Living Opposites

Category: Living Opposites

  • Psychic Stabilizers in a Breaking World

    Different psyches are not broken in the same way or by the same things – they are organized around different primary stabilizers, and when those stabilizers fail under sufficient pressure, the failure looks different and demands different responses. This essay maps five primary stabilizer types, how neoliberal feudalism is degrading each of them, and why the solutions that work for one constitutional type are metabolically toxic for another.

    Welcome back. In my Formal Logic of the Crucifixion of Opposites post, I discussed how the concept of God as totality could not be identified with by limited beings, and how identification with it would lead to either ego inflation, total collapse, or paralysis, and therefore the solution was to identify one’s unique energy signature and God-given life path, to put up blinders and to focus on it. I wrote:

    P22. If totality cannot be inhabited, and if the privatio boni [redemptive] load-bearing structure has been recognized as metaphysically false, the individual faces the base-layer problem directly: the crucifixion of opposites must still be borne somewhere. It does not disappear because its previous container has been dissolved.

    P23. The structural solution is the rebirth of the gods within the psyche – the differentiation of totality’s energy currents into personalized functional positions that can be related to without identification. The specific symbolic vocabulary used for this differentiation – gods, planetary archetypes, psychological complexes, or other frameworks – is a heuristic interface rather than a metaphysical claim. What matters structurally is that the energy currents are differentiated and related to without identification rather than projected outward onto external authorities or discharged through acting-out. If MBTI, Big Five, or another mapping system provides an accurate somatic guide to one’s specific energy currents, it serves the same structural function (though typically with less symbolic depth than mythic or archetypal vocabularies, which carry greater load-bearing capacity for extended periods of psychic pressure). The map that produces accurate self-knowledge and keeps one on one’s constitutionally specific path is the operative criterion, not the symbolic vocabulary used.

    What I tried to do in this series and elsewhere was to break our energetic makeups into four constituent parts:

    1. An energy signature typology, which relates to where and how energy is directed and flows throughout our body;
    2. How these energy signatures interact with our physical makeup in the form of humors (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic), which determine how cheap or costly energy flow in certain directions is;
    3. as referenced in footnotes in that series and also in my post Individuation Under Abraxas, the specific stabilizers that people use to absorb the crucifixion of opposites. I had written: “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….” Stabilizers result from numerous genetic and environmental factors and include but is not limited to trauma adaptation, whether one is neurotypical or not, an epistemic temperament, and/or a spiritual orientation; and
    4. The God image acts as the cybernetic regulator of the stabilizer system, in the Ashby sense, which determines how that protection is interpreted and maintained.

    The framework effectively offers a four-pronged differentiation:

    1. Movement: Energy signatures describe how psychic force moves. Where does the energy go? (e.g., Introverted Intuition vs. Extroverted Sensing);
    2. Metabolism: humors describe how expensive different energetic operations are. What is the cost of moving that energy? (e.g., a sanguine person finds social interaction metabolically “cheap”; a melancholic finds it “expensive”);
    3. Regulation: stabilizers describe what the psyche ultimately protects. Why do we move the energy? What is the homeostatic goal? (the stabilizers);
    4. Orientation: God-images describe the highest-order regulatory architecture governing the stabilizers themselves. What reality is the psyche orienting toward? What range of contradiction, suffering, uncertainty, and ambiguity can be metabolized before destabilization occurs? (e.g., privatio boni, Abraxas, historical progress, enlightenment, cosmic indifference).

    For example, two people may both appear introverted: one because social interaction is metabolically expensive, another because coherence-seeking overrides social reward, another because attachment trauma makes closeness threatening, another because their symbolic/intellectual life is intrinsically rewarding. Two individuals may possess the same primary stabilizer while inhabiting radically different psychological worlds because they operate under different God images. An attachment-regulated Christian experiences abandonment differently than an attachment-regulated materialist. A coherence-regulated Abraxian metabolizes contradiction differently than a coherence-regulated believer in privatio boni. The stabilizer specifies the regulatory need; the God image specifies the highest-order architecture within which that need is organized, justified, and maintained.

    Most personality systems collapse movement, metabolism, regulation and orientation into one variable, which I think is incorrect. MBTI collapses cognition, orientation, and energy movement, Big Five collapses behavioral tendencies and emotional regulation, enneagram collapses defense structure and desire, and even Jung often blurred symbolic orientation with psychological function.

    Perhaps this approach is too unwieldy, and take from it as much or as little as you like. Looking at my energy signature phenomenologically (which, along with recursive political/cultural predictions, is largely how I attempt to determine what is true today, in an era when institutional trust has utterly collapsed) I can take this breakdown and state:

    1. My energy signature is primarily two rough polarities, a severe “Saturnian” exterior with a “Dionysian” (chained but wild) interior with “Hermes” serves as mediator in the form of writing output;
    2. My humors are primarily melancholic with choleric overlays and low sanguine1;
    3. My primary stabilizer is coherence. As I wrote, “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…For those with my psychic profile, contradiction feels like suffocation….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”; and
    4. My God image is a non-redemptive Abraxas, the horrifying unity of good and evil, totality.

    Putting these together, I have wild Dionysian energies chained by external Saturn severity, overlaying a melancholic core with choleric overlays which makes it metabolically expensive to process energy through action instead of introspection, leading to Hermes writing as output, all with the objective of trying to achieve coherence – to understand the world so that it makes sense, underneath an Abraxian non-redemptive God image.

    This is a specific combination, and it doesn’t mean my combination is better or worse than anyone else’s – it is a specific and narrow energy pattern which is geared toward intensity, interiority, understanding, and writing, and is very inefficient and poor in many areas. What I mean by this is that my somatic profile is specific and unique to me, with specific strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and challenges, and the same is true for everyone else with their own. A person isn’t “better” for having a certain energy signature; they just have a different metabolic profile and a different regulatory need. This creates a framework for incommensurability rather than superiority. What this means in effect is that my path is not your path, and your path is not anyone else’s path, and what is salvation for one person is poison for another.

    This is what I mean when I emphasize that a God image of Abraxas is (so far) good for my psyche – it solves the problem of somatically feeling as a crushing weight the endless contradictions in this realm, the injustice, the depravity, in a way that coheres for me, but this is a metabolically expensive solution – to hold the crucifixion of opposites internally until the transcendent function provides a provisional answer is very expensive, because it means I am spending my limited, finite energy looking internally instead of going out and making money or having adventures or being extroverted or whatever. This is why, if one adopts a non-redemptive God image, if one really grapples with this problem, it eventually becomes clear (if one doesn’t devolve into ego inflation or collapse) that this perspective is not one of superiority vs. those who have not undergone this specific path, but rather that a non-redemptive God image solves a very specific constitutional problem based on threshold conditions, i.e. no one will adopt a new God image – which is a very difficult, scary, uncertain and metabolically expensive undertaking – unless one has crossed a threshold where the pain of remaining where one is at exceeds the cost and uncertainty and fear of making that leap to a different God image, after every attempt to reinforce or stabilize the existing God image has failed. Everyone has such a threshold, but where that threshold is depends on one’s specific metabolic and psychological makeup. My contention is that more and more people will cross that threshold as neoliberal feudalism proceeds, making the vast majority of people materially poor, and (for those astrologically inclined) as the age continues its transition into Aquarius with the image of the water bearer representing individuals being forced to carry their own psychic weight. Threshold crossing occurs when a stabilizer can no longer be adequately regulated by its existing God-image architecture.

