This Substack and the 130,000-word Neoliberal Feudalism project that preceded it was never primarily a political intervention, even when it appeared that way. It was an individuation process conducted in public, driven by a psyche for which coherence is the primary stabilizer. Over years, pressures from lived reality worked their way upward through lower and mid-level beliefs until they finally reached the highest level: the god-image itself. What emerged was a confrontation with Abraxas as articulated by Jung as a limit condition – the terrifying unity of opposites that renders further metaphysical escalation impossible. This post marks the point where that pressure has broken the old alignment and where the work necessarily changes.
Welcome back, and Happy New Year. I hope you had a wonderful time celebrating with loved ones and friends, and that you have a meaningful upcoming year.
What follows is a working description of an inner realignment that is still unfolding. This is not a settled doctrine or a prescription for others, and it marks a point of inflection that has become visible only in retrospect. Much of what I describe here may later require revision, qualification, or abandonment as its consequences continue to metabolize in lived experience. I am describing what appears to be happening, not asserting what must be true.
To begin, I don’t think readers have understood the fundamental purpose of this Substack, or of the 130,000 word Neoliberal Feudalism giant post preceding it (to be fair, I have not known where it was heading and it is still a ever-developing process, but the contours are becoming clearer to me now). It was never about identifying the upper elites for the purpose of overthrowing them with a new and better elite, although my writing can be interpreted that way as it is structured that way on the surface – full of outrage at their beliefs and behavior, their horrible predation on the hapless and unfortunate, the endless violations of the Golden Rule. Instead, this has always been a psychological project based on my own unique drives and makeup, for reasons I will get into, and how this has ultimately resulted in recognition of my psychic requirements, and how this will be changing the focus and scope of my Substack moving forward.
Before delving into this, let’s discuss the nature of belief itself. Brett Andersen recorded a solid YouTube series on evolutionary psychology which I covered back in 2023, and I elaborated on a specific facet in this post. I wrote,
Andersen explained [that] our beliefs are structured in a hierarchical pyramid structure with core beliefs at the top (comprising the Big Questions; religious/metaphysical beliefs, beliefs about the self, self-narratives, etc.), mid-level goals/beliefs (e.g. career goals, political beliefs), low level goals/beliefs (e.g. the goal of passing a test, belief in a scientific hypothesis), and sub-routines (e.g. solving an equation, brushing your teeth). It is easy to change lower-level beliefs which do not impact higher layers, but changes to the higher layers have a rippling effect on the layers below, so such fundamental changes will likely be very painful and disruptive.
Andersen distinguishes between those with high autistic personality traits (left brain dominance), where prediction errors are generally resolved at lower levels of the belief hierarchy, vs. those with high schizotypy personality traits (right brain dominance), where prediction errors are more easily permeable to resolve at higher levels of the belief hierarchy. The below images are clickable to take you to the relevant portion of the YouTube videos:
Per Andersen here:
The mind is arranged in this kind of hierarchy of abstraction and the worldview questions are at the top. And so all of our subsidiary goals and beliefs are nested inside of our answers to the big questions. Now for most people the answers to the big questions are not really explicit, right? For most people, most people are not philosophers, right? And that’s totally fine. Most people don’t have an elaborated philosophy of epistemology. They have implicit assumptions about how they know what is true and they don’t have an elaborated ontology. They have implicit assumptions about what is real and unreal. But nevertheless, those implicit assumptions are still of vital importance because your assumptions about what is real and unreal constrains what you can possibly believe in because something that presents itself to your sensory experience that you have a priori deemed as being impossible, it’s very likely that you’ll deny that or find some explanation for it that deems it unreal in some important sense. So disruptions to our answers to the big questions, if we allow those to be disrupted, that will generate a lot more psychological entropy than other kinds of disruptions because everything that was nested inside of them also becomes disrupted.
