This piece examines how modern power structures rely on externalized moral authority to maintain asymmetry, and why any political revolt built on the same moral grammar ultimately reproduces the hierarchy it opposes. Drawing on Jungian individuation and the symbol of Abraxas, the essay argues that integrating one’s capacity for evil dissolves the psychic machinery that elites depend on, making the individual ungovernable but not insurgent. It frames the only meaningful form of rebellion as an interior reconfiguration of the Self, a revolt that cannot be weaponized into tyranny or mobilized into a movement.

Welcome back. In this post, which is a follow up to The Archon Class, I would like to discuss what it means to “resist” globohomo. By globohomo I mean a portmanteau of globalization plus either homogenization or homosexuality – basically, a technocratic One World that flattens all aspects of reality into the controllable and commodifiable, controlled by a hidden but hierarchical and parasitical upper elite who own the central banks of the world and the money supply, enforced by transnational security elite gangsters and thugs and a cloying media/school system propaganda apparatus.

Now, I see a lot of endless “We must resist the elites! We must resist socialism and the centralized state and propaganda and the New World Order and the Great Reset and the CBDCs!” Okay, great, thanks for that. But what does resistance mean here? I read about, think about and write about this topic with an intense focus for most of my waking hours and I am personally entirely caught up in this system, just like you are. I am on my phone, computer and the internet for way, way too many hours a day. I use Gmail, I use Bing (a little better than Google), I use LLMs (carefully), I use Instagram and Telegram and the App Store and Signal. I use Substack. I use WhatsApp and Citi Mobile and Wells Fargo and look at Redfin. I use eBay and Slack. I have delivery of Amazon boxes by the equivalent of slave labor. I look at YouTube and watch movies and television. I use electricity from the power company and food from the grocery store and I derive income paid in U.S. dollars. I have health insurance. And if an observer was following my actions, they would see all this too – I am entirely keyed into this system, using it for most of my waking hours, and so are you! Sure, an ideal would be to live out in the countryside, grow my own food, do barter trade with locals – but for those doing this it is a very tough and poor life, necessitating funding from other sources like retirement income or social security (Owen Benjamin, for example, relies on donations from his followers – he isn’t close to living off the land) and property taxes have to be paid in US dollars anyway while barter is taxable in USD per the IRS code. Even the Amish have to deal with the real world and pay taxes, even they are keyed into the system (but less than most because they limit technology use – I will cover them further in the future). So retreating into the countryside, disconnecting from technology like a luddite is not going to solve your problems – you will be very poor, have very limited opportunities, have no opportunities for spouses or to help your offspring, globohomo will continue its infinite monetary printing inflation and shoving tens of millions of illegals to live right next to you. By comparison the “pagans” – a slur term used by Christians to refer to the Hellenic rural holdouts – were all absorbed into the system eventually even if they held out longer than others. And if you participate in urban technocratic system, you will inevitably be required to use its tools and to try to use them better and more efficiently than everyone else, or you will fail to succeed.

So my question is, when you or anyone else says we need to “resist the system”, what exactly are you referring to here? You want Republicans instead of Democrats in power? How’s that working out? You want immigration reversed but otherwise you’re cool with the advancement of technology into a neofeudal control grid? You want to insist on “paying in cash” as a way to “resist the encroaching digital system?” You want to larp as a “based Christian nationalist” – Christ is king, brother! – or a “based pagan” and worship Odin? These actions, piecemeal, are like putting a bandaid on a gaping bullet wound. Which parts of this system do you want to keep, which parts do you want to chuck, and on what philosophical, moral, ethical, and practical basis do you make your determination? You are aware that “nationalism” in the first place is entirely the product of a particular earlier stage of technological advancement, right? (the advent of the printing press). This is because the system as a whole, this Spenglerian Faustian reach-for-more, Whig history-as-progress, technological monstrosity is all tied together based on its metaphysical presuppositions – that consumption is good, growth is good, secularism is good, efficiency and money are good, increased interconnectiveness is good, flattened non-symbolic language is good. What most of you want is a tweaking of the existing system so that you have higher status and a higher percentage of the overall economic pie, you in charge instead of the current upper elites, better demographics and no pride flags, but because you are caught up in the propaganda and influencer and Current Thing and status games most are too myopic to see it. And if you or I ever took power we would very likely turn into the same Demiurgic archons we see in power today, because that is the incentive structure for gaining and retaining power baked into the nature of reality itself.

There is a way to resist this system, I think, but not in the way that basically anyone talks about. Resistance in this sense is not political, cultural, or economic resistance, (although those are fine to engage in as a manifestation of interior resistance) – it is not ultimately about building parallel institutions or living in a cabin in the woods, ludditism or turning into McVeigh or Kaczynski, “build your own [X]”, “reject modernity, embrace tradition” – those energies are all absorbed by and into the system, resistance is turned into strengthening it. Instead, the fundamental resistance I refer to is metaphysical, to develop internally an entirely different way of seeing the world. As I wrote to :

I’d argue the regime’s deepest mastery isn’t drones + imported voters + gun confiscation, it’s that they’ve captured the noetic commons so completely that the native population literally cannot coordinate perception of the war being waged on them. Trust in media is dead, yet the media still owns the Overton window, the topic list, the emotional script, the images that are allowed to go viral. The Current Thing is still manufactured in a handful of buildings in Manhattan and Langley.

Before any serious resistance is possible, there would have to be a metaphysical shift away from outsourcing reality to institutional authority toward an inner source of truth: a cultural immune reaction that says “I will no longer accept your frame as the starting point of truth.” In my view, that’s what Jung called individuation: reclaiming the capacity to perceive, value, and judge without needing permission from the system being resisted. The moves in this direction are very nascent.

Basically, the soft power that the upper elites use to control the world is one of externalized division. They want people to associate with one side against another, to see the world as black and white, good versus evil; the specific delineations aren’t relevant. When they corral people in this manner then they can sit an influencer at the top of each group in order to direct and guide them. Such divide and conquer tactics are how the upper elites have always worked to control the noetic commons. But if you develop a perspective that sees the world as gray and not black and white – that while there is endless competition with winners and losers, it doesn’t make our side just and their side unjust, it allows one to step back and much more impartially view the situation, and this, in turn, helps one to see propaganda and dialectics for what it is and to defang it.

The way of Jungian individuation is such a route, although it sounds like gibberish to those not experiencing it directly from the inside (even a couple of years ago I would have had no idea what such words actually entailed). It is the trans-subjective process of holding crucified the opposite energies within us, seeing reality as layers which often contradict each other, until our intuition / the Self tells us the path forward via the transcendent function. This leads to Jung’s conception of numinosity, where issues can be grasped in an infinity of contradictory ways and directions. It is a lived phenomenological approach with results felt as a lived reality on an ongoing basis, a constant flux of possibilities and change. The path requires rejecting the privatio boni notion of God as all good in favor of God as Abraxas, the horrifying unity of all good and all evil. I’ll cover the metaphysics more fully in a future post.

If one works this horrifying and dangerous process, one may come to realize that good cannot exist without evil, that light cannot exist without darkness, and instead of suppressing our own darkness into our unconscious which then gets projected outwards onto the Other, which then makes one easy to manipulate via propaganda (us vs. them is always a controllable dialectic for third party goals), one may come to see how nuanced and internal and gradated this world is, how many different and contradictory levels of reality exist on so many different planes, and when one does this one becomes opaque, unclear to the system as a whole, unpredictable and unprogrammable, because one is listening to the infinite Self within instead of looking for outside authorities for answers. There are only two uses for integrating evil – the powerful use it to sanctify asymmetry (“this is the way the world works, better us on top than others, eat or be eaten”); alternatively, the individual may use it to dissolve the illusion of any external moral authority.

That is the answer to the predicament of the world that I see. To be clear, this interior reconfiguration is not intended as a retreat into passivity, quietism or spiritual solipsism – the individuated individual remains obligated to act in the material world, and even two highly individuated people may clash, as the resolution of opposites is only partial and provisional on the material plane. Nor is it a call to commit evil, but to recognize the impulse for evil within ourselves and integrate it intellectually as a part of being human. If one works on this process, the nature of action becomes transformed: one operates from one’s own necessary interest, which is a tragic requirement of existence in a reality that demands consumption and conflict (to be alive is to endlessly consume other living creatures in violation of the Golden Rule), without projecting one’s internalized darkness onto the opponent. A conflict may still occur but will be seen as tragedy instead of “destroying evil.” This means engaging with the world, making necessary choices, and even opposing others, but doing so with a radical understanding of the opponent’s perspective and validity, refusing to reduce them to a moral caricature or the external source of evil. This integration allows one to act effectively and decisively without engaging the psychic machinery of moral hysteria that elites rely on to control the masses. But this is interior work, it is unpredictable in how it manifests, it involves patience and acts of listening and it is dangerous work, too, especially as there is a flat zero institutional scaffolding today to offer guidance during it (vs., say, the Mystery cults) – but if it caught on, if people really practiced it, the metaphysics would ultimately affect all of society as a whole in radical ways, because politics and culture are downstream of belief. But this revolt scales exactly zero percent through movements, parties, or manifestos – it scales one soul at a time, in silence, through the terrifying work of meeting your own darkness without flinching.

Thanks for reading.

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The ultra-wealthy are not just failing to be productive; they are active agents (”archons”) of a false, oppressive reality. Their “philanthropy” is either status signaling or a more sophisticated form of control. The system itself selects for and rewards a specific, spiritually-deficient archon energy characterized by ruthlessness, myopia, and a robotic consciousness, fully in line with a gnostic understanding of the world.

