The text argues that elite control is maintained by pathologizing psychological diversity and forcing a “one-size-fits-all” model of productivity and morality. By adopting a mythic typology -recognizing that different people serve different internal “gods” or metabolic profiles – individuals can reclaim their attention from the “Current Thing” and institutional shaming. This shift from a perfectionist worldview to a tragic acceptance of reality decentralizes power, as the system loses its ability to govern a population that views its differences as ontological strengths rather than defects to be cured.

Welcome back. In this post, the final part of a three part series, I am going to discuss how a mythic typology of human temperament weakens upper elite control over the noetic commons. The intent is to match humanity’s evolving understanding of the God image1 as closely as possible to reality, and weakening of elite control is a biproduct of this process. In the centuries leading up to the industrial revolution belief was what predominated, but in the modern era humanity hungers for experience over belief. When external sources of authority have been corrupted into irrelevance, it is only by the turn inward where that experience can be found.

In the past I have highlighted the “Current Thing” as modernity’s religion, which is where the upper elites use media organs to funnel public attention to a particular topic, monopolizing attention at the expense of an infinity of other topics; whether one agrees or disagrees with the Current Thing doesn’t matter, it only matters that one take a side and plays along. This serves as mass hypnosis.2 The intent of a Current Thing is always (at best) either simply a distraction, or (more regularly) a topic framed dialectically to push upper elite longterm goals and shift population values. As I wrote in a Note, all of the major influencers on both the right and the left are both controlled and entirely caught up in this cycle.

I am seeing (from my limited social circle) the same people who went along with the COVID hysteria and an infinity of other Current Things (a list of over 100 of them was discussed here) trotting out the same old tired lines on both sides, “the right are dictators!” vs. “the left are evil!” having learned nothing from any of the prior Current Things. It is a secular replacement religion, although a weak one psychologically. As I wrote in a Note,

When metaphysical afterlife weakens, the compensation logic does not disappear, it migrates. Modern politics is Christianity with the eschaton dragged into time. Observe the structural equivalence: Heaven becomes utopia/liberation/equality, Hell becomes fascism/reaction/evil Others, Judgment becomes tribunals, purges, cancellations, Sin becomes structural guilt and wrong consciousness, salvation becomes alignment with history’s “right side.”

Politics becomes a moral afterlife simulator. Why? Because once people lose faith that injustice will be corrected elsewhere they demand that it be corrected now, by force, through total systems. This produces zero-sum moralization, apocalyptic rhetoric, intolerance of ambiguity, compulsory innocence signaling. In Jungian terms the unintegrated shadow of the all-good God returns as collective persecution. Modern political movements are not primarily rational projects, they are attempts to re-install Heaven and Hell inside history after metaphysical belief collapses. This is why they are so ferocious: they are carrying the weight of theodicy without admitting it. Abraxas detonates this. If there is no cosmic justice arc politics cannot redeem, enemies cannot be metaphysically purged, history cannot be purified. What remains is tragic management, not salvation, which is intolerable to most people.

The Noetic Commons

Elite control over the noetic commons depends fundamentally on misrecognition of metabolic diversity. This is how I see the mechanism: elite control of perception works by establishing a single dominant metabolic profile as “normal” and pathologizing everything else as deviation requiring correction. The current regime privileges fast processing (throughput over depth), social circulation (networking, visibility, performance), surface legibility (metrics, credentials, demonstrable outputs), short feedback cycles (quarterly results, viral content, rapid pivots), and heat-based discharge (expressiveness, activism, constant motion). This is a prescription of which humans get to work, not a neutral description of how humans work. The key move is that they frame this as universal human nature rather than one metabolic profile among several.