    Generally speaking, I think that those with a coherence primary stabilizer are more likely to cross that threshold before those of other primary stabilizers, mostly because of how intensely incoherent the world is today. There is so much contradiction, so much uncertainty, such a decline of societal expectations in hope and progress and meaning, a total devolution into secular material atomized nihilism, that those who are primarily stabilized by coherence are already under high internal stress loads. But that doesn’t mean that other stabilizers are immune to the effects of these societal changes.

    Let me briefly work through each of the stabilizers: (1) attachment and belonging, (2) esteem and status, (3) meaning and narrative, (4) control and agency, (5) coherence and truth-consistency.

    1. Attachment and Belonging

    The attachment-regulated psyche organizes reality around relational connection. Safety is relational, meaning is relational, the self exists in and through its bonds to others – family, community, beloved, tribe. What must remain intact is the sense of being held, known, and connected.

    The characteristic strength of those who are attachment-regulated is warmth, loyalty, and the capacity to sustain community across time. The attachment-regulated person can tolerate enormous external chaos such as political collapse, economic hardship, or philosophical incoherence as long as the relational field holds. The characteristic vulnerability is that relational rupture produces destabilization proportional to the depth of the bond. Abandonment, betrayal, death of the beloved are not ordinary losses to attachment-regulated psyches, they are regulatory catastrophes. No argument can substitute for the lost connection, no insight can metabolize the grief. I have an acquaintance who lost his mother a decade ago, and he still posts regular and glowingly about her on Instagram – this is a small example of an attachment-regulated psyche.

    The god-image most compatible with this stabilizer provides cosmic belonging, a personal God who knows and loves the individual, a divine family, a sense of being held by something that will not let go. The privatio boni works beautifully here. The all-good Father guarantees that the ultimate relationship cannot be broken. But the material substrate of attachment-regulation – stable communities, extended families, religious congregations, neighborhoods with multigenerational continuity, institutions worth belonging to – has been systematically dismantled by the same neoliberal feudal process that produces material deprivation. Economic precarity forces geographic mobility; people follow work, and following work severs the multigenerational rooting that genuine community requires. The digital substitution for community such as social media, parasocial relationships, and online belonging provides a simulacrum that activates the same social circuits without providing the metabolic equivalent. Virtual belonging is to genuine community what a photograph of food is to eating. The system registers the category without metabolizing the substance.

    For an attachment-regulated person, the Abraxian position does not primarily provide structural intelligibility, it provides something more counterintuitive: it removes the demand for cosmic belonging as a condition of psychic function. If totality contains all good and all evil without allegiance, without preference – if Abraxas is genuinely indifferent rather than personally loving – then the absence of relational confirmation from the cosmos stops being an accusation. The universe is not failing to love you; it does not have the capacity to love or fail to love in any personal sense. But this is a cold comfort and it is not available to many attachment-regulated constitutions. Some cannot metabolize an indifferent cosmos because the regulatory architecture requires personal relation as its foundation and Abraxas provides no personal relation, and for those constitutions the Abraxian position is metabolically toxic. What becomes available instead may be something closer to the differentiated gods: specific psychic energies that can be related to without being personal in the Christian sense but without being indifferent in the Abraxian sense. The Jungian anima, the specific archetype that claims a person, the God energy heuristics identified above are relational structures that survive the collapse of the personal God without requiring full adoption of Abraxian indifference.

    1. Esteem and Status

    The esteem-regulated psyche organizes reality around standing, recognition, and a viable position in the social field. The self is defined through its significance in the eyes of others through achievement, reputation, or the specific form of significance that transgression and rebellion can provide. What must remain intact is the sense of being someone whose existence registers as meaningful in the collective field. The characteristic strength is the capacity to sustain high-performance output when recognition is available, to maintain social intelligence, and to generate compelling self-presentation. Esteem-regulated people build, lead, and perform. The characteristic vulnerability is that status loss produces destabilization that no private reassurance can address. Public humiliation, professional failure, and social exile are felt as existential erasures, not ordinary setbacks. Being ignored is worse than being hated, because hatred still registers as recognition.

    The god-image most compatible with this stabilizer provides cosmic significance: election, a divine mission, a place in a meaningful hierarchy where virtue is ultimately recognized. The privatio boni works because it promises that alignment with the Good will be honored, that the moral order ultimately vindicates those who deserve vindication. But neoliberal feudalism produces a specific distribution of recognition: it concentrates status at the apex while systematically degrading the status infrastructure that previously allowed mid-tier actors to maintain viable social positions. Professions lose their prestige as credentials are devalued. Middle-class markers of status become increasingly inaccessible. Social media provides an endless performance of significance – follower counts, engagement metrics – that activates the esteem-seeking circuit without satisfying its regulatory function, serving as the form without the substance.

    The Abraxian position for esteem-regulated constitutions offers an uncomfortable reframing: if totality contains all recognition and all invisibility without remainder, if cosmic indifference means that significance is not cosmically guaranteed, then the drive for recognition stops being oriented toward an eventual accounting that will vindicate the effort. What becomes available instead is a position I have inhabited: the work has intrinsic value regardless of whether it registers. The creative instant in which something timeless is produced, whether or not ten thousand people admire it, a comment made by Picasso as related by Ernst Junger.2 This removes the cosmic guarantee of recognition without removing the value of the work. But this is also cold comfort and it is not available to all esteem-regulated constitutions.

    1. Meaning and Narrative

    The meaning-regulated psyche organizes reality around story, purpose, and the sense that existence participates in something larger than the individual life. The self is defined through its role in a narrative arc as protagonist, witness, contributor, or inheritor of something that matters. What must remain intact is the sense that the sequence of events constitutes a story with direction, that suffering serves a purpose, that the individual life is embedded in a larger significance. The characteristic strength is the capacity to sustain enormous deprivation as long as the narrative frame holds. The characteristic vulnerability is narrative collapse – the loss of the story that made suffering meaningful, the revelation that the arc doesn’t bend the way the narrative required. The god-image most compatible with this stabilizer provides cosmic story: creation, fall, redemption. The privatio boni is structurally optimal here because it guarantees that the story ends well. The secular-progressive narrative is its modern mutation: the arc of history bending toward justice, the story of civilization advancing.

    This narrative has been the dominant load-bearing structure for meaning-regulated psyches across the ideological spectrum for two centuries, and it is failing on its own terms; not because it has been philosophically refuted but because the material evidence of its failure has accumulated beyond the narrative’s capacity to metabolize it without increasingly obvious special pleading. Inequality increases despite decades of progressive policy, the institutions built to produce justice increasingly serve elite capture, the technology that was supposed to liberate produces the most sophisticated surveillance and control apparatus in history. The meaning-regulated person who has invested their regulatory architecture in the progressive narrative must either perform increasingly implausible special pleading or begin the slow recognition that the narrative frame itself is compromised.

    The path from meaning-regulation threshold toward Abraxas is in some ways the most direct of the four non-coherence paths, because the meaning-regulated person is already constitutionally oriented toward narrative and symbolic architecture. The move is not from symbolism to structure, as it is for coherence-regulation, but from redemptive narrative to tragic narrative, from a story that promises resolution to a story that acknowledges permanent crucifixion as the condition rather than the problem. The tragic vision by Homer or Ecclesiastes has historically been the most accessible secular alternative to redemptive religion for meaning-regulated constitutions. It retains narrative form while refusing the redemptive arc.