Welcome back. One of the interesting questions I’ve had is why does it seem like the ultra wealthy do nothing societally productive with their wealth? By this I mean to help local communities, to strength the body politik, to assist the volk, to direct funds into pioneering research, to oppose the Federal Reserve system and to limit immigration (which hurts working families), to establish alternative media companies and alternative social media companies and to issue prizes to the best dissident content, to push for real environmental sustainability (lowering immigration rates dramatically impacts environmental sustainability because immigrant consumption rates dramatically increase within first world countries – this is why many in the Sierra Club used to be anti-immigration before the org was skinsuited in the late 1990s with the David Gelbaum $100 million bribe), educating the youth to care about and value society and not just themselves and lead by example, to sponsor dissident thinktanks. The closest I can think of is Henry Ford, who wanted to raise his workers’ wages at the expense of shareholders and who was barred from doing so by judges, after which his foundation was skinsuited by globohomo after his weak son lost control, or maybe Charles Lindbergh with the America First Committee (although he wasn’t nearly that wealthy). If I had billions of dollars, there is so much cool stuff that one could do that isn’t done by our modern class of the ultra wealthy. Someone like Peter Thiel really doesn’t count – he uses his wealth to silence critics (Gawker), to sexually exploited handsome young men for sex, and he throws his funds back into controlling and hurting society even more. Or look at Steve Bannon, the so-called “populist” who was secretly scheming with Jeffrey Epstein and Chinese billionaires to overthrow Orange Man because Orange Man chose Jared Kushner over him (and Bannon had a God complex), or Bill Gates, who also as a God complex and endlessly plots to sicken and destroy the world under friendly and helpful slogans, or Musk, who is deeply in bed with the military industrial complex (see: Starlink in Ukraine, CIA/ADL in charge of Twitter censorship) and his populist rhetoric is merely a lark to tittilate the bored masses). The way these people text to each other is revealing – it’s all about circles of influence, who you know, who the target is, who can be scammed, how one’s status can be raised. It’s so superficial and egotistical and disgusting.

What one sees in the billionaire class is a combination of apolitical material and atheistic consumption (big boats, whores, many houses, private air travel), ego inflation (names on school buildings), or outright shitliberalism. This is especially true of the wives and ex-wives of billionaires, who are extremely easy to persuade into social status signaling into “effective altruism”: I think of Bezos’s ex wife and Jobs’ widow as two that quickly come to mind, but there are many more – basically throwing endless money into “social justice” (education and welfare scam complex for the urban poor, which hurts instead of helps them) and “climate change” (amorphous justification for big government expansion, totally ignoring that most environmental pollution comes from China which is exempted from such pressures). I look at these people and want to scream, “You people are shallow MORONS! You have unlimited wealth at your fingertips, and all you do with it is consume and status signal! You are unworthy of the mandate of heaven!” I feel like I’m yelling at the aristocratic class before the French Revolution in terms of their level of disconnect (although the dynamics here are entirely different, they aren’t in danger of overthrow); at least with the (arguably) prior ruling class, the Protestant elites, they felt some degree of noblesse oblige; that is all gone, either total indifference or actual noblesse malice remains.

These people have been blessed with wealth by the Gods, but it is an interesting thing this realm of Caesar vs. the realm of Christ/spirituality – Jesus said “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). In other words, those who succeed in the material world are usually spiritually deficient, and the other way around as well (those high in spirituality are usually materially poor). So it is an interesting opposite – those who have the money have no use for it other than consumption, power games and social status signaling to those in their class that they’re “better” than their peers even as the world goes to Hell, while those who could find a good use for it have no money. What has Sergey Brin done with his wealth other than buy a private island and enrich his ex-wife? What about Larry Ellison, going through a bunch of wives and buying movie studios and propaganda outlets, passing on the cost of his “Project Stargate” scam onto the public? Alternatively, the accumulation of wealth comes with significant strings attached to it, the wealth isn’t yours to do with what you will (just ask Kanye) – if you step out of line of the establishment consensus you will lose your investors, your financiers, your friends, your reputation, and therefore the pragmatic course for the ultra wealthy is to keep one’s head down and focus on one’s narrow niche. (I will note, that Michael Milken made great inroad into treating prostate cancer when he dedicated his life to it after his release from prison – it seems like he’s doing something useful with his funds, perhaps, even though his yearly conference is used by the ultra elites to connect.)

Maybe this is all coming from jealousy on my part, where I think I could allocate funds better than others. Yet if I were in their situation I would very probably end up doing the same things they do because of the incentive structure built into the system. My mentality is very different than theirs, but on the other hand that’s probably why I’m not wealthy (comparatively; everything is comparative).

This then leads into the conception of the archons, which is an idea I am wrestling with. Under the gnostic conception the archons are those who either wittingly or unwittingly do the will of the malevolent Demiurge on this plane, keeping the masses toiling in deliberate ignorance. As Stuart Douglas states in The Apocalypse of the Reluctant Gnostics:

The scholar of gnosticism Nicola D. Lewis (2013) notes that the word “archon” is derived from the Greek work for a political ruler, and also notes that the language in the gnostic texts used to describe “those who oppress us through enslaving our minds and hijacking our appetites is also political” (the use of the word “appetites” seems apropos given that the archons feed off us). She suggests that the gnostics’ use of the term “archon” might convey a deeply political message and that the gnostics’ view was that our enemies are “those in high places”. Were the gnostics – and perhaps Lewis – alluding to the idea that the archons control, deceive, defile, and imprison humanity through the agency of those in high political office? The Reality of the Rulers quotes St. Paul who taught that our struggle is not against the flesh, but against the authorities of the world, and the spirits of wickedness in high places. There are some commentators, the ones who are invariably dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”, who claim that there is a hidden agenda by a nefarious secret government that seeks the total enslavement of humanity. The gnostics would disagree; humanity was always been born into slavery. The Matrix that is our reality has already been pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth.

One of the fundamental points that should be noted about the archons is that their powers are limited.

The Reality of the Rulers teaches that it is a mistake to think that the archons have power over us. The archons do not have the capability to “overpower the root of truth”…Lewis comments that, whereas the archons “can harm us, oppress us, violate us, imprison, and enslave us”, they can enact their violence only on our bodies; they cannot harm our spirit. It might be added that, in addition to our bodies, the archons can equally, and far more significantly, harm our minds and our souls. The spirit, on the other hand, is immaculate, immune, incorruptible, and immortal. Due to their limited powers, the archons need to control humanity through deception. In Philip K. Dick’s view, the power of the archons is nothing more than “mere occlusion”. It is said that the devil’s greatest achievement was in persuading people to think he did not exist. The same could be said for the demiurge and the archons.” Furthermore, “in gnostic systems the archons that keep humanity imprisoned are not so much to be seen as evil – although their effects are very much evil – rather they are to be seen as being ignorant and of a very limited, unfeeling, robotic consciousness. As a result, the key to achieving salvation is not so much overcoming evil but about becoming more conscious.

I would argue that the archon energy is something each of us have to one degree or another – Philip K. Dick’s conception of reality as the Black Iron Prison isn’t guarded by demons with pitchforks, it’s administered by mid-level managerial demons in Patagonia vests who believe they’re the good guys and the public who gives them legitimacy – but one’s willingness to be ruthless, myopic, short sighted, to treat others abominably just for some more money and social status is directly tied to one’s rise in social status. In other words, it is human nature, and perhaps baked into the nature of reality itself, for those to rise to the top of the social hierarchy with a certain perspective and disposition. Per Douglas, “In accord with Jung’s dictum that what we resist, persists, Philip K. Dick thought that those who fight against the Empire become “infected by its derangement”, resulting in the paradox that, to the extent we defeat the Empire, we become the Empire. Sticking with the viral analogy, he notes that the Empire – the archons – spreads like a virus, imposing its nature on its enemies, and thereby takes control of its human hosts.” In other words, to try to beat the archons – the upper elites – at their own game means to become power hungry, empirical, paranoid and obsessed with control, which is also why our current leaders are so obsessed with destroying any nascent challenges to their rule. It was just announced that Mr. Beast is teaming up with the Rockefeller Foundation to unleash a stream of propaganda to target the youth; did Mr. Beast rise higher because of the brilliance behind his fish-dead eyes, or because his archon energy was so strong, where he does a little philanthropy with a hundred cameras on each shekel given out to make him look good to the public while selling low quality food and gambling to children?

I don’t have the answers to this stuff, but it feels like this world is a bunch of narrow-minded clowns shoved into a clown car and I – and you – are along for the ride. But if it all falls apart – which it might, as we barrel ahead recklessly into the void without any degree of environmental or social stability whatsoever, short-sightedly chasing greed, power and control – then Zuckerberg, Altman, and the entire upper levels of finance and the military industrial complex will retreat to their fortified underground bunkers while the rest of the world devolves into cannibal rape gangs straight out of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, where they will then blame the victims for their endless greed and predation.

Thanks for reading, and see here for Part 2.

PS: This post is dedicated to Erik Builds, who asked for a post without any LLM editing / content smoothing (I always write the initial drafts of my posts and generally use LLM to improve readability and flow, but no LLM use in this one). The tone of this post feels like Howard Beale ranting in Network, so it will likely entertain you “people” as I dance for attention (sorry, I am frustrated at Substack’s increased shadow banning and figuring out how to respond to it, maybe with a self-hosted website as backup).

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This essay examines Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad of media effects as a framework for understanding how communication technology shapes human perception. It explores how each advance reorganizes sensory priorities, social structures, and thought patterns while retrieving elements from past forms of communication, and what the medium reverses into when pushed to its limit. It then applies this framework to emerging LLM technology.

Welcome back.

Many of you have likely heard of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), who coined the phrase “the medium is the message” and the expression that Timothy Leary appropriated, “turn on, tune in, drop out.” McLuhan became known as the “father of media studies” and heavily influenced a wide range of modern philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard, previously covered here, and influencers. He has many similarities to Jordan Peterson1, which is an unfortunate but helpful comparison. He argued that the technological medium shapes humanity in all-encompassing ways – for example, the adoption of the written word fundamentally set modern man apart from prehistoric man, and the invention of the printing press led directly to the modern nation state because it promoted a standardized mass man, each individual influenced by the same printed material (something covered previously from another angle here).2 Today, everyone is glued to their phones and people are atomized to a level never seen before in human history; we text instead of call or meet in person, we stare at screens all day transfixed by the Current Thing, and we are increasingly interacting with AI instead of with others. Communications technology has a fully transformative effect on the person using it, mind, body, soul, and this is not new.

