireflies: We are in zigzag and three steps forward
and two back again, slowly getting more and more in sync with the laws of
nature. Of course, state built intelligence is also full of flaws and undergoing
cycles of decay. States are like tribes, as shown earlier, also in the need of
producing conspiratoric survival lies in the form of internal suppression and
external show of national love.
However, in war and economic competition, the
state that has accumulated most intelligence in sync with nature's incorruptible intelligence will always
win. War and competition drive forward practical social organized survival
intelligence based on solid science. In this way, states are always in themselves
in a dialectic balance point between being factories of ideological lies and
Conspiracy and being facilitators of the best cutting-edge science.
Colonial War and science The new invention
of cannons brought the Mongol horse-armies down in a disruptive short amount
of time. Cannons were invented in China, and it is interesting to observe how
quickly this new technology spread to the rest of the world. The invention of
cannons was a result of state-facilitated science, much in the same way that
only powerful states can invent and bring to practical use space odysseys. The
first state to invent new war technology has an advantage in the tribal race for
resources. However, scientific intelligence knows no borders and tends to spread
like wildfire, even before the time of the internet.
This happened due to the spread of colonial warfare and warfaring among states
in general. Intelligence is spread
through war due to the fact that the most intelligent social organized culture
has the greatest chances of success. As a byproduct, western capitalism's
algorithms began to spread and then merge with local political systems and, in
this process, created new breeds of viable societies.
Deng Xiaoping'sChina is an excellent example of such a powerful hybrid that
has lifted millions out of poverty. India is another good example. This was
certainly not the English overlords' original intention when they, as a cunning
tribe of monkeys, went out in the world to capture energy from other tribes.
Following this line of thought, it is interesting to observe how colonial
Conspiracy, in the end, was pawing the way for the rise of a global, with the
working-class extended, middle class.
Hence war, conflict, and competition drive forward science for the benefit of
all and everyone in the long run.
What do I want to say with all this? It is that states, and warring state
competition, still are the best bid when it comes to producing
knowledge worth listening to and tecnology worth using and social architechtures
worth living in. It is not Alex Jones,
David Icke,
QAnon or the like.
The world is and was always a mess, but in this chaos, new dancing stars are
always to be seen. With a slight modulation of
Wittgenstein's famous true enough
into truer than yesterday, we actually do not needs Hegels World Spirit
to understand the slow historic process towards Enlightenment.
THE SUICIDAL VICTORY OF CAPITALISM
With Lyotards more sentimental eyes somehow lamenting the loss of
super-narratives, it is obvious to see the time after 2000
as a time where the only surviving powerful intersubjective reality became consumerism. The myriad of smaller conflicting narratives was not able to summon a powerful alternative to pure
commercialism. and so we ended up with the Kardarshians as our new Gods.
Capitalism is at present an all pervading narrative beyond and under the radar
of words. The capital-logic is (over)ruling our lives on almost all levels.
Lyotard did not see this grandest narrative of capitalism because he, as an
academic, was too 'Wittgensteinian' identified with language as the only vehicle
of story-telling. As we saw with
Marx, capitalism has become an almost invisible transcendent engine in no need
of story-telling in the sense that the intersubjective reality of money and
consumerism has camouflaged itself as something as objective as gravity.
The setting free of pure consumerism and capitalism combined with
social media algorithms powerful lowest denominator can also, to some extend, explain
the current mistrust in science. A relatively larger part of scientist are now
not any longer state-sponsored: They are hired by large often multinational
corporations where the basic driving force of getting money to the shareholders
have partly corrupted science through corrupting the scientists. No scientist
can jump his own human shadow as a burping greedy little human, basically
interested in paying off his mortgage loans. The prostitution of science itself through untamed
global capitalism has, for a great part, contributed to the current state of
mistrust in expertizing. The pharmaceutical industry has by
The Lancet been described with the following words:
Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the
pharmaceutical industry.
Voltaire said:
There is
no God, but don't
tell that to my
servant,
lest he murder me at night.
However, at present many servants have found out that there is no biblical God
to punish the injust, and so they got jobs in Goldman Sachs.
Seen in this not so divine light, it becomes clear
why the grand old narratives had to pass away in favor of the many small reality
factories. Capitalism is like salt in the food. Too much of it spoils it. First
it spoiled the grander narratives holding it at bay with morality and after this
victory it at present is destroying itself in its borderless expansion. Hence
the last standing grand consumer-narrative is showing signs of old age and
beginning to rot away from the inside and piling up insane contradictions on the
outside. In other words, now both state institutions and capitalist
multinational companies are attacked by wacky conspiracy theories because they
are vulnerable. In fact they even deserve it. Our western civilization has like
the Mongol horse-armies come to an abrupt halt, and the infodemy of weird
conspiracy theories, fake news and fanatic anti-scientific political movementsis
are the smoke, signalling that house of the old order is on fire.