    1. Control and Agency

    The control-regulated psyche organizes reality around the capacity to act effectively. The self is defined through its efficacy – the ability to intervene, redirect, build, or prevent. What must remain intact is the sense that agency is real and that its exercise makes a difference.

    The characteristic strength is sustained action under adverse conditions, strategic thinking when others have collapsed into affect, and the specific form of courage that comes from being oriented toward what can be done. The characteristic vulnerability is the encounter with genuine helplessness – situations where nothing that can be done makes a difference, where the system is too large for effective intervention. The failure signature is rage first, and then something more dangerous: the substitution of symbolic agency for real agency.

    This is perhaps the stabilizer most directly targeted by the architecture currently being assembled. The panopticon, the algorithmic mediation of social life, the CBDC infrastructure, the AI surveillance apparatus are all systems that reduce the effective agency of ordinary actors while concentrating it at the apex. The control-regulated person does not primarily need community or recognition or structural coherence, they need to act effectively in the world, and the world is being redesigned to make effective action by non-apex actors increasingly impossible.

    The Abraxian position for control-regulated constitutions offers the most counterintuitive reframe of all: if totality contains both agency and its absence without remainder, if cosmic indifference means there is no ultimate guarantee that right action produces right outcomes (reminding me of the great Chinese “maybe” story as recounted by Alan Watts), then the absence of efficacy stops being a temporary obstacle to be overcome by greater effort and becomes a structural feature of the condition itself. This removes the implicit promise that sufficient agency will eventually restore control. What becomes available is precise discrimination between what is and what is not within the domain of genuine agency (i.e. the serenity prayer), combined with full commitment to what is within that domain and full acceptance of what is not.

    1. Coherence and Truth-Consistency

    The coherence-regulated psyche organizes reality around structural integrity, logical consistency, and the correspondence between model and world. The self is defined through its capacity to hold a non-contradictory orientation, to see reality clearly, without special pleading. What must remain intact is the sense that the highest-order framework contains no unresolvable contradictions that require active suppression.

    The characteristic strength is immunity to motivated reasoning, pattern recognition across domains, and the courage to prioritize accuracy over comfort. The coherence-regulated person can tolerate material deprivation, isolation, and bleakness as long as the structural frame holds. The characteristic vulnerability is that contradiction produces destabilization that no amount of emotional reassurance, relational warmth, status, or narrative meaning can compensate for. False coherence feels like suffocation.

    The god-image most compatible with this stabilizer provides structural intelligibility: a metaphysics without internal fracture. The privatio boni fails here not because it is emotionally unsatisfying but because it is structurally unsound. Evil is not a privation to anyone who has witnessed its positive, generative power. The coherence-regulated psyche experiences this as a regulatory catastrophe – the body registers the contradiction before the mind finishes the argument.

    The Abraxian position offers structural relief rather than comfort. If God is totality containing all good and all evil without remainder, the contradiction disappears. Observed injustice and depravity are not exceptions to be explained away but the content of the divine, metabolized without special pleading. The cost is high – holding the crucifixion of opposites internally requires metabolically expensive presence – but for the coherence-regulated psyche, non-falsity is the precondition for all other goods. Without it, no love, recognition, meaning, or agency can stabilize the system. With it, even suffering becomes potentially bearable, because suffering is no longer compounded by a god-image that claims love while permitting atrocity.

    Stabilizer Mismatch

    The stabilizer model explains why standard solutions work for some people but systematically fail others and why those people are often blamed for the failure.

    Most therapeutic modalities are designed implicitly for specific stabilizer types. Cognitive behavioral therapy targets the stories people tell about events, restructuring catastrophizing narratives, challenging irrational beliefs. For meaning-regulated psyches, this can be genuinely effective because restructuring the narrative restores regulatory function. But for other types it often does not work. For coherence-regulated psyches, it often fails because the problem is not the narrative content but the structural integrity of the highest-order orientation, which CBT doesn’t reach. For attachment-regulated psyches, CBT can feel cold and relationally insufficient, the therapeutic relationship itself is often more important than the cognitive restructuring. For control-regulated psyches, CBT can feel passive – talking about thoughts doesn’t feel like doing something. The modality works for some constitutions and not others, and the failure is typically attributed to the patient rather than to the mismatch.

    Attachment-based therapies are highly effective for attachment-regulated psyches and often puzzling or frustrating for coherence-regulated ones, who experience the warmth of the therapeutic relationship as pleasant but regulatorily beside the point. The same coherence-regulated patient may be diagnosed as intellectualizing or avoiding affect. Meanwhile, control-regulated patients may find attachment-based work aimless – they want tools, not attunement. Esteem-regulated patients may find it useful only insofar as the therapist’s validation substitutes for the recognition they need, which creates dependency rather than resolution.

    The practical implication is a prior diagnostic question that current frameworks don’t ask: what is this person’s primary stabilizer, what has destabilized it, and what would restore its function? A person presenting with depression who is attachment-regulated needs something different from a person with identical symptom severity who is coherence-regulated, control-regulated, or esteem-regulated. Treating them with the same protocol because they share a diagnostic category is the therapeutic equivalent of prescribing the same medication to everyone with chest pain regardless of whether the cause is cardiac, musculoskeletal, or anxiety-related.

    The same dynamic operates in institutions. Schools are designed around social belonging (the classroom community, peer relationships, the teacher as attachment figure) and narrative meaning (grades as progress, curriculum as arc, graduation as completion). These are effective for attachment and meaning-regulated students. For coherence-regulated students who need structural integrity rather than social belonging, the gap between the institutional narrative and the actual experience can be destabilizing (and this explains why I have always hated and been bored by formal schooling). For control-regulated students who need efficacy and real-world impact, the endless preparatory exercises can feel like busywork. For esteem-regulated students, the grading system works only if they are winning; once they fall behind, the same system that motivated them becomes a source of shame. Each stabilizer type experiences the same institution differently, and institutional design treats one type’s needs as universal.

    Religious communities are designed almost entirely around attachment and meaning stabilization (belonging to the community of faith, participation in a narrative of salvation). The instruction to have faith in the face of doubt works well for attachment-regulated psyches (trust the relationship with God) and meaning-regulated psyches (trust the arc of the story). It fails coherence-regulated psyches who cannot suppress what the body registers as structurally contradictory and it also fails control-regulated psyches who need efficacy, not trust. The same community that stabilizes some members destabilizes others, and the destabilized are typically seen as having a personal crisis of faith rather than a constitutional mismatch.

    At the interpersonal level, stabilizer mismatch is a structural source of relational friction. The attachment-regulated partner who responds to distress with increased closeness seeking is doing what their regulatory system requires, the coherence-regulated partner who withdraws into structural analysis is doing what theirs requires, the control-regulated partner who wants to fix the problem is doing what theirs requires, the meaning-regulated partner who wants to understand what the conflict means for the story of the relationship is doing what theirs requires. Each is genuinely trying to repair the connection through the mechanism that works for them, but each experiences the other’s repair attempt as aggravating the problem because each is solving for their own stabilizer rather than the other’s. This cannot be resolved by better communication alone, because the communication itself is routed through different regulatory architectures.3

    The most practically important effect of the stabilizer model at the individual level is the conversion of experienced failure into constitutional information. The person who has repeatedly failed to be stabilized by therapeutic interventions, institutional participation, or relational intimacy has typically been told that the failure reflects a deficit in them. The stabilizer model reframes this: the interventions failed because they were designed for different regulatory architectures. The failure is not a sign that something is wrong with the person but that the person has been applying solutions designed for other stabilizer types to a problem their own type presents. This reframing does not solve the problem, but it removes the secondary suffering of believing oneself to be uniquely broken. The problem becomes structural rather than personal. That shift is small in description and large in consequence.