I read his The Medium is The Massage (1967)3 and it was a light, smart read, with some creative and innovative visual features; I followed up with it with his Playboy interview (1969) which you can read here, along with Laws of Media (1988), published posthumously by his son Eric. In these McLuhan holds himself out as an expert, making many wild and wrong predictions4, along with some accurate predictions like the advent of the internet. My intent is not to pick McLuhan apart; that wouldn’t be worth a post. Rather, his tetrad of media effects is a brilliant way of looking at how media changes the way people approach the world, and this aspect is worth delving into, although I cannot recommend Laws of Media otherwise as it is written in an obnoxiously academic, self-important style by McLuhan’s son.

Let’s delve into the tetrad.

The Tetrad: McLuhan’s Fourfold Lens

McLuhan argues that technology warps the ratio of the senses of the people who use it. Before modern technology, and especially before the advent of the written word, the senses were balanced; however, the adoption of the written word followed by the printing press dramatically skewed the senses of the user toward the senses of sight and substantially downgraded touch, taste, hearing and smell. One may see this dramatic skewing when a third world tribe is exposed to the written word5; within one generation they are completely different in outlook and perspective. This process was greatly exacerbated by the advent of the printing press.6 Further changes in the mode of communication with the telegram, radio, film, television, the internet and now artificial intelligence skewed the senses and how people interact with the world in totally different and often contradictory ways. By understanding how the medium affects perception, one may become more conscious of these processes and regain an element of free will in relation to them. This is important because our default is that we do not process such changes as they occur, but rather cling to earlier stages of development until long past the point where we should have recognized the changes they imparted (which McLuhan called the “rearview-mirror view of their world”).7

His tetrad consists of four questions that can be applied to any medium, as follows:

1. What sense does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete and which sense does it downgrade in importance?
3. What sense and style does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes? [This relates to Jung’s concept of enantiodromia, although I don’t think McLuhan ever referenced Jung directly].

Using the example of radio:

• Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. Radio amplifies news and music via sound.
• Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the importance of print and the visual.
• Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.
• Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.

This tetrad resembles Jung’s conception of astrological ages, where symbols and meanings of prominence in one era fade into the background of another, while dormant energies from prior eras resurface. It’s not quite the same, of course, and increases in communications technologies make time speed up faster and faster, where centuries collapse into decades which collapse into years, in line with Rene Guenon’s conception of the increased solidification and speeding up of the world, discussed here.

Applying the tetrad conception to television, the internet, and now artificial intelligence, we see the following:

Television

1. Enhances: Visual immediacy, passive spectatorship, mass emotional resonance. It delivers collective experience with synchronized rhythm.
2. Obsolesces: Print culture and deep reading, analytical thought, community-based storytelling. Localized meaning yields to centralized narrative.
3. Retrieves: The tribal campfire, mythic spectacle, and oral tradition, but in synthetic form. The image replaces the word as the organizing force.
4. Reverses into: Mass sedation, symbolic flattening, atomized spectatorship, passive omnipresence masquerades as connectedness. Eventually, it reverses into distraction-as-sovereignty – attention becomes the only freedom left.

The Internet

1. Enhances: Interconnectivity, hypertextual thinking, speed, and access. It amplifies lateral association and decentralized participation.
2. Obsolesces: Linear logic, singular authority, and stable identity. It erodes canon, tradition, and memory.
3. Retrieves: The bazaar, the archive, the commons – the sense of vast unbounded knowledge once held in ancient libraries or oral encyclopedias.
4. Reverses into: Surveillance, fragmentation, hyper-niche identity, and algorithmic manipulation. It breeds isolation under the guise of pluralism, and information abundance flips into existential paralysis.

LLMs:

1. Enhances: Linguistic productivity, access to knowledge, simulation of human conversation. It extends and amplifies writing and thinking assistance (drafts, summaries, analysis, even code), emotional simulation (therapeutic dialogue, reassurance, companionship), education (tutoring across domains, democratized access to expertise), and organizational cognition (accelerated research, planning, coordination). In short, the thinking and communicating mind is externalized and multiplied, while human internal dialogue becomes an interface.
2. Obsolesces: Certain traditional forms of mental effort and knowledge-seeking, for example memorization and rote learning (replaced by instant querying), classical search engines and browsing behaviors, traditional gatekeeping institutions of expertise (e.g., encyclopedia, schoolteacher, journalist), solitary thinking or slow reading. LLMs encourage dialogic outsourcing of cognition. Also obsolesced: genuine silence and mental stillness. The gap between stimulus and response collapses.
3. Retrieves: The pre-literate or oral tradition – the sage, the oracle, the dialogue partner, similar in some respects to the Delphic oracle. The symbolic registry of LLMs is a partial black box where the programmers have limited understanding of its inner workings, much like the human brain. These tools call back the Socratic method (question-based inquiry), the confessional priest, therapist, or storyteller, even the daimon or inner voice, now simulated externally. In their ability to compose, they retrieve the scribe or secretary, now instant and tireless. LLMs also retrieve alchemy: they transmute base inputs (scraps of prompts) into structured symbolic form.
4. Reverses Into: Epistemic confusion, dependency, and simulated reality. Potential reversals include: displacement of the human voice by mimicry, language without soul, de-skilling of cognition, people become unable to think without the model, hyperreality – where outputs dominate and warp human perception of truth, meaning, or creativity, and the digital panopticon where every thought is externalized, logged, surveilled, mined. Ultimately, LLMs may reverse into semantic collapse, where language is so manipulable, so contextless, that meaning itself decays.

We can see the changes wrought by LLMs happening among the younger generations now. Since smart phones became common in 2012 (per this post by ) people have been increasingly staring at their screens wherever they go – queue the sad family with both parents and both kids looking at their phones quietly, not talking, at dinner – and children are growing up with YouTube, TikTok, and increasingly relying more and more on LLMs to do their thinking for them. By contrast, boomers are analog – most can’t use computers very well and they are not glued to their phones like younger generations are. Communications technologies distort and fundamentally change every aspect of our lives, and while we cannot stop each ratchet of technology (turning into a Luddite and putting ones head in the sand is not a solution, and neither is Kaczynski’s), being more aware of the effect it has may allow us to approach it with more understanding and hesitation. Because each new medium asks the same question in a different disguise: which part of you is this replacing, and do you notice it happening? And now what is being replaced is the outsourcing of symbolic function, what used to be called soul-work; the dissolution of interiority into exterior simulation. In effect, it is the manifestation of the end of the Age of Pisces as represented by the twin fish: from maximum spirituality at the start of the Age to minimum spirituality at the end of it.

Thanks for reading.

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1 “Look a bit closer at both nationalism and industrialism and you’ll see that both derived directly from the explosion of print technology in the 16th Century. Nationalism didn’t exist in Europe until the Renaissance, when typography enabled every literate man to see his mother tongue analytically as a uniform entity. The printing press, by spreading mass-produced books and printed matter across Europe, turned the vernacular regional languages of the day into uniform closed systems of national languages–just another variant of what we call mass media–and gave birth to the entire concept of nationalism. The individual newly homogenized by print saw the nation concept as an intense and beguiling image of group destiny and status. With print, the homogeneity of money, markets and transport also became possible for the first time, thus creating economic as well as political unity and triggering all the dynamic centralizing energies of contemporary nationalism. By creating a speed of information movement unthinkable before printing, the Gutenberg revolution thus produced a new type of visual centralized national entity that was gradually merged with commercial expansion until Europe was a network of states.”

But there is a paradox:

“We confront a basic paradox whenever we discuss personal freedom in literate and tribal cultures. Literate mechanical society separated the individual from the group in space, engendering privacy; in thought, engendering point of view; and in work, engendering specialism— thus forging all the values associated with individualism. But at the same time, print technology has homogenized man, creating mass militarism, mass mind and mass uniformity; print gave man private habits of individualism and a public role of absolute conformity. That is why the young today welcome their retribalization, however dimly they perceive it, as a release from the uniformity, alienation and dehumanization of literate society. Print centralizes socially and fragments psychically, whereas the electric media bring man together in a tribal village that is a rich and creative mix, where there is actually more room for creative diversity than within the homogenized mass urban society of Western man.”

2 Both (1) are/were Canadian thinkers shaped by a Christian moral imagination, concerned with the dissolution of meaning and the degradation of human consciousness under modernity, (2) insist structure matters more than surface (McLuhan analyzed media as reshaping perception, thought and social structure, while Peterson sees narratives as psychological ecosystems for meaning and order, (3) appealed to ancient forms as correctives to a diseased present (McLuhan via Catholicism and typographic awareness, Peterson via Judeo-Christianity and Jungian structures), (4) each became a translator-figure bringing esoteric insights (McLuhan: media theory, Peterson: Jung, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky) into public view, and (5) both were establishment figures, elevated to positions of authority: Peterson as a surrogate father figure for lost young men, while McLuhan advised top executives at General Motors, Bell Telephone, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, won the chairmanship of a Ford Foundation seminar on culture and communications and a $40,000 grant (equivalent to millions today), and became head of the University of Toronto’s Center for Culture and technology.

3 The typist of the original draft spelled “message” wrong and McLuhan decided to keep it in.

4 He predicted dissolution of the United States based on rising tribalism, he argued that television would remain low definition and fundamentally distinct from film, he predicted the imminent end of elections, that both the automobile and mega cities like LA and NYC would disappear, that marketing and stock market would die too, that automation would result in lives of leisure (ha!), and he argued in favor of one world government manipulating people into believe whatever the elites wanted, where we are seeing propaganda becoming more and more sophisticated with artificial intelligence.

5 “It is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the message–that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio. The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb….

Any culture is an order of sensory preferences, and in the tribal world, the senses of touch, taste, hearing and smell were developed, for very practical reasons, to a much higher level than the strictly visual. Into this world, the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell, installing sight at the head of the hierarchy of senses. Literacy propelled man from the tribe, gave him an eye for an ear and replaced his integral in-depth communal interplay with visual linear values and fragmented consciousness. As an intensification and amplification of the visual function, the phonetic alphabet diminished the role of the senses of hearing and touch and taste and smell, permeating the discontinuous culture of tribal man and translating its organic harmony and complex synaesthesia into the uniform, connected and visual mode that we still consider the norm of “rational” existence. The whole man became fragmented man; the alphabet shattered the charmed circle and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished “individuals,” or units, functioning in a world of linear time and Euclidean space.”