Once you understand that psyches have genuinely different operating parameters, several control mechanisms collapse:

1. Pathologization loses power: The system labels depth-bias as “overthinking” (needs therapy), “antisocial” (needs social skills training), “resistant to feedback” (needs coaching), “analysis paralysis” (needs to execute faster), but if you know you’re melancholic with Saturn/Apollo orientation, those aren’t symptoms, they’re your correct operating mode. The “treatment” is the pathology. Recognition of metabolic diversity delegitimizes therapeutic capture.
2. Standardized metrics lose legitimacy: Current systems measure visible output, social proof, speed to market, extraverted performance, network effects. These privilege sanguine/choleric + Jupiter configurations by design. Once you see these as measuring compatibility with one metabolism, not universal excellence, the meritocratic claim collapses. A melancholic who takes five years to produce dense synthesis isn’t “less productive” than someone churning out weekly content, they’re operating on different time-scales with different yields. The metrics society favors are selection mechanisms promoting specific constitutions.
3. Institutional sorting becomes visible as metabolic filtering: Education, corporate life, media, politics are all structured to reward quick verbal processing, social performance, tolerance for noise/interruption, comfort with ambiguity and rapid pivoting, an ability to “read the room”. These are testing for metabolic compatibility, not intelligence or virtue – narrow-path people who fail these filters being filtered out by design. Once you see this, institutional authority loses its claim to be selecting “the best”; it’s just selecting for metabolic fit with its own operational requirements.
4. Moral shaming loses grip: The system maintains control partly through “you need to be more social” (moral demand disguised as development), “you’re not a team player” (pathologizing depth-work as selfishness), “you need to adapt” (framing metabolic damage as virtue), “stop being so negative” (policing critical analysis). But if you’re cool-dominant/melancholic/depth-biased by constitution, these are attempts to force downshifting3, not moral failings – the shame only works if you accept that there’s one correct way to be human. Metabolic diversity awareness immunizes against that claim.

The noetic commons is controlled by establishing what counts as legitimate knowledge, controlling who gets to produce knowledge, and pathologizing alternative modes of knowing. Humor/god-energy awareness threatens all three when it states different metabolisms produce different kinds of knowledge (not just more/less of same kind), that institutional gatekeeping is metabolic filtering, not quality control, and what’s labeled “pathological” is often just metabolically incompatible with extraction-optimized systems.

Elite control requires you to internalize the mismatch as personal failure. Metabolic awareness reframes this perspective positively for those suffering from the mismatch: “I can’t keep up” shifts to “System operates at wrong tempo for my metabolism”, “I don’t fit in” shifts to “System selects for different conductance pattern”, “I’m exhausted” shifts to “Chronic downshifting depletes my specific configuration”, “I see contradictions” shifts to “My depth-bias processes what throughput-bias skips.” The control vector breaks when you stop trying to fix yourself and start recognizing structural mismatch. Modern institutions say: “Jupiter/Mars/Sanguine = success” but if you’re Saturn/Apollo/Melancholic, you can say: “I’m not serving your gods. I’m serving mine.” This is recognition of incompatible altars, and the system loses power when it can’t claim to represent universal truth/success/health. This knowledge isn’t meant primarily as a therapeutic; Gods as psychic realities pluralize legitimacy in a way that therapeutic language can’t. Therapy says “you have depression, anxiety, executive dysfunction – here’s treatment”, while Gods say “you’re consecrated to Saturn – of course Mars-work feels wrong.” One is pathology requiring correction, the other is ontological orientation requiring alignment. See here for a note tying this into exercise as an example.

Metabolic diversity awareness breaks pathologization, but it doesn’t dismantle the metaphysical ground that makes universalist claims possible in the first place. For that, we need Abraxas.

Tying God energies back into Abraxas

The elites control the noetic commons which governs public perception is based upon the public’s belief in a secularized form of the privatio boni, where evil/suffering is the absence of good, therefore the world is considered perfectible through proper application of effort/resources/will, while inequality, conflict, suffering are errors to be corrected, not structural features of reality. This generates endless progressive projects (“we can achieve equality if we just…”), ever-shifting targets of deviation (“this group is now the problem”), permanent revolution (no stable endpoint, just continuous correction), and moral demand for participation (refusing the project equals moral failure). Elite power is maintained by claiming monopoly on the path to perfection (only they know how to achieve equality/justice/progress), identifying ever-new deviants (whoever currently fails to conform to egalitarian metrics), demanding constant effort toward impossible goal (keeps population in mobilized, anxious state), and pathologizing those who won’t participate (you’re regressive/hateful/broken if you resist). This is divide and conquer dressed as moral unity. Their goal isn’t actual equality, it’s maintaining permanent revolutionary tension that prevents stable alternative power centers from forming.

