Maya: Lifting the Veil, pt 1

Waking Up

Up above aliens hover
Making home movies for the folks back home
Of all these weird creatures who lock up their spirits
Drill holes in themselves and live for their secrets

Radiohead — Subterranean Homesick Alien

I intended to start this as a way to express what I’ve been feeling and thinking. Not necessarily to convince someone or to persuade, but because I have to arrange my thoughts. This turned into a kind of autobiography of sorts because I found it necessary to confront myself, honestly and directly, with what and who I was, what and who I am, what and who I want to be. I make it public because I want to make sure I am being forthright and honest. I do not seek validation with this writing, or criticism, or arguments.

I am not writing a persuasive article because I do not think whatever I’m trying to say here can be taught. They must be understood, but I don’t think “learning”, in the traditional sense, is how you can understand it. This is why religious texts and profound stories are written in the frame of metaphor and allegory. You just simply cannot be told the nature of yourself and your relationship to the universe. The only way to describe it is through story and narrative. Or perhaps prose and song. It’s why you’ll see references to these scattered throughout this.

This writing is intended for no one and nothing in particular. I am not making an argument. I am not professing beliefs. I am not complaining. I am certainly not claiming to know anything, or to be an expert on anything, and I’m damn sure not enlightened.

It’s long. Maybe you find it compelling, maybe you find it curious, maybe you hate it and find it boring, trite, or unenlightened, malicious or evil. That’s fine. I have no business telling you how to live or what to think. If I want to convey anything to another person with this it is simply to be aware. I do not mean to preach; if persuasive language is used it is merely because linguistics is limited.

I was wrong
we are not these bodies alone
in a dream with a mind of its own
Live- We Walk in the Dream

I Was Wrong

I have come to reject materialism, and by extension atheism. What has compelled me to do so? I was so sure in my convictions. I had thought it through so much. I have read books from towering intellectuals with deep scientific and philosophical backgrounds and came to agree with them that religious principles, and spiritual principles, were simply nonsense. Occam’s razor ought to apply, I thought, and it’s facile to explain away consciousness and emotion as the result of evolutionary biology, which is a result of living beings, which were the result of some coincidence of chemistry and physics.

This made sense to me. I couldn’t explain how life arose, but had a good guess in self-organizing and replicating proteins, and that the universe was so vast that this improbability was inevitable and had to occur somewhere.

As soon as you’re born you start dying, so you might as well have a good time CAKE- Sheep go to Heaven

The end result of this was living a life that a seemingly large majority of us in the modern world live. “YOLO” was the annoying rallying cry of millennials everywhere, and was itself an evolution of Boomer mentality as they entered the post-divine, “rational”, “modern”, “advanced”, “progressive”, “tolerant” era. We eschewed all mystery, all spirituality, self-sacrifice and discipline because we only lived once, so we might as well have a good time in the process.

I had set out engaging in that which simply felt “good”, and felt I had to answer to no one but myself: Acquiring money, spending that money on frivolous experiences and things, pursuing sexual gratification with little or no meaning, pursuing pleasure with alcohol and other drugs, or using them to numb the itch at the back of my mind that kept telling me something was wrong with all of this.

I spent nearly eight years of my life connected in one way or another to the racket of the war machine. I had discovered scuba diving and felt some peace in this activity and enjoyed the connection with nature and and almost meditative silent contemplation it provided me. I had, so I thought, done a 180-degree shift from the warrior type to the fun-loving scuba instructor type when I moved to the Caribbean to pursue a certification in teaching the sport. I lived among other “free-spirited” types. Very nice people who loved to have a good time. I thought I was immersed in a completely different world with different people.

I hadn’t forgotten my militaristic roots however, and still identified with the strength and discipline my comrades-in-arms shared. I, so I thought, had begun to internalize these changes in myself to seek a kind of middle ground between stoic, sometimes harsh but essential and no-nonsense warrior type to the “free-spirit” types. I believed there had to be some middle ground there, for the world would fall apart without some order and someone to defend from the wolves, and the world would descend into cruelty and tyranny if militarism and hard-heartedness won the day. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered these two “camps” had much, much more in common with each other than I could ever imagine.