6 “In isolated pockets, [old tribal cultures] held on until the invention of printing in the 16th Century, which was a vastly important qualitative extension of phonetic literacy. If the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell on tribal man, the printing press hit him like a 100-megaton H-bomb. The printing press was the ultimate extension of phonetic literacy: Books could be reproduced in infinite numbers; universal literacy was at last fully possible, if gradually realized; and books became portable individual possessions. Type, the prototype of all machines, ensured the primacy of the visual bias and finally sealed the doom of tribal man. The new medium of linear, uniform, repeatable type reproduced information in unlimited quantities and at hitherto-impossible speeds, thus assuring the eye a position of total predominance in man’s sensorium. As a drastic extension of man, it shaped and transformed his entire environment, psychic and social, and was directly responsible for the rise of such disparate phenomena as nationalism, the Reformation, the assembly line and its offspring, the Industrial Revolution, the whole concept of causality, Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of the universe, perspective in art, narrative chronology in literature and a psychological mode of introspection or inner direction that greatly intensified the tendencies toward individualism and specialization engendered 2000 years before by phonetic literacy. The schism between thought and action was institutionalized, and fragmented man, first sundered by the alphabet, was at last diced into bite-sized tidbits. From that point on, Western man was Gutenberg man.”

7 “All media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, sense or function, and whenever it takes place, the central nervous system appears to institute a self-protective numbing of the affected area, insulating and anesthetizing it from conscious awareness of what’s happening to it. It’s a process rather like that which occurs to the body under shock or stress conditions, or to the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression. I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible. This problem is doubly acute today because man must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension. The fact that he has not done so in this age of electronics is what has made this also the age of anxiety, which in turn has been transformed into its Doppelgnger–the therapeutically reactive age of anomie and apathy. But despite our self-protective escape mechanisms, the total-field awareness engendered by electronic media is enabling us–indeed, compelling us–to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious, toward a realization that technology is an extension of our own bodies. We live in the first age when change occurs sufficiently rapidly to make such pattern recognition possible for society at large. Until the present era, this awareness has always been reflected first by the artist, who has had the power–and courage–of the seer to read the language of the outer world and relate it to the inner world.”

As the digital spectacle enters its decadent phase, the social media “grift economy”, once a tool of mass manipulation and personal enrichment, is running on fumes. The same psychological levers that once fueled engagement now breed exhaustion, cannibalism, and nihilism. In this late stage, the influencers and their audiences mirror the collapsing empire they inhabit: parasitic, addicted to novelty, unable to produce meaning. The grifter civil war is the death rattle of the entire postwar dialectical soft power control system.

Welcome back. In two of my recent posts (here and here) I discussed how elites used influencers – each within their own niche, both right and left leaning – in order to control the public, how the system was firmly in place in the post-World War 2 environment with the CIA-controlled Congress for Cultural Freedom which paid a who’s-who of famous writers, artists, intellectuals, and other culture war influencers to advance their dialectical games, and how the same system is in place now just with digital form.

The dynamics required in an environment of societal expansion, though, are different than the dynamics required in an environment of social contraction (a shift from hope for material collective improvement to a hope for identity-based justice or revenge), and there are different levels to this. The odious Peter Thiel remarked how we have transitioned from an optimistic to a pessimistic society, because the opportunities presented to us have really not panned out – “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” (I watched an episode of The Jetsons recently and it doesn’t hold up well at all, the plot pacing is too uneven and meandering, although it still represented a stay at home mother/one parent working household.). Here, the following dynamics are at play:

1. The e-grifters need continued access to the mainstream platforms;
2. The mainstream platforms are all owned by the international financial elite, policed by lower level shitlib and Indian moderators who do what they’re told without question;
3. As such, the grifters must stay within tight and ever-changing content parameters depending on upper elite goals;
4. The Jewish question, which was previously forbidden on these platforms, is now allowed to an extent. However, discussion of the dialectical control by the upper elites who control both the right and left for their own purposes is still forbidden – hence, guys like Owen Benjamin are still banned on YouTube. (The upper elites are fine throwing the Jewish masses to the wolves as scapegoats, which they did previously in controlled World War 2, which is necessary now to effectuate the ingathering of the exiles per eschatological End of Days prophecies, which they are following as a blueprint);
5. Because the grifters either don’t understand the bigger picture or they can’t talk about it, and because positive political/social developments are not forthcoming, they have to keep changing their messaging, increasingly desperate, to hold onto their audiences, who are growing increasingly bored and angry with no positive change occurring. Audiences are a fickle beast, they require constant newness and hope stimulation or their attention will wander (this is, ultimately, a knock not on the grifter but on the masses and human psychology itself; the grifters are providing a service desired by many so they can avoid thinking for themselves or, worse, contemplation of the void). How can they hold on to their audiences when things are continuously getting materially, politically and culturally worse and the sparkly promises never materialize? Furthermore, Trump support is collapsing, which will be discussed further below, which further impedes their efforts;
6. This is resulting in an ongoing and increasing intense grifter civil war, such as Owens vs. Fuentes vs. Shapiro vs. Tucker. It’s natural; they are desperate and cannibalizing each other’s content and audiences (although Shapiro’s audience is especially astroturfed);
7. The grifter civil war is promoted by the elites and juiced by endless CIA, Israeli, Indian, and Chinese bots as a sparkly Current Thing;
8. A sure sign you are being conned is a regular use of the words “we” (who is “we”? It’s the grifter proclaiming that he speaks for you) and “need to”, i.e. “we need to do X in order to prevent Y or gain Z”. No, I’m not part of your “we” and I don’t need to “do” anything; neither do you. Do what you want, tend your garden. I discuss this further in this Note;
9. At the same time, the sophistication of the grifters has capped out: they’ve all learned their engagement tactics from guys like Mr. Beast who were early hackers of the public psyche – everything from how video thumbnails needed to be structured to how videos should be edited to what words needed to be said, these were studied as a science in order to maximize viewership, engagement, and “please like and subscribe.” If you look at any grifter topic on Youtube they all look the same now, begging for your attention and engagement (Thumbnail A/B testing → 400% CTR uplift, 8-second hook rule → 70% retention cliff, all political YouTube now mimics this: same red arrow, same ALL-CAPS, same “you won’t believe…”) – it’s not ideology but rather industrialized attention theft, and it’s pathetic. The big players like Mr. Beast have entrenched their position, especially as he has his Amazon deal and huge spend for Beast Games – he’s constructing a moat that his competition will not be able to reach, which is why he treats it as a loss leader and allegedly lost tens of millions on season one – allegedly.

Because of these factors, going on culture war social media like Twitter/X or YouTube is utterly toxic today – I look at Twitter and it’s the same e-grifters doing the same tired, boring cons, juiced by their bot armies, trying to farm engagement with endless Current Thing hysteria. As I wrote, “Twitter/X is an abomination. I check on it occasionally to get a pulse for the current culture war slop, and to check out a couple of posters such as Owen Benjamin, but man, the state of it is terrible – it’s stuck in a Current Thing goyslop shallow culture war nightmare, with urgent hot takes begging for your attention by the same grifters doing this day in and day night for years at a time, astroturfed by an infinity of Zionist, Indian and Chinese bots and with zero memory or ability to draw inferences whatsoever. This is how people are choosing to live their lives? Christ, abolish the internet if this is what it’s going to be.” This stuff is getting tired, it’s getting played out, and a shift is coming. Substack traffic is up massively, which creates its own issues including upticks in grifters and bots, but longer form content looks like a Godsend compared to the horrors of short-form Tweeting, YouTube or corrupt academia, and is only natural at this point.

The wonderful gnostic bishop Stephan Hoeller stated in his 2025 America tarot reading that all of the cards for 2025 were good – except for the last one, which meant that the year would end in great disappointment:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Af_nGtyNUWI?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Trump is intentionally tanking the America First movement on behalf of his international finance handlers (which was, to my eyes, a requirement for him to avoid prison, be allowed to win the controlled 2024 election and to financially grift billions for himself – it seems that he was turned fully in early 2024 after his proposed replacement Ron DeSantis flamed out, discussed previously here and here), doing all the things necessary to destroy support for the movement. These moves to dynamite the right include (1) unlimited corruption (see pre-inauguration Trumpcoin and Melaniacoin to start), (2) unnecessary and counter-productive heavy-handed immigration enforcement1, (3) over-the-top Epstein obstruction (which remains a puzzle), (4) 50 year mortgages, (5) support for the Gaza ethnic cleanse (and now U.S. Gaza military base) and globohomo Ukraine war, (6) inviting Al Qaeda to the White House, (7) no “deep state” arrests, (8) endless corrupt pardons, (9) dramatically expanding the national security state, (10) Palantir and Operation Stargate corruption, (11) crypto corruption, (12) heavy inflation and deepening deficits, (13) tariffs without domestic job growth, (14) curbing free speech, (15) going to war against Iran, (16) support for unlimited H1b and Chinese foreign students, the list goes on and on. See here for Emerald Robinson’s take, but I’m confident that none of this is a mistake and it’s not due to listening to poor advisors (these grifters are still using that line?). Ay carambe:

It seems like 2026 and 2028 are shaping up to be massive Democrat victories after they dramatically overperformed in various November 2025 elections, including Soros-backed Mamdami (yes, Dolores, most of these elections were in Democrat strongholds, but they strongly outperformed expectations and Hispanic support for Trump/Republicans – always weak historically – has dramatically collapsed in the wake of the intentional botching of immigration enforcement). After their upcoming victories the push for brown race communism will accelerate far faster than what we have seen so far (akin to what happened in California, where a historically Republican state has turned into a permanent supermajority failed state due to non-white voting (which votes consistently Democrat) and is therefore a simple math problem, exacerbated by fake and controlled vote-by-mail which counts “votes” for weeks after the election itself) – structured as a grievance-based smash and grab against whites, shrinking the nation’s economic pie massively, which will then be blamed on the victims and ratcheted further – if the financial backers of Trump (who are the same financial backers of the race communists) don’t criminalize speech and utilize ICE against the American right first, anyway. It’s an endless controlled Republican to Democrat to Republican to Democrat ping-pong oscillating dialectic straight into the bowels of Hell.