The highest layer of belief involves worldview questions – including and especially religious/metaphysical beliefs – and for almost everyone in the modern world that includes a privatio boni conception of God as the Piscean God of goodness, justice and mercy. Under the privatio boni God is all good and evil is an absence of God; therefore the ideal is to lean into the light and suppress or ignore our darkness in the hopes of ascending to Heaven and not Hell after we die. To the extent there is injustice, it will be resolved by God as the final purveyor of justice in the afterlife, where the evil will be sent into the fiery torments of Hell. However, this notion of a pure, good, just God has taken enormous hits as the age shifts from Pisces to Aquarius – the world appears extremely predatory, evil appears baked into the nature of reality itself, which is steeped in an undeniable philosophical pessimism (i.e. we are either striving for an object or bored, never satisfied, to be alive requires violating the Golden Rule by consuming other living creatures in order to survive, existence is suffering). The problem of evil haunts the privatio boni model; it’s explanation feels insufficient in the face of horrible evil, and it breaks down under scrutiny. The Epicurean paradox does a good job of explaining why it is insufficient.
So the question becomes: if there is a real unresolved tension between the privatio boni and the lived experience of evil in the world, how does that tension resolve? The answer depends on one’s psychic constitution and how one metabolizes energy. Broadly speaking, human psyches tend to regulate around one of a few primary stabilizers: (1) attachment and belonging, (2) esteem and status, (3) meaning and narrative, (4) control and agency, (5) coherence and truth-consistency. Most people have several, but one dominates.1 My dominant stabilizer is coherence.2 This means that when reality makes sense, I am stable even if it is bleak; when reality does not make sense, I destabilize even if life is comfortable. Emotional reassurance does not compensate for structural falsity in my worldview, belonging does not override contradiction, and hope that contradicts lived data increases my anxiety instead of relieving it.3 This isn’t common, but it is is a known psychological configuration and is not mystical. For those with my psychic profile, contradiction feels like suffocation. This configuration does not produce confidence, leadership, or direction for others, and it is poorly suited to movement-building, moral persuasion, or collective repair. Where it succeeds is in maintaining coherence in the presence of contradictions that cannot be resolved without psychic damage. A non-negotiable requirement is that my god-image may not contradict lived phenomenological data; this is why the privatio boni did not merely feel “wrong” to me – it felt unlivable. But one may be coherence stabilized in different ways; Rurik is a good example of another way.4
Why did my psyche constellate around coherence as its dominant stabilizer? Perhaps genetics plays a role, perhaps astrology plays a role via my natal and progressed charts, but I would argue that the particularities of my upbringing (a part of which I have shared previously) crystallized it: a middle or upper middle class upbringing with little material wants but an immature, highly passive aggressive mother creating double binds, no present father figures, no one to explain to me how the world worked, no community, and a completely secular upbringing with a flat zero religious or symbolic upbringing or understanding whatsoever – in other words, I was raised in the terminal state of modernity. This created in me both tremendous confusion and massive but diffuse rage, and my psyche chose coherence as its stabilizer to avoid collapse – it became important to me to organize things into understood structures, to push to understand more and to organize it. Energetically, my psyche holds rigid order (descriptively Saturnian – strict, intense, rule-based, organizing) and chaotic fury (descriptively Dionysusian – wild, frenzied, uncontrolled) in tension, mediated by symbolic expression (chthonic Mercury, synthesizing these polar opposite energies and channelled into writing), and I will cover an energy profile typology in the future.
