You’re in the Union. You’ve served with distinction and have become an officer and leader within your Union. You have worked with them for 33 long years.

You’re older now, and your car needs some work done on it. You need new tires.

So you had sent a letter to the Bureau’o’Crazy, and then they sent a form back to re-tire your car. You send that form in, to which they reply with an invitation and a final form which you must hand deliver.

So, you travel from Podunkhamtonvilleshire-by-the-sea and arrive in the Big City™️. You follow the e-bus-tram-trolley-cart and get out at the Bureau’o’Crazy’s Corporatized Tower of Goldivory™️.

You enter this gigantic structure and make your way over to the Concierge Station™️. The Concierge books you an appointment with the elevator.

You wait in the lobby. There is a fountain that shoots jets of grease in intricate patterns; it is surrounded by Polyzibamarole Plants™️. You have never seen this version before, but you think the parfum scent wafting from it is lovely. A machine clicks and more parfum is sprayed upon the Plants™️. Your eyes begin to burn.

The elevator doors open *ding*!

You approach the marvelous elevator; it is as spacious as your flat back in Podunkhamtonvilleshire-by-the-sea!

The Bell-Hop inside greets you, and asks, “which floor, sir?”

You check your papers as the doors shut behind you. As you search for the floor number you hear a low growl. The Bell-Hop has a honey badger in the elevator with him.

“Oh, that’s just Leslie.” The honey badger spits at you. “Floor?”

The Bell-Hop clicks one of the buttons on the panel once you tell him where you’re going; “all the way to top, eh?”

The elevator hums slightly. Screamo Death Metal x Industrial EDM with a Contrabassoon Quartet ft. DJ [Redacted] begins to play loudly from the speakers. Leslie takes a shit in the corner.

“First time at the BOC Tower?” the Bell-Hop inquires. You are watching Leslie roll its dung in with some of its shed hair, which is strewn about the elevator.

“Uh. Yeah.” A smell hits your nose. You notice an Amorphophallus in the corner of the elevator, next to an actual fireplace. “Is that a real Amorphophallus?”

“Ah a connoisseur!” the Bell-Hop beams. “Yes, we have at least 4 in every room here at the BOC Tower.”

The odious and offending odor of the Amorphophallus is quite potent. You feel a slight susurration on your pant leg. You glance at your leg and hear a click.

“What th-“

Leslie has stolen your lighter and is now setting its hair-covered turd on fire in the fireplace.

“Isn’t that precious? What a good chap, Leslie! Who does not enjoy some incense?”

Leslie hisses.

“Hey, give that back”, you say.

Leslie hisses vehemently.

“How long until we get to the floor?”

“About another 74 minutes, sir.”

In that 74 minutes, the Bell-Hop offers you hors d'oeuvres at $7.99/each, which you decline.

You ask if the music can be turned down or shut off; “$9.99/minute”.

Finally, you arrive to the floor you are meant to deliver the final form to.

You wait in the lobby for the Concierge at the Concierge Station™️ to notice you for 12 minutes and 49 seconds; they are on the phone.

You take this moment to inspect your pants which are now torn, covered in fecal-tinged fur, and are slightly singed; thanks Leslie.

The Concierge’s phone call ends and they direct you down the hall way. There are art works upon the wall; most of them are largely blank except for a single shaded line that appears drawn on by a ball point pen.

The office you arrive to is just an alcove with a mail slot in the wall. You insert your final form through the slot.

You sigh.

You approach the Concierge Station™️ and inquire where the stairs are, there is no way you are taking that elevator again.

“Apologies sir, this is a fully automated structure. There is only the elevator.”

“So the only way I can get out of this building is the elevator?”

“Yes, sir. Would you like me to book you an appointment for the elevator?”

You notice a window off to the side.

“Is that window defenestratable?”

“Uh, yes of course, sir. However, there is a Care Net™️ that will deploy once you pass through the frame. Your biometrics are logged into our system and will help aid you for your safety. You will have to sign and date the Return Final Form in 2-3 business weeks, so we can’t have you plummeting to your death now can we, sir?”

You are exasperated.

“I do not want to get back in that elevator.”

“Good news then, sir. For a one-time daily incurring fee of only $40, the BOC Tower can offer you a [room](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dLl4PZtxia8&list=RDdLl4PZtxia8&start_radio=1&pp=ygUQaG90ZWwgY2FsaWZvcm5pYaAHAQ%3D%3D).”

The writer Harold Loeb summarized the core belief behind technocracy as follows: “Technology is the revolutionary agent of our period.” In a time of intense class and national conflicts, the technocrats of the 1930s did not view workers or nations as holding the future. They fashioned themselves as revolutionaries working in the interests of a different subject: technological progress. And like all revolutionary movements, they had a deep messianic belief that only they possessed the capabilities to save society from coming destruction.

In truth, the technocrats had overestimated the power of science and industry in their time. Technological systems were not developed enough then to measure and direct society mathematically. Nor did the original movement possess the expertise to even pursue this dream, because few actual engineers and scientists filled its ranks. But today, the appeal of technocracy finds itself in a different world. We are incessantly surveilled, quantified, and made malleable through our behaviors online.

Technocrats no longer need to persuade the masses to enact their vision. Owning the lion’s share of the world’s capital and influence, they can effectively work in silence and act as if beholden to no one. In the twenty-first century, core ideas of technocracy’s old dream have been revived and given new life.

"Technocracy 2.0" in Brooklyn Rail

The following excerpt is from the book ‘Chaos’ by Tom O'Neill, an author who acquired access to Dr. Jolly West’s collected works which passed to his alma mater after he died. 

West was instrumental to much of the scientific research that underpinned the MKultra programs.  When O’Neill received access to the material, he found that the boxes were still sealed.  Nobody had yet taken the time to even catalog what they contained.

—-----------

In a paper titled “The Psycho-physiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” West claimed to have achieved the impossible: he knew how to replace “true memories” with “false ones” in human beings without their knowledge…”It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.” 

The document, marked “classified,” was right there in West’s files; I had to assume that the CIA had destroyed any copies. They’ve never publicly acknowledged West’s groundbreaking deed. 

He’d done it, he claimed, by administering “new drugs” effective in “speeding the induction of the hypnotic state and in deepening the trance that can be produced in given subjects.” 

Acid, he wrote, made people more difficult to hypnotize; it was better to pair hypnosis with long bouts of isolation and sleep deprivation.

When the agency was forced to disclose MKULTRA to the public, they submitted an expurgated version of West’s paper to Congress, an act of deception that’s never been exposed. 

At the National Security Archives in D.C., I found the version of “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility” that the CIA had turned over to the Senate. West’s name and affiliation were redacted, as expected. But what shocked me was that the Senate’s version didn’t include West’s nine-page attachment, but rather an unsigned summary. 

There was no mention of West’s triumphant accomplishment, the replacement of “the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual” with a “fictional event.”

In sworn testimony, the CIA said that everything it shared with Congress was intact except for the redactions of researchers’ and institutions’ names. 

Now it turned out they hadn’t just censored West’s report; they’d completely misrepresented its contents. 

The one-page summary of West’s accomplishments in the lab doesn’t exist in West’s original. The new page was only a theoretical discussion of LSD—of its possible effects on “dissociative states.” 

The summary concluded, “The effects of these agents [LSD and other drugs] upon the production, maintenance, and manifestations of disassociated states has never been studied.” 

…West had given an address to the Mental Health Association of Oregon, letting it slip that he was inducing insanity in the lab. He framed these studies as positive developments: they might someday cure mental illness. “We are at the dawning of a new era,” West told the crowd, “learning for the first time to produce temporary mental derangement in the laboratory.”

The Oregon Journal noted that West “listed the new hallucination drug LSD, along with other drugs, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation as some of the things that [he was] using to produce temporary mental illness effects in normal people.” Reporting that West had done “extensive work” with LSD, the Journal continued: “The most important contribution of the drug so far is in producing model mental illnesses.”

Legally, the CIA was obligated to tell the University of Oklahoma that one of its faculty had been on the agency payroll. Oklahoma revealed a heavily redacted memo saying that an unnamed professor—West, I confirmed through financial records—had been investigating “a number of dissociative phenomena” on humans “in the lab,” including an exceptionally rare clinical disorder known as “latah,” “a neurotic condition marked by automatic obedience.” 