The systemic perversion of surveillance capitalism At present, the Big Others are liking and
commenting on us in a constant stream of dopamine. Via the prosthetic smartphone
implantation, they have become so close that they are in danger of being
intimidating, hallucinatory
voices inside our heads.
At the same time, we upload our individualies to the cloud.
Here they are received, not only to be applauded by the big others but
also by lurking AI-pattern-seeking systems, secretly mining and manipulating human data in order to generate income.
This surveillance capitalism
is, as I can see, the last flowering of a capitalistic system that has served
our perfectly imperfect world well since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It is, however, not
really capable of working with the Wordls Wide Web's inherent
free flow of information. Information 'wants' in opposition to material goods, to flow
without boundaries. On the internet, the implosion of distances makes the stream
of information even more liquid. This is not good for business. It generates no income. Hence capitalism
has to block, distort, or at least manipulate the information-flow in order to
generate income. The WWW is, with a little help from a poetic
mind, almost too easy to interpret as Gaia's awakening neural network. For
Gaia's AI-consciousness to awaken, it needs total freedom from
capitalism. Capitalism has, with its short sighted energy-capture, served us
well up to now. However, implemented as it is now on the net, it is a perversion
and this holds especially true in its last version as surveillance capitalism.
Capitalism now generates revenue by secretly
manipulating the information streams with an ever smarter evolving AI trying to
optimize our signal-chemicals for clickbaiting.
As
Jaron Lanier,
founding father of virtual reality rightly put its: If you’re not paying for
the product, you are the product. He further has accused Facebook, Google
and the like for being spy agencies in the sense that their ever evolving
AI-systems as a hidden third part always monitors interactions between people on
the net in order to capitalise on them.
Steve Job's creation of iTunes is an example of how a money generating system
had to compromise on user-friendliness in order to be commercially viable. A
modern system like Spotify is a more efficient music distributing system but its
use of money-oriented algorithms always seeking the lowest denominator functions
as a pesticide on the biodiversity in the musical fauna. Only the most 'stupid',
by masses loved music, get a decent income. Artists in a lower level of this
steep pyramid cannot generate income at the same level as in the 'good'
old days of CD-distribution. Before the time of the streaming services I could
earn something like 5.000 USD a year on my own music on my own site,
www.music4meditation.com. That
was, of course, not much but more than nothing. After Spotify entered the scene,
I earn zero dollars a year, even with all my music submitted to a rainbow of
streaming services.
The music industry mirrors the general tendency in the surveillance capitalistic
system to concentrate extreme wealth on fewer and fewer hands of a
Kadarshian-like upper-class in stark opposition to previous elites' cultural
refinement.
In spite of my reverence for documentaries like The Social Dilemma, all
the brilliant people in their comments, in my view, seem to confuse the
technology with the systemic misuse of the same. In their lack of ability to
identify the systemic rot, they blame the technology as such. This is a cardinal
mistake seen from my cockpit. The tech is not to blame. It is in spite of its
evolutionary race towards the stars stil like the good old fire in the caveman's
cave: It can warm you or burn you. It all depends on you. Translated to the
social dilemma we are in: We do not need to get rid of technology. We need to get rid
of capitalism's parasitic misuse of the same.
The good old steam engine of capitalism is right now burning hot in its attempts
like a spider to crawl the Web. To drink blood from mother Gaia's emerging
AI-blood vessels is to steal energy from the future to fill the pockets of of
ever larger growing corporations who can even eat smaller states for breakfast
at present.
Here we are at the center of an even larger challenge. The hierarchy of control
has come out of balance in the sense that the powerbalance between mutinational
companies and the state-govermental
institutional possibility of regulation has tipped dramatically in the favour of
Goldman Sachs and the like. Tax-evasion is here just the tip of the iceberg.