Abandoning the privatio boni as an internal governing mechanism is not easy to do. The benefits of the Current Things to its adherents are immediate: it gives attachment/belonging types4 something to bond over, it gives esteem types higher status compared to the “unclean” who take the wrong position, it provides meaning and narrative to people so they don’t have to think about the void, and it makes control and agency types feel like they are reclaiming power for themselves. However, the longer term effects of the Current Thing are at best a distraction and at worst (baseline) they enhance the digital control grid that controls everyone’s lives. For attachment and belonging types, elite control of the noetic commons has reduced everyone to atomized, blown out husks – there is no real life “attachment and belonging” anymore, social structures are destroyed. For esteem and status types, under neoliberal feudalism everyone’s status declines except for those at the very top. For meaning and narrative types, the Current Thing is weak and ultimately unsatisfactory. For control and agency types, elite control over the noetic commons consistently reduces control and agency. So this structure is bad for everyone of all psychological types, but the problem is that the benefits of the Current Thing are immediate and result in dopamine hits, while the drawbacks of belief in the Current Thing are abstract and further into the future.

An Abraxas god-image, alternatively, accepts that good and evil are both ontologically real, not privation vs. fullness; reality contains ineradicable contradiction, the world is not perfectible, only navigable, and suffering/conflict/inequality are structural, not accidental. This destroys the secularized privatio boni because if evil is real (not just absence) then you can’t eliminate it through effort/resources/correct policy, attempts to do so will generate new evils (not move toward perfection), and the progressive project becomes recognized as metaphysically impossible, not just difficult. Furthermore, if contradiction is ontological, then “equality” as perfect sameness contradicts metabolic diversity, attempts to enforce it require violence against what is real, and the egalitarian goal is incoherent, not just unachieved – the entire control mechanism collapses because the metaphysical ground dissolves.

Humanity has shown that it can live with a God image of all good and all bad – the Hellenic gods were arbitrary and capricious, Yahweh is deeply morally ambiguous, the Hindu Gods are both creative and destructive – but there has not been a viable alternative that has manifested in the modern West, and such a conception is definitely not Abraxas for most people. This is because attachment types resolve ambiguity through: “What does my group believe?” Esteem types resolve through: “What position elevates me?” Narrative types resolve through: “What fits the arc?” Control types resolve through: “What can I act on?” The function of these stabilizers is to avoid sustained ambiguity, because sustained ambiguity is phenomenologically intolerable for most nervous systems – it creates anxiety, disorientation, paralysis. So if one tells an attachment-regulated person “adopt Abraxas for protection against manipulation-through-belonging,” what one is actually asking is “tolerate sustained uncertainty about your tribal position in order to gain long-term benefits.” But they regulate through certainty about tribal position. The medicine requires the exact capacity their psyche is organized to avoid. This is why the Hellenic gods worked – they didn’t require sustained ambiguity. They were capricious but discrete entities with knowable (if unpredictable) dispositions. You could still ask “What would Athena want?” or “Is Dionysus angry?” Abraxas doesn’t give you that out; instead it says: “The situation contains both Athena’s order and Dionysus’s chaos, and you must hold both as equally real simultaneously.”