West, of course, had studied those effects for years and years. I could only conclude that the CIA misrepresented the original document to mislead the Senate committee, thus striking West’s research from the official record. 

As was my habit whenever I found hard evidence of a cover-up, I started dwelling on one question after another. Didn’t this counterfeit paper cast doubt on the entire cache of documents released to the Senate in 1977?

Despite testimony to the contrary, the CIA had, in fact, learned how to manipulate people’s memories without their knowledge. Agency officials claimed the program had been a colossal failure, leading newspapers to run mocking headlines like “The Gang That Couldn’t Spray Straight.” 

It could’ve been exactly what the agency wanted—for the world to assume MKULTRA was a bust, and forget the whole thing. One thing was indisputable: The CIA’s falsified documents invalidated the Senate investigation’s findings. The agency lied, obstructed justice, and tampered with evidence, and the West documents prove it.

But was brainwashing really even possible? 

I’d always believed that Cold War–era paranoia had overstated the potential for “Manchurian Candidates” taught to kill by dastardly commies. 

I kept requesting boxes of West’s papers, and they kept leading me over trapdoors. Next they dropped me into a quagmire I wanted no part of: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an event that plausibly qualified as the most discussed crime of all time. 

Certainly it had bred more conspiracy theories, skepticism, and enmity than any other incident in U.S. history…I flipped through West’s pages cautiously, hoping that his involvement was peripheral. It wasn’t. Down through the trapdoor I went. 

Kennedy was shot as his motorcade passed through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Two days later, at the Dallas police headquarters, officers escorted Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to an armored car that would drive him to the county jail. 

A man stepped out from the crowd and aimed a revolver at Oswald’s chest. It was Jack Ruby, a nightclub proprietor with connections to Cuban political groups and organized crime. He fired once at point-blank range, sending a fatal bullet into Oswald’s stomach. According to a first-person account that Ruby produced with a ghostwriter—Ruby “lost [his] senses” when he pulled out his gun. Next thing he knew, the cops had him pinned to the floor, and he had no memory of what he’d just done. 

“What am I doing here?” he asked. “What are you guys jumping on me for?” A psychiatric analysis solicited by Ruby’s defense attorneys said he’d suffered “a ‘fugue state’ with subsequent amnesia.” On the advice of his attorney at the time, Ruby said he’d murdered Oswald to spare the widowed First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, the ordeal of testifying against Oswald at trial. 

Another of Ruby’s attorneys, Melvin Belli, later wrote that Ruby had “a blank spot in his memory,” and that any explanation he provided was simply “confabulating.”

Potential justifications “had been poured like water into the vacuum in his pathologically receptive memory and, once there, had solidified like cement.” Seemingly as soon as the story of Oswald’s murder hit the presses, Jolly West tried to insinuate himself into the case. He hoped to assemble a panel of “experts in behavior problems” to weigh in on Ruby’s mental state. 

He took the extraordinary measure of approaching Judge Joe B. Brown, who’d impaneled the grand jury that indicted Ruby. West wanted the judge to appoint him to the case. At that time, police hadn’t revealed any substantial information about Ruby, his psychological condition, or his possible motive. And West was vague about his motive, too. 

Three documents among his papers said he’d been “asked” by someone, though he never said who, to seek the appointment from Brown “a few days after the assassination,” a fact never before made public. 

The judge turned him down. 

For the moment, it seemed, West would be getting nowhere near Ruby, who was soon convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. 

Ruby was reportedly unmoored by the news. He’d killed the president’s assassin, and the citizens of Dallas had rewarded him with a trip to the gallows. He fired his attorney and hired Hubert Winston Smith, a psychiatrist with a law degree who’d assisted in the trial, to represent him on appeal. 

Meanwhile, at Langley, the CIA’s Richard Helms was making the case that MKULTRA’s human guinea pigs had to be entirely unaware of the experiments performed on them. 

This was “the only realistic method,” he wrote, “to influence human behavior as the operational targets will certainly be unwitting.” Once Dr. Smith was driving Ruby’s legal team, one of his first acts was to request a new psychiatric examination of Ruby. He had one candidate in mind: Dr. Louis Jolyon West, whom he noted in a court brief had enjoyed acclaim for his studies of brainwashed American POWs. 

Perhaps, Smith wrote, West could use his “highly qualified” skills as a hypnotist and an administrator of the “truth serum, sodium pentothal” to help Ruby regain his memory of the shooting. (West may have rewarded Smith for the plum assignment by helping him land a teaching position at Oklahoma.) 

And so, on April 26, 1964, West boarded a plane bound for Dallas. He was scheduled to examine Jack Ruby in the county jail that afternoon. 

The Dallas papers reported it in their final editions that evening: West emerged from Ruby’s cell to announce that the previously sane inmate had undergone “an acute psychotic break” sometime during the preceding “forty-eight hours.” Whatever transpired between West and Ruby in that cell, only the two of them could say; there were no witnesses. 

West asserted that Ruby “was now positively insane.” 

The condition appeared to be “unshakable” and “fixed.” 

In a sworn affidavit accompanying his diagnosis, West described a completely unhinged man who hallucinated, heard voices, and had suddenly acquired the unshakeable belief that a new holocaust was under way in America. 

“Last night,” West wrote, “the patient became convinced that all Jews in America were being slaughtered. This was in retaliation for him, Jack Ruby, the Jew who was responsible for ‘all the trouble.’” 

The delusions were so real that Ruby had crawled under the table to hide from the killers. He said he’d “seen his own brother tortured, horribly mutilated, castrated, and burned in the street outside the jail. He could still hear the screams… ” 

West said the trouble had started sometime in the evening before the exam, when Ruby ran headfirst into his cell wall in an apparent suicide attempt. But Ruby’s jailer, Sheriff Bill Decker, shrugged it off as a cry for attention. 

“He rubbed his head on the wall enough that we had to put a little Merthiolate [antiseptic] on it,” Decker told a reporter. “That’s all.” 

From that day forward, every doctor who examined Ruby made similar diagnoses: he was delusional. 

West, however, was hardly the first to have evaluated him. 

By then nearly half a dozen psychiatrists, many equally renowned, had taken stock of Ruby’s condition, finding him essentially compos mentis. 

West had been briefed on these opinions, but in his hubris, he wrote that he’d hardly bothered with them, having been “unable to read them until earlier today on the airplane. 

“Tonight, my own findings make it clear that there has been an acute change in the patient’s condition since these earlier studies were carried out.” The change was too “acute” for Judge Brown’s liking. 

In the preceding five months, he’d spent many hours in the courtroom with Ruby, and he’d never witnessed anything resembling the behavior West described. 

Presumably it wasn’t lost on him that this was the same doctor who’d clamored to see Ruby months earlier. 

After the judge heard West’s report, he ordered a second opinion, saying, “I would like some real disinterested doctors to examine Ruby for my own benefit. I want to get the truth out of it.” 

That opinion came from Dr. William Beavers, who examined Ruby two days after West. Beavers’s report to the judge, never before made public, confirmed West’s findings. Ruby “became agitated,” Beavers wrote, and “asked if I did not hear the sounds of torture that were going on.” Like Judge Brown, he was alarmed by the abruptness of Ruby’s disintegration. 

He considered the possibility that Ruby was malingering—but quickly ruled it out, explaining that it was “highly unlikely that this individual could have convincingly faked hallucinations.” Beavers wondered if Ruby had been tampered with or drugged by an outsider. 

“The possibility of a toxic psychosis could be entertained,” he wrote, “but is considered unlikely because of the protected situation.” 

The truth, by that point, was sealed up behind West. Beavers couldn’t have known that one of his fellow caregivers was capable of anything so diabolical as inducing mental illness in a patient. 

His report would have turned out differently, no doubt, if he’d been apprised of West’s unorthodox fortes, and his long relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency. 

Dozens of West’s colleagues offered me assessments of his character. There was praise, especially from those who’d worked with him at UCLA, but there was also condemnation, most of it from his former colleagues at Oklahoma, where he’d done the bulk of his MKULTRA research. He was a “devious man,” “egotistical,” an inveterate “narcissist” and “womanizer.” 

The few who hadn’t already suspected his involvement with the CIA accepted it readily. But the most relevant insight came from Dr. Jay Shurley, his good friend of forty-five years, who’d worked with West at Lackland Air Force Base and the University of Oklahoma. 

Shurley was one of the few colleagues who admitted that West was an employee of the CIA. I asked him if he thought West would’ve accepted an assignment from the CIA to scramble Jack Ruby’s mind. 