Ultimately, as I wrote in a Note, the more intense and sophisticated globohomo power control gets, the more they reveal themselves and the deeper one must dig inside spiritually for a counterbalance. Indeed, it is the level of oppression that brings out the depths of spirituality; Solzhenitzyn said there were basically no suicides in the forced labor camps, contrast that with the massive nihilism and despair in decadent, materialist society. So everything comes with a silver lining to it. Personally, I think the upcoming level of oppression will be the greatest in human history – with woke, malevolent AIs micromanaging humanity on an individual basis for nefarious purposes (the “Mark of the Beast” and the digital panopticon), really proving Schopenhauer’s comment that this world is some kind of Demiurgic Hellhole2 – and for humanity to survive, it will have to reach a spiritual depths that it has not accessed previously.

Thanks for reading.

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1 As I’ve repeatedly stated, not a single physical deportation of illegals is required in order to get most illegals to leave. All one would have to do would be to (1) enforce criminal penalties against employers, not employees, (2) ban financial remittances to Latin America, and (3) cut off social services to illegals. But the goal is and has never been to substantially decrease illegal immigration numbers (of which the financial backers behind Dementia Joe let in 20 million during his term) – it’s a fake narrative, a con to prop up Trump’s failing support numbers among his base, to keep them from waking up for as long as possible as the CBDC/woke AI/social credit score system continues to be implemented.

2 “As a reliable compass for orienting yourself in life nothing is more useful than to accustom yourself to regarding this world as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony. When you have done this you will order your expectations of life according to the nature of things and no longer regard the calamities, sufferings, torments, and miseries of life as something irregular and not to be expected but will find them entirely in order, well knowing that each of us is here being punished for his existence and each in his own particular way.”

This is a post about 1982 novel The Running Man, whose dark, despairing tone in a society of blown out neoliberal feudalism, ubiquitous electronic spying, rampant crime and no opportunities predicted the general tone and feel of the modern world, and which bears some parallels to the previously-discussed manhunt for Luigi Mangione.

Stephen King is a gross, deranged boomer. If anyone has followed him over the past near-decade all he’s done is scream at the top of his lungs about how bad Orange Man is, and in recent years called for worldwide shutdowns and forced heart attack jabs. You can pretty quickly understand the paranoid, deranged mentality of the guy in this 2022 interview.

He’s also been irrelevant for a long time. I can’t think of the last Stephen King book release, although I’m not really sure there’s an audience for it these days anyway.

Growing up I read a lot of his stuff. I read The Stand, Needful Things, Desperation and The Regulators, The Dark Half, Pet Sematary and It, some of his short stories such as the excellent The Jaunt (“Longer than you think! Longer than you think, dad!”), and watched various film and television adaptations such as The Shining, Langoleers, The Green Mile, Misery, The Mist, Thinner and The Shawshank Redemption. The quality was generally hit-or-miss and his novels were extremely verbose, double or triple the length they should have been, like he was being paid by the word.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/5IFGJPDKtZc?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Early Family Guy poking fun at King’s marked decline in quality.

King began his career in 1974 with Carrie and his early books were reasonably written. They only grew to interminable length once he became established and successful. Reflecting this was King’s sprawling The Dark Tower series, of which I only enjoyed book one, The Gunslinger (published 1978-1981) and sort-of book four. The Gunslinger was written in a sparse western style, showing instead of telling; there were frequent allusions to past events which were not explained in the novel and plenty of tarot imagery as well, both of which I appreciated. The main character Roland made difficult, painful choices and sacrifices in order to pursue the Man in Black, a mysterious figure of significant power. King later butchered the story and turned it into word-vomit when he finished the seven book series and “updated” book one to account for later story developments, but such is life (if you ever read it, find an early edition and stop after book one). Some of the first couple books was made into a disaster of a film which I watched and reviewed previously here.

King’s alter-ego

King wrote under a pseudonym toward the start of his career under the name Richard Bachmann. He did this because his publisher wouldn’t let him publish as often as he wanted and also because he wanted to see if he was successful solely due to luck, or if there was an element of skill which would allow him to succeed with a different writing style, a Pessoan heteronym. He picked the name Richard Bachmann in part after the pseudonym of fellow writer Donald E. Westlake, who had written written adventure novels under his real name but who also wrote separately under “Richard Stark.” Westlake’s content as Stark was a much darker hardboiled stark noir style about an unemotional career criminal named Parker – who was like Jack Reacher but amoral and hardened with no backstory instead of being a lame military police officer – and his stories of capers and revenge. The Parker novels are excellent novels and I highly recommend them. They’re apparently popular in prison and I remember that it’s flat, selfish tone wore off on me for a little while after reading them – I too felt like I was a “badass”, which of course was divorced from reality. Much later a couple of well-done graphic novels were released.

King’s writing as Richard Bachmann was a nod to the Stark writing style, written with brevity and with a dark and uncompromising tone. He wrote four books as Bachmann before one of his readers discovered who he was and announced it publicly. The subsequent publicity killed King’s willingness to write under the name and style further and he went back to writing the bloated garbage he’s known for.

Of the four novels published as Bachmann only two were good, The Running Man and The Long Walk. The Long Walk made for a pretty good story about a group of kids in a futuristic military dictatorship where whoever walked the furthest in a race got an unlimited reward while everyone else was killed. The other novels, Roadwork and Rage, were both forgettable except Rage predicted the later school shooting trend.

The Running Man

Some of you probably know The Running Man due to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fun but silly film about it. The film takes the title of the book and the main character’s name, along with the broad story of a man who has to survive a reality television show where people are trying to kill him, and changes everything else. There’s nothing about the characters, plot, or tone of the film that matches the novel. King writes that the main character of the novel is “about as far from the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in the movie as you can get”. I guess the trigger for this post was the fact that the novel is being remade with Glen Powell based on Edgar Wright’s remake, with some other announced cast here, where he wants to stick much closer to the source material (although I suspect he will still have to substantially modify the ending). I think I can see Powell as the main character of the novel if he can lose some weight to appear gaunt, pale and haunted.

I don’t want to spoil the novel for you — note that the forward of the novel spoils the quite shocking ending, so don’t read it until after you finish the book if you decide to read it — but I’ll provide a short non-spoiler description of the plot.

The setting is this: it is the future and Ben Richards is an out of work mechanic. He is thin and malnourished. His wife turns tricks as a prostitute to try to make basic ends meet while his newborn daughter has pneumonia; they can’t afford medicine. The air in the environment is poisoned after decades of pumping chemicals into it. To save his daughter he volunteers for the network games where, if one is selected, one would have the “pleasure” of being mocked, tortured, and – if qualified for the most lucrative game, The Running Man – killed. In the network show a participant is given a day’s head start to run and hide and then Hunters are unleashed. They track the participant down and kill him with the public’s input and help. The longer the runner survives, the more money his family receive. No one had lasted very long at all. Richards tries out for the games. He qualifies for The Running Man, and he has to try to survive and by doing so protect his family.

As mentioned, the tone of the novel is dark, stark, and pessimistic. Richards is an antisocial independent loner type, a clear dissident to the system, and he is portrayed in a sympathetic light even as the braying, bloodthirsty mob after him is highlighted as his opposite. He is not portrayed as heroic but desperate, which is a very important distinction. The novel does an excellent job of predicting the tone of the Hellscape nightmare society we currently inhabit – a dark, foreboding environment without opportunity and with malice, despair and desperation around every corner.1 King described the “Bachman state of mind: low rage, sexual frustration, crazy good humor, and simmering despair.”

It’s an easy, entertaining, and quick read. It’s one of the few novels from when I was young that really stand out vividly decades later, and I still think about it once in awhile to this day. That speaks to the story’s enduring power, tapping into a well of populist rage that King himself would later totally abandon.

It’s ironic how, in a brief flash of King’s life, he created a novel that sympathized with the very populist figures who he would later on come to abhor. I wonder if he has made such a connection. Probably not; his mind seems pretty rotten from too-much boomer success. Be careful of the success one may wish for, you might just get it…

Anyway, if you’d like to pick up the novel the Amazon link is here. It is also available for free to read online here. Remember: skip King’s introduction until after you read it so the ending doesn’t get spoiled for you. And if you do read it, I’d be interested in what you thought of it in the comments below.

Thanks for reading.

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1 Even the alternate 1985 in Back to the Future: Part 2 seems less grim than reality today. In that alternate reality men were still men, sex was still popular, there was a degree of order under authoritarian Biff and everyone knew he was in charge, I don’t recall seeing any trannies or obese people…

Owen Benjamin, the exiled comedian turned homesteader, illustrates what happens when a man refuses the “Devil’s bargain” of institutional approval and accepts exile in exchange for authenticity. This essay examines what his story reveals about the principle of yajna, that every true work, every expression of the Self, requires something to be given up. In an age when most trade integrity for access, Benjamin’s descent from fame into relative obscurity becomes a parable of individuation: the necessary crucifixion of the ego for the sake of wholeness.

Welcome back. As a follow up to my two previous posts on how mainstream influencers are controlled (here and here), I wanted to write something about someone who I like: Owen Benjamin. Few public figures today have willingly sacrificed worldly success for psychic wholeness and this guy, for all his flaws, did.

As background, Benjamin is a giant 6’8” pretty handsome fellow who was a mainstream and successful comedian – he had a book deal, a development deal, and was repped by CAA – and who was cancelled from everything in 2017-2019 after he went off the reservation in terms of discussing forbidden topics (race, Jews, Hollywood pedophelia, the child trans agenda, etc). His public opposition to a powerful, connected figure transing his five year old son was apparently the final straw that got him cancelled, discussed by him here. Benjamin was talented – quick on his feet, presentable, great with music, funny – and he could have easily maintained and grew his mainstream success if he had played ball, but he refused. Some of his comedy specials are online for free to watch here, and his 2018 special Huge Pianist was pretty good. He moved to Idaho where he’s married and raising a bunch of kids (4?) while working on his farm, doing free daily comedy streams for his bread, posting on Twitter, and doing event organization with his followers (including a yearly festival at a campground in the Ozarks, which looks great), who he calls “bears”.