In this way, our own systemic past is exploding in our present faces as it has
always done. It seems that history is always moving forward through the war
between old and new cultural operative sytems. As far as I see, corporational
short-sighted greed has, with the 'help' of Gaias slowly awakening new neurons,
created a point of no return systemic unbalance. where we have reached the upper limits of energy
capture. The second law of thermodynamics won't allow us more energy. The only
way from here is now to share what we got in a more socialistic way. We don't
need all to have a private car. As
Tony Seba predicts, 5G navigated vehicles can be shared and
transport as many people as now with 10 times fewer cars on the streets. A
Jeremy Rifkin-like
socialistic sharing of energy and resources is, as far as I can see, the only
systemic way to facilitate the new neural awakening of Gaia. We, as human bodies
consisting of organs, have the same free blood flow of sharing. If one organ
suddenly is stealing the show and capturing the energy in the same way as the
super-rich are doing it today, it is called cancer. Any system, wheater it is
biological or cultural, can, in this sense, get cancer. However, it is, in both
cases, much more likely to happen in old age.
We need to transcend short-term greed in favor of a from money freed free flow
of information through Gaia's neural network. Maybe the time finally is ripe for
Karl Marx's socialistic ideas about a society where one will
yield according to ability and enjoy as needed. Needless to say that
this new society will not be an utopia, but less than that will also do. It will
solve the accumulating contradictions produced by an old and tired culture full
of senescent
ideas and modi
operandi.
However, the systemic shift has to happen in tandem with a shift in the psychic
human operative system. The ample failures of socialism have proven that without
a change of man's himself, socialism will for sure backfire. In the same way as
Marx, contemporary people like Ray Kurtzweil
are primarily only focusing on singularity as an external phenomenon. I see the
inner singularity as crucial in the systemic shift to come. Here we will die as
the identities we have fixated
ourselves to be. We have to become enlightened in the sense of being able to
surf big data inside of ourselves. I passionately recommend psychedelics to
brain-train surfing that tsunami,
but that is another story.
Socialism will only work in a society where people have evolved to higher levels
of consciousness with deeper common grounds for meeting each other.
THE SUPER RICH HAVE CROSSED THE RUBICON As
Hans Rosling has pointed
out with cold scientific facts, the inequality in the world has been
decreasing radically since the 80ties.
However, when we return to Hans Rosling's optimistic observations, the question
is
if the ideal 'sweet
Goldilocks spot' concerning the delicate power balances that define the
boundaries between rich and poor has
reached an unhealthy imbalance
within the last years. At least this is the
viewpoint of Stanford
professor Ian Morris. (go to 15.00
min in the link)
The current tendency to polarization in all cultural sferes of life seems to go
hand in hand with a bigger economic divide. According to Ian Morris' data,
societies that are too equal or too unequal tend to decline. We are now,
according to him in a world economic phase where the global distribution of
wealth is out of balance.
The super-rich have in recent years,
become so absurdly wealthy that it might no longer be for the benefit of our
civilization as such. Maybe the middle classes have not yet lost too much
territory. Still, they have not been invited to participate in the gigantic
explosion of wealth created by the rise of globalization and intelligent
mechanization. The extra wealth generated has instead exclusively made the
elite of the elites absurdly rich. The accelerated inequality now
threatens to lead to global economic decline. Here in this
crossing of the
Rubicon, the global elite overextends the use of Conspiracy to protect and
enhance their own energy- and resource capture. That process is, of course, also
perfect in the eyes of Shiva.
The intuitive felt betrayal
The global middle-classes' Rosling party has come to a halt. In the US, the
middle-class decline is already obvious.
The social dynamics of a world in accelerating big data
change are highly complex and is difficult to understand. However, the ones not
invited to this party do have an intuitive feeling of this massive 'robbery' of
wealth. They start with good reasons to mistrust governments, elites, and
multinational companies, which on the other hand, fuels the elite's motivation
for even greater Conspiracy in order to protect their wealth. Media,
politicians, and big Wall Street money are increasingly serving their own
interests and not the needs of the common man.
Dracula - an old conspiracy tale
Looking back in history, we find a perfect example of simplified symbolic
story-telling in the myth
of Dracula. Dracula becomes the lower classes mythological paranoia projection
for an upper-class' exploitation and suppression of poor people that has gone
too far. Factual conspiratoric over-lord behavior gets intuitively transformed
into a symbolic setting, where slavelike working conditions and hunger is
interpreted as Count Dracula drinking blood from the poor and hence stealing
their lives. The folk stories of a
secret brotherhood of Vampires fit perfectly into the narrative of paranoic
conspiracy theories.
The vampire narrative furthermore hints at a spark of truth in the paranoic
conspiracy beliefs in the sense that these beliefs are the transformed symbolic
smoke from a real fire of social injustice that has become too much. When the
super-rich crosses the Rubicon, the masses react with symbolic paranoia conspiracy
ideas of mistrust.