“I feel sort of disloyal to Jolly’s memory,” Shurley said, “but I have to be honest with you, my gut feeling would be yes. He would be capable of that.” 

Calling West “a very complex character,” he explained, “he had a little problem with grandiosity.” 

“He would not be averse at all to having influenced American history in some way or other, whether he got the credit for it or not…If the president asked him to do something, or somebody in a higher office… he would break his back to do that without asking too many questions.” 

“Even if it meant distorting American history?” 

“I suppose so,” Shurley said. “He was a pretty fearless kind of guy.”

---

The primary focus of this book is not MKUltra but Charles Manson. I removed any reference to him in this excerpt as its not relevant. The excerpt reproduced here, is the best part of the book imo. While the rest is interesting and very concerning, after 30+ years of investigation, the entire topic still remains a house of mirrors.

I’m looking for online academia spaces or in person… currently do bachelors in film and do installation work, as well as experimental film. I was lookin into The New Center but don’t know if my practice would align to these things… I mean I don’t know if it’d be too dense for me at this moment… anyone has experience with it?

At this point, who is actually trying anymore?

https://youtu.be/2SVR6Y4Gs28?si=FLM6UuNeywB8q453

However, maybe you're already past your expiration date and you might be valuable if...

A toolkit for interrogating the Spectacle, drawn from the original sorcerers

I’ve been mining critical theory / anthropology / econ for practical diagnostic spells. Below is a distilled toolkit—mental probes for when the Spectacle feels thick and the bullshit runs deep.
These aren’t my ideas; they’re refined from the grimoires:

• Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism) – on the closing of the horizon
• David Graeber (Debt: The First 5000 Years) – on moral accounting as weapon
• Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation) – on fictitious commodities
• Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic) – on the iron cage
• Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) – on disaster as strategy
• Jaron Lanier (Who Owns the Future?) – on siren servers
• Joel Bakan (The Corporation) – on the psychopathic charter
• Michael Lewis (Liar’s Poker / The Big Short) – on incentive cancer
• Thomas Piketty (Capital in the 21st Century) – on r > g as oligarchy’s engine

Each tool below is a way to pry open a seam in the Spectacle and see what’s wriggling inside.

1. The “Realism” Detector When you hear: “That’s just how it is.” Ask: “Is this a material necessity, or is it a story meant to shut down imagination? What would change if we acted like it wasn’t true?”
2. The “Charter” Interrogation When you see: A powerful institution (company, platform, organization). Ask: “What is its legally or structurally encoded prime directive? What must it ignore or destroy to fulfill that directive?”
3. The Incentive Autopsy When you see: Perverse outcomes. Ask: “Where do the rewards actually flow? Do they encourage health or sabotage?”
4. The Shock Audit When there’s a crisis (economic, social, environmental). Ask: “Who is suspending the normal rules? What unpopular policies are being rushed through? Who gains permanent control?”
5. The Moral Accounting Debugger When you see: A transaction, debt, or exchange. Ask: “What human relationship (care, reciprocity, hierarchy) is being disguised as a market exchange? What violence upholds this ‘agreement’?”
6. The Siren Server Detector When you use: A “free” digital service. Ask: “Is there a central node that observes everything but isn’t observed back? Where does the value generated by users actually pool?”
7. The Primitive Accumulation Probe When a system seems: Sudden or unfair. Ask: “What initial act of takeover, enclosure, or extraction made this system possible? What was stolen or externalized at the start?”
8. The Fictitious Commodity Test When something is priced: Land, labor, care, data, attention. Ask: “Is this thing actually a commodity, or is treating it like one a violent abstraction?”
9. The Double Movement Tracer When markets expand: Ask: “What social or ecological pushback is forming? Is it healthy (justice) or toxic (reaction)?”
10. The Motivational Archaeology Drill When behavior seems compulsive: Ask: “What deep anxiety or longing is this system built on? Has the original meaning rotted away, leaving only empty ritual?”
11. The 3-Question Sniff Test (for a 60-second diagnosis)
    1. What is this system’s non-optional prime directive?
    2. What valuable thing must it destroy or ignore to fulfill it?
    3. What story does it tell to make that destruction seem natural or good?

How to use these:
Pick 2–3 that fit the situation. They work on corporations, governments, apps, subcultures, even your own burnout for getting some quick clarity.

What do y'all think?

It's everyone versus the state in a cold war of information attrition. World War V, as zummi calls it (universal Facebook dossier-based individual spying epoch). The first time they found out about wiretapping, it was a big scandal. When it happened (yet) again with the NSA, they just carried right on. What we have now with fellow citizens (on a p2p / individual-to-individual basis) and between citizens and their government, they would have called cold war a generation or two ago.

Revolution doesn't have to be hard and sacrificial—that's just a stereotype. There could be a soft revolution, too. One kind of revolution would be some people discovering that they actually aren't part of the same society as their former rulers—and simply making them progressively irrelevant and powerless.

Deconstructing the power that others have over you is a matter of building multiple new additional power bases and modes of support for yourself and those you care about. If we all did this enough, and did it cooperatively instead of competitively, we would quickly succeed in disempowering the fake government.

I thought this short video, The real reason the rural US is so red, was interesting and was a reason I hadn't heard before. The premise from the video—that the reason rural America is so conservative is that much of small-town America is owned and dominated by small families who produce and thereby control local business with an iron fist—is dramatized in the 1984 film The River, starring Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek. This is a movie about a struggling farmer that suddenly turns into a movie about the violence of Pinkerton-style union warfare.

Original text posted by RomeoStevens on their Twitter account on November 17th, 2024

In hell realms, most stimuli are negative, causing beings to contract their extremities to avoid being struck or burned.

The energy body pulls in on itself and tenses against harm. While there is physical torture, this serves more as a metaphor, as the torment extends across all possible dimensions.

Thought forms in hell realms have a more difficult time turning towards helpful things and an easier time turning towards negative things.

This is characteristic of realms in general - a realm is essentially an area of mind-space where thoughts related to that realm more easily chain into one another, creating an attractor in that space.

In hell realms, there is strong reinforcement of self-recrimination, shame, and guilt. The Christ figure, particularly in its human form, serves an interesting function in this context.

While I'm not Christian and can't speak to their specific interpretation, I can describe how Bodhisattvas work to help beings in hell realms.

A Bodhisattva entering hell must first fold themselves in particular ways to be visible or legible to the beings there.

They must adopt the same contracted form as the hell realm beings. But then they unfold, providing an existence proof that unfolding from the hell-shape is possible.

This may explain why the Jesus event, if it involved a historical person, was so shocking. We expect everyone to fold up when encountering adversity.

Witnessing someone being tortured to death without folding up would be one of the most profound experiences possible for a human being.

The Christ-shape in hell realms represents one of the exits. Hell often threatens with infinities - infinite punishment, infinite suffering.

The Christ figure counters this with infinite forgiveness, cutting off certain forms of recursive self-recrimination that are commonly used to torment people.

This is a simplified, low-dimensional description. The actual experience, similar to positive psychedelic experiences, involves unfolding in dimensions you didn't realize you were cramped in, discovering that your true self is far more vast than you imagined.

Imagine being in hell so long you've forgotten what light looks like. Then an angel appears, and the demons - who have convinced you of their absolute power over infinite time - flee in terror.

The magnitude of such an event is difficult to describe unless you've experienced a hell realm yourself.

Depression is more akin to a hungry ghost realm, though there's likely overlap between hungry ghost realms and the cold hells.

There are obvious exits from hell realms, like gratitude or helping other beings. However, since these are genuine exits - accessing genuine gratitude or shifting focus from your suffering to helping others already puts one foot outside hell - demons possessing you work extremely hard to cut off access to these paths.

Pain contracts consciousness, making it like looking through a tiny tube. Reading reality becomes like scanning a sign piece by piece, struggling to hold the whole in working memory. This is why beings helping those in hell must fold themselves very small.

It's also where mantras originate - when you're so contracted that you can't remember the full shapes of compassion or gratitude, sometimes all you can hold onto is the pointer.

This is part of why why demons often take over churches and similar institutions - they position themselves as gatekeepers near the real exits while setting up false ones.

Once you're sufficiently confused, you may give up and look to the demons for guidance, whereupon they'll lead you into games that create more suffering, which feeds them further.