First, let’s get what I don’t like about him out of the way before discussing his positive traits. I think Benjamin either intentionally or more likely unintentionally causes a substantial amount of drama with many of those who he interacts with, which he then disclaims wide-eyed as not being his fault (to the point there is a Reddit haters group focused specifically on him1); I think he is prone to schizophrenic spirals, that a lot of his hot takes are wrong (such as his recent take on Erika Kirk, who I find to be, at minimum, acting in poor taste, although his bit on FBI scriptwriting incompetence around the Kirk assassination was strong2), his understanding of male/female dynamics is wildly skewed3, his understanding of elite/mass dynamics isn’t quite right4, there is a bit of a stylistic clash5, he regularly has Vox Day on his show who I think is smugly arrogant and poorly informed, and he deep-dives into stuff like flat earth which I’m not really onboard with. Not that I’m against it, per se; I haven’t looked into it, it isn’t a topic that interests me, but I do not have faith in our institutional experts – and once you lose faith in institutional credibility, unless you have the proper scientific, mathematical, engineering or other background to investigate a topic yourself it’s best to keep an open mind about things, to acknowledge our limitations (see other conspiracy theories like 9/11, dinosaurs being fake, nuclear weapons being fake, etc). Because if you haven’t investigated a topic yourself while possessing the specific knowledge set that lets you competently do so, then you’re always going to be putting your faith in someone or something about it. The most interesting thing about flat earth to me is how enraged the topic makes the spherecucks, suggesting it hits on certain unacknowledged aspects of their personal and collective unconscious. If Flat Earthers were simply wrong then one could ignore them as clown figures and not be emotionally triggered by them.

What I like about Benjamin, primarily, is the clear sacrifice he made to be where he is at: he sacrificed his career for authenticity, to be able to speak his mind in whatever way he wants on his stream. He can say anything about anything, from any angle, no matter how offensive – this is really clear if you watch his stream, that he’s speaking from the heart. As he said in a recent stream (at 1:55:20), “I do [my work] because it’s my gift and if I don’t I feel darkness. Like you gotta do what you are. What you’ve been given [in terms of talents] is your role.” Sure, he rambles and causes drama and his views often are strange, but the authenticity comes through heavily, especially in contrast to others, and some of his ideas are indeed unique (for example, I appreciated his recent criticisms of Jungian therapists, discussed here). Authenticity is a fundamental and non-negotiable prerequisite for the re-sacrilization of language (which I discussed here) necessary to re-enchant the world, and freedom of speech is required for such authenticity; inauthentic language can never be holy.6 Benjamin’s raw, unflattened speech and the subsequent public scorn serve as confirmation that his language, while flawed, still retains the “charge” that is missing from the procedural, soul-dead language of the mainstream.

Because of this, while YouTube is allowing some prior banned “right wing” content creators back on its platform (including Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes), Benjamin is not one of them – he tried to rejoin and was very quickly banned despite keeping content innocuous; this mirrors how he remains persona non grata to most of his well known former “friends” in the comedy scene. This near-immediate ban happened because he does not buy into the right/left dialectic, he sees through much of the elite narrative creation and dissemination, and he is not controlled (although he does have an understandable element of lingering envy and perhaps bitterness towards those of his peers who accepted the Devil’s bargain for continued mainstream success and easy wealth, such as Shane Gillis shilling Bud Light and Bill Burr, and those more famous comedians like Dave Chapelle who he believes stole his work). Because here’s the thing: there is a sacrifice involved in every action, no matter how small or how big. What matters is what is sacrificed and in furtherance of what objective.

Here, now, you are sacrificing a small amount of your time and psychic energy in order to read this; hopefully you gain some small element of information, perspective or wisdom in return, but perhaps the additional cost is some element of estrangement from regular society, or some additional cognitive dissonance. Or let’s say you’re faced with with a big life decision, and you sit there paralyzed; then it will be decided for you with whatever consequences it brings. Or you do nothing on your individuation journey and you pay for it when you’re older with bitterness and regret – as the Bhagavad Gita states (3.4-6), it is absurd to think we have a choice not to act. There is literally no action you can take or not take in life that does not come with a sacrifice associated with it, whatever it is. It would be better if more people thought in these terms because it would make one more mindful of one’s decisions. One of the most important principles of mysticism is the principle of yajna or spiritual sacrifice: in order to reach the highest fulfillment, the human being returns vital energy to the process rather than clinging to it; it is the sacrifice that consecrates, that makes the object holy. Even though I try to think in these terms, it is not fully solidified and I do not default to this frame because society’s influence is so great – I have to force myself to think in this way.

Reading and writing on Substack contains substantial costs for me, too – I have less time to spend with friends and family, I feel utterly disconnected from broader society, my views (gnostic, philosophically pessimistic and blackpilled, individuation focused) cannot monetize into larger social networks even if I wanted to – the only support I’ve received from much bigger players was being linked to twice by Darren Beattie on Revolver News before he came to understand I wasn’t ideologically aligned with him – and the individuation process is walking a tightrope over an abyss where I am constantly fearful both of collapse or of an institutional crackdown, etc. It is a hard way to live, but I feel compelled to do so by the Self – the alternative, a life of psychic “normalcy”, would be akin to death to me.

Comparing Benjamin to others

Let’s compare a cancelled figure like Benjamin to some “mainstream” right-leaning figures like Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens, both of whom I dislike. Why do I dislike them? Well, Owens is an easy one – I just think she’s a grifter and she blends truth and falsehood together into a toxic clown stew, much as Alex Jones did before he was compromised into full irrelevance. One cannot retain institutional legitimacy and be allowed on mainstream platforms without being a yes man (or woman) to higher masters, it isn’t possible.7 And she hasn’t paid a price for her views anyway. With Fuentes, other than the stuff about him being a federal asset (which I think is true – he told his followers to storm the capital on 1/6 and they were prosecuted and he wasn’t), he has regularly displayed contempt for his fatherless, young male audience who he tries to groom into incels, gay or trans ( has a lengthy takedown of him here). So I think he is disingenuous and ill-intended; Benjamin routinely mocks him, also here and here.8 Furthermore, it is true that Fuentes has sacrificed something – he had lost some aspects of his mainstream access previously, he was potentially debanked (although I read the funds taken were given back to him), he had been suspended on Youtube and other channels (although he’s being highlighted there now, including on Tucker Carlson’s channel), an assassin even tried to kill him – but the question isn’t if someone sacrifices – because every action we take requires sacrifice – but what is sacrificed and for what purpose. Fuentes, to me, has suffered ostracism not in furtherance of a deeper spiritual journey or freedom like Benjamin has, but to build a personality cult on the fringes of the internet – although even that, too, he appears to be betraying for greater mainstream access (as he is doing around the Kirk assassination by directing attention away from Israel). I will note that he is only 27 years old, young for someone who has become as infamous as he is, he is a mesmerizing public speaker a bit like Celine9, and he does have decent points from time to time.10

Ultimately, whether one or more of these influencers resonate with you comes down to a gut check, intuition and discernment – no one in the mainstream passes my gut check, though. I had hope at various points for mainstream figures like Mike Benz, Stephen Miller, and Darren Beattie, but these guys disappointed me over time as they traded personal integrity for political access and culture war slop. I never followed Charlie Kirk but, after researching him, he seemed to me to be a grifter who was having an authentic change of heart behind the scenes (which is perhaps why he was assassinated); he hired Blake Neff after he was unceremoniously fired by Fox (with Tucker Carlson’s acceptance) for being “racist” which showed that he had some real courage – hiring Neff after his fall was not something anyone in the establishment would have done. Andrew Anglin, despite having some seriously misguided views on stuff like Putin/Russia, a misunderstanding of the structure of the world, along with his mental health issues and drinking problems, is another figure that I think ultimately is pursuing some kind of path toward truth. And other public figures I admire include Charles August Lindbergh, Gareth Jones, Julian Assange (kind of), and Ian Smith. Doing the right thing always requires sacrifice and almost never results in payoff in this world; one does the right thing and fades into obscurity or derision from the public, who simply want to be entertained into oblivion with no personal responsibility.

As Gustave Le Bon stated, “The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” And the great movie The Lives of Others, previously discussed here, makes the same point. It should be emphasized that the principle that one cannot be mainstream and at the same time authentic, whether or not true (and I think it is) implicitly creates a reverse-status hierarchy where the degree of social ostracization becomes a proxy for spiritual truth, potentially romanticizing paranoia and anti-social behavior, which contains its own dangers. As Ernst Junger stated when he was 100 years old, “The sociological definition of elite is already an indication of the corruption of the concept. A warning, for me, to no longer trust even the elites, but now only the great loners.”

Going back to Benjamin, another thing I appreciate about him is what I perceive as his life goal of wholeness. Most people are not pursuing this as their fundamental motivation; they are chasing fame, or status, or women, or money, or adventure. Jung, too, had wholeness as his fundamental objective. I perceive this about Benjamin because of the way he has structured his life: his marriage, his children, his home, his animals, his friendships and his work and his freedom of expression and his campground – he is trying, and I think (from what I see from the outside) successfully, to create a balanced and full life, although building parallel institutions is an ever-present struggle.11 Wholeness is what I want for myself as well, as I wrote previously. These ties to daily living serve as grounding tethers to objective reality, much as Jung had his wife, children, clinical practice, speeches, and leadership roles; it forces one to be accountable to practical results (farming, family, financial streams) which cannot be excused by pure ideology. The value of this is in forming a high-fidelity model of the world, which is ultimately tested by the individual’s ability to navigate the future successfully.12 And you can easily compare Benjamin’s life to some of the others discussed: Fuentes is a homosexual incel with an extremely imbalanced lifestyle (see the Brunet link above), while Owens was basically a mail-order bride to a British oligarch (i.e. an 18-day long distance courtship).