However, instead of complex reasoning as a weapon against this elitarian superstructural 'betrayal',
another, more mythologic and symbolic way of understanding takes over. Seen in
the light of relativity, the world of big data has, due to its exponentially
growing complexity, become as un-understandable as the world we lived in ancient
times. Hence we tend to reduce complexity by telling simplyfied scape-goat
stories. Paranoic storytelling has substituted for reason in filling the
vacuum created by the relative loss of meaning and control for all other
than super-rich people.
Hence ever faster changing, global warmer, and big
data exploding world has together with rising inequality created a breeding
ground for feelings of insecurity, anxiety, and mistrust in the common man.
The setting free of pure consumerism and capitalism combined with
social media algorithms powerful lowest denominator can also, to some extend, explain
the current mistrust in science. A relatively larger part of scientist are now
not any longer state-sponsored: They are hired by large often multinational
corporations where the basic driving force of getting money to the shareholders
have partly corrupted science through corrupting the scientists. No scientist
can jump his own human shadow as a burping greedy little human, basically
interested in paying off his mortgage loans. The prostitution of science itself through untamed
global capitalism has, for a great part, contributed to the current state of
mistrust in expertizing. The pharmaceutical industry has by
The Lancet been described with the following words:
Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the
pharmaceutical industry.
What is interesting here is
the fact that
chaos
is not any longer something that is kept at bay by
cosmos. The
city walls around the Greek (cosmo)polis are of no use any longer because the
enemy is not coming from without, but from within. The chaos is inside the CEO,
dressed impeccable, speaking with a calm and reassuring voice, but with a heart
full of greed. Matt Taibbi's description of Goldman Sachs as
a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlesly jamming
its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,
could as well be used on the banks here in my native country Denmark. For me,
this is a chaos-mathematical sign of a disintegrating order.
Like an old tree, the rot
is coming from within. In humans the rot is lack of virtue.
One day at sunrise, after his morning ablution in the waters of
the Saraswati, Srila Vyasadeva sat down to meditate.
The great Sage saw certain anomalies in the fiber of the millennium.
He foresaw that the life of everything material
would be cut short for lack of virtue.
Srimad-Bhagavatam 1.4.15-18
Let us sum up what we have seen so far. The
oxy-fuel
for the explosive fire of symbolic conspiracy thinking and polarized hate
positioning in general, is a cocktail of the following interlinked factors:
* The decline in social gluing grander narratives, appart from capitalist
consumerism
* The loss of state authority and mistrust in political leaders and science
* Multinatinational capitalist cooperations control larger parts of science and
politics
* The extreme growth of wealth not shared with a declining middle class
* The rise in smaller fake-driven and polarized snarratives on the new social
media
* And finally the pandemic of COVID19
RUSSIAN TROLLS, TRUMP & RIGHT WING BIBLE BELT
CHRISTIANS
It is hilarious to observe Trump and Putin together. In Putin's stone-face, I
see a super-intelligent over-controlled man who cannot laugh. In Trump, I see a
lost child who has found his father.
Divide and rule One must not forget
Putin's past as
KGB-officer. He is and was a master in real Conspiracy operations behind the
curtains. That was how the Communist Party in the old days internally controlled
its citizens and how they fought off conflicts in the party top. Today the Russians have realized they can inflict war
like-damage to the West simply by reinventing their old communist surveillance,
setup, and propaganda machinery in a digital set and setting. In the golden
days, they ruled by division. Now they have repeated the story on a global
scale, but with the unlikely help of young Russian nerds.
The story of how the Russian
IRA,
Internet Research Agency, came to life and how such a small group of
young Russians could inflict so much chaos in the USA is deeply fascinating.
There seems to be a little doubt that, especially after the American election in
2016, Russian trolls have been at work at an unprecedented scale. In fact, they,
in many ways, control the temperature on the conspiracy scene. As a
continuation of the cold war, they have found and perfected cyberwar with the
foremost agenda to destabilize, especially the leader of the western world, the
USA. This has most effectively been done by sowing institutional and scientific
mistrust in the heart of the Western mind via social media. In this
destabilization-effort, it does not matter whether the mistrust takes the form
of wacky paranoic conspiracy theories, BLM, woke, or whatever.