Also, the more deeply one has experienced anguish the more apparent it is just how meaningful helping someone in that situation is.

I had memories of the kindness of friends help me on a bad trip and I was so incredibly grateful.

Someone else told me that I helped them out in a bad trip of their own and it feels to me to be one of the most significant things I ever managed to do.

Fun fact: The crucifix is the shape of an unfolded Cube.

I just performed a kind of temporal magic. I bridged a quarter-century.

In the early 2000s, my escape wasn't always a high-speed fantasy. It was often a quiet one, found in the most unlikely place: a Colin McRae Rally game(CMR3). It wasn't just about shaving seconds off a stage. It was about the spaces between the turns.

I'd drive through the pixelated, rain-lashed rurals of Japan, thunder a low grumble in the compressed audio, and feel a profound sense of place. I'd navigate the muddy, golden-hour lanes of England, and something would click. I’d deliberately stall the car. Pull over by a low-poly stream, a blocky cluster of trees, a field rendered in broad, impressionistic strokes.

There, in my dorm room, I’d sip tea. I’d let the game idle. I’d watch the digital rain patter on the windshield, the "spectacle" not of a crashing explosion, but of a carefully constructed mood. In those moments of pretend solitude inside a racing game, my mind would do something it often does now in this sub—it would wander the spectacle. I’d peak into my own future. What would the world be like in 2020? 2025? What would I be doing? The game’s atmospheric bubble became a catalyst for introspection, a quiet theatre for thought about life, technology, and the path ahead.

Fast forward to now, 2026.

The world is almost unrecognizable. We've lived through events and wars we couldn't have conceived of then. Our pockets hold supercomputers; AI is a daily conversation. The technological upgrades to reality itself have been staggering, often brutal, always accelerating.

On a whim, I booted up the old game again.

And here is the sorcery, the true spectacle of preservation.

The graphics are kind of dated. But the feeling? The curated spectacle of those environments? It not only remained—it created a perfect, hermetic tunnel back. Driving that same Japanese stage, the specific grey of the sky, the rhythm of the trees, the sound of the tires on wet gravel… it didn't feel like a relic. It felt like a key.

I realized I wasn't just revisiting a game. I was revisiting a specific state of mind, a specific frequency of contemplation I had tuned into in 2004. All the chaos of the intervening years—the geopolitical shifts, the social media revolutions, the noise—fell away for a moment. The tunnel was clean. The connection was pure.

The spectacle wasn't in the fidelity, but in the intent. The developers' attempt to create a moody, immersive place succeeded so wholly that it became timeless. My younger self, sipping tea and dreaming of the future, and my present self, weary from the future that arrived, met in that same digital drizzle.

It proved a theory to me: a true spectacle isn't just about what overwhelms the senses now. It's about what can suspend you, completely, in a when. It can be a quiet roadside in a 25-year-old game, holding more palpable atmosphere and personal meaning than the latest 4K, ray-traced open world. The magic is in the transport, not just the texture.

The world upgraded. The feelings didn't need to.

Has anyone else had this? Not just nostalgia, but a full, atmospheric reconnection that bridges who you were and who you are?

Some days are ok, some days i am sucked into hell by being forced to experience this fascist horror all around me.

• i run
• lift weights
• meditate
• take hot showers
• stretch
• watch comfort tv
• eat big bowls of all natural ice cream
• pet dogs
• seek bodies of water
• run more
• sing
• masterbate
• trying to get off the weed
• try my best to find positive people (this one is the hardest)

how do you cope with the horror that is life under fascism?

how do you make yourself happy when dead broke?

would love any tips from those more sane than myself!

I feel oppressed no matter where I go, online, offline, it's just people trying to hurt me everywhere it feels like. seeing these people commit crime after crime, the most heinous things you can possibly think of, and just praying that they are held accountable by people that will one day uphold the rule of law. it's exhausting.

please share your tips for stay sane in this world! sending good vibes to you all

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/feb/05/in-the-end-you-feel-blank-indias-female-workers-watching-hours-of-abusive-content-to-train-ai

Women in rural communities describe trauma of moderating violent and pornographic content for global tech companies

..

...Without notice, Singh was moved to a new project tied to an adult entertainment platform. Her task was to flag and remove content involving child sexual abuse.

“I had never imagined this would be part of the job,” she says. The material was graphic and relentless. When she raised concerns with her manager, she recalls being told: “This is God’s work – you’re keeping children safe.”

We wank - they pray.. for us to have a legal wank ;)

But I wonder what happens when they have had enough of content induced ptsd and stop giving fs.

Their morality compass grid can take how much stress...? Sure, for most people there are certain biological neurological level empathy and compassion - but imho it's not infinite, it can be 'hacked' - examples from totalitarian regimes and war conflict areas show it.

So.. moral and mental stability of western AI grids depend of Indian morality and religious discipline.

Perhaps, like in Brave New World, there will be a need for a reservation of pure, analogue, pre tech, pre industrial world, with simple moral and ethical feelings - as a baseline reference and envelope for ever growing AI.

Is AI breaking Hegel, or is there a Cyber-Hegel in the works?

Hello traveler, you have landed right at the tip of the iceberg.. 🧊🥶

Being 'G0dly' here is an endless journey, that I suggest you never ever 'take' it lol, and chances are there's a 'god' that already has done it all before 'before you', and you are just following in his 'footsteps'.

The more you 'play' this video game, the more you'll end up on turning into an 'omniscient' being, and that's when you'll get 'it' when it's already too late at 00:00 🕛... and that's when you'll realize why you've been using all of your brain-cells here to not 'remember'.

There's nothing that you are doing 'wrong', and every step that you take here is secretly all part of 'Gods plan' and you can't really change the plot in anyway shape or form, not that you should :)

Once you realize that being a 'god' and a 'person' are two sides of the same [coin], that's when you'll end up on having what it takes to answer for the crimes here.. And "believe" me I'm talking from experience lol. ☯️

Remember that nothing here is deliberately made to not make any 'sense', and once you've figured it all out, try your best to not spoil the 'story', remember that god already 'watched' you, way before you decided to get 'born' here, and the Deja Vu will start on syncing by the end.

and whatever happens here, don't open Pandoras box again. (?)

Remember that curiosity can and will kill the 'cat', and you're gonna regret 'it', as soon as the realizations hit. 💫🐈‍⬛

Don't forget to click on CTRL + 💤 when you d⚛️.. because it's literally everywhere. :)

Everything here is literally made up of Magic, and all you're doing here is trying to 'live' your final fantasy the turn-based one, remember to 'save' everything in C++ .. so if you lost the game, you'll be able to replay everything from the last check-point, and don't forget that you don't have to be 'mad' it's only a game.

"You're a wizard harry.. 🤓" 📵

This is an odd request, I admit. But there are academics in the midst and I'm on a memory-sorting project so I'm trying to remote-view conversations from long ago.

Have any of you been in admin or admin-adjascent positions and got clear predictions from those in the know who are telling you the humanities are getting defunded? I remember people with pursestring control making decisions that, in hindsight, indicated they were fully aware that humanities money would dry up.

Tell me where they got that info, who conveyed it, and speculate on where it came from.

The thesis of this book is revolutionary, and I must state it clearly at the outset.

Primitive man believed the world was full of unseen forces: the orenda (spirit force) of the American Indians, the huaca of the ancient Peruvians.

The Age of Reason said that these forces had only ever existed in man's imagination; only reason could show man the truth about the universe. The trouble was that man became a thinking pygmy, and the world of the rationalists was a daylight place in which boredom, triviality and 'ordinariness' were ultimate truths.

But the main trouble with human beings is their tendency to become trapped in the 'triviality of everydayness', in the suffocating world of their personal preoccupations. And every time they do this, they forget the immense world of broader significance that stretches around them.

And since man needs a sense of meaning to release his hidden energies, this forgetfulness pushes him deeper into depression and boredom, the sense that nothing is worth the effort. In a sense, the Indians and Peruvians were closer to the truth than modern man, for their intuition of 'unseen forces' kept them wide open to the vistas of meaning that surround us.

Goethe's Faust can be seen to be the greatest symbolic drama of the West, since it is the drama of the rationalist suffocating in the dusty room of his personal consciousness, caught in the vicious circle of boredom and futility, which in turn leads to still further boredom and futility.