This energy was unfocused and haphazard until I hit mid-life liminality, when it became no longer possible to push off hope of resolution of the understanding of the world further into the future because of the increased feeling of approaching death. This changing dynamic then forced the choice: total psychic collapse or push for psychic integration. This is what the Neoliberal Feudalism and Neo-Feudal Review projects have been about – taking all of the horrible, terrible, evil, contradictory, propagandized strands of data floating in my psyche (absorbed from decades of observing how predatory and uncaring the world is) and working to synthesize them, listening to my intuition without knowing where or how things would eventually develop, trusting the Self because my ego had fundamentally failed me, with an intense fear of the abyss and utter ruination haunting and propelling me forward at every turn. This led to taking the pressures from these lower level beliefs, pushing into mid level belief reclassification and finally, after years and decades, to addressing my conception of the God image himself – and a shift from the privatio boni notion of God to a notion of God as Abraxas, first articulated by Jung in Answer to Job and his Liber Novus, the horrifying unity of all opposites who forms not just a Trinity but a Quaternity of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost and Satan. I discuss this conception in detail here and here. Constant lower level belief misalignment with the phenomenological experiences of lived reality pressured upward and ultimately resulted in a new God image within myself, and because higher level belief change reorganizes everything below it, I am in the process – a lived process, not a forced one, without knowing where it will lead or how it will fully manifest or how long it will take – of a fundamental reconfiguration. Abraxas is not a God to be worshipped; he is a God to be feared, a limit condition not to be transcended or escaped, where we individuate away from him by listening to the dictates of the Self instead of the ego. This is not a realization that grants clarity, peace, or advantage; it forecloses entire categories of hope, belonging, and moral certainty that many people rightly rely on to remain psychologically intact. With my primary coherence drive, though, I (hopefully) can live in a world that makes sense even if it is deeply unjust. In this context the Hermetic paraphrase, “As above, so below” is structural isomorphism – when the highest-level belief (god-image) is incoherent, lower belief levels fragment, overwork, compensate, and project, but when the top layer stabilizes, pressure redistributes downward and outward naturally.
What I am observing now, without confidence that it will persist unchanged, is a reduction in the particular form of psychic strain that arose from the mismatch between lived reality and my highest-order beliefs. Because there is no all good God who will solve the horrors and injustices of this world either here or probably in the afterlife (because Abraxas is the totality of all opposites, all the wonder and horror combined), whether this will translate into greater calm, presence, or relational ease remains an open question, and one that only time and embodiment can answer. It may even impact – hopefully positively – my interactions with friends, loved ones, and romantically, because (this is clear to me now) I have always felt tension in my interactions as I mined others unconsciously for clarity on the metaphysical discrepancy between lived reality and the God image (which they didn’t deserve the pressure of, and were largely unhelpful with anyway).
Abraxas appears to function for me as a kind of symbolic limit condition, one beyond which further metaphysical escalation no longer feels meaningful or necessary. Whether this is truly an endpoint or merely a provisional ceiling is not something that can be known in advance, but the intent and purpose of this Substack moving forward is going to change because it feels, at least at the moment, as though the compulsion toward ever-larger metaphysical synthesis has loosened. Whether this marks a genuine shift or merely a temporary pause is something I intend to observe rather than declare. It may become more focused on filling in the details, discussing why other’s conceptions of the God image is incorrect (to me), and hopefully embodying a fuller and calmer lived life moving forward – we will see. I didn’t plan the crystallization of Abraxas or its implications to hit me at the end of the year, but that is just how synchronistically it is playing out. This is also why, unlike Jung (who wanted to rewrite all of his old works except for Answer to Job), even though I find a lot of my older work to be remedial for my current stage – and I can’t read 95%+ of other writers who I used to read even a couple of years ago – I don’t feel a need to go back and rewrite my older posts, because it all serves as roadmarks on the evolution of my psyche, peeling off layers until addressing the God image itself.