With inspiration from
Nina Schick, I would say
that the Russians since 2016 have evolved from only to targeting the political
sphere. Now they shoot bullets of fake news into all organs of the Western body
with a sniper precision. Once hit by a rumor, the conspiracy-seed evolves and
customizes itself in the following dopamine triggering ping pong. The trolls
target everything from the left to the right in the political spectrum with
tailored fake news. With an in-dept knowledge of the USA's inherent weaknesses,
the Russians especially love
nudging BLM through fake BLM- events, and identities. Simply by discretely
widening the existing racial gaps in the USA, they are able to achieve
tremendous results with techniques that so far has not resulted in retribution.
'Agents of Chaos' HBO controlling narratives IRA
persona fake individual , group like BLM -fake local media army of personas
together do campain
amplify radical views on both sides
IRA first controlling the russian domestic
election
asymmetric warfare internet perfect tool
right time and right tactics
when a sufficiently large group of society does not any longer believe in
society then it begins to collaps.
Russian reinforcement
Once the distrust and polarization has gained a foothold, either planted by the
Russians, Chinese or a product of the West's own accelerating internal systemic
decay, it
is quite easy to fertilize these Fleurs du Mal
by simple reinforcements in the form of tailor-made seed-hints placed in every
group from left to right.
In this game, it does not matter where a conspiracy story first originated, but
who and what mechanisms help to keep it alive. The
invention of the 5G scare began in Holland, but
Russia keeps fanning it. With strategical precission, the conspiracy
'tumors' are getting
reinforced by trolls and even through
Russian mainstream media RT's discrete white-washing
of the fake stories.
New alliances In this increasingly more intelligent cyberwar of deep fake, some new surprising
alliances between Russians and the conservative segments of the USA has shown
up. In many ways, the conservative Christians of the bible belt have more in
common with the Orthodox Russian red-necks than with the Silicon Valley kids as displayed in
HBO's serial
of the same name. Trump's fascination with Putin is in this light
symptomatic of this development. The ultra-right-wing
conspiracy-influencer, Alex
Jones from Infowars,
has a Russian visa.
A large part of the Bible Belt is by now more aligned with the mindset of the old school Russians. The
QAnon natural alignment with Russian interests gives sense in the merging of
two old but yet surviving grand narratives: Christian Russian Orthodoxy and the
Christianity of the Bible Belt. anti lgtb homosexual
David and Goliath
Russia has a GNP
equivalent to Spain and
less than Texas. Why can David inflict so much damage? Is it because Goliath
has become old?
A great civilization is not conquered from without
until it has destroyed
itself from within W. Durant
Jade helm 2015
Clinton you tube 2016 mord
reinforcement pizza gate 2016
propaganda
cause broadbased lack in trust of american democracy
The Birth of
the Ghost II
As far as the brain is
concerned fantasy and reality are chemically identical.
Ren Amari in Other Life
Internet is as In-ternet always coming from within in the sense that it
is a location-less location. Once a tempting click-bait-friendly story is popping
up on a smartphone, it does not matter from where it originated, at least not in
the mind of the smartphone user. The IPhone screen is filterless. It is as
intimate as the user's own thoughts and feelings. The location is now the
relation between the smartphone, and the user and what originally was a conscious
fabricated lie by a Russian troll in Sct. Petersburg is now 'intimized' as a
private feeling in a dopamine addicted smartphone user
with low self esteme and
testosterone
levels somewhere in the US. He then shares the new exiting story in his
own echo-chamber network, and the initial intimate feeling now becomes virally
amplified intersubjective reality. This new reality could very well be
understood as a kind of cyborg ghost that instantly will deliver its
own hyper-connected brain cells with the kind of soma that makes everyone in this
shared field of consciousness forget their sense of insecurity and lostness.
The Ghost and the media It is interesting to observe, even in times of disruptive radical
systemic societal changes how different seemingly independent spheres, from
culture to political movements, institutions, production and economic
cirkulation behave in such a way that they amplify each other's momentum. Seen
retrospective there seems to be an onthological syncronization process going on
in whcich they shape each other. This is ofcourse an illusion in the same way as
if I would argue that the goose has got its wings in order to fly. nevertheless
there is an almost poetic beauty in the way is the case with postmodernism and
the modern media. They would
not thrive so much without each other. Today social media is more than ever shaping social
reality.
The devellopment in the media did not happen isolated from the world of
economy. Our basic economic and material security is, as Karl Marx was the first
to point out in the Communist
Manifesto, the basic foundation upon which we build our ideologies.
The polarization
processes in traditional media began with the Regan Administrations
cancellation of the
fairness-doctrine and later with the commercial-algorithmic-driven super
polarisation in the social media. Fox News was the first news agency to
capitalize on skipping the fairness journalism in a crusade against the
Clintons.