I had always had a keen interest in politics. I had grown up in non-urban yet non-rural parts of the United States of America during the 1980s and 1990s. I lived in the shadow of the Cold War where the fear of tyrannical Soviet communism was present and its horrors relatively recent, and during an economic era of prosperity as the country evolved from the recession of the 70s and early 80s. I was proud of my country and its principles. I had considered myself fortunate to live in such a place that could resist the siren song of Utopian collectivism while making available a more comfortable life for a kid from a working class single parent household than could be imagined in most of the world. I never had to go hungry. I never had to sleep in the cold, and I recognized this. I had dedicated myself to maintaining the spirit of the founding, as it had given me so much. It’s why I joined the Marine Corps. I was willing to defend it with my life.

The Demon Inside

You will be a minister of Death, praying for War — Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, Full Metal Jacket

September 11th and the subsequent “War on Terror” and the “Liberation” of Iraq had sent shockwaves throughout the world, and it certainly changed the people who engaged in it the most. I had, hesitantly, believed in the casus belli of the Iraq war. During our transit of the Atlantic on the USS Kearsarge, I had struggled with our purpose and our mission. I had eventually come around because of two influences: peer pressure from the rest of the Marines I was with, and what I can only describe as a coping mechanism. I was being sent to fight, possibly kill, and possibly die. Retrospectively, I think I had to condition myself to believe in the narrative to protect my soul. If I truly believed it was the right thing to do, I could do so with courage and without self-judgment.

Thankfully, I wasn’t placed in a situation where I had to kill, and I came out of deployments physically unscathed. I was actually disappointed by this at the time; a manifestation of my internalization of the lie. I wanted vengeance. I was full of wrath. I wanted a purpose in life and that purpose was to bring my enemies to justice. I was a damn Marine, it was my job to kill, or at least die in battle. It was the defining identity of my life at that point. I felt ineffective because our unit was simply not in a position to engage with the enemy in that way. We ended up in a rear guard position that the enemy did not probe.

But I sought battle. And somewhere, in places I forbid myself to explore, I wanted to die, as, in my view, I would have achieved my purpose in life and wouldn’t have to think about it further. Remembered as a hero and/or martyr. Reserved a spot in Valhalla, in a way. For those who were against the war, I would at least earn a status as a victim of circumstance or “brainwashing”. It was seemingly paradoxical, but a combination of Pride and subconscious seeking of meaning had given me a death wish. Nihilism had already been set in the dark recesses of my mind. By halfway through my Afghanistan deployment, what remaining shreds of Catholicism I had pretended to believe in had withered away in the face of witnessing the full scope of human brutality and what I was lead to believe was religious “evil”.

I continued to work in the Iraqi theater as a contractor after being discharged from the Marines. After all, what’s a nihilist/hedonist doing in the military? It’s getting in the way of fun, what with all the rules and discipline. Contracting was great at the time because it not only filled my wallet and allowed me to spend my non-working time how I wished, but also gave me this illusion of purpose and the possibility to sate my bloodlust and/or fulfill my secret (secret even to me) death wish. I’d consequently blow this money on bullshit when I did go on leave, because, you know, YOLO. I didn’t plan on living past 30 anyway.

And I had the foolish notion that this was somehow “enlightened”.

Exposure to the “behind the scenes” action of the State Department had completely eroded whatever faith I had left in the government as well as their “mission”. I got bored, and somewhere deep inside felt something needed to change. I checked in my rifle on my last day and went to go scuba diving with the money I had not yet squandered.

Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island

It was great. Beautiful scenery. Beautiful women, plentiful booze, and of course, diving every day. What I had thought to be a “reawakening” of sorts and the discovery of a joie de vivre was occurring. I found what I perceived to be a type of bliss. I felt as though I was making up for the “lost time” I didn’t have attending college parties. Surely living in paradise and engaging in the things you find pleasurable are any modern man’s definition of a perfect life right?