Benjamin reminds me a bit of the story of the Roman emperor Diocletian. Diocletian had retired to his farm after putting into place a governance system, but it all fell apart and people came to him begging for him to become emperor again. His alleged response is illuminating: “If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn’t dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed.” Diocletian, too sacrificed; he sacrificed his power for peace and contentment. What’s interesting is that the Renaissance masters never painted this amazing scene despite how powerful and archetypal it is, so I had ChatGPT generate one. I think it turned out pretty well after some tweaks despite too much of a brown tone:

I may try to paint this myself down the road with a different color scheme.

Or look at Diogenes of Sinope, who I covered previously; he sacrificed all earthly belongings in order to make fun of everyone – which Alexander the Great recognized as an amazing sacrifice, to the point where he allegedly stated that if he were not Alexander he would want to be Diogenes.

Benjamin embodies, however imperfectly, the withdrawn king archetype (Diocletian) or holy fool archetype (Diogenes). The historical analogies are inexact, of course, and they overstate Benjamin’s intentionality. While he has adapted admirably, the initial “sacrifice” was not entirely voluntary, which weakens the archetypal parallel. Diocletian’s choice was a deliberate exit from power; Benjamin’s feels more like a forced exile after cancellation.13 Similarly, Diogenes’ radical asceticism is more extreme than Benjamin’s homesteading, which still involves public engagement. These are merely meant as rough analogies demonstrating the price to be paid for peace of mind or freedom of speech.

I hope that this essay may inspire in you some thought about what you sacrifice in your life, for what purpose, and for those who you read, listen to, watch or follow, what they have sacrificed in furtherance of their own lives.

Thanks for reading.

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1 It appears that the website which had Ghislaine Maxwell as one of its top moderators and the recipient of the 8th largest amount of Reddit gold in site history does not allow a positive Benjamin subreddit.

2 The latest pointing to Israel as the culprit is Kash Patel preventing investigation into foreign influence in the assassination per Daily Mail. Alleged Tyler Robinson lover and roommate “Lance Twiggs” disappearing is also suspicious.

3 Again, he is a handsome tall quasi-famous giant where women threw themselves at him, and he simply does not understand a non-Chad mindset of female scarcity as opposed to abundance – where scarcity is the lived reality for the vast majority of men.

4 Benjamin believes that the upper elites cannot force people to do things, that it requires buy-in by individuals. However, there is no buy-in to the poisoned, flouridated water supply or the ongoing chemtrail spraying, there is no way around the endlessly inflating and bloodsucking monetary system for the vast majority of people, there is no buy-in for those peoples and nations subject to destruction by the upper elites, etc. Yes, the elites generally prefer a Fabian approach with symbol manipulation and public participation but this is because, at least in part, soft power is easier to exercise than hard power; but they can and will exercise hard power when they want to, whether or not you intentionally accept their schemes or not.

5 This is not meant as a knock, but he is an extraverted audio/visual learner and I am an introvert who prefers to learn via reading, which makes for a bit of a stylistic clash – I try to do as little audio/visual learning as I can, although I make an exception for Benjamin and for stuff like physiognomy analysis.

6 To speak authentically is to allow the symbolic forces of the unconscious to manifest in the world. This requires freedom from internal censorship (self-editing based on fear of mainstream reprisal). The existence of figures like Owen Benjamin proves that the system exacts a cost (loss of career, public scorn) for this internal freedom. The demand for “freedom of speech” is a demand for the system to stop imposing this cost, thereby making the act of speaking authentic language possible in the public sphere; this will, of course, not happen.

7 See this post discussing how compromised mainstream figures in the West were highlighted during the Cold War.

8 Benjamin believes that Fuentes is a clown figure who is being strategically used by elites to smear the far right movement in general to normies; he likens it to how the morally correct anti-war movement during Vietnam was smeared by hippy drug musicians, many of whom were astroturfed and were children of the military-industrial complex like Jim Morrison, whose father commanded the U.S. forces during the Gulf of Tonkin incident. One could point to a similar strategy with Richard Spencer, an FBI clown figure asset who was used to smear the alt-right, or neo-Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell, who is on the record stating that he intentionally leaned into a clown image in order to gain media attention. This explains, for example, why Fuentes says, smirking, that he is an “admirer” of Joseph Stalin.

9 Ernst Junger’s World War 2 diaries, Paris, 7 December 1941 entry:

At the German Institute this afternoon. Among those there was Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Tall, raw-boned, strong, a bit ungainly, but lively during the discussion – or more accurately, during his monologue. He speaks with a manic, inward-directed gaze, which seems to shine from deep within a cave. He no longer looks to the right or the left. He seems to be marching toward some unknown goal. “I always have death besides me.” And in saying this, he points to the spot beside his seat, as though a puppy were lying there.

He spoke of his consternation, his astonishment, at the fact that we soldiers were not shooting, hanging, and exterminating the Jews – astonishment that anyone who had a bayonet was not making unrestrained use of it. “If the Bolsheviks were in Paris they would demonstrate it, show how it’s done – how to comb through a population, quarter by quarter, house by house. If I had a bayonet, I would know what to do.”

It was informative to listen to him rant this way for two hours, because he radiated the amazing power of nihilism. People like this hear only a single melody, but they hear it uncommonly powerfully. They resemble machines of iron that follow a single path until they are finally dismantled.

It is remarkable when such minds speak about the sciences, such as biology. They apply them the way Stone Age man did, transforming them only into a means to slay others.

They take no pleasure in having an idea. They have had many – their yearning drives them toward fortresses from which cannons fire upon the masses and spread fear. Once they have achieved this goal, they interrupt their intellectual work, regardless of what arguments have helped them climb to the top. Then they give themselves over to the pleasure of killing. It was this drive to commit mass murder that propelled them forward in such a meaningless and confused way in the first place.

People with such natures could be recognized earlier, in eras when faith could still be tested. Nowadays they hide under the cloak of ideas. These are quite arbitrary, as seen in the fact that when certain goals are achieved, they are discarded like rags.

10 It will be interesting to see what happens to him; he is very eloquent and a great public speaker, but also quite short (5’5”?) which may limit his future in politics. As I have described elsewhere, I believe that increasing anti-semitism levels – while genuine and a result of decreasing material prosperity and neoliberal feudalism, along with the Gaza ethnic cleanse and how in-your-face Jewish power is today – will be used dialectically ultimately to force an ingathering of the Jewish diaspora to Israel in accordance with Old Testament eschatological dictates before destroying Western economies and leaving them smoldering ruins. Perhaps Fuentes will be used as a tool in this unfolding.

11 This is because the internet is heavily centralized and people have been herded like cattle into the top sites; without being highlighted by institutional power, or without the draw of the possibility of future political power, it feels like a Sisyphian struggle against entropic decay to carve out alternative spaces.

12 The importance of tethering one’s views to objective reality is also why I stress the value of making recursive predictions, discussed here.

13 Yet at the same time the exile was a result of sticking to principles, which elevates the withdraw whether or not forced. Compare to someone like Tucker Max, for example, who also withdrew from urban living for a farm, marriage, and four children; his withdraw lacks the career sacrifice for values that elevates the Benjamin story, although I’m sure Tucker Max’s withdrawal carried its own set of costs.

Behind the façade of compassion and care, the long-term care industry exposes the true economics of modern death. Private equity, insurance schemes, and government subsidies turn the decay of the body into a revenue stream. The “care” system is not a moral failure but the logical endpoint of secular materialism: the monetization of our fear of the void.

Welcome back. This is a post about the West’s approach to aging and end-of-life care.

I have had a few personal experiences with this subject, but really not too many yet. (1) My grandfather reached his 80s, pissed through all his money and then arguably starved himself to death – he stopped eating, but it’s also possible he had cancer or something, we don’t know – his belief was that when you get old don’t let a doctor open you up, because if you do then you’ll die of the complications from the surgery itself. He died at home. (2) My other grandfather had family support and some longterm care insurance, which we will discuss, and he died at home after battling cancer for years. (3) A family friend had a stroke right after getting the COVID booster, and lingered with a small amount of consciousness and round-the-clock live in care for two years before dying – gruesome. (4) Another relative lost her mind young to early onset Alheizmers, a very nice lady, and she also had at-home assistance, which was paid out of pocket and very expensive. (5) Another relative of mine in her 90s lives in an old age facility, a very nice one as far as these things go, and she has longterm care insurance – a good policy – otherwise the out-of-pocket expenses would be close to $10,000 a month – wow, that is crazy.

Modern America has a really schizophrenic approach to aging – first, it is entirely youth obsessed and the elderly are ignored and hidden far away from the media spotlight. Second, even though the elderly are out of the media spotlight, they are generally desperate to live for as long as they can, to take every breath they can, because they are secular, materialist, and terrified of death and the possibility of the Void; the boomers are ready, willing and able to stack on unlimited debt so they can live a little longer, as points out here. This terror is magnified by the ubiquitous propaganda that hypnotizes the masses until old age when they belately come to realize, with mounting regret, that they never lived their own lives. discussed the top five regrets of old people, and the #1 regret is that they were never true to their inner selves – they ignored their individuation journey which, for many (including myself), only begins around midlife. This reminds me of the film About Schmidt (2002), which is about an elderly man played by Jack Nicholson who slowly and haltingly comes to realize he wasted his life, which I discussed in this Note. So of course one will be terrified by death if one has not lived.

Because modern America is so atomized with low fertility rates, a lot of aging people do not have family to take care of them so they end up in a really basic Medicaid facility – if that – where they expire in a pretty gruesome way from neglect.1 As someone wrote, “I volunteered as a driver for meals on wheels and the state of many elderly people was appalling. Many of them we were their only social interactions. They’d get low quality trash meals once per day and that’s all they got to eat. Also one lady we delivered to every week, seemed normal & in good health, then the next week we went there her relatives were there dividing up all her possessions after she died. They had an estate sale and there was a little portable TV with a plaque on it that said her husband was awarded it on retirement after working at a local company for 40 years, they were selling it for $5. The company was long out of business too, shut down due to NAFTA.”