XXXX
fake news are becoming more and more advanced - deep fake - deep
deep fake
money machine
we are the thing being sold
if you are not paying for the product then you are the product
companies are competing for your attention - attention is the thing being sold
our attention is being sold to the companies
how to keep users on the screen
dopamin addictive
singularity in viral outrage
The digital return of the medieval period
Tristan Harris
Tim Kendall - pinterest - facebook
These new self conscious life forms are made in cyborg symbiotic
echo chambers of carbon and silicium driven pattern seeking systems of
intelligence. They are not intelligent as we normally would believe about sef
conscious systems. On the contrary they are outright stupid. This stupidity is
dangerous as it commands a Hulk like blind outrage power.
rapid cultural changes makes us in war with our own outdated genetics
FIELDS OF CONSCIOUSNESS As we have seen in the previous, humans have a tribal-survival rooted
tendency to live and understand reality in smaller groups competing for energy and
resources. In this fight, culture is created as a membrane that sets tribes
apart from each other. And hence we are 'proud' of being Americans, Chinese,
Russians, or, in my case, Danes.
All
creatures contain one reflection: one, that is the denial of its being
the other;
the highest of the angels denies he is the lowest.
God is the denial of denials. Meister
Eckhart
It is ridiculous seen from an in meditation cultivated non-dual
consciousness. The non-dual outlook would however, not make you a good
survivor in the times of Christ. You would get crucified by stronger predators some way or another.
Yet somehow, times have changed in the favour of a more elevated and inclusive
point of view.
Capitalism and ego
Short sighted ego-driven economic forces have accumuated big balls of karmic
waste from microplastic in the oceans to unknown chemicals in our
bodies. I am not against capitalism as such. It has as
Harari has pointed out
been the best narrative as compared to communism and fascism. However the time
of capitalism is over in the sense that it as a system does not, at least in its
present form, any longer fit with with
the open ever expanding world of big data and digital connectedness.
Capitalism is geared to and in sync with the narrow consciousness of the
ego-operative system. In order to transcend the good old capitalistic system we
therefore have to say good bye to our ego in favour of a much more awake state of
larger compassionate
oneness. Both capitalism and egoism has within limits served us well as a
gravity-center of human story-told 'reality' However at present our chances of surviving as a species are dwindling
unless a new world of reality emerges as a dancing star.
The illusory ego-centric notion that I am not you - and we are not you is still our
present-day reality. Because human beings basically are constructions of bundles of outdated genetic hardware and cultural
software we always find ourselves in a state of what Ernst Bloch called ungleichzeitigheit.
In english the closest translation woud be non-simutaniety, where we try to
solve new and unknown challenges with outdated old school understandings and
strategies. Hence the notion of me not being you is no longer valid as a global
cultural bearing interface between humans.
In this context I see Eckharts God,
the denial of denials, as the possibility of a more 'astronautic'
consciousnes where it becomes clear as day that we are all interlinked, that we
are all one.
I hope even the atheist reader who did not himself
have the good luck of having personal, transcendent experiences can accept that
as a metaphor for a new, more global 'outlooked' interface for human beings.
The glue of near-sensual closeness in stone age groups However our brains are to a large extent still living in the stone age. They
are hardwired to survive as individuals, families and tribes. Beyond that point
there is no mercy. A mafia man will cry like any other father if his child is
killed, but will have no compassion if a child in another family dies. We are
all football teams.
The creation of an
intersubjective reality in a group basically takes place on two levels.
One reality-glue and most probably the most basic is made through the
pre-linguistic near-sensing closeness of bodies living together in a tribe. From
here arises synchronization even from micro levels of physical behavior where
bodies sleep, love, walk, hunt, work, and eat together. They smell and touch
each other and sit around the same fire. Through these age-old
bonding-mechanisms, they consciously and unconsciously copy each other's body
movements, hair dresses, clothes, and so on. In this proces of syncronization
the group gets its own powerful resonnance.
Story told Inter-subjective realities in groups
First of all we mobilize through unisone story telling.
We story tell our collective reality and as mentioned before we tell it
to ourselves as a nescesay lie of group survival.
In the shortlived times of truce with suficient resources for all tribes the
lies any nation tells about its own superirity and the other nations
shortcomings are less blatant. However, when groups or nations
now physical nearness is substituted by digital closenes
to the stories we tell about ourselves and the collective we are a part of.