Well, it didn’t satisfy my ego. Sure it was cool to be the “cool guy” who dived for a living in the Caribbean, but I had also had another delusion of grandeur that I had to satisfy. I was so damned convinced of my own intellect that I felt I was doing myself and the world a disservice by not educating myself. I packed my bags and headed for university back in the States. And oh yeah, I had a girlfriend at the time after being single for most of my life.

Her

My life in an upturned boat
Marooned on a cliff
You brought me a great big flood
And you gave me a lift
Girl, what a gift!
You tell me with your tongue
And your breath was in my lungs

And we float up through the rift

The Shins — Simple Song

If that seemed like an afterthought it’s because it kind of was at the time. After all, I was me. Many people don’t believe me when I say this, but I’m not a humble person. People don’t believe this because I am full of self-doubt and say words to indicate that I’m humble. The people who really get to know me learn this about me, and it has been my greatest fear. She knew, because she knew me. She saw straight through me and, for whatever reason, didn’t run like the rest of them. She saw something in me that made her want to stay. I still, to this day, do not comprehend exactly why.

Deciding to marry her was a major awakening event. It meant letting go of some amount of control. It meant acknowledging I’m not the only person in the room. It meant I had to actually explore the depths of my emotions and empathize- really empathize- with someone. I didn’t fully understand the extent to which I had to do this, but understood it was something I had to do. It was a hunk of humanity that was missing from me. She was missing from me, and I knew that if I walked away, I would resume this life that I did not want to lead.

It’s a terrifying realization that you need someone. It’s also terrifying to have someone actually love you, because that leaves open the door to disappointing someone in a catastrophic way. It means now, not only do you hurt yourself when you fuck up, but you can damage someone else. I had always ended things, (or perhaps sabotaged them in some way) to avoid this. I knew I could do it no longer.

The being that lived in darkness and solitude and Pride had to be brought to light and exposed. It had to be purged in the purifying fire of love. It had to die. It’s painful. Growth often is. Ten years of marriage has assured me that it does not go quietly.

Now we drive the night, to the ironies of peace
You can’t help deny forever
The tragedies reside in you
The secret sights hide in you
The lonely nights divide you in two
All my blisters now revealed
In the darkness of my dreams
In the spaces in between us
But no bodies ever knew
Nobodys
No bodies felt like you
Nobodys

Love is suicide

Bodies — Smashing Pumpkins

Quandary

A fresh start. A different, beautiful location. A new group of friends. A broadening of education. A wife. Hope of a prosperous future. Ambition for “success”. The pursuit of academic greatness. Perhaps someone will recognize me for my achievements. Maybe I’ll end up with a great paying job where I can “contribute” to society so that my name will be lauded, somewhere, by someone.

Do you see the issues with this?

Fast Forward.

I end up in graduate school in yet another different place with different friends and thankfully retaining my wife. I faltered. My academic success now had to be proven in the lab. I had to put up or shut up. I had to show I knew what I was talking about and put theoretical concepts into action in a way that was beneficial to the school (in other words, it had to get us that sweet grant money).

Man did I fail. I was outclassed. I was in a lab with people of unfathomable intelligence. People often talk about “imposter syndrome”. Counselors and advice columns and orientations warned against this. Said that you belonged here, that it’s a psychological thing. Nope, it was real. I simply was not cut out for it, and did not have the intelligence, the passion, nor the patience to keep up. This was another big awakening moment for me.

I failed, and I failed in something that I was always told and something I always believed I would succeed in something. I was never an alpha, athletic guy, so I chalked up my struggles in the Marines as to simply being in the wrong place. I simply reasoned I wasn’t “supposed” to be there. But here I was, where I was “supposed” to be, and getting my ass handed to me. Faced with the prospect that maybe my ego was writing checks I couldn’t cash, and faced with the prospect that I didn’t seem to “belong” anywhere, was crushing.