    The same mismatch can occur at the level of God-images. A religious architecture optimized for attachment-regulated psyches may destabilize coherence-regulated ones. A God-image that provides profound structural relief for coherence-regulated constitutions may feel cold, alien, or psychologically hostile to attachment-regulated constitutions. This helps explain why theological disagreement is often experienced somatically rather than intellectually; the disagreement is not really over doctrine (although people consciously think that) but over competing regulatory architectures attempting to stabilize different constitutional needs.

    Conclusion

    The threshold model, then, is not a single path with different speeds. It is multiple paths with different phenomenologies, different trigger conditions, and different endpoints, some of which are full Abraxian adoption and some of which are post-privatio boni positions that stop short of Abraxas but have moved beyond the available redemptive alternatives. What they share is the structural mechanism: the primary stabilizer is no longer being adequately metabolized by the available regulatory architecture, and the threshold has been crossed where the cost of remaining inside the failing architecture exceeds the cost and uncertainty of reorganization.

    The framework is not predicting mass adoption of Abraxas. Most psyches that cross their threshold will reach for compensatory intensification first – doubling down on the available redemptive alternatives, joining high-demand communities, attaching to totalistic political movements – and only a subset will find their way to any post-privatio boni position through the long and metabolically expensive process of genuine reorganization. But the number crossing their threshold will increase as neoliberal feudalism continues its advance, and the number finding that the available redemptive alternatives cannot metabolize their specific threshold condition will increase alongside it.

    What the framework offers those people is not a solution but a legibility – a name for what is happening that does not require pretending the privatio boni is still working when the body has already registered that it isn’t. The crucifixion of opposites does not end, the path does not resolve, but understanding the structure of what is happening potentially makes it possible to bear without the additional suffering of confusion. That is not redemption, it is not salvation, it is the cold comfort of coherence, and for those who need it, it may be enough.

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    1

    I had written: “My melancholic core relates to depth processing, high sensitivity to contradiction, long integration cycles, and symbolic metabolism, while my choleric overlay (conditional) relates to sharp articulation and structural clarity, and carries with it a capacity for decisive action after integration. I have low sanguine; this mean I have low tolerance for noise, low reward from novelty, and high cost from social performance. I am highly efficient in narrow, aligned channels. When the pressure is real (not artificial or performative), the problem is structural (not tactical or social), the frame allows integration rather than compliance, and the output is symbolic, analytic, or synthetic (writing, theory-building, pattern recognition) my system converts energy with very low loss. In those states I don’t thrash, I don’t loop emotionally, I don’t require much external regulation, and my output is dense relative to input.” There are substantial negatives associated with this configuration too, which I discussed in Part 2 of that series.

    2

    “As for posthumous literary glory, I don’t set excessive store by it. I’m skeptical, for I’ve observed that such glory pales even in an author’s lifetime. He then leads the life of a pauvre poete oublie [a poor forgotten poet]. Or else he behaves very sensibly, like Rimbaud, who after producing an exceptional literary oeuvre in his youth, devoted himself to commerce in Africa; that was more important in his eyes. And sub specie aeternitatis, the day will come when even Homer will be totally unknown. Glory is like the blazing tale of a comet, which still sparkles for a while in the wake of the work. You may then wonder what the goal of writing is assuming it has a goal. It is the creative instant itself, in which something timeless is produced, something that cannot be wiped out. The universe has affirmed itself in the individual, and that must suffice, whether or not anyone else notices it. In 1942, when I visited Picasso on Rue des Grands-Augustins, he said to me: “Look, this painting, which I have just completed, is going to have a certain effect; but this effect would be exactly the same, metaphysically speaking, if I wrapped the painting up in paper and cosigned it to a corner. It would be exactly the same thing as if ten thousand people had admired it.” – p. 56, The Details of Time

    3

    This may sound superficially like the Five Love Languages framework, but the difference is one of depth. Love languages describe how people prefer to receive affection – words, touch, service, time, gifts. The stabilizer model describes what the psyche is organized around at the level of regulatory architecture. The attachment-regulated partner doesn’t just prefer closeness; closeness is what prevents their system from destabilizing. The coherence-regulated partner doesn’t just prefer clarity; structural honesty is what prevents their system from suffocating. The repair mechanisms aren’t preferences that could be swapped for another love language with sufficient goodwill. They are constitutional requirements, and when they are not met, the result is not disappointment but regulatory crisis.

  • The God-Image as Regulatory Architecture

    This essay argues that god-images function as highest-order psychophysiological regulatory architectures rather than as theological opinions, organizing perception, affect, and bodily coherence across every domain of human experience. When a new god-image is articulated in systematic form, the act is recursive where the framework participates in the psychic reorganization it describes. This quality is a consequence of the framework’s central claim: that the god-image determines how contradiction itself is metabolized, and that changing it constitutes a regulatory intervention rather than a change of opinion.

    Welcome back. In general, reading and writing serve as a pressure release valve; this is because when ideas are verbalized the thought becomes an object separate from the thinker and therefore manageable (this is also why mass censorship increases societal pressure, because the ideas have no verbalization outlet). The God-as-totality Abraxian metaphysical framework seems to operate in reverse, though: the more precisely it is articulated, the deeper it acts on me. Rereading the logic of the crucifixion of opposites essay (and I felt compelled to read it maybe a dozen times post-publication) produced a renewed sense of this simultaneously Christian and anti-Christian, gnostic and anti-gnostic God image being metabolized, as though the text were an ongoing reorganization of the perceptual and somatic systems that generated it.

    This follows directly from the framework’s central claim: that a god-image is not primarily a theological opinion, but rather a highest-order psychophysiological regulatory architecture organizing perception, affect, interpretation, motivation, contradiction tolerance, and bodily coherence. We are metabolic and energy beings and our top level beliefs affect every nested belief below it. If that is true, then articulating a new god-image in systematic form is a regulatory intervention, not an intellectual exercise. The framework recursively participates in psychic organization and orientation as much as it describes it, and it predicts that it will operate this way – the accuracy of that prediction becomes a part of its own metabolic-coherence validation structure.

    1. The Rupture

    Most people think of a god-image as a religious opinion, a symbolic preference, an ideological framework, or perhaps a cultural inheritance. This framework treats it as something foundational: a highest-order cybernetic regulator organizing the psyche-body system as a whole.

    This changes almost everything: if the god-image is regulatory rather than merely propositional, then contradictions at that level do not remain intellectual, they propagate downward recursively into perception, affect, bodily tension, motivation, moral orientation, relational patterns, identity stability, political participation, and eventually civilization-scale symbolic organization. Therefore theology, psychology, politics, embodiment, and cybernetics cease being separate domains entirely and become different observational angles of the same recursive regulation process. The god-image sits at the apex of that process because it determines how contradiction itself is metabolized. Modernity became capable of analyzing subsystems by severing them from the total regulatory architecture they once inhabited – theology became belief, psychology became cognition, politics became administration, economics became incentive management, and embodiment became biology. This fragmentation increased analytic precision while simultaneously obscuring the organism-level regulatory unity those domains previously constituted. The modern mind therefore tends to interpret symbolic systems as “mere ideas” because it encounters them after the regulatory totality has already been conceptually disassembled.