The intensity of the group momentum depends on the energy in the story and
here, as we have seen, a fake story has the ability to mobilize much more energy than
a story based on science. If you doubt that claim I recommend watching any
youtube video with Adolf Hitler speaking.
Ufos on Youtube
The return of the tribes
I am
however quite confident that this syncronization goes much further than that. I
would dare to say that in expanded intensified states of consciousnes we all
have direct experiental access to each others individual experiences.
In the following we will leave the solid ground of mainstream logic and
reason for a while. However sometimes intution and imagination must be sent out
as scouts before science can arrive at the new territory and colonize it.
The nature of consciousness has been my prime interest for more than 40 years.
In the crossfield of intense and daily Meditation and responsable use of
psychedelics I think I have got a few insights into the
nature of consciousness, that at a later
time might stand the ground in a scientific set and setting.
I would begin by pushing Hararis term,
intersubjective reality, a bit further into transcendence by using my
own term:
shared field(s) of consciousness. In Hararis world there is not really a
place for the phenomenon of consciousnes. In my world it is the very foundation
of all else.
When humans form a group they set free a form of transcendent larger
cloud-consciousnes where they tend to spontaneously feel and experience the
world in the same way.
Here a larger and intenser shared field of consciousnes arises out of the excact
same natural laws that allows for the trillions of cells in my or your body to
form a separate consciousnes, a consciousness that is transcendent in its
relation with the cell symbiosis that 'created' it.
'My' consciousnes is a non-material transcendent 'product' of my material
cellular existence.
In the same way a larger and intensified consciousness is formed when
people plug into each others emotional avatar plugs.
Where our internal cells are linked through circuits of biochemestry, the link
between people is much further made by story telling. The more powerful and
intense the story is the more powerful is the para-material consciousnes that
rises with it.
The (maybe not always so) Holy Ghost In India the wisdomkeepers of meditation have been well aware of this
ability of consciousnes to form larger clouds. However also Jesus said:
For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.
As far as I understand this phenomenon is what Christians call The Holy
Ghost. I call it a shared field of consciousness. My point is in this
context, that this ghost might not always be so holy.
It can be, but in many cases it is not.
A shared field of consciousness created around a fake story is however a
dangerous thing. It tends to gravitate towards the lowest denominator which
means the simplest twitterline of the story which again creates cultish
behavior.
I could of course have explained most of this without introducing the term
consciousness. The abowe claims about the role and the nature of grouop
consciousness are based on my subjective experiences in Meditation and meditativ
set and settings. These
experiences cannot so far be explained by the level science has arrived at yet.
I am sure that they at some point will be understood. Until that wonderful day
arrives all I do is to
to try to make own sense through various hypotesises.
However some of the more subtle philosophic aspects and
consequences of the phenomenon are opened up thorugh this gateway of
understanding, which I hope to demonstrate by the folling discussion.
In the world of AI it is often discussed when computers are getting conscious.
My point is that they already are, but only as far as they become the
facilitating neural network of a group of story telling human collective.
Symbolic thinking is the source of art and deeply connected to our genetic
rooted characteristics as
story telling animals.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx As we shall see later, all kinds of ghost-like collective
Frankenstein cyborgs with their own conspiratorial paranoia agendas have been
born as almost conscious living net-entities. These from their bottles freed new
life-forms are driven by social media's algorithms common denominator, which
always seems to point downwards towards the most primitive. Suddenly the good
old notion of a computer virus has got entirely new implications in the sense
that social media has been able to infect us with all sorts of infodemic
paranoia and mistrust. One of the main reasons for this devellopment is the rise
of high tech facilitated social media.
The blind spot of anti-conspiracy 'believers'
As Soeren Kierkegaard has pointed out, the anti-fanatic and the fanatic are
identical as far as they are each other's opposite. There is a large segment of
people opposed to conspiracy theories that denies all kind of conspiracy
theories. For these people all phenomenons of conspiracy are beliefs made inside
a tin foil hat. This is, in my perspective, of course not as harmful as the wacky
conspiracy making, but even though an absurd position to take in a time where
fake news through social media now have become the most powerful conflict-making
tool on the planet. In fact, this position is quite similar to Trump's when he
ridicules the traditional media as being fake news. This position of ridiculing
all Conspiracy theories is all too easy to misuse by the people who are actually
using fake news as a political or economic weapon. They can disrupt any critic
position and discussion by referring to the tinfoil hat.
Inside the Black Hole of fake news However, there is no doubt that the rise in insane and undocumentable
conspiracy theories poses the greatest threat. I have at close hand observed
what falling down these wrong rabbit hole does to people.