A nervous breakdown led to me walking out of the lab. I couldn’t take it anymore. One more failed reaction and I had to start over. Again. I closed my fume hood and walked out. What followed was avoidance. My wife kept me from completely going off the deep end. I called in sick and didn’t go back to campus for a week. I ended up in a headshrinker’s chair. Got some stuff off my chest, talked about the war, my parents, my relationship with my wife. Thought I was making progress.

Ended up diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed mixed amphetamine salts (Adderall). You see, my problem was partly neurological, it was explained to me. ADHD makes it hard to organize my life and my thoughts. This is probably complicated by your parent’s divorce at an early age and trauma endured from war. It explains your inattentiveness at home and the growing resentment from your wife.

But it’s ok! Therapy will help you cope with the problems stemming from your history and the amphetamine will kick in more of that dopamine that you lack.

In other words: Your suffering is entirely due to material problems. Not spiritual ones. Your problems are not entirely your fault but simply arise because of the nature of your circumstances.

And I ate this up, because who doesn’t like to be told that satisfaction with life can be had by a pill and talking about yourself? I understand now that the field of psychiatry has basically been completely separated from the human condition, but I didn’t then. I mean, I was a chemist for God’s sake! If I didn’t believe in better living through chemistry then who would?

Any wonder why we have scores of children not only being put on Adderall but antidepressants? Hang on, let’s not get off track.

Amphetamines make you feel awesome. It’s like being injected with supersoldier serum. You’re sharper, brighter, have more endurance both physically and mentally. Your mind doesn’t wander and you can actually set tasks and see them through to the end. I wondered if this is what “normal people” feel like.

Oh yeah, and you don’t dream anymore and your inner monologue goes from free association to obsessively laser-focused. You are increasingly prone to stress and anger, and at times when laying in bed your heart feels like it’s going to beat out of your chest.

On Adderall you’re the kind of guy that actually remembers to buy your wife flowers for that particular occasion (yay!) and are actually able to follow her when she talks to you (if your mind isn’t already laser focused on something else), but later will throw dishes on the floor or become so obsessed with work that you shut her out completely.

You know, just side effects. Nothing to worry about.

Hitting bottom isn’t a weekend retreat, it’s not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go. Let go.

Palahniuk- Fight Club

Eventually, after attending counseling and taking the drugs, I had come to the conclusion that I had to discontinue the doctorate program. I still think this is the right choice. I’m not saying therapy isn’t useful, but it never healed the root problem. It’s a salve that hopefully can lead you to what you have to do next. Unfortunately with the ever-devolving state of academia as a whole and the deconstruction of traditional philosophy, I fear that psychiatry and psychology are growing to be actively harmful, but again, I’ll try to stay on topic. Let’s just say I’m glad to have not been saddled with someone who was thoroughly indoctrinated in postmodern bullshit.

After working at a local dive shop for a while, I end up getting a “real” job since being a scuba guy in Massachusetts is not exactly enough to bring home the bacon. Oh yeah, in between the scuba job and the desk job I had almost completely wrecked my marriage. I’d rather not dwell on it, but it’s pertinent to the veil- the Maya- the illusions of this world. I’ll get there sometime, I promise.

It’s a desk job. It’s something decently challenging but not beyond my scope of abilities. It means I stare at a screen a lot and am terminally online. Hey, that’s work right? I mean if it didn’t suck sometimes they wouldn’t pay you to do it.

Got a nice gym membership and I resolve to start improving myself. Getting myself right. Physical fitness is tied to mental fitness is what I’ve been told.

I got into yoga after my colleague convinced me to go. We’d often have deep conversations. I was in the process of trying to figure myself out.

It never scratched the itch fully but it was something. All I knew is I wanted to be better, and did not contemplate why I could not shed that feeling. And every misstep I made would leave me frustrated as to why I couldn’t be better. Why my missteps and mistakes seemed to be inevitable. Why I couldn’t totally find peace.

But things were superficially better. I was “centering” myself through yoga practice. I was getting fit. I was settling into my work. There were some improvements, and I managed to stay busy enough to distract myself from existential crisis.