    A redemptive god-image regulates individuals by promising that evil is temporary, contradiction is resolvable, suffering is meaningful, moral alignment is possible, history bends toward justice, and reality is fundamentally good. This produces enormous psychophysiological consequences: hope, future orientation, moral mobilization, institutional trust, capacity for sacrifice, collective coordination, psychological offloading, civilization-scale coherence. The regulatory efficiency is immense. But the Abraxian framework argues that this coherence comes at the cost of metabolically falsifying certain forms of lived phenomenological data. Specifically: the irreducibility of contradiction, the persistence of evil, the inevitability of double binds, the impossibility of final reconciliation, the constitutive nature of suffering, and the permanent crucifixion of opposites. If lived experience repeatedly contradicts the highest-order regulatory image, then incoherence accumulates throughout the system. And here the framework makes its most important move: it interprets psychological suffering as regulatory contradiction between lived phenomenology and inherited god-image architecture, not merely as pathology or trauma.

    That is a profoundly different model of the psyche. The psyche is no longer primarily a pleasure-seeking machine, a rational calculator, a trauma repository, or a self-authoring identity construct. It becomes a symbolic-metabolic regulation system attempting to maintain coherence between experience and highest-order orientation.1

    This framework operates across two levels whose relationship remains uncertain. At the regulatory level, the god-image’s reality is established by its psychophysiological consequences, i.e. a highest-order regulatory architecture that produces measurable effects on perception, affect, motivation, and somatic organization and therefore is rooted in material reality and thereby measurable in some sense. Whether the regulatory architecture also tracks metaphysical structure – whether the irreducibility of contradiction at the experiential level reflects genuine ontological co-originality of good and evil – is a question the regulatory framework cannot answer from within its own terms. This agnosticism acknowledges that the epistemological reach of the metabolic coherence criterion extends to regulatory reality and not further. The metaphysical claim, if it is to be made (and I do make it), must be made on other grounds – phenomenological, ontological, revelatory, or via recursive prediction – and the epistemological level of this framework neither requires nor forecloses it.

    II. The Criterion Shift

    This reframes the question of what makes a belief system “true.” Modern discourse evaluates worldviews according to familiar standards: empirical verification, moral acceptability, social legitimacy, emotional comfort, ideological consistency, political usefulness, therapeutic benefit, personal empowerment. Even when these standards conflict, they operate within a shared grammar. Beliefs are treated as propositions to be judged, identities to be inhabited, or values to be affirmed.

    The framework shifts the terrain underneath those categories. The central question becomes not “Is this belief morally approved?” or “Is this belief socially validated?” or even “Is this belief objectively true in some detached sense?” The question becomes: Does this worldview produce increasing coherence or increasing contradiction between lived phenomenological experience and highest-order orientation?

    This is neither straightforward empiricism nor conventional mysticism; it is closer to metabolic realism. A worldview is not primarily important because it is emotionally comforting or socially adaptive, it is important because it organizes psychic energy. The consequences of this shift are enormous. Once beliefs are viewed as regulatory structures rather than mere intellectual positions, large portions of modern life appear differently: political movements, ideological commitments, institutional loyalties, moral panics, therapeutic frameworks, even interpersonal relationships stop looking primarily like rational debates over truth claims and begin looking like stabilization attempts by organisms struggling to maintain coherence under conditions of existential contradiction.

    The symbolic and the physiological are not separate domains operating independently, they are recursive layers of the same process. A contradiction at the level of highest-order belief eventually propagates downward into perception, affect, bodily stress, identity fragmentation, compulsive projection, relational instability, and ideological rigidity. Likewise, symbolic structures that successfully organize psychic energy create temporary coherence: meaning, motivation, solidarity, moral orientation, emotional containment. More precisely, theology regulates meaning horizons and contradiction tolerance; politics regulates collective coordination and aggression distribution; media regulates perceptual salience and symbolic participation; morality regulates social trust and motivational hierarchy; economics regulates temporal orientation and libido distribution; psychology regulates internal contradiction management; embodiment registers cumulative coherence or incoherence physiologically. None of these operate independently, they are nested scales of a single organism-environment symbolic metabolism. A disturbance at the highest regulatory level – the god-image – propagates downward through all of them simultaneously. This is why the civilizational symbolic collapse we are experiencing does not produce merely intellectual uncertainty, it produces psychophysiological fragmentation across every nested layer at once.

    If worldviews are evaluated by metabolic coherence rather than propositional truth, then this framework is also subject to that criterion. The implicit claim is that the Abraxian regulatory architecture produces greater coherence between lived phenomenology and highest-order orientation for constitutionally specific psyches than privatio boni does – not for everyone, but for those for whom privatio boni was generating increasing incoherence.2 Whether it passes that test is not determinable in advance, it is legible only through the longitudinal record of whether the reorganization it induces produces increasing coherence or increasing contradiction in the psyches it reorganizes. That is a falsifiable claim, which is more than most metaphysical systems offer. For constitutionally specific psyches (primarily those coherence regulated), the inherited anesthesia no longer functions because their regulatory systems have become sensitized to the specific falsification the architecture requires. Repeated exposure to lived phenomenological data that the god-image cannot metabolize without suppression eventually degrades the suppression mechanism itself. The sensitization is a loss of metabolic insulation that makes the Abraxian architecture the only available regulatory option that does not require ongoing suppression of what the body already registers as false. This is why the transition is experienced as forced recognition rather than chosen belief, naming what sensitized organisms have already been living without a vocabulary adequate to the experience.

    Measurability

    The framework’s submission to its own criterion operates on two tracks simultaneously. The first is internal: does inhabiting the Abraxian regulatory architecture produce increasing coherence or increasing contradiction in the psyche that attempts it, measured longitudinally through somatic stability and the reduction of psychophysiological pressure? The second is external: does the framework generate greater predictive accuracy about political and cultural developments than the alternatives it displaces? The privatio boni framework predicts that moral forces tend toward eventual victory, that justice bends toward restoration, that predatory structures are ultimately unstable. The Abraxian framework predicts that apex predation is structurally self-reproducing, that redemptive political movements generate new predatory structures rather than eliminating predation, and that civilizational contradiction intensifies rather than resolves toward synthesis. The empirical record of political and cultural development constitutes a longitudinal test of these competing predictions. Based on decades of observation, holding opposites dispassionately – neither collapsing toward redemptive optimism nor toward nihilistic negation – produces measurably greater predictive accuracy than the redemptive grammar does.3 That external validation track is independent of subjective coherence and operates as a check against the circularity that any self-referential framework risks. The two tracks together – internal coherence and external predictive accuracy – constitute the framework’s epistemological method, and their convergence is the strongest available epistemic signal.

    This is not subjectivism; a regulatory architecture that produces temporary psychological coherence while degrading predictive contact with reality will eventually fail metabolically as contradiction accumulates. Likewise, a framework that generates accurate predictions while producing increasing psychophysiological disintegration in the organism inhabiting it is also incomplete. The criterion is not comfort, nor mere survival, nor instrumental success in isolation, it is sustained coherence across both experiential and predictive domains simultaneously. The framework therefore rejects both naïve objectivism and postmodern relativism. Regulatory architectures are neither arbitrary narratives nor purely detached truth-propositions, they are organism-reality mediation systems whose adequacy becomes visible through longitudinal consequences.