One can’t live at the Abraxas limit condition longterm, though: Abraxas as god-image is unbearably total – it names the whole (good and evil, creation and destruction) but provides no livable orientation within it. Ffinite beings cannot stay at the level of totality, and it is also extremely difficult for non-coherence regulated psyches to approach structurally from a privatio boni standpoint shift. Trying to stay at the Abraxas level produces paralysis (everything contains its opposite), nihilism (no ground for action), and psychic exhaustion (holding total contradiction constantly). So the psyche does what it must: it differentiates. The gods are reborn inside as functional partitions: Saturn (limit, boundary, necessary constraint), Dionysus (dissolution, ecstasy, destruction of form), Apollo (clarity, meaning, intelligible structure), Mars (conflict, assertion, directed force), Hermes (mediation, translation, movement between). This is not about choosing a god-image; it is about recognizing which energies already claim you, and learning how to live without being either possessed by them or destroyed by environments that deny them. These aren’t metaphysical realities “out there”, they’re psychic necessities given the Abraxas condition. They provide livable orientation (this situation calls for Saturn, not Dionysus), functional differentiation (different energies for different contexts), mediation between opposites (Hermes allows Saturn and Dionysus to coexist without destroying each other).

The Rebirth of the Gods within the psyche

The secularized privatio boni requires one god (progressive egalitarianism), one goal (equality/perfection), one metric (deviation from sameness), one path (institutional correction). The rebirth of differentiated gods within the psyche makes this impossible:

1. Pluralizes legitimacy: There’s no single “good” to maximize. Saturn says: limit, boundary, accept constraint, Dionysus says: dissolve, exceed, break form, Apollo says: clarify, structure, make intelligible, Mars says: conflict is generative, not error. These can’t be collapsed into “equality” or “progress”; they’re incompatible orientations that are all necessary.
2. Delegitimizes the perfectionist project: If good and evil are both real, then eliminating conflict eliminates necessary Mars energy, enforcing equality suppresses necessary differentiation, pursuing perfection deies ontological constraint (Saturn). The project itself becomes visible as hubris, not virtue.
3. Removes the scapegoat mechanism. Secularized privatio boni requires ever-shifting targets: first this group deviates, then that group, then this idea, then that behavior. This only works if deviation from unity is the problem. But if reality is constitutionally plural (different gods, different metabolisms, ineradicable contradiction), then deviation is structure, not patology. You can’t blame the current scapegoat for preventing perfection because perfection was never possible. See my response to Jasun Horsley here.
4. Shifts frame from perfection to maintenance. This is the key reframe: Under privatio boni (secular) the natural flow is: reality should be perfected → current state is error → someone must be blamed/corrected → permanent mobilization toward impossible goal. Under Abraxas and differentiated gods, though, the flow is starkly different: reality contains ineradicable contradiction → maintenance under siege is the actual condition → optimization is hubris → orientation within constraint is the task. This is not conservative vs. progressive, it’s tragic realism vs. gnostic perfectionism.5 Elite control depends on the gnostic frame because it generates permanent dissatisfaction (never good enough), permanent mobilization (always more work to do), permanent need for guidance (elites know the path), permanent scapegoating (someone is blocking progress). Abraxas plus gods destroys this because it says that dissatisfaction is ontological (not solvable), mobilization toward perfection is delusion (not virtue), guidance requires recognizing your specific gods (not universal program), and scapegoating misses that contradiction is structural (not caused by deviants).

The specific detonation sequence is as follows:

1. Abraxas recognition: Good and evil are both real, contradiction is ontological, perfection is impossible.
2. But Abraxas is unlivable: One can’t operate at total contradiction constantly.
3. Gods differentiate inside psyche: Functional partitions provide livable orientation (Saturn, Apollo, Dionysus, Mars, Hermes as situational guides).
4. Metabolic diversity becomes visible: Different psyches host different god-configurations, have different operating parameters.
5. Universalist claims collapse: Can’t have one path/metric/goal when constitutions are genuinely different.
6. Perfectionist project revealed as gnostic delusion: The world can’t be made equal/perfect because contradiction and diversity are structural.
7. Scapegoat mechanism fails: Can’t blame deviants for blocking progress when there’s no progress to be blocked.
8. Frame shifts to maintenance: Instead of perfecting the world, navigate it; instead of correcting deviants, recognize metabolic difference. Elites lose their soft power control mechanism: no permanent mobilization, no scapegoating, no need for expert guidance toward impossible goal.
9. Noetic commons decentralizes: Knowledge becomes local, metabolic, god-specific rather than universal and institutionally mediated.