Apocalypse ( ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis) ‘revelation, disclosure’)

I’d hate to say it, this is where politics has to come in a little bit, because it was one of the things that really started to open my eyes. I had always considered myself a Constitutionalist, a libertarian of sorts. I still irked internally at some of the more “degenerate” and consumerist social activities that had been taking over the culture but had the idea of “well, whatever happens between consenting adults is their business”, etc.

I noticed, like a lot of people on the fairly conservative spectrum that the media seemed to tilt in one way. That Obama was portrayed as the second coming of Christ. That he was applauded, unironically, as having an administration with “zero scandals” even though we all knew this to be patently false.

Then Donald Trump was elected, and the media completely, and totally took their mask off. Now, I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016. I did not vote at all for the presidency. I was skeptical of him as he seemed like a charlatan, but regardless of your impression it was absolutely clear just how much the entirety of the media apparatus was levied against him. The amount of hysteria generated about him was ludicrous beyond belief. He was going to be the Destroyer of Worlds. The murderer of poor immigrant children. Single-handedly responsible for climate change and impending asteroid impacts. It wasn’t just exaggeration or bias, but metric tons of digital and print ink were spilled to print objective lies.

The few times these lies were called out they were quietly redacted days later, and no one had seemed to realize they were redacted. After all, he was so bad that even the lies were justifiable to undermine him, as he was Satan incarnate. No holds barred, he had to go down, and any sense of truth and reason be damned.

He had given hope to a whole lot of people, because they could see the nation spiraling out of control. They could see the perversions mounting and decent people scattering. They put their faith in this guy because the system that we had suspected was corrupt had exposed itself completely and the institutions we saw as hostile to us mobilized in force against him. But now we had a dog in the fight. Someone to take it to ’em, so to speak. Many people believed this. I mean, I did.

By the time COVID and the 2020 elections happened, reality was hanging by a thread. It would not survive these two events.

I won’t, and I can’t, expound on much here. I’m far too tired. All I can say is that if you didn’t catch how fucked up things really are when COVID hysteria was in full bloom, I don’t know if you ever could. I don’t know how one could live through this and not see the absolute magnitude of power wielded by those that want to enslave us and the insanity that people engaged in due to what can only be explained as mass brainwashing.

When I read 1984 as a teenager, I thought it was an interesting story. I never thought it would actually come to be because I perceived people, malleable as they are, as having some element of critical thinking. That they would be able to have some kind of BS detector of sorts. That surely a lie and a gaslighting of this magnitude could never pass muster with the public. Boy, COVID sure relieved me of this notion. It set me down the path that made me question everything. Because I underestimated just how deep and how long this has been going. Once you’re exposed to such blatant propaganda you begin to see history through a different lens. You see the same tactics and the same language. You start to understand that history is written by the victors, and that propaganda is not, and was not a new thing.

“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.”

― St. Antony the Great

You see deadly riots portrayed as “fiery but mostly peaceful protests”. You get told that all of the principles held as virtue for thousands of years are fundamentally evil. You are told that you and your race are the only reason why anything bad happens in the world. You are told that male and female do not exist and that these concepts only arose from social conditioning. You are told that it’s “compassionate” to give children hormones to block their puberty and to surgically remove their genitals. You are told that it’s totally fucking ok for a young boy to dress as a girl and dance in a sexually suggestive manner while half-nude for gay men, and not only is it not just ok, but you must accept this as a virtue for his “bravery”. You see every single aspect of critical thought replaced by vacant dogmatism, and you see this lauded as “rational” and “scientific” and “enlightening” and “compassionate”.

It makes you angry, it makes you confused, and it makes you wonder just what the hell has happened in the world. You wonder how things got to this point, and how the hell it seems like every single institution or individual with power and wealth seems to march in lockstep with every. single. one. of these issues. How could it be that the ones pulling the levers are so adamant about the destruction of virtue? About the destruction of civility? About the destruction of critical thought? About the destruction of prosperity? About the destruction of sanity and the celebration of mental illness?