    III. The Reframing of the Social World

    From this perspective, the modern world increasingly appears psychologically strange. Modernity simultaneously dissolves inherited symbolic systems while continuing to require the organism to function coherently under conditions those systems previously stabilized. The result is chronic fragmentation. The modern subject is told that reality is mechanistic, meaning is subjective, morality is socially constructed, identity is self-generated, transcendence is suspect, tradition is oppressive, and truth is endlessly negotiable, while simultaneously being expected to maintain stable motivation, psychological coherence, moral orientation, relational trust, and existential resilience.

    The system increasingly lacks a shared symbolic grammar capable of metabolizing contradiction at scale. This helps explain why modern populations oscillate so violently between ideological fanaticism, therapeutic narcissism, political hysteria, conspiratorial thinking, identity absolutism, nihilistic entertainment, and compulsive moral mobilization, because they are compensatory stabilization attempts to failed offloading mechanisms. People are attempting to regulate unbearable contradiction.

    Political polarization begins looking less like disagreement and more like competing coherence systems defending themselves against disintegration. Moral outrage becomes partially intelligible as projection management where unresolved contradiction displaced outward onto sanctioned enemies, institutional loyalty becomes a stabilizing attachment to symbolic structures that reduce existential uncertainty, and conversion experiences become large-scale reorganizations of psychic energy around new orienting architectures.

    Noetic commons and apex predation

    The noetic commons, in this sense, is civilization-scale psychophysiological regulation where elite soft power acts as management of god-image architecture at mass scale. This produces a specific structural dynamic at the apex: high-agency actors who have operationally abandoned the mass regulatory architecture while continuing to maintain it for collective coordination purposes are engaged in regulatory arbitrage, where they exempt themselves from the contradiction-management constraints the architecture imposes on the population while extracting the coordination benefits that architecture generates. The mass symbolic system continues generating civilization-scale coherence – hope, moral mobilization, institutional trust, sacrificial coordination – while apex actors operate outside its constraints. The Sabbatean and Frankist antinomian strands discussed previously are the most explicit historical articulation of this structure with the permission architecture for regulatory arbitrage at the apex formalized as theology, but the dynamic is not confined to those lineages. It describes the operational logic of any apex tier that has privately abandoned the redemptive grammar it publicly enforces.4 The simultaneous public enforcement and private suspension of moral architectures – controlled transgression, symbolic inversion, selective antinomianism – act as cybernetic asymmetry at its outer boundary.

    The population for whom the redemptive anesthesia fails is not fixed, it is based on threshold dynamics. The threshold marks the line where offloading the crucifixion of opposites is greater or less than bearing the cost of bearing it internally, and it differs from individual to individual based on one’s primary stabilizers (see footnote two), although likely measurable on larger populations statistically. As civilizational contradiction intensifies through technological amplification of opposing forces, the collision of incompatible symbolic systems at global scale, and the acceleration of information that makes shadow suppression increasingly difficult, the falsification cost of maintaining redemptive architectures rises faster than those architectures’ stabilizing capacity. What presents clinically as epidemic anxiety, depression, political radicalization, and identity fragmentation is partially the observable signature of this process: organisms whose inherited regulatory architecture can no longer metabolize the contradiction load being imposed on it, reaching for emergency compensatory stabilization in the absence of any alternative (including doubling down on redemptive narratives). This framework is not intended to convince people by rational argument; it is intended to provide language to those who are already somatically crucified between the opposites and lack the words and structure to articulate it – it is intended to find resonance for those already at or across the threshold. However, it also anticipates that those approaching the threshold will increase over time as neoliberal feudalism continues to ratchet and intensify.

    IV. The Ancient After Cybernetics

    The Abraxian framework feels simultaneously ancient and unprecedented because it recombines domains that modernity has spent centuries separating. Premodern consciousness did not sharply distinguish psyche from cosmos, morality from fate, embodiment from politics, metaphysics from daily life, which were experienced as interwoven layers of a single reality.

    Modernity fragmented them into disciplines: psychology studies the mind, politics studies power, neuroscience studies the brain, theology studies belief, sociology studies institutions, economics studies incentives. The framework argues that these are not truly separate systems, they are nested layers of symbolic-metabolic regulation emerging from the same organism-environment process.

    Ancient symbolic systems achieved integration of cosmology, embodiment, morality, and social order but lacked the recursive systems language to describe their own operation – they functioned without being able to model themselves functioning. The king, the gods, fertility, war, ritual, ethics, and cosmic order formed one integrated symbolic metabolism whose regulatory function was real even when its cosmological claims were not literally accurate. Modernity shattered that unity into disciplines – science studied matter, psychology studied mind, economics studied incentives, politics studied power, theology became privatized belief – and in doing so dissolved the integrated regulatory architecture without replacing its function. Modern cybernetics and systems theory subsequently rediscovered regulation formally but evacuated symbolic depth in the process: it could describe recursive self-organization without being able to ground meaning within it.

    This framework attempts the recombination. It uses second-order cybernetic vocabulary to describe what ancient symbolic systems were actually doing, and it uses the symbolic depth of those traditions to give the cybernetic description its full weight. The result is neither a return to premodern cosmology nor a reduction to systems theory, it requires both registers simultaneously. The fragmentation became pathogenic because the civilization lost a coherent highest-order symbolic regulator capable of metabolizing contradiction across levels simultaneously. The framework names that loss enough to make it visible without pretending the integrated premodern architecture can be simply restored, and it does so without collapsing into either scientistic reductionism or vague spirituality. Most contemporary spirituality immediately reintroduces redemption, cosmic benevolence, manifestation, enlightenment, healing, transcendence, universal love, or ego-inflating narratives of awakening. This framework blocks those exits and insists instead that contradiction is structural, the opposites are irreducible, totality itself is unconscious, consciousness emerges through limitation, and the psyche cannot inhabit totality directly without collapse.

    Most systems promise stabilization through eventual resolution, but this framework proposes stabilization through conscious load-bearing. The individuating psyche is not saved, instead it develops enough internal structure to metabolize contradiction without externalizing it entirely onto institutions, ideologies, enemies, movements, or redemptive teleologies. This is not enlightenment or empowerment, it is forced reorganization under psychic pressure for those who have passed the threshold. The crucifixion of opposites is permanent as a condition of life.

    V. The Denial of Psychic Rewards

    Most comprehensive metaphysical systems offer rewards to those who adopt them, which include redemption, moral certainty, collective identity, transcendence, utopian resolution, heroic purpose, divine protection, historical inevitability, existential consolation. The creator of a grand theory typically becomes elect, awakened, saved, morally elevated, historically aligned, spiritually protected, or cosmically justified.

    The Abraxian framework systematically blocks those exits as anti-narcissistic stabilizers, insisting that the position it describes is not superiority but incommensurability to its inhabitants – a different scale, not a higher rung. It claims the framework cannot spread without destroying its function, that the intervention removes the anesthesia without removing the crucifixion or elite control, that individuation does not protect against predation and does not guarantee anything other than increased clarity. Individuation becomes a metabolic necessity for those past the threshold rather than an election, something forced by constitutional pressure, not chosen by virtue.

    As such, this framework is being constructed at significant personal cost without the ordinary compensating payoffs that grand theory construction delivers. The psychic rewards are blocked by the framework’s own logic. The work continues not because it produces recognition, community, status, wealth, or existential comfort – it produces none of these reliably – but because the alternative is increasing psychosomatic pressure from a path not followed, previously discussed here.

    VI. The Uncomfortable Middle

    Modern liberal consciousness is heavily organized around the image of the sovereign rational chooser, where the self is imagined as freely selecting beliefs, identities, values, and goals from a neutral position. But from a metabolic-coherence perspective, beliefs are not freely selected in that simplistic sense. Instead, they emerge from recursive interaction between constitution, developmental experience, symbolic environment, embodied contradiction, social reinforcement, and lived phenomenology.