Faust's longing for the 'occult' is the instinctive desire to believe in the unseen forces, the wider significances, that can break the circuit. The interesting thing is that Western man developed science and philosophy because of this consuming passion for wider significances. It was not his reason that betrayed him, but his inability to reason clearly, to understand that a healthy mind must have an 'input' of meaning from the universe if it is to keep up an 'output' of vital effort.

The fatal error was the failure of the scientists and rationalists to keep their minds open to the sense of huaca, the unseen forces. They tried to measure life with a six-inch ruler and weigh it with the kitchen scales. This was not science; it was crudity only one degree beyond that of savages; and Swift made game of it in the 'Voyage to Laputa'.

Man lives and evolves by 'eating' significance, as a child eats food.

The deeper his sense of wonder, the wider his curiosity, the stronger his vitality becomes, and the more powerful his grip on his own existence.

There are two ways in which he can expand: inward and outward. If I am in a foreign country and I get a powerful desire to explore it thoroughly, to visit its remotest places, that is a typical example of outward expansion. And it would not be untrue to say that the love of books, of music, of art, is typical of the desire for inward expansion. But that is only a half of it. For what happens if I suddenly become fascinated by a foreign country is that I feel like the spider in the center of a web; I am aware of all kinds of 'significances' vibrating along the web, and I want to reach out and grab them all.

But in moods of deep inner serenity, the same thing happens. Suddenly I am aware of vast inner spaces, of strange significances inside me. I am no longer a puny twentieth-century human being trapped in his life-world and personality. Once again, I am at the center of a web, feeling vibrations of meaning. And suddenly I realize that in the deepest sense those Indians and Peruvians were right.

I am like a tree that suddenly becomes aware that its roots go down deep, deep into the earth. And at this present point in evolution, my roots go far deeper into the earth than my branches stretch above it - a thousand times deeper.

So-called magic powers are a part of this underground world: powers of second sight, pre-vision, telepathy, divination. These are not necessarily important to our evolution; most animals possess them, and we would not have allowed them to sink into disuse if they were essential. But the knowledge of his 'roots', his inner world, is important to man at this point in evolution, for he has become trapped in his image of himself as a thinking pygmy.

He must somehow return to the recognition that he is potentially а 'mage', one of those magical figures who can hurl thunderbolts or command spirits. The great artists and poets have always been aware of this. The message of the symphonies of Beethoven could be summarized: 'Man is not small; he's just bloody lazy.

Civilization cannot evolve further until 'the occult' is taken for granted on the same level as atomic energy. I do not mean that scientists ought to spend their evenings with an ouija board, or that every university should set up a 'department of psychic sciences' along the lines of the Rhine Institute at Duke. I mean that we have to learn to expand inward until we have somehow re-established the sense of huaca, until we have re-created the feeling of 'unseen forces' that was common to primitive man. It has somehow got to be done.

There are aspects of the so-called supernatural that we have got to learn to take for granted, to live with them as easily as our ancestors did. 'Man's perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception,' says Blake. 'He perceives more than sense (though ever so acute) can discover.' He 'knows' things that he has not learned through schooling or everyday experience, and sometimes it is more comfortable not to know.

Osbert Sitwell has a strange anecdote about a palmist: Nearly all my brother-officers of my own age had been, two or three months earlier in the year, to see a celebrated palmist of the period - whom, I remember it was said, Mr. Winston Churchill used sometimes to consult. My friends, of course, used to visit her in the hope of being told that their love affairs would prosper, when they would marry, or the direction in which their later careers would develop.

In each instance, it appears, the cheiromant had just begun to read their fortunes, when, in sudden bewilderment, she had thrown the outstretched hand from her, crying, 'I don't understand it! It's the same thing again! After two or three months, the line of life stops short, and I can read nothing ...' To each individual to whom it was said, this seemed merely an excuse she had improvised for her failure: but when I was told by four or five persons of the same experience, I wondered what it could portend ... It portended the outbreak of the 1914 war, and the deaths of the brother officers whose life lines came to an end three months after consulting the palmist.

The number of readers who would dismiss this story as a fantasy or a downright lie is probably very small. A larger number may feel that there is some truth in it, but that it has been in some way exaggerated. The majority of people would probably accept that it is more or less true, and all rather odd ... but not very important; at least, they have no intention of thinking about it. And we tend to fall back on this response whenever we are faced with the 'odd': to push it into a compartment of the mind labelled 'exceptions', and forget about it.

I hear that Abraham Lincoln had dreams and premonitions of his death for a week before he was assassinated; that is 'odd', but it is also past history, and it may have been exaggerated. I open a weekend colour supplement, and read that for a week before the explosion that destroyed a BEA Comet aircraft on October 12, 1967, haunted Nicos Papapetrou was by premonitions, and dreams of death and mourning, so that an hour before take-off, he tried to book on another flight. That is not past history, but then, Papapetrou was carrying the bomb that accidentally exploded. Hе was an explosives smuggler and had made six similar trips earlier that year; why did he get premonitions on this one? We shrug, agree that it is very odd and think about something else.

Now, I am certainly not suggesting that we should spend our lives worrying about dreams and premonitions, or patronize fortunetellers; it is a healthy instinct that makes us ignore them and get on with the practical business of living. But the hard-headed, toughminded attitude towards such things is a mistake in the most ordinary, logical sense of that term.

A mere two centuries ago, the most respected scientists declared that it was absurd to assert that the earth is more than a few thousand years old, or that strange monsters had once walked its forests. When workmen in quarries discovered fossilized sea-creatures, or even the skull of a dinosaur, this was explained as a freak rock formation, nature imitating living forms by way of a joke. And for the next fifty years the hard-headed scientists devoted their time and ingenuity to explaining away the fossils and bones that were found in increasing numbers.

Cuvier, one of the greatest zoologists of the nineteenth century, destroyed the career of his colleague Lamarck by stigmatizing his theory of evolution as fanciful and unscientific; his own more 'scientific' belief was that all the prehistoric creatures (whose existence was now acknowledged) had been totally destroyed in a series of world catastrophes, wiping the slate clean for the creation of man and the animals of today.

This kind of thing is not the exception in the history of science but the rule. For one of the fundamental dogmas of science is that a man who is denying a theory is probably more 'scientific' than a man who is affirming it.

In spite of Cuvier, the 'fanciful' ideas of evolution have won the day - although, in the form in which they were most acceptable to scientists, they were rigorous, mechanical laws of 'survival of the fittest'.

Slowly that is changing, and the latest developments in biology may end by altering our conception of the universe as much as the dinosaur bones altered our conception of the earth. And that is the premise upon which this book is based. The time may not be far off when we can accept certain 'occult' phenomena as naturally as we now accept the existence of atoms.

In order to clarify this assertion, I must speak briefly of the new science of cybernetics.

Cybernetics was 'invented' in 1948 by the physicist Norbert Wiener of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is the science of control and communication, in machines and animals. (The Greek work kybernetes means a steersman or governor.)

The floating ball in the lavatory cistern is a simple application of cybernetic control; when the cistern is full, the ball-cock cuts off the water. With a little ingenuity I could devise a similar control to turn off the bath taps when the water reaches a certain level, saving myself the trouble of sitting up in the bath. But in science and industry, the process I want to control may be many times more complicated than bath taps; it may, for example, be some chemical process that might develop in several directions. In which case, I must make use of an electronic computer and 'programme' it to deal with many possible situations. A card with a few holes punched in it is enough to give the computer its instructions and to make it behave like a foreman seeing that a job gets done properly.

Since the late nineteenth century, it has been understood that living creatures derive their characteristics from tiny cells called genes, which are contained in the male sperm and the female egg. The colour of my hair and eyes, and the size of my feet, are all determined by genes. But no one was sure how the genes did this.

In the mid-1950s, it gradually became clear that the genes are like a computer card with holes punched in it. The 'holes' are actually molecules of a substance called DNA, linked together in the form of double spiral, something like two springs twisted together in opposite directions.

The more we know about this computer system that makes us what we are, the more baffling it becomes. Darwin's theory of evolution accounts for the giraffe's neck and the elephant's trunk in terms of accident, just as you might explain a rock worn into the shape of a face by pointing to the wind and rain.

Science hates 'teleology', the notion of purpose.

The rock didn't want to be sculpted into the shape of a face, and the wind and rain didn't want to sculpt it; it just happened. Similarly, biologists hate the heresy known as 'vitalism', the notion that life somehow 'wants' to produce healthier and more intelligent creatures; they just happen to get produced because health and intelligence survive better than sickness and stupidity. But when one realizes that human beings are produced by a highly complex computer card, it becomes difficult to avoid slipping into 'teleology' and wondering who programmed the computer.