In the third world today and for basically all of human history, an elderly, infirm individual would naturally be taken care of by family because there would be no other alternatives. They would also have lived more of their own life for themselves (as they were not subject to such intense propaganda) and they would have had a worldview that was more religious, more other-worldly, and therefore less scared of death. I think of Eskimos who didn’t want to be a burden on their family and so went out into the cold to freeze to death (which apparently is an easy way to go, just getting groggy and falling asleep).

Each person has a unique perspective toward death and often we do not know how we will react to it until we are faced with the situation. I don’t know how I would react if I make it to elderly age, or if I came down with cancer or heart disease. I don’t think I would want to be around if my brain was failing; developing bodily infirmity seems more preferable. I think of Stephan Hoeller, 93, who is still sharp mentally despite being weak physically. I think of Revilo P. Oliver, who killed himself as he was physically declining; alternatively I think of Emil Cioran who wanted to kill himself but chickened out and his Alheizmers took hold and he went out in a really dragged out, gruesome manner in a facility. I would like to think that if I was declining mentally that I would take advantage of an assisted suicide facility both for certainty and for lack of pain, but who knows how certain these things even are? I heard of a woman who went to a assisted suicide clinic, the suicide pod failed and they had to strangle her to death.

The Financials

I also think of how rich the owners of these assisted care facilities are getting. The way it works is as follows: a facility will either take someone with long term care insurance, or if they’re middle class the person will max out their debt (reverse mortgage or sell their home) in order to stay there, and after they lose all their assets then they will be allowed to get on Medicaid (which won’t cover them if they have assets) and end up in a basic facility. The cost of staying in one of these facilities is many thousands of dollars a month; for a decent facility it is around $10,000 a month, for a basic one at least $5,000 through Medicaid. The cost of a nice place is staggeringly expensive.2

So the owners cut services to a minimum and they are able to generate huge profits – I think perhaps this is why there are a lot of Orthodox Jewish owners of nursing facilities who make enormous amounts of money, yet try to be very quiet publicly about how this system works. Yes, there is government oversight and yes, it is a low status and difficult profession with a lot of dealing with gruesome stuff (infirmity, disease, complaints, cleanliness issues, personnel issues, litigation, etc), but they are apparently tremendous money makers. As states, “Crazy, right? It’s the end of the line for your “greatest wealth transfer in history’“ – bled dry by the ‘care system’. I remember an explosion of these facilities a few decades ago when private equity got involved, their access to cheap capital and a guaranteed payment from the Feds created a goldmine. A numbers game, they backed into how much they could spend on facilities, care, and operating expenses when subtracted from their guaranteed $, and then just need to meet their occupancy targets….My wife’s side of the family has 4 elderly living in the Mesa Arizona area, I’ve watched them start out in the higher end facilities and then downsize as the funds began to run out. They’ve switched facilities 3 or 4 times.” concurs, stating “Something, anything, must be done to expose and educate about this sick process of long term care, if people cannot take care of elderly relatives at home how awful the whole thing is, I honestly think a lot of people just have no idea about nursing homes, Medicaid, LTC, etc unless they have personally dealt with it. Dont forget about private equity buying nursing homes too. Its truly an embarrassment to our society, and I think exposes the all around greed and lack of caring in this country. Truly sick.” And details his father’s experience in the old age system here, while a Redditor shares his grim experience here.

Now, many of the elderly today have long term care insurance, which was handed out like candy to the middle and upper class a couple of decades ago, and many of the policies had 5% compounding interest provisions in them. The insurance companies miscalculated; too many people held onto the policies, people lived longer than expected, and so the insurance companies lost a lot of money on these policies. The premiums have therefore increased massively in the past twenty years and the number of companies offering these products has fallen to a shadow of what it once was, so what we are seeing today with millions and millions of people living in nursing homes is not going to be the wave of the future. Other countries which apparently have decent aging care facilities – Norway (or maybe not), Sweden, Denmark, Japan – are all historically homogenous cultures with high societal trust, but America today is a desolate wasteland, not homogenous at all and with very low societal trust, so deciding on some government policy to improve things is simply not going to work. sees a similar situation in Italy. The people derive the culture and the government comes from that, not the other way around really, so these long term care facilities are never going to get better. I think of Ben Stiller’s performance as a tyrannical nursing home facility worker in Happy Gilmore, although the general attitude of staff in real life seems to be more laziness, neglect and sullenness than malice; and, to be fair, these Medicaid facilities are generally massively underfunded and understaffed, they are very hard jobs, and many of them are also occupied by new immigrants – dealing with endless elderly complaints will likely grind down most workers mentally over time.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/avOOB6Xei_E?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

has a great post about the nursing home system, where he states, “In many ways, these places are like prisons, and the patients are for all intents and purposes incarcerated. There may be no bars on their cells, but most of them couldn’t walk out to escape anyhow. How many of us picture our final years being like this? All alone, surrounded by often incompetent and usually uncaring strangers. “Caregivers” who don’t care. That seems like a brutal way to wind up our painfully short lifespan. My loved ones can count on me, and a few others, to come and see them. But there are so many cases, especially in the horrific nursing homes, where elderly people are relegated to staring out of the window at a world they no longer are a part of, with the full realization that their children or grandchildren aren’t coming. Some patients receive no visitors. Ever. Their families have forgotten them, naively secure in their fleeting youth. Or they don’t have any family. No children to not visit them enough.”

The government wants to massively slash Medicaid funding, too: correctly notes, “No wonder that slashing social benefits, Medicare, Medicaid are all on the top of the government’s list — we can take severe cuts to those as a given. But then what’s there to do the year after? Sure, cutting social spending will result in lower consumption (and lower GDP growth), but resource depletion won’t stop just because we no longer give adequate medical and financial support to retired citizens…” Trump’s BBB bill slashed Medicaid spending by 15%, although it was not primarily targeted at old age facilities3, and this is just the start.

The Future

I think the future is going to be a reversion to the mean to an extent: elderly people will have to live with their children, if they have any, or end up on the streets (further exacerbating the gentrification of panhandling, which notes is already a trend), and/or facility quality will continue to decrease. Because we are toward the end of the greatest mass consumption event in human history, and along with it the greatest secularism in human history, I do think there will be some sort of return to religion, and hopefully with it some sort of trends away from the atomization we are all experiencing – even though it is getting worse with LLMs and with work from home – because otherwise it makes me sad to think of how terrible end of life care is going to be for people moving forward, which will make the care afforded today look good by comparison.

Ultimately, modernity’s refusal to confront death mirrors its metaphysical void: that our end-of-life system is the materialization of our spiritual condition of secularism, atomization, and nihilism. As someone wrote, “Abused as kids by parents, abused as elders by caregivers. Abused as adults by the system. Lol at this world. And we keep reproducing.” This world is some kind of demiurgic Hell, especially for those sensitive to injustice. Perhaps we are simply witnessing the outer form of a civilization that long ago died inwardly – the body now lingering, fed by tubes and policy, afraid to let go. In a way, it is similar to the final “pagan” generation of Rome, which was utterly unwilling to address the ascension of Christianity and the death of the old world as described by Edward J. Watts in The Final Pagan Generation:

The ‘final pagan generation’…is made up of the last group of elite Romans…who were born into a world in which most people believed that the pagan public religious order of the past few millennia would continue indefinitely. They were the last Romans to grow up in a world that simply could not imagine a Roman world dominated by a Christian majority. This critical failure of imagination is completely understandable. At the beginning of the second decade of the fourth century there had never been a Christian emperor, and the childhood and early adolescence of members of this generation living in the East coincided with moments when the resources of the Roman state were devoted to the suppression of Christianity. The longest-lived of this group died in an empire that would never again see a non-Christian sovereign, and that no longer financially supported the public sacrifices, temples, and festivals that had dominated Roman life in their youth. They lived through a time of dramatic change that they could neither anticipate nor fully understand as it was unfolding.

As the old Romans watched their gods fade into memory, we too watch the death of the only faith we ever truly had – the belief that progress could postpone death forever.

Thanks for reading.

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1 I wrote about my former stepfather who thought he would die homeless under a bridge, but a childhood friend let him live with him until the end.

2 From here: “Wife and I checked out one of these in our area. $270K is the cheapest possible buy in for a small one BR apartment ($410K if you want to get 80% it back when you die) plus $5.5K/month with no care. If you need care, the price goes up depending upon how much care you need. Triple the buy in and add 50% to the monthly for a place we might actually want to live in. Monthly charges are raised annually. They will take some number of Medicaid patients in the skilled nursing facility part. Long wait lists (years)for the nicer units.

The cheapest way to spend your golden years is probably in an assisted living group home. I got my sister into one of these. It did not take Medicaid. 10 years ago it was $3K/month for a private room in a large house in an upscale tract neighborhood. Full time staff and meals included. Assisted living in a facility with a private apartment is probably $6-15K depending upon the area and niceness.

Wife and I are trying to figure out what to do if we fail to drop dead on schedule.

Wife’s sister has dementia and is a facility where almost everyone is on Medicaid. It’s actually not bad physically, but there are no activities. Her husband takes her out almost every day. Otherwise she would sit and stare at the wall.”

3 According to Dr. William H. Dow, professor of health policy and management at UC Berkeley School of Public Health and director of the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging, “Although the primary focus was not on older adult health care, various provisions will have adverse effects. One is that the loss of dual Medicaid coverage for some Medicare enrollees will make it harder for them to financially access long-term care.

Another effect that nursing home experts are concerned about is a provision that bars enforcement of a Biden-era rule mandating minimum staffing levels in long-term care facilities, so the result is that the BBBA is preventing nursing home quality improvements.

More indirectly, state budgetary pressure has often led to cuts in state-funded home and community-based services for older adult caregiving, so that is a potential concern. The biggest wildcard is that the magnitude of the tax cuts in the bill will raise the national debt by about three trillion dollars over the next decade, which would trigger a deficit-reduction provision that would significantly cut Medicare provider reimbursement rates—unless Congress chooses to waive their own rules.”