    As mentioned above, a psyche under sufficient incoherence pressure does not “decide” to reorganize, reorganization increasingly becomes structurally necessary for continued functioning. The path is recognized, not freely invented. The threshold is crossed when the cost of not crossing exceeds the cost of crossing. Agency is real but bounded – the choice is whether to align with the reorganization or resist it, and resistance produces its own specific suffering. That intermediate zone – constrained inevitability without full fatalism – is psychologically uncanny because modern consciousness is built around narratives of self-authorship. The framework partially dissolves that narrative without collapsing into mechanism either – the psyche still participates, recognition still matters, alignment still matters, but the path appears discovered rather than invented.

    VII. Conclusion

    The framework continues metabolizing somatically post-publication because it functions as a regulatory intervention into god-image architecture; it predicts this recursive reorganization process and then induces it. The old redemptive regulatory structure weakens, my body attempts re-stabilization, perception changes, emotional valence changes, social participation changes, the moral field changes appearance, politics changes appearance, relationships change appearance, institutions change appearance. The somatic changes lag intellectual changes by an indefinite and extended period – months, years, or longer – which are induced in part by a process of rewriting or rewiring old perceptions and reactions.

    Once a person begins perceiving beliefs, institutions, ideologies, and identities as regulatory structures rather than merely truth claims, the entire social world changes appearance. It becomes harder to participate in collective moral enthusiasms, harder to find comfort in institutional belonging, harder to lose oneself in the warm narratives that make ordinary life feel meaningful. The gain is clarity and the cost is almost everything else.

    The framework’s deepest promise is not happiness or victory, it is legibility. The intervention removes the anesthesia without removing the force, making the structure of reality more readable while making it no less painful. The goal is not salvation from contradiction, it is the development of sufficient internal structure to consciously bear contradiction without collapse, projection, or premature offloading.

    If the god-image is a psychophysiological regulatory architecture rather than a propositional belief system, it cannot be transmitted through argument or evidence alone. It can only reorganize psyches that are constitutionally prepared and under sufficient incoherence pressure to be receptive to reorganization. The transmission model is not persuasion but recognition – the prepared reader encounters the framework and experiences not conversion but identification, a sense that the framework names what their own regulatory system has already been moving toward under pressure. The framework predicts its own audience: those already experiencing increasing incoherence between lived phenomenology and inherited highest-order orientation, those for whom the redemptive grammar has already begun failing as a regulatory architecture, those constitutionally capable of bearing contradiction without requiring its resolution. That is a narrow band, and it explains why the appropriate horizon is the kind of private substantive engagement that constitutes genuine recognition – and why that recognition, when it occurs, feels less like persuasion and more like the articulation of a regulatory shift already underway.

    The epistemological foundations laid here – the metabolic coherence criterion, the regulatory architecture framing, the criterion’s reflexive application to itself – are not primarily argumentative, they are diagnostic. They are not intended to convince a reader who does not already feel the crucifixion of opposites that the framework is intellectually coherent. A reader for whom the redemptive grammar is still functioning as a regulatory architecture will find the framework strange, cold, or needlessly difficult. That response is accurate information about their regulatory position, not a failure of the text to persuade. The foundations are for the reader who already feels the contradiction but lacks the structural vocabulary to name what their body has been registering, who knows something is wrong with the inherited architecture without being able to say what or why. For that reader, the criterion shift is not a new argument to evaluate, it is a name for something already lived. A reader who finds the framework intellectually compelling but has not experienced the somatic incoherence it describes is encountering the text from the wrong direction. The framework’s own diagnostics apply: intellectual adoption without metabolization is a misread and produces the superiority register, the framework as team, the position as elevation rather than incommensurability. To do that is to begin the offloading of the crucifixion of opposites over again under a new label.

    Instead, what is exchanged if the new God image takes hold somatically is the anesthesia that made the ordinary social world legible and participable – the inherited regulatory architecture that organized perception, motivation, moral orientation, and relational trust – in exchange for a clarity that makes the structure of that world visible while making unreflective participation in it increasingly difficult. The strangeness of the framework is the strangeness of having made that exchange, and of continuing to make it, without knowing whether the clarity is worth what it costs. The framework cannot answer that question, it can only describe the structure of the exchange. The living of it is something else.

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    1

    This account has empirical adjacency to Karl Friston’s free energy principle in neuroscience, which proposes that biological organisms are fundamentally organized around minimizing prediction error rather than maximizing reward. Under that framework, a highest-order prior that generates persistent prediction error – a god-image that systematically fails to predict lived phenomenological experience – produces the specific somatic and psychological costs described here. The metabolic coherence criterion is not merely metaphorical and has a plausible neurobiological substrate. Friston’s framework provides independent empirical grounding for the claim that highest-order regulatory architectures have direct psychophysiological consequences.

    2

    As I wrote in this essay,

    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. 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. This isn’t common, but it 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.

    3

    The framework’s predictive claims are statistical and structural rather than prophetic; it does not predict specific events so much as directional tendencies generated by contradiction load within complex symbolic systems. Therefore, its validity rests on whether its structural expectations repeatedly outperform competing interpretive architectures across time.

    4

    As I wrote:

    A fundamental tension exists between metabolic power (the ability to direct resources and populations) and noetic clarity (unmediated contact with the divine/reality). These appear to be inverse properties. To achieve the infinite interpretive flexibility required to manage a global hierarchy, an individual or group discards the “anchors” of objective truth and universal empathy. This creates a closed loop:

    1. Selection: The structure filters for those willing to trade internal sovereignty for external dominance;
    2. Transformation: The occupant of the high-tier office is reshaped by the metaphysical affordances of the role; and
    3. Convergence: Even a revolutionary elite motivated by “good” or “liberation” finds that without adopting non-redemptive theology and ontological stratification, they lack the binding glue to prevent their own movement from fracturing.

    The tragedy is not that “evil” people have seized the framework, but that the framework is the only one capable of holding the apex. Any hand that reaches for the scepter must first wither.

    This leads to a profound philosophical pessimism: history is not a progress toward enlightenment, but a series of “Succession Crises of the Blind.” If consciousness and power are opposites, then every New World Order is a fresh regression into deeper contraction. The selection pressure ensures that the most spiritually hollow group always wins the competition for the top tier. In this view, civilization is a machine that systematically converts human consciousness into hierarchical stability until the resulting spiritual brittleness triggers a systemic collapse.

  • The Formal Logic of the Crucifixion of Opposites

    Welcome back. What follows is a formal structural account presenting the argument of the Living Opposites project in logical sequence – premises, inferences, qualifications, and summary – stripped of the phenomenological and narrative registers of the other posts. The purpose is to make the architecture visible in isolation so that the load-bearing claims can be assessed independently of the voice in which they are usually carried. Readers unfamiliar with the broader project may find it useful to read the Collapse of the All-Good God series and the Fork in the Architecture of the Soul first. Readers already inside the framework may find this a more precise statement of what the project has been arguing across its full arc.

    I. Core Ontological Premises

    P1. Reality contains irreducible opposites – good and evil, matter and spirit, love and hatred, greed and asceticism, light and darkness, persona vs shadow, masculine vs feminine, rational vs irrational, action vs. reflection, justice vs. mercy, order vs. chaos, hope vs. lucidity, there are an infinite number of such pairs. This is ontological, not epistemic, and the contradictions are structural.