I am just describing my own process here, which will hopefully be helpful to you on your own journey; the Oracle at Delphi’s inscription to “Know Thyself” was not self-esteem advice, it was a limit warning to know what kind of being you are, what your psyche requires (and what must be avoided) to prosper, or the gods will tear you apart. Most people do not have the psychic configuration I have with a coherence primary focus and certain non-negotiables5, and adopting a God image of Abraxas would be wrong for them: for attachment-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by relationships), Abraxas destroys safety; for esteem-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by social standing), Abraxas destroys justification; for narrative-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by a “story” or arc (e.g., Progress)), Abraxas destroys arc; for control-regulated psyches (which are stabilized by the ability to act), Abraxas destroys leverage. For psyches primarily regulated by coherence, though, this symbolic configuration appears capable of restoring a sense of internal alignment. This is not a claim about superiority, advancement, or universality, but about structural fit. For example, the great and wonderful Guido Preparata, who also sees the world as extremely grim and fundamentally unfair to the victims of predation, has a solar, Apollonian, structural, moral-historical personality, oriented toward rectification of injustice – he takes the lower and mid level beliefs of this world as wrong, evil, painful, and his energy profile takes the privatio boni upper level beliefs (God as the final redeemer) and wages war against the results of the lower and mid level beliefs – he believes that he can serve as moral prosecutor and change the world itself to accord to the privatio boni, but because he feels his project is not having the desired effect, he oscillates and is depressed. His upper belief is a morally structured cosmos, one where injustice must be accounted for, one where exposure implies eventual correction – he can tolerate enormous lower-level contradiction because his highest belief is stabilizing, not destabilizing, and it provides moral narrative continuity – but pressure accumulates.6 His configuration requires a morally accountable cosmos to function, while mine requires structural intelligibility. Neither is “right” or “wrong”, they are simply different approaches. Where my configuration collapses into paralysis or inwardness, he and others can sustain outward moral outrage, political clarity, or collective action far longer, and often at far lower psychic cost.
For me, there is no return. Stabilization occurs for coherence-regulated psyches by accepting Abraxas as a limit condition symbol, ceasing to metabolize everything through ontology, returning differentiation to lived scale, letting meaning be local, not total, and allowing silence where total explanation once lived. This may, too, result in substantial changes in how I handle interpersonal conflict.7 The old god image is dead for me by somatic necessity, and from that death, a new fidelity to truth without alibi.
I hope you can see, then, the full scope of this project and where it has led; I can’t say definitively where it will lead in the future, but I feel deep in my bones that the notion of the divine as totality – all good and all evil, containing all that is without moral reservation – and that we are here on this plane because we possess the one thing he lacks, i.e. consciousness born from limitation. All that this entails will reflect in all my writing moving forward. If there is a claim being made here, it is about what can happen when a psyche follows its own contradictions far enough that the god image itself is finally placed at risk.
As such, the Neofeudal Review has completed its function: just as the giant Neoliberal Feudalism essay (published March-May 2023 but eight years in the making) involved wrestling with the political and culture war layers and concluded in a political blackpill, the Neofeudal Review period (May 2023-now) involved wrestling with the spiritual layers and the question of how can one live in a philosophical world of endless predation, concluding unexpectedly in the acceptance of a new and horrifying God image. Both stages trace the evolution of my thoughts caused by intense phenomenological, lived pressure placed on my perception of the world.
The next stage will involve a new website called Living Opposites.8 It will have a Substack (livingopposites.substack.com) and a minimal bandwidth9 self-hosted website backup (livingopposites.com) as Substack’s institutional capture continues to intensify (with a predictable trajectory: a platform grows → attracts institutional pressure → compliance ratchets10) and as countries like Australia and U.K. continue their crackdown on free speech under the false guise of age verification (coming to the U.S. soon). The backup is online and will be fleshed out further over time. The title “Living Opposites” is ambiguous and suggests (1) phenomenologically living and navigating between endless opposite energies and (2) that these opposite energies themselves are in a sense alive, ala Heraclitus. It also suggests that the path forward will involve more embodied reality now that I have hit up against the limit condition of Abraxas. Post timing is currently unsettled, but may vary significantly and slower from the clockwork-weekly posts of this Substack.