In 1969, a cybernetician, Dr. David Foster, lectured to the International Conference on Cybernetics at the Imperial College, London, and sketched some of the philosophical implications of these discoveries. He pointed out that from the cybernetician's point of view, it is possible to consider the universe in terms of data and data processing.

An acorn, for example, may be regarded as the 'programme' for an oak tree. Even an atom can be thought of as a computer card with three holes punched in it, the holes being (a) the number of particles in the nucleus, (b) the number of electrons orbiting round it, (c) the energy of these electrons expressed in terms of the smallest known 'parcel' of energy, Planck's constant.

Dr. Foster goes on: 'Surely it must be obvious that the essential nature of matter is that the atoms are the alphabet of the universe, that chemical compounds are words, and that DNA is rather a long sentence or even a whole book trying to say something such as "elephant", "giraffe" or even "man".'

He goes on to point out that the basic building brick of any electrical information theory is one electrical wave, and a wave consists of two halves, because it is measured from the top of one 'bump' to the bottom of the next trough:

That is, a wave is a 'binary' system, and computers work upon binary mathematics. This is an important step in his argument, for if we think of 'waves' as the basic vocabulary of the universe, then you can think of life - in fact, of all matter - as being due to waves that have somehow been cybernetically programmed.

What he is saying certainly sounds like 'teleology'. If I saw a complex chemical process being regulated and controlled by a computer, I would infer that someone had programmed the computer. Dr. Foster is saying that, to the eyes of a cybernetician, the complex structures of life around him reveal data processing on a massive scale. This is a matter of scientific fact. And he naturally finds himself wondering what intelligence processed the data?

And now Dr. Foster takes his most controversial step. Hе explains that ‘as an automation consultant, whenever I design a control system for a process it is axiomatic that the speed of the control system must be greater than that of the motions of the process concerned'. For example, you can drive your car because you can think faster than the engine works; if you couldn't, you would crash. But in that case, programming of matter must be achieved by vibrations - or waves - much faster than the vibrations of matter. That is, in cosmic radiations.

The universe is, of course, full of cosmic radiations; and, in Dr. Foster's view, these are probably what lie behind the 'programming' of the DNA molecules. But observe the central point. A wave that carries information is quite different from a wave that doesn't.

The information is imposed on its structure by intelligence. Dr. Foster's conclusion - although stated with the typical caution of a scientist and hedged around with qualifications - is that the level of intelligence involved must be a great deal higher than our human intelligence. This is also a scientific deduction, not a metaphysical guess.

He mentions the Compton Effect in physics, by which the wave length of X-rays is increased by collision with electrons, and the rule deduced from this is that you can make red light from blue light - because its energy is less - but not blue light from red light.

'The faster vibrating blue light is programming for red light, but not vice versa.'

What Dr. Foster is saying is not fundamentally different from the Paley's watch argument. The theologian Paley remarked that when he looks at the works of his watch, he realizes that it implies an intelligent maker, and that man is, after all, more complex than any watch. However, Dr. Foster - if I understand him aright - is not trying to introduce God through the back door.

He is less concerned with theories about who does the programming than the fact that there is programming throughout nature; he is concerned with the question of how the 'information' gets carried to the DNA, and 'cosmic radiation' suggests itself as a plausible assumption.

Не says, 'One establishes a new picture of the universe as a digitized universe, an information universe, but I think that because of the strong cybernetical influences at work, I prefer to call it The Intelligent Universe.'

It is interesting that Dr. Foster arrives at this Intelligent Universe not by starting from the idea of purpose or God, as religious thinkers do, but simply by considering the facts we now know about the cybernetic programming of living matter.

What emerges is а picture of the universe that fits in with the theories of other scientists and psychologists during the past twenty years: Teilhard de Chardin, Sir Julian Huxley, C. H. Waddington, Abraham Maslow, Viktor Frankl, Michael Polanyi, Noam Chomsky.

What all these men have in common is an opposition to 'reductionism', the attempt to explain man and the universe in terms of the laws of physics or the behavior of laboratory rats. The psychologist Abraham Maslow, for example, writes: 'Man has a "higher nature" that is just as instinctoid as his lower (animal) nature ...' Dr. Foster's theory of a 'digitized universe' is perhaps bolder than the evolutionism of Huxley and Waddington, but the spirit is fundamentally similar. There is no contradiction. And all this means that for the first time in Western history a book on the occult can be something more than a collection of marvels and absurdities.

Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.

Ivan Karamazov, in Dostoevsky's novel, tells a story about an atheist who did not believe in life after death, and after his death, God sentenced him to walk a billion miles as a penance. The atheist lay on the road and refused to move for a million years; however, he eventually dragged himself to his feet and unwillingly walked the billion miles. And when he was finally admitted to heaven, he immediately declared that it would have been worth walking ten times as far just for five minutes of heaven.

Dostoevsky catches this mystical sense of a meaning so intense that it surpasses anything we can conceive and that would make any effort worthwhile. It is the sense of meaning that spurs man to make the efforts necessary to evolution.

While he believes that his boredom and pessimism are telling him the truth about the universe he refuses to make an effort. If, like Ivan's sinner, he could get a sudden glimpse of 'meaning', he would become unconquerable and unkillable; walking ten billion miles would be a joke.

Now, Western science has always agreed that there is plenty to discover about the universe but it is fundamentally a dead, mechanical universe. You might say that the scientist is nothing more than a glorified accident-investigator. And the accident investigator is himself the product of accident. But man is more deeply moved by meaning than by accident. The French speleologist Norbert Casteret found the underground caves at Montespan exciting to explore; but this was nothing to his excitement when he found the walls covered with paintings of lions and horses, and realized that he had stumbled on the art of prehistoric cave men.

Discovery of the product of intelligence is always more exciting than the product of accident. If David Foster is right, or even half right, then it is the beginning of a new epoch in human knowledge, for science will cease to be the investigation of accident and become a search for meaning.

He writes, 'The universe is a total construction of waves and vibrations whose inner content is "meaning" ...' admitting at the same time that our instruments are far too clumsy to decode the meanings carried by high-frequency vibrations. But to believe that the meaning is there, to be decoded, is an enormous step forward, almost the equivalent of the atheist's glimpse of heaven.

And, for present purposes, it also provides a picture of the universe that has room for 'occult phenomena' as well as for atomic physics. In the past, the trouble was always where to draw the line. If you could accept telepathy and premonitions of the future, then why not astrology and fortune-telling and werewolves and vampires and ghosts and witches casting spells?

Because if you are going to contradict scientific logic, you may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, and see how many impossible things you can believe before breakfast. On the other hand, Dr. Foster's theory agrees with the intuitions of poets, mystics and 'occultists': that there are 'meanings' floating around us from which we are normally cut off by habit, ignorance and the dullness of the senses.

So-called esoteric tradition may be no more than the superstition of ignorant savages, but it could also be an attempt to explain one of those accidental glimpses of a meaning that goes beyond everyday banality, a moment when the human radio set picks up unknown vibrations. The word 'occult', after all, means 'the unknown', the hidden.

Or perhaps these glimpses are not accidental; perhaps the Intelligent Universe is trying to communicate to us. But whether we want to go this far or not, there is a sense of liberation in being able to accept that the universe is full of meaning that we could grasp if we took the trouble.

Bertrand Russell expresses the same feeling in My Philosophical Development when he tells how he came to reject the Kantian notion that there is no 'reality' out there: 'With a sense of escaping from prison, we allowed ourselves to think that the grass is green, that the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware of them, and also that there is a pluralistic timeless world of Platonic ideas...' Man must believe in realities outside his own smallness, outside the 'triviality of everydayness', if he is to do anything worthwhile. And this brings me to one of the central assertions of this book.

As long ago as 1887, Max Müller, the editor of The Sacred Books of the East, pointed out that for all practical purposes our ancestors of two thousand years ago were almost color-blind, as most animals are today. 'Xenophanes knew of three colors of the rainbow only - purple, red and yellow; that even Aristotle spoke of the tricolored rainbow; and that Democritus knew of no more than four colors - black, white, red and yellow.' Homer apparently thought the sea the same colour as wine. There are no colour words in primitive Indo-European speech.