Metabolic diversity breaks institutional claims to measure universal merit, but understanding and accepting Abraxas removes the metaphysical ground that makes universalist claims possible in the first place. Secularized privatio boni creates moral demand for unity/equality, legitimacy for those who claim to guide us there, and scapegoating of whoever currently deviates, while Abraxas and differentiated gods destroys the metaphysical possibility of perfection, the legitimacy of universalist projects, the coherence of scapegoating mechanisms. One is not just delegitimizing current elites, one is delegitimizing the entire frame that makes elite rule through moral mobilization possible. This is not oppositional; it is disengagement at the metaphysical level.

Conclusion

But as I wrote at the start, wrestling away power from the elites is not the primary point here. There is no alternative to the Current Thing or ubiquitous nihilism on the horizon; modern belief in science has detonated the old God image, and there is no return to it. Nor is there a return possible to the “pagan” Gods – no one believes in them today and those pretending to are larpers – technological modernity has fundamentally changed our relationship to the world (just like it has changed our relationship in prior aeons6) and we can’t re-enchant a God image simply by will.

An updated God image allows one to recapture one’s attention and to redirect it in ways that improves ones energetic fit, based on a phenomenological, lived, experiential understanding of the human condition, which is what the current technological environment so desperately and so deeply craves; recognizing that the old Gods never died, that instead they have manifested within the psyche as specific and recognizable energies. Whether these energies are understood as symbolic descriptions, interiorized residues of once‑external ordering forces, or as transpersonal agencies that act through the psyche is intentionally left unresolved; what matters here is that they behave as autonomous, law‑like operators regardless of their ultimate ontology. Most people are already devoted to Mercury or Venus or Mars- they just call it “personality” or “vibe” or “how I am.” What one may do is to make the implicit explicit, given people a diagnostic language for forces they’re already serving.

One doesn’t ask people to adopt Abraxas, one shows them they’re already living under one or more gods, and that the pantheon-structure itself is real. This perspective is adjacent to James Hillman’s but not the same thing.7 The protective benefits emerge naturally once people can name what’s already happening: a Mercury-dominant person realizes “Oh, I’m structurally vulnerable to whatever the Current Thing is because I metabolize through mimicry and social smoothness”, a Mars-dominant person realizes “I keep getting baited into conflicts that don’t serve me because I metabolize through dominance structures”, a Venus-dominant person realizes “I avoid necessary confrontation because I metabolize through harmony”. Once you can see your own metabolic pattern you can see how it’s being exploited, what it can’t do (its blind spots), and what other patterns exist and aren’t wrong, just different. This is Abraxian at the systems level without requiring Abraxian consciousness at the individual level. The pluralism of the pantheon does the integrative work. Nobody has to hold all gods simultaneously, they just have to recognize that their god is real (validation), other gods are also real (pluralism), the Current Thing is trying to hijack their god (protection). This makes the gods descriptive before prescriptive -”this is already how you metabolize reality; here’s the accurate name for it.” Looking at the risk profiles and patterns, there is a built in protective function: “If you’re Mercury-dominant, here’s specifically how you’ll be exploited: anxiety, identity diffusion, mimicry addiction, superficial stress from constant adaptation.”