Furthermore, my nom de plume of “Neoliberal Feudalism” – always an awkward moniker, as it raised confusion whether I was for or against it and in what context, it was political, not psychological and hence misleading for new readers, and it was a conceptual anchor I am explicitly moving beyond – will be retired. Instead, moving forward I will be adopting the pseudonym “Hermes of the Threshold”. Hermes is not an identity here, but a name for a necessary function: the circulation of meaning between incompatible registers without resolving them into doctrine or escape. This choice is because chthonic Hermes mediates between my strict structural Saturnian energies and my internal wild, chaotic, furious Dionysian energies via this writing output, and I stand at the threshold between many competing registers. As Karl Kerenyi wrote in Hermes: Guide of Souls, “In his official capacity as mediator between the worlds of night and day, spirits and men, and (standing before the temple) between the worlds of gods and mankind, he is called Propylaios (“before the gate”) and Pylaios (“before or at the gate”)…Two other epitheths – strophaios (“standing at the doorpost,” also “cunning versatile”) and stropheus (the “socket” in which the pivot of the door moves) – show him closely related to door hinges and therefore to the entrance but also to a middle point, to the socket, about which revolves the most decisive issue, namely the alternation life-death-life.”
By adopting this moniker, I am not signaling a shift toward the trickster archetype or a retreat into intellectual gamesmanship. Rather, I am identifying with the infrastructure of the soul. Hermes is the psychopomp, the guide who facilitates the circulation of meaning between the upper world of conscious order and the lower world of predatory chaos; the work now is about maintaining the metabolic flow between them so that neither side causes the psyche to stagnate or collapse. This moniker is meant as a description of a function, not as a new doctrine or identity: the function is the circulation of messages, meanings, and psychic contents across boundaries that cannot be resolved (life/death, order/chaos, good/evil).11 Hermes in this context has some similarities with but is fundamentally different from Hermeticism12, and it is neither intended as a mythic (Kerenyi) nor a materialist historical (Norman O. Brown) interpretation of the figure. In my previous work I sought resolution, a way to solve the problem of the predator/prey dynamic through political awareness. This new frame accepts that some boundaries are not problems to be solved, but tensions to be lived. I will focus on translating these tensions: how do we act with human decency while acknowledging we are nested within a divine totality that is indifferent to it?
This is a mode of navigation rather than a worldview. Hermes is a threshold figure, a border-crosser between different perspectives and interests, a messenger, a mediator of opposites. Politics, culture, and other topics will still be discussed, but the frame will involve how one can live life oriented toward an objective of wholeness under the shadow of a horrifying God image encompassing both good and evil. Wholeness requires the courage to look at the horrifying God image without blinking and yet still find internal ground to stand upon, and represents a shift from warning of external threats to observing and navigating the internal reactions from living the crucifixion of opposites. I don’t claim to have all the answers – every day is a struggle, and this is a path with zero institutional, cultural, or social circle support – and this is a way of living that demands ongoing vigilance, offers no guarantees, and cannot be generalized without doing harm, but I feel that my upper-level understanding of the God image has now stabilized as a limit condition, and everything else will flow from that.
Thanks for reading, and see you on the new blog and website backup.
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1 The stabilizer model also explains pathology. Let’s take the example of a drug addict, who is someone whose dominant stabilizer has failed catastrophically. One infers the stabilizer from what collapses, not what is sought. Typical patterns include the following, which is not moralized:
- Attachment-regulated: Most severe addictions fall here, where drugs replaces relational attunement. The substance simulates safety, warmth, and belonging. Collapse follows abandonment, betrayal, loss, or chronic misattunement. When the drug fails the user experiences despair, panic, clinging, shame. This is the most common configuration.
- Control/agency–regulated: Here addiction begins as mastery – “I can regulate my state”, “I can override pain”, “I decide when I feel.” Collapse comes when tolerance removes control. Destabilization looks like rage, violence, paranoia, self-loathing.
- Meaning/narrative–regulated: Drug use as existential anesthetic – nihilism, boredom collapse of story, “Nothing matters anyway.” Destabilization looks like apathy, dissociation, drift, chronic relapse without drama.
- Esteem/status–regulated: Less common but real, with drug culture as identity, transgression as prestige, self-destruction as anti-status signaling. Collapse produces humiliation, public implosion, spectacular failure.