This is the time when I walked the line of madness. I could not reconcile what I was seeing. I literally could not believe it.

Now I realize why: it was the growing pains of waking up to the reality of our situation.

I have probably known it for some time but did not want to confront it. I can only try to explain how people get so tied to the lies and the propaganda and the absolute, utter bullshit. I think it’s because they believe:

A: The world still makes sense and our leaders actually care for us

B: They think there’s an opportunity for us to be in a post-scarcity technological Star Trek-like utopia at some point

C: Because it makes them feel so good to be such a good person in the eyes of the masses.

They seem to be like NPCs: Non-player characters in a video game. They will repeat the lines programmed to them. They are systems in the Matrix. They will defend their illusions of the world to their death, because they can’t handle waking up.

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

Morpheus- The Matrix

The Matrix, along with The Wizard of Oz, The Truman Show and Dark City, among other films of this type, seem to grasp this. There’s something wrong with the world, some veil pulled over our eyes. Something doesn’t sit right with me regarding the overall message of these films, though. They get 90% of the way there, but seem to endorse a sort of Gnostic theme; that God (the Architect, the Wizard, Christof, the Strangers) is a false God, and that we can break out of this veil to become our own God. This is a little too Luciferian for my tastes, but, well, it’s Hollywood. What do you expect but a perversion of the truth?

You see, I eventually had to talk about politics because politics is born in philosophy. The world has almost universally bought in to “Enlightenment” principles to some degree (The Islamic world stubbornly resists it to some extent) and have some vision of liberal democracy as being an ultimate good. Sure there are those that would return to outright despotic socialism or national socialism, or some who would bring back monarchism, but ultimately all politics boils down to philosophy.

The arguments typically stem from morality to materialist prosperity (or sometimes they appeal to both), but ultimately, each believer seems to have some kind of faith that if their system (or lack thereof) of government would lead to “happiness”… whatever the hell that means. The most deluded are those that believe their political solution would result in “Utopia”. These are the most dangerous. Becoming gods and creating aspiring to create Heaven itself has never brought about anything but pure, unbridled suffering.

This was illustrative to me, and examining its roots we find Pride: The root of sin. Human beings aspiring to become God. It lies at the heart of the human condition, and despite the deceptions that you are told, you are not going to find Heaven on earth.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

This is what causes the feelings of anxiety and depression in the modern man. This is what everyone was so broody about in the West in the 90s. The best fed, most comfortable peoples in the history of the world descended into nihilism and instinctively eschewed the modern world and its consumerism. The seeds of the cultural revolution of the 60s had come to a head. The promise of free “love” and drugs and “doing what you want, man” had lead to this.

The absolute rejection of tradition by the boomers resulted in nothing more than once iconic “rebel” rock stars shilling for fucking Pepsi. You see the cultural pushback of this throughout the 90s. People felt something was wrong with the world, but couldn’t put their finger on it.

I’m not going to elaborate much on the 60s, as I didn’t live through it, so I’ll move my frame of reference to the 90s, as it’s a lived experience for me and it illustrates many of the same themes.

“I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we’ve been all raised by television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t and we’re slowly learning that fact. and we’re very very pissed off.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Many just blamed “capitalism”, and this continues today, ignoring the fact that they were indeed quite well off compared to literally everyone in the world up to that point. ]What exactly were they chafing against? Commercialism? Greed? Consumerism?

I was a teenager in the 90s, and still a bit naïve as life seemed pretty good to me, but the sense that the older Gen Xers were giving up and descending into apathy was palpable.

I’ve been busy procrastinating all day — Daria, MTV

They were going to universities and delving deep into the human condition only to go back home and find that people were still watching braindead TV and buying crap like Beanie Babies. This of course instilled a sense of superiority which fed their apathy and nihilism. “Fuck it, I’m too smart for this and my genius won’t be recognized anyway.” seemed to be the attitude.