Once enough people can name their metabolic type, they naturally become less exploitable because they can see when they’re being played to type, they can recognize their pattern without being enslaved to it, they can access other gods instrumentally when needed (a Mercury type can consciously invoke Saturn for a specific task, even though it’s not their native metabolism), and most importantly, this framework assumes differences in metabolic stances but no moral superiority or inferiority, which inherently makes life about energy tradeoffs and not imposing one’s will on others. This pantheon emerges through recognition, not invention. This isn’t creating new gods, it is giving people mirrors to see which gods they’re already living under; a Mercury-dominant person can understand “I’m Mercury-dominant” without being able to hold Abraxian paradox, just like they can understand “I’m an extrovert” without understanding Jung’s entire system. The Abraxian wisdom is encoded in the pantheon structure itself in the fact that there are multiple gods, that they’re all real, that they’re all necessary, that none is supreme. The user doesn’t have to consciously integrate this; they just have to learn their type and respect that others exist. This is how one gets Abraxian benefits without requiring Abraxian consciousness; the system teaches what the individual doesn’t have to hold. This spreads as diagnostic literacy, not as religion or ideology, a framework people adopt because it makes their own experience legible.

Thanks for reading.

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1 “God image” is a term Jung uses to describe man’s shifting conception of God over time. We cannot know God directly but we have an image of what God is psychologically; this is the God image, and they are different things. Abraxas is a limit condition because it is totality – all good and all evil, all opposites combined, which is horrifying – and one cannot worship such a conception. The idea is that it is a “limit condition” – one recognizes it and then one individuates away from it via the crucifixion of opposites and the transcendent function toward one’s unique North Star.

2 The Current Thing was recently the Minnesota ICE raids followed by the Epstein document release, but by the time you read this it might be something else – the pattern is what matters.

3 “Downshifting” = forcing energy to operate below its natural gear. Examples: A depth-oriented psyche forced into constant small talk, rapid affect regulation, performative agreeableness, or a long-arc synthesizer forced into short feedback cycles, daily metrics, superficial outputs. The energy can operate there but at terrible cost. So even correct god energies become inefficient when Saturn is used for bureaucracy instead of structure, Apollo is used for optics instead of form, Hermes is reduced to networking instead of mediation. The system spends all its energy translating downward instead of transforming upward.

4 I wrote previously that most psyches were not equipped to deal with unlimited ambiguity and contradiction and contemplation of the horrors of the Void, and that only a subset of coherence-dominated psyches might be prepared to accept the limit condition God image of Abraxas. I wrote:

Broadly speaking, human psyches tend to regulate around one of a few primary stabilizers: (1) attachment and belonging, (2) esteem and status, (3) meaning and narrative, (4) control and agency, (5) coherence and truth-consistency. Most people have several, but one dominates. My dominant stabilizer is coherence. This means that when reality makes sense, I am stable even if it is bleak; when reality does not make sense, I destabilize even if life is comfortable….

Most people do not have the psychic configuration I have with a coherence primary focus and certain non-negotiables, and adopting a God image of Abraxas would be wrong for them: for attachment-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by relationships), Abraxas destroys safety; for esteem-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by social standing), Abraxas destroys justification; for narrative-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by a “story” or arc (e.g., Progress)), Abraxas destroys arc; for control-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by the ability to act), Abraxas destroys leverage. For psyches primarily regulated by coherence, though, this symbolic configuration appears capable of restoring a sense of internal alignment. This is not a claim about superiority, advancement, or universality, but about structural fit.”

5 Gnostic in this sense means this world is fallen/corrupt but can be redeemed through knowledge/effort/correct organization, while tragic in this sense means this world contains irreducible good and evil and it can be navigated but not perfected.

6 Briefly, the Taurus mother goddesses with their birth-death-rebirth cycles and Titans were a result of intensifying agriculture innovation; the solar warrior gods in Aries resulted form city formation; the Christ figure evolved due to intensifying class pressures (appealing to the lowest stratum of society).

7 While Hillman and I both utilize a polytheistic ‘internal pantheon’ to make the psyche’s energies legible, we diverge sharply on the ultimate aim. Hillman’s archetypal psychology seeks ‘soul-making’ through deliberate dwelling within the plurality of the gods, rejecting the Jungian ‘Self’ or any ‘transcendent function’ that might resolve the tension between conflicting archetypes. The ‘meta-paganism’ described here is instead a tool for functional individuation and tragic management.