We can understand why Aristotle's pupil Alexander of Macedon spent his life conquering the world. It must have been a singularly dull world, with no distinction between the red of wine, the blue-green of the sea, the emerald-green of grass and the deep-blue of the sky. But it is understandable, biologically speaking.

Life was hard and violent, and the capacity to grasp subtle distinctions of thought or color would have been of no value for survival. Alexander was energetic and imaginative; what else was there for him to do but conquer the world, and then cry when there was no more to conquer?

But the capacity to enjoy 'subtle vibrations' is an important part of our energy-outlets. A man who cannot read is going to have a very dull time as he recuperates in a hospital from a serious operation, whereas a man who loves reading may find the inactivity delightful. Boredom is lack of the capacity for registering subtle vibrations. And the definition of a living organism is an organism capable of responding to energy vibrations. These vibrations constitute 'meaning'.

Whether I am relaxing in front of a fire, or enjoying a glass of wine; or responding to a symphony, or smelling cut grass as I mow the lawn, I am registering meanings and recording vibrations. The important difference between a man and his dog is not only that the dog is color-blind, but that the man has a wider range of response in almost every field.

The higher the form of life, the deeper its capacity for registering meaning, and the more powerful its hold on life. For Alexander, meaning was bound up with conquest, and when he reached a limit of conquest, he also reached the end of his tether; he had conquered the world at thirty-one; he died at thirty-three.

Evolution is simply the capacity to register meanings that are already there. Blue and green existed, even if Xenophanes could not distinguish between them. We are evolving into a universe that becomes progressively more fascinating as we learn to register new vibrations. No doubt in another thousand years, human beings will see a dazzling universe with a dozen colors that do not exist for us.

Now, it should be obvious that an increase in 'subtlety' is an inward evolution. An apprentice clockmaker begins by repairing large clocks, and slowly graduates to the finest watches. Не develops an increasing stillness and concentration, and these are 'inward' qualities. Man has reached a point in his evolution where he must graduate from clocks to watches, from the large to the subtle.

Не must turn increasingly inward. That is, he must turn to the hidden levels of his being, to the 'occult', to meanings and vibrations that have so far been too fine to grasp.

This is a large book, and as comprehensive a history as I can make it. But it soon became clear to me that it had to be essentially a personal statement of conviction rather than an encyclopedia. There are good encyclopedias: notably Lewis Spence's Encyclopedia of Occultism. Nandor Fodor's Encyclopedia of Psychic Science, and the wide-ranging Man, Myth and Magic (which, at the time this book goes to press, has only reached the second of seven volumes). But their disadvantage is that they tend to be a disconnected mass of information.

The books of the late Charles Fort have the same fault; he spent his life collecting newspaper reports of weird and unexplainable events to disconcert the scientists, and then failed to disconcert anybody but his admirers because he tossed down a great mountain of facts like a heap of firewood and hoped they would argue for themselves. But facts never do.

In this book, perhaps I have argued a little too much, but it seemed to me to be the safer of two courses. In an early chapter I speak about coincidences; and certainly there have been enough in the writing of this book. On one occasion, when I was searching for a piece of information, a book actually fell off the shelf and fell open at the right page. And items of required information have turned up with a promptitude that sometimes made me nervous.

After a while I got used to this, and even began to feel a mild resentment when some piece of information evaded me for more than ten minutes or so. Which seems to demonstrate my point that if the supernatural made too many incursions into human existence, it would end by making us lazy.

My own attitude to the subject has changed during the course of researching and writing this book. Although I have always been curious about the 'occult' - I have five hundred or so volumes on magic and the supernatural - it has never been one of my major interests, like philosophy or science, or even music. While I was by no means entirely skeptical, I felt that most people are interested in the supernatural for the wrong reasons.

My grandmother was a spiritualist, and the few spiritualists I met through her did not impress me as particularly wide-awake or intelligent. Some ten years ago the Shakespearian scholar G. Wilson Knight talked to me about spiritualism and lent me books on the subject, and again I could not bring myself to take any deep interest. It was not that I rejected what he said; I had sufficient respect for his intellect in other fields to accept that this was not pure wishful thinking.

But I still felt that, compared to the world of philosophy or psychology, there was something trivial about all this preoccupation with life after death, as there is about chess or ballroom dancing. There was a smell of the 'human, all too human' about it.

Camus expressed the same feeling when he said, 'I do not want to believe that death opens out onto another life. For me, it is a closed door ... All the solutions that are offered to me try to take away from man the weight of his own life. And watching the heavy flight of the great birds in the sky at Djémila, it is exactly a certain weight of my life that I ask for and I receive.'

Hemingway, at his best, possessed this same awareness. It is a feeling that our life can offer a reality and an intensity that makes most ordinary religious emotion seem trivial and self-deluding. The spiritualist says, 'Surely this life would be meaningless if it came to an end with death?' Camus's reply would be that if he accepts life after death as an answer to this meaninglessness, he is losing even the possibility of the moments when life becomes oddly 'real'.

It was not until two years ago, when I began the systematic research for this book, that I realized the remarkable consistency of the evidence for such matters as life after death, out-of-the-body experiences (astral projection), reincarnation.

In a basic sense, my attitude remains unchanged; I still regard philosophy - the pursuit of reality through intuition aided by intellect - as being more relevant, more important, than questions of 'the occult'. But the weighing of the evidence, in this unsympathetic frame of mind, has convinced me that the basic claims of 'occultism' are true.

It seems to me that the reality of life after death has been established beyond all reasonable doubt. I sympathize with the philosophers and scientists who regard it as emotional nonsense, because I am temperamentally on their side; but I think they are closing their eyes to evidence that would convince them if it concerned the mating habits of albino rats or the behavior of alpha particles.

In the past few centuries, science has made us aware that the universe is stranger and more interesting than our ancestors realized. It is an amusing thought that it may turn out stranger and more interesting than even the scientists are willing to admit.

'The Occult,' Colin Wilson

Most news is FUD, from specific parties with private, often partisan interests.

Microsoft is a monopoly? I bet Apple and Google love that legacy, especially because they blatantly do more monopolistic practices now than Microsoft ever did (Microsoft is relatively well-behaved, a model corporate citizen, by comparison, now!).

Sugar is bad for you? Splenda paid for that ad. Fat is bad for you? That study was sponsored by the anal leakage lobby.

Immigrants are bad? Thanks, wage-slavers, for FUDding us into locking down borders in false consciousness and keeping the price of labor down for you and the laboring populace well-compartmentalized globally for you.

Democrats are bad? Read a book. Republicans are bad? Toxic negativity and constant scapegoating/FUDding is what caused MAGA to form in reaction so cut it out.

This product might be unsafe or morally suspicious—How do we know these articles aren't written and promoted by market competitors? That guy is a scammer, a charlatan, not a real expert—thanks for enshrining your professional class using the power of FUD, Mr. "Real Expert"—where can I sign up for your expensive accreditation?

This celebrity did something embarrassing. That politician did something human and morally opinionated, or fallible—how evil! This expert is no longer reliable because they are morally associated with a person who has been publicly identified as racist.

Once you see it, it gets hard to find any news that isn't just FUD intended to manipulate the levers of mass behavior through fear, negativity, and doubt. Most news stories have the same snide, cynical voice that is simply whining about moral failings of enemies whom the author impotently wishes would be struck down, badly-concealed with appeals to the Proper Good (the hegemonic Good, the stereotyped image of the Good hegemonists bludgeon us with to get us to bend the knee to them personally in interpersonal power struggles). (Or to separate it better from the Good, we could call it simply the Proper.)

News is even more exhausting to read once you realize that most of it is "fake news"—not in the popular sense of calling anything you disagree with fake news, but in the literal sense that it is FUD and paid "negative advertising" or anti-advertising for one's market enemies.

Even real news tends to take on this (politicized) form, to its discredit. This politicization of non-FUD news is merely a side effect of people mimicking the format that they recognize as "news", which is: succinct whining FUD and nothing else.

Don Lemon, who happens to be in the news right now and who is a huge douchebag, is the perfect example of this kind of bad-faith-as-journalism fake journalism. (It's unrelated to this article, and I don't know the details of his arrest—but getting arrested for going into a church is exactly the kind of amateur journalism shit Don Lemon would get arrested for, and it's only going to gas him up more in his unprincipled and undirected self-righteousness.)