I’ve got this great idea
Why don’t we pitch it to the Franklin fucking Mint?
Fine pewter portraits of
General Apathy and Major Boredom singing
“Whatever and ever amen”

Ben Folds Five- The Battle of Who Could Care Less

During this era, some have figured out that modernity has lead to this dissatisfaction. A place where we are comfortable but unchallenged. There was a recognition that a life free from nature, free from the struggle of life and death, a life where your anxieties came not from the threat of being eaten by a cougar but from whether or not you made a fool of yourself for wearing the wrong outfit to the office “Holiday” party.

One of those people was Theodore Kaczynski.

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. It is well known that the rate of clinical depression has been greatly increasing in recent decades. We believe that this is due to disruption of the power process, as explained in paragraphs 59–76.

But even if we are wrong, the increasing rate of depression is certainly the result of SOME conditions that exist in today’s society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.

Another example of the problem of modernity is echoed by Tyler Durden, who was essentially a fictional version of Ted:

In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Remember the Dark Knight? Alfred tells a story to Bruce Wayne trying to explain the Joker’s behavior. He explains “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

This rubs me the wrong way. This is what was said of Kaczynski in the media. He was portrayed as a lunatic. He just wanted to watch the world burn, they said. He succeeded in intimidating the Washington Post to publish his manifesto and this is the only way we know this is not the case.

He didn’t want to see the world burn for his own personal pleasure or because he was a sociopath. He wanted to burn down the modern world, or at least to wake people up to it, because he perceived it as a threat. It was not the actions of a man who finds glee in murder, but a man trying to save humanity from itself.

The road to evil is paved with good intentions. We condemn Uncle Ted for his actions (and rightly so), but then applaud for the politicians, CEOs and heads of state that do far worse in service to their supposed “vision for the future”. They are both manifestations of Pride, and both thought they could force the world and its people in succumbing to their whims. Watch Tony Blair’s talk at the WEF and tell me how this former Prime Minister of the UK, can otherwise talk so blithely and confidently about reorganizing the entire social, political and economic structures of foreign nations while dismissing any complaints or rebuttals their people might have as mere idiocy.

Ted rots in prison for sending a few bombs and killing a few people, but the “Powers that Be” never seem to be brought to justice for bombing entire cities, starting wars that further their goals and strengthen their power, poisoning their own people, dumping waste into the sea while saying that it’s our fault that the oceans are in such bad shape, weakening opposition through coercion and censorship and threats and propaganda, enslaving everyone in an economic Ponzi scheme of debt and fake currency while funneling the actual fruits of your labor to fund ethnically cleansing native populations via forced immigration, as well as more wars, more propaganda, more slaughter and more poison.

Ultimately, they are building a prison planet where everything you do and everything you think is governed by them. Every cent you spend, everything you write, everything you say, and soon everything you think will be monitored (via predictive algorithm AIs).

You know, for your own good.

They, like Ted, are driven by their own Pride and delusions of grandeur, but unlike Ted, they will never be brought to justice for their crimes. This has been going on for centuries. Perhaps millennia.

Odd that many of the thinkers of the 90s who pointed out these precise issues of modernity have all but gone underground in the modern age, as the generations that succeeded them have bought, hook, line and sinker, into the “amazing” world of technology and science.

Hell, a movie was made about Fight Club and it earned a cult following. Imagine a film centered on an antihero that condemns shallowness, consumerism and modernity being greenlit today in an era where TikTok, instant Amazon gratification and an all-encompassing internet are our golden calves. Why such a movie may get called “extreme right wing trad white boy incel terrorist rage porn” today. Throw in “anti-semitic” for good measure.

Did you notice that the “Occupy Wall Street” movement seemed to blink out of existence at the exact same time that social justice and identity politics rhetoric seemed to ramp up? Do you think this is a coincidence?

People claim to be empathetic, and this is why they buy into this stuff. I’d argue that their unstated desire is to be lauded for their so-called empathy (virtue signaling). This is perhaps how we got into this phase during this millennium: they just had to be prodded with enough propaganda that appealed to their egotistical notions of what good people they are.