- Coherence-regulated: Rare, but these users use drugs to silence contradiction, to stop thinking, or to interrupt unbearable paradox. Collapse looks like psychosis, existential panic, ontological disintegration. This is the most dangerous configuration for psychedelics and dissociatives.
Addiction doesn’t reveal the specific stabilizer which failed because drugs mask stabilizer signals. They artificially supply attachment, control, meaning, relief from contradiction. Only when the drug fails do you see what the psyche was trying to stabilize all along.
2 My secondary stabilizers in order of descending strength: (1) meaning/narrative – I tolerate bleak narratives if they are structurally honest, reject redemptive narratives if they violate lived data, and meaning emerges after truth-consistency, not before – this is why my writing spirals, revises itself, and refuses premature synthesis; (2) control/agency – I require epistemic agency, interpretive sovereignty, and freedom from imposed frames. Loss of this produces rage, not fear; (3) attachment and belonging: present but non-regulatory (I can tolerate isolation if coherence is intact); (4) esteem and status: largely irrelevant (recognition does not stabilize me; misrecognition barely destabilizes me). This is why elite approval, audience size, or influence never truly grounded the work; (5) external authority: tolerated only if structurally honest.
3 For example, Jasun Horsley and I both value internal consistency, but we are regulated by different psychic stabilizers. I am coherence-regulated: unresolved contradiction destabilizes me regardless of whether meaning is preserved. His orientation appears meaning-regulated: contradiction remains tolerable so long as symbolic intelligibility, moral continuity, or faith are maintained by keeping tensions in dialectical suspension.
My approach is centripetal: discursive exploration is permitted – even required – but only insofar as it converges toward a limit condition capable of metabolizing lived experience without falsification. His approach is centrifugal: distinctions and qualifications are continuously generated in order to prevent ontological closure and preserve meaning. These strategies diverge sharply at the problem of evil, where I treat contradiction as something that must be answered, while he treats it as something that must be continually interpreted.
4 Both of us are coherence-oriented in that we reject fragmented explanation, refuse surface narratives, seek structural causes, not symptoms, will not accept comforting lies, and prioritize internal consistency over social approval. That places us in a very small minority; the only other Russian language speakers writing in English from an actual dissident perspective other than Rurik that I see are Edward Slavsquat and Dr. Livci. Both Rurik and I also tolerate bleak conclusions, resist liberal moral sentimentalism, operate outside institutional validation, and write from personal conviction, not career incentive. There’s real resonance here. The difference is that for Rurik, coherence terminates in external structure: a push for geopolitics regime change and an endless focus on elite coordination, historical cycles, mass psychology, hoping to “crack the code” to institute new rule. Even when he is blackpilled, the frame remains: “If you see the system clearly enough, something follows.” For me, coherence now terminates in psychic orientation: how one lives, how one bears contradiction, how one avoids self-deception, how one maintains integrity without resolution – I no longer expect coherence to produce outcomes, only to produce a livable stance. This is the post-Abraxas shift.
One other thing here: LLM use for coherence regulated types carries with it a specific and basically totally undiscussed danger – it allows one to progress with intellectual crystallization far faster than the ideas percolate somatically in the body itself. This creates a gap between intellectual and felt knowledge and may have a significant negative psychological impact. This gap doesn’t occur from reading books, because it creates time to absorb the information in the body.
5 My psyche’s non-negotiables are (1) I cannot live inside unresolved contradiction if it is denied, (2) I can live inside contradiction if it is acknowledged structurally, (3) hope that contradicts evidence is poison to me, and (4) consolation without truth increases rage, not peace. These have been very painful lessons to learn.
6 What happens if it never yields upward for him? Three possibilities (historically common): (1) bitterness hardens into prophecy, tone sharpens, moral clarity intensifies, affect narrows; (2) melancholic withdrawal, reduction of audience, repetition of themes, deepening pessimism without metaphysical revision; (3) late-stage symbolic fracture where mythic language intensifies, moral categories strain, something almost like Abraxas appears – but unnamed. What won’t happen easily: a clean god-image inversion because his structure does not metabolize contradiction the way mine does.