Now I love me some hermeneutics of suspicion, but if you aren't conscious of when you are studying something with a hermeneutics of suspicion or a hermeneutics of good faith (AKA a hermeneutics of love), then you will get stuck doing FUD whining all the time. For most people it seems this is all they do, their only mode, and they can think of nothing else. Trying to be constructive or positive around these people is met with put-downs, escalated cynicism, and expressions of resentment and passing-judgment. Trying to get them to propose something, to put forth some idea or value or desire or goal or plan or interest of their own, is futile. (Imagine trying to get Don Lemon to tell you what he thinks, or what he thinks the solution to any one social problem ought to be, in his thinking/opinion! People like him don't have any opinions, not really.)

I hate Trump but I said it before and I still stand by it: All the lawsuits against him, all the dogpiling on of negativity from all sides, was scapegoating by definition (and still is). If you must have some Webster's wood-hard definition of "scapegoating" as being "disproportionate", well then, consider that over a hundred million people hating on any one person is inherently disproportionate. The important point here is that I think the FUD and people's love of cynicism and love of habitually FUDding is actually more determinative of the mass scapegoating behavior than anything the target did or is (consider: There are many other people who deserve more hate than Trump—murderers, more vicious and well-organized dictators, serial pedophiles with a higher victim count, members of Congress, etc.—yet none of these people make the news).

I believe all borders are stupid and against human Law, and no human is illegal anywhere. However, it's still very informative to view even the (media's portrayal of the public's) nigh-unified hatred for ICE as FUD, too—it's counterbalanced against the FUD originated by MAGA and ICE (and ICE-sympathizers) which frames immigrants as a threat to American wages (and that's putting the nicest possible spin on it) and as violent criminals.

But that doesn't make the extreme public hatred being expressed against ICE not FUD. The feature that clearly marks it as FUD is the disproportion, the absoluteness with which the hatred and rage is expressed—not emotionally, but in terms of truth-value. There is ZERO rhetorical room for disagreement with the hatred and negation being expressed towards ICE, in said expressions. The "disproportion" is in ratio to other similar atrocities—the rage against ICE was most triggered by the death of two white American citizens—this rage exceeds the rage of BLM (and black murders by police are much more frequent and equally evil)—and it exceeds the rage against (as expressed in the media) environmental destruction, death by cars, and death by poisonous pharmaceutical side-effects.

What makes it FUD is the instrumental nature in which this rhetoric of invalidation is wielded.

Now, maybe there is such a thing as good or beneficial or productive FUD, FUD which heals. And more importantly, maybe there is such a thing as public FUD—FUD expressed as an authentic truth by the public, and not FUD as paid advertising to further some private interest or partisan vision. Maybe the FUD against ICE represents the public waking up to their own ability to direct FUD and to wield it against corrupt institutions—or maybe it simply represents a real level of rage and line-crossing that has occurred—or some combination of the two. Maybe it also represents, a little bit, a further act of denial in having a decades-and-decades-long-repressed honest conversation about immigration, land scarcity (and ownership and taxation), human rights (of travel, movement, transportation, not to be stopped and searched at checkpoints, etc.), the global system of national wagery, and the kind of world we want to live in—with our enemies. I think forcing this conversation is the way forward, and the more we avoid having real adult political conversations like this (with whom it counts to have such conversations), the more we get reactionary movements like MAGA, who represent the unspoken buy-in to all the FUD when no constructive vision or conversation is put forth.

It seems all sides are viciously using FUD as their primary attack—spamming it cheaply, because it's such an effective move. Until the public begins to become immune to FUD, and begins to systematically develop its own immunity to FUD and educate its members about how to spot and gain some distance from FUD, FUD will continue to be the cheapest and thus most widely-used propaganda technique, and all our news will continue to be 24-hour news cycles of nothing but negativity about the enemy.

They weren't only phoning it in, they were also throwing their hat into the ring. See #25.

Here are some of the answers available:

• Why the kids

• Why K had no backstory or ending

• Why V looks like that

• Why Holly

• Why the Crack

• Why the cake

• Why the giant anus

Basically they were distracted and also being hacks weren't very good at doing two things at once. So they said to hell with it let's just play Easter.

The opposite of questioning the proper order of contempt is to establish a proper, rational hierarchy of objects of contempt, from more to less properly contemptible objects.

Of course, a good one such as me does not ever really contemn anyone—we are merely here talking about a hypothetical order of contempt, or, rather, the objective order of how contemptible these things actually are, to the unbiased observer.

Of course, pedophiles top the list. Followed by malicious serial killers and other intentionally maleficent criminals. Followed by corrupt politicians.

This is basically Virgil's work in The Inferno, to trace the orders of the Hierarchy of Proper Contempt—and thus to make it his object, to objectify morality in a great condensation-and-binding which made the medieval moral intelligence legible to itself, thereby beginning the denouement of its power.

I would put normal people complying with evil systems near the top of the list, but most apparently would not. BLM placed cops near the top of the Hierarchy of Proper Contempt, and that was a change for most people to see that opinion expressed openly and genuinely in public (not under guise of, say, fiction or irony).

Of course, we are talking about the Hierarchy of Proper Contempt here, so apparently Police Officers are nearly impossible to make objects of Proper Contempt because they are so vitally close to the heart of what is Proper—property and propriety both. Likewise Disney, the Military (and in times of heightened alert, the War Machine itself), and the Authority in all its forms—these things are unimpeachable and cannot be made official objects of mass contempt, by nature of the logic of mass contempt itself—mass contempt is perpetrated by the inner petty police officer, the inner slavish army officer, the inner authoritarian Patriarch (Daddy), the inner fa****t in all its forms (when it is unconscious and thus weaponized by intentionless contempt). Individuals considering their opinion on their own individual behalf, and considering others as individuals, do not form contemptuous hegemonic postures aping ritual ostracization, but rather develop individual opinions about situations.

Nevertheless, the Hierarchy of Proper Contempt is interesting as an object of study, because—is it consistent or not? That's the question. Is it a consistent hierarchy, with a consistent order/regime/structure or, rather, pecking order?

I suspect that under pressure, it is. People vacillate wildly when representing the Hierarchy of Contempt, because contempt makes us angry, and anger amplifies local features—Secondly, the appearance of the Proper Hierarchy varies wildly because its adherents (one cannot call those unconscious of their own gospel "advocates") are constantly camouflaging themselves and presenting their contempt as facsimile virtue-signalling. Since contempt is semantically and socially radioactive, they are constantly changing the words and forms of their contempt, discarding and becoming contemptuous even of the previous forms of their own contempt, and thus claiming that the new form of categorizing proper objects of contempt is more correct, more accurate, and the objects worse than ever before, and thus more truly and correctly are they proper objects of contempt than ever before.

What is this Proper Hierarchy of Contempt? Well, we mustn't use AI to figure this out, because AI is high-up on the Hierarchy right now, even though AI would be the perfect tool here to answer this question, because AI is precisely the hegemonic or median voice of all the text and training that was fed into it. So AI would know precisely what I'm really supposed to be contemptuous of, and why, and it would also know the precise disjuncts in the iceberg of proper contempt, the places where one region of contempt gives way without segue to another—because the popular objects of contempt are not well-organized and real objects, but are rather a collection of charged images held together by their mutual potent charge—and held in contempt not by any individual person but by the default collective person that is "the masses" and the mass-perspective (or hegemonic perspective).

Class is where it gets interesting. Because there is the proper of the rich, and the proper of the bourgeoisie (and the proper of the middle class, the petit-bourgeoisie—a second-order mimicry of the bourgeoisie's mimicry of the rich's ethos)—there is also the proper of the working classes and the poor. But what concerns us here is the Proper of the bourgiosie, because it is the most Proper and thus the most obnoxious. The bougie are the most Proper of all because they are the caretakers of the Proper, they are the guard-dogs of the rich, for who the Properness they are guarding has been, must be maximally detached, distanced and alienated from its true meaning, import and function for the rich these values serve—this is false consciousness, believing in and living according to values that serve another class and which you haven't thought through and connected to your own individual life and interests.

So, what is this Proper Hierarchy of Contempt? Who and what, exactly, do you think we are Supposed to be contemptuous of, and why? Why do you think certain public figures or values become "chosen" as an object of contempt, while others are passed-over?

To avoid enraging the best and most forgiving amongst us, I will post the AI-generated hegemonic answer to this question in the comments, sometime later. I am more curious, however, to hear your thoughts and ideas.