Maybe they felt it wasn’t fair that they got theirs while there was still injustice and starvation in other parts of the world. Maybe they felt that the “planet” was at risk of destruction because of our overabundance? If only they could remake things in their way, then we could all find not only equality but equity.

Then we could all be united in the Brotherhood of Man, like that John Lennon song that all my favorite celebrities sang! We could all live as brother gods/goddesses/godxs on Mt. Olympus and our cup would overflow with vegan milk and vegan honey and we would have our paradise right here on Earth.

Oh yeah. That again. Pride.

This is how we came to this materialist religion of “Social Justice”. This is the inevitable result. When people are ignorant of the truly Divine, they still have an instinctive sense to seek purpose from somewhere. The ultimate good must be obtainable on Earth when they do not believe in anything higher than themselves. The only way towards betterment is material benefit.

You must create a burnt offering of your petroleum. You must sacrifice your own children on the altar of progressivism and remove their genitals. You must accept migrant crime and rapes as “part and parcel of living in a city” as atonement for the original sin of whiteness. There are blasphemous words you cannot speak. You must stamp out your old, “bigoted” ideas and in so doing, wipe out your philosophers, your art, your music and the traditions of your awful, evil, old culture to make way for the new “Brotherhood of Man”.

Look around this world we made
Equality
Our stock in trade
Come and join the Brotherhood
Of Man
What a nice contented world
Let the banners
Be unfurled
Hold the Red Star proudly
High in hand.

Rush- 2112

When Nietzsche proclaimed that we have “killed God”, many midwit atheists (myself included at the time) took this as a proclamation of victory over old, outdated superstition at the hands of a new, “enlightened” race of men.

It wasn’t a victory statement. It was a warning:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

You will all dance before the golden calf of self-aggrandizement and hedonism, for pleasure and “self-love” and safety and comfort are the central tenets of the faith. There is no room for adventure and free thought and real beauty here.

After all, adventure is dangerous, free thought can lead to rebellion and beauty devalues the profane.

The only morality that matters is one that increases pleasure and safety for people, because after all, what else is there?

A soul?

What are you some kind of stupid peasant from the 13th century? It’s current year and the Priests of the Temple of Syrinx say there is no soul. Sorry sweetie, try again.

…I see still the incredible beauty of the sculptured cities, and the pure spirit of man revealed in the lives and works of this world. I was overwhelmed by both wonder and understanding as I saw a completely different way to life, a way that had been crushed by the Federation long ago. I saw now how meaningless life had become with the loss of all these things…

Rush- 2112

And who was pushing this on the culture? Who is implanting this shit into people’s brains? Well, it turns out, the kinds of people that were flying to Little St. James to attend some kind orgy involving children at a Babylonian-looking temple. They’re the kind of people who attend “spirit cooking” “art” events where they participate in a simulation of eating human flesh. They’re the kinds of people who like to display “art” in their homes depicting horrific child abuse.

When you pry deeper and learn the proclivities of the “rich and famous” you find even more disgusting, utterly depraved, patently repulsive, perhaps demonic shit.

Not only do you find perversions but the practice of warfare as a method of obtaining wealth and power. The use of usury and corruption to horde as much as they can up to the complete ruin of entire towns, cities and even nations. The instigation of riots and rebellions that further their aims. The systematic destruction of anyone who calls them out on any of these things. The wringing of blood and treasure from normal people. Murder for hire. Slander and propaganda. Poison disguised as medicine and food.

These are the people telling you that this new perverse “religion” of transhumanism, deviancy and materialism that has been built is the pinnacle of human achievement and the dream for our future.

This is what finally convinced me that real, ontological evil exists. Where does one go from here?

Now we walk in the dream
But dream no more
To live a life in love
To hear the voice in the wilderness
The other side of the door
Somethin’ more

More than these
Women in the streets pullin’ out their hair
Somethin’ more
Somethin’ more than all the pain we feel
Somethin’ more
More than we could dream of, all light
Love-bliss, no death and no fear
No fear!

Live- We Walk in the Dream