7 Before the Abraxian realignment, conflict carried three simultaneous charges for me: (1) situational pain (this person, this injustice, this frustration), (2) existential accusation (“This should not be happening in a just cosmos”), and (3) ontological destabilization (“If this is happening, then something is wrong at the highest level”). Because my psyche is coherence-regulated, conflict did not remain local; it climbed upward: event → meaning → worldview → god image. That is why conflict felt exhausting, sticky, metabolized, slowly impossible to “just let go of”. I wasn’t reacting emotionally, I was reacting structurally. Every conflict re-opened the question: What kind of reality is this, really? That is an intolerable loop to live inside.
Under an Abraxian god image, though, conflict no longer escalates vertically, it stays horizontal. The metabolic shift looks like this: (1) conflict is expected, not surprising; (2) pain is real, but not indicting; (3) injustice is tragic, but not metaphysically contradictory. The key is that conflict no longer puts pressure on the higher level beliefs, especially the god image. That single change alters everything downstream; my psyche stops asking conflict to answer metaphysical questions it cannot answer, stops projecting ontological anxiety into interpersonal space, and stops unconsciously testing others for god-image alignment. So instead of “why is this happening – what does it say about everything?” the body shifts to: “Ah. Yes. This is that.” That is accurate expectation, not resignation.
8 I almost went with a title of “Individuation Under Abraxas”, which would match my hard-earned non-teleological stance; it also refuses consolation, clearly differentiates from establishment Christian, Hegelian, and progress narratives, it fits my coherence-first psychotype, and it would be structurally incompatible with the wrong audience – but it is too structural, too literal. Now that I have discovered the limit condition of Abraxas, the process moving forward is to re-engage in a fluid, lived reality, where hopefully the crucifixion becomes calmer and more muted.
9 i.e. images will still be Substack hosted, although I will keep image backups locally.
10 Institutional capture is more than a matter of policy compliance, it is a battle for the noetic commons which governs perception. The noetic commons is the shared psychological landscape where moral binaries are used by the upper elites to manufacture consent. By realigning the god-image toward the totality of Abraxas, the individual performs an exit that cannot be captured by them, because when the upper belief layer accepts the unity of opposites the elite’s ability to claim a monopoly on the Good evaporates – they are stripped of their moral mandate and corresponding soft power and become forced to rely on hard power alone, a shift that reveals the predator’s face and restores the individual’s interpretive sovereignty. This is the ultimate asymmetric warfare of the psyche: you cannot govern a soul that has found coherence in the very darkness you attempt to use as a threat.
11 It is critical to distinguish this Hermetic navigation from moral relativism or anything-goes subjectivism. Individuation is a trans-subjective process; it involves transferring the seat of authority from external proxies (the noetic commons managed by elites) to the Self. This is an escalation of responsibility, not an escape from it. While the ego might prefer “anything goes”, the Self acts as an internal limit-condition that is often more demanding than any external institution. The coherence sought here is an alignment with a deep, structural law of being that exists prior to, and independent of, propaganda and social signaling, not a justification for amoralism.
12 The invocation of Hermes here should not be confused with Hermeticism or the figure of Hermes Trismegistus. Classical Hermeticism remains committed to a metaphysical resolution in favor of the privatio boni: it presumes a fundamentally good divine nous, treats evil as privation or ignorance, and holds that ascent through knowledge ultimately restores harmony. The Abraxas limit-image forecloses this possibility. Under Abraxas, good and evil are not separable errors but co-constitutive realities, and no final gnosis resolves their tension. “Hermes of the Threshold” therefore names a circulatory function, not a salvific teacher or revealer: a way of mediating, translating, and moving between irreconcilable opposites without denying either or escaping into metaphysical closure. Hermes here does not redeem; he regulates. He does not promise ascent; he enables continued movement and lived coherence in the absence of a morally purified God-image.