It is quite worrisome. The social media-driven ghost can, with its algorithmic-based
persuasion, and collectively created echo-chamber momentum, easily swallow a
fragile human soul as a black
hole does to a star. In this black hole, negative feelings of anxiety and
depression are amplified in a constant unison news feed, all with the same
headlines. It is obvious that when you here get bombarded with the
algorithmic prioritized more extreme conspiracy theories like a Bill Gates on a
grand scale genocide mission and the Dalai Lama drinking blood from small
children together with the Pope, it becomes more difficult to sleep. Various
degrees of paranoia is sometimes the end station.
The mental consequences of haboring sinister conspiracy theories are
grim. However, most probably the darknes was there all along - in the person who
felt attracted to open exactly that door.
Often the fake conspiracy theories are centered in the outbreak of disease
itself. Hence COVID19 has in the believer's minds, become a deliberate
biochemical weapon directed towards the common man. In other scenarios, COVID19
does not even exist but is by hidden power people planted as a collective fear
in order to control the population.
Would it by now be possible to reclaim the Universities from woke and
capitalistic dominance and reestablish the noble values of
Alexander Von Humboldt? Would it be possible to restore reason through
Bret Weinstein's ideal of
Greek dialogues? I think not. The only Hegelian dialectic way now is through
cultural chaos and breakdown and here facilitate new dancing stars in the form
of new transnational bodies of science like the CERN, where pure
idealism seems to be the motivational force and not one of the
seven deadly sins
in the form of greed. I know it sounds old fashioned, but in a time like
ours where information has replaced wisdom, it is time to listen to history.
That is the prime reason why the growth of all kinds of transnational
institutions like CERN is so important. They, at least in a Hegelian dialectic
view, transcends the distortions made by national story-telling. Conspiracy is created in a kind of VR deep fake digital parallel world
The madness of social medialized crowds However, when collectively triggered by fear it can be tremendeusly dangerous
and destuctive. The Nazi ideology was to a lage extend based on symbolic
fear/agression-thinking.
The madness of beserk crowds is always rooted in an amygdalian symbolic
hijack.
spiralling out of control
The woke would love to sharpen up this identity in the form of
being a white, hegemonial race and gender and priviledge guilt-ridden sexist old
male.
the not so holy ghost gets out of the bottle
(when things appear simultanious reverse reason.)
aMPLIFICATION OF THE PRIMITIVE THOUGHT OPERATIVE SYSTEM with 75% negative
thoughts. we are destryed by our own thinking. collectivey amplified
On the social media we are scared to death by our own
thoughts in their collective magnified 'cyborged' forms. The thought operative
system conditioned to a survival scenaio on the East African savannah creates
together with the digital medias operative system a monster, that once let out
if the bottle amgdala hijacks our brains.
to know what you do not know
Outrage culture, conspiracy and the algorithms of the net
conspiracy : follow the money
fake ufo viedo follow the money
the need to compete in chock click bait
when you release them, they take on a life on their own
nobody ever intended the consequences
the link between social media and mental health
evaluate the quality of conspiracy person
snapchat dysmorphi to get operated so you look like the selfie
filters
Roger McNamee - facebook venture investor capitalist
selling their users
Aza raskin - firefox
That is Sam Harris theoretical problem
In the endless experimentations and variations most of the intersubjective mind-bobles
the negativity rate in the thinking mind is
mirrored in the media
a
•
I am quite sure that
almost nobody in these twitter-times will have enough dopamine in their
signal-chemical reward system to come through this article.
The by social media created dopamine deficiency syndrome makes it much
more tempting to listen to stand-up conspiracy clowns telling you that
the worlds is ruled by an alien race of reptilians.
•
The thoughts presented are, of course, based
on my subjective reflections, and I do not claim to be in possession of
any absolute truth. I might even be wrong. I only write to present
fragile viewpoints that might inspire you to find your own, hopefully,
fleeting truth about the matter.
•
Unfortunately,
big internet cooperations like Facebook Twitter and Youtube have
censored their information feed. They try to eliminate the availability
of conspiracy voices on the net.
To block free speech in this way is nothing less than a disaster and
will do nothing else than make the paranoia conspiracy theorists
stronger in their beliefs.
It also makes it more difficult for me to substantiate with links when I
quote from conspiracy theorists.
However, my aim is not here to refute each and every paranoic conspiracy
argument, but the present a larger frame in which to observe the
phenomenon.
•
In this information overload we get vulnerable when we try to
sort out what is fake and what are facts.