    P2. The ultimate unity of all opposites comprises totality, which is what we think of as God and is referred to as Abraxas (a Jungian concept from his Seven Sermons to the Dead).

    P3. There is only one totality, because otherwise the being would not be the ultimate unity of all opposites.

    P4. Totality (Abraxas) is unconscious, because consciousness arises from subject/object differentiation and such distinctions are otherwise unified within it.

    P5. The one thing totality lacks is the lived experience of the opposites arising from limitation.

    P6. Humanity and all of life’s role is to add consciousness to totality via the lived crucifixion of opposites.

    P7. All experience contributes to totality, no matter how wonderful or how terrible.

    P8. Abraxas cannot be psychologically identified with by a finite being, because identification with totality produces inflation, collapse, or paralysis. Worshipping it is also senseless because totality does not favor one polarity of opposites over another; all experiences add to it (P7).

    P9. Therefore consciousness requires differentiation into partial functional positions. The psyche cannot hold everything simultaneously and remain operative.

    II. The Crucifixion of Opposites as the Primary Structural Problem

    P10. The crucifixion of opposites – the permanent, unbearable tension of inhabiting a reality constituted by irreconcilable poles – must be borne somewhere. This is not optional. The tension exists regardless of whether it is acknowledged, and the question is not whether it is processed but where and by whom.

    P11. There are three structural responses to the crucifixion of opposites, each following coherently from the same metaphysical premises while arriving at radically different destinations. These are structural attractors rather than exhaustive categories; hybrid states and cycling between them are common, but the attractors describe the dominant equilibrium positions.

    1. Institutional offloading: The crucifixion is borne by an external authority – religious institution, secular expert, ideological movement, cultural consensus. The individual submits to the authority’s mediation of the opposites and is relieved of the direct encounter with the void. This is the dominant historical response and the structural foundation of the noetic commons, which is the shared perceptual common ground of society.
    2. Antinomian acting-out: The crucifixion is resolved by collapsing into one pole, typically predation, transgression, or dissolution. The tension is discharged rather than held. This produces short-term relief and long-term psychic contraction.
    3. Individuation: The crucifixion is borne internally. The ego holds the opposites in suspense without resolving them through external authority or acting-out, until the transcendent function produces a provisional orientation from within. This is costly, painful, and constitutionally unavailable to most psychic configurations under ordinary conditions, though crisis, somatic contradiction, and forced encounter with incoherence can shift individuals across the threshold.

    P12. The vast majority of people across all historical periods and cultures have chosen Response 1, not because they are constitutionally incapable of an alternative in some fixed sense, but because the cost of externalization has not exceeded the cost of bearing the crucifixion internally. When somatic incoherence1 between lived reality and highest-order belief remains below a certain threshold, offloading is the rational equilibrium response to an unbearable psychological demand. Institutions exist because people desperately need them to bear what they cannot bear themselves, and it is also efficient, freeing up energy for offloaders to engage with life – constant wrestling with the opposites internally is energetically very costly. This is the Grand Inquisitor’s argument, and it is not wrong as a description of human psychology even if it is wrong as a prescription.

    III. The Noetic Commons as Aggregate Offloading Structure

    P13. The noetic commons – the shared symbolic field within which legitimate perception occurs, moral categories are assigned, and social reality is maintained – is not primarily an elite construction. It is the aggregate expression of the universal demand described in P10. It exists because billions of individual psyches are offloading the crucifixion of opposites onto shared symbolic structures simultaneously.

    P14. Elite soft power does not create the noetic commons, it captures and instrumentalizes a demand that already exists and that would exist in some form regardless of elite intervention. The elites are downstream of the psychological demand, not its origin. This is why soft power is cheap – it doesn’t have to construct compliance from scratch, it only has to manage and direct a compliance structure that the population generates spontaneously out of psychological necessity.

    P15. This distinction matters structurally. If the noetic commons were purely an elite imposition, removing elite control would dissolve it. But because it is rooted in the universal demand to offload the crucifixion of opposites, removing elite control would simply produce a different noetic commons organized around different authorities, which is what the history of reform movements, revolutions, and counter-cultural projects consistently demonstrates. The population does not want to bear the crucifixion of opposites, it wants better authorities to bear it for them.

    P16. This is why the privatio boni structure – the all-good God, the perfectible world, the moral arc of history – is so durable across its mutations. It is not primarily a theological claim, it is the metaphysical expression of the demand to offload the crucifixion of opposites onto a cosmic authority that will bear it and eventually resolve it. Its secular mutations – progressive teleology, technocratic optimization, therapeutic culture – are structurally identical because the psychological demand they serve is identical. The privatio boni (good is universal and perfectible, evil is deviation requiring correction, history has a moral arc) is one particularly scalable and stable Western encoding of the offloading function. It’s advantage is its ability to mobilize, its coherence and emotional manageability. Other cultures have produced different encodings of the same base demand; the privatio boni is historically specific, not metaphysically necessary.

    IV. The Privatio Boni as Load-Bearing Mechanism

    P17. The privatio boni framework is the specific metaphysical form the noetic commons takes in the Western tradition and its secular mutations. It is load-bearing in that it carries the crucifixion of opposites for the individual by promising that the tension is temporary, that evil will be corrected, that suffering has redemptive meaning, and that alignment with the Good is possible and morally required. Just as the individuating psyche requires internal load-bearing structures, the non-individuating psyche requires external ones, and the privatio boni is the Western form of that external structure.

    P18. Modern elite soft power operates by managing this load-bearing structure – directing its moral categories, controlling its attention targets, determining which deviations require correction and which are virtuous. This is cheaper than using hard power because the population is already generating compliance through its own psychological need. The elites are toll collectors on a road the population is already traveling, not the engineers who built the road.

    P19. The noetic commons is therefore a layered structure: at the base, the universal psychological demand to offload the crucifixion of opposites; in the middle, the specific metaphysical framework (privatio boni, perfectionist teleology) that gives the offloading structure its form; at the top, elite management of that framework’s specific moral categories and attention targets.

    V. The Abraxas Intervention – What It Actually Disrupts

    P20. Abraxian ontology (i.e. that evil is a part of totality and not a deviation from it) when metabolized somatically rather than merely intellectually adopted disrupts all three layers of the noetic commons simultaneously, but unevenly. The distinction between intellectual adoption and metabolization is important: intellectual adoption means holding the framework as a new belief system while still somatically operating from the old load-bearing structure. Metabolization means an individual’s highest-order belief layer has shifted where somatic incoherence between lived experience and the god-image has resolved through metabolic realignment, a process which takes a long period of time. The sign of mere intellectual adoption is that Abraxas becomes a team, a form of special knowledge that elevates the holder above those still in the noetic commons. The sign of metabolization is that the superiority register disappears – what remains is not elevation but incommensurability, a different scale rather than a higher position on the same scale.

    1. At the top layer – upper elite management of moral categories – the disruption is direct. The individual no longer accepts the managed moral categories as transparent windows onto reality. They recognize them as instrumental constructions serving coordination functions. Elite soft power loses purchase at this layer immediately.
    2. At the middle layer – the privatio boni metaphysical framework – the disruption is also direct. If good and evil are ontologically co-constitutive, perfectionist teleology loses its metaphysical grounding. The moral arc of history, the redemptive narrative, the promise that alignment with the Good is possible, all of these become structurally incoherent.
    3. At the base layer – the universal psychological demand to offload the crucifixion of opposites – the disruption is not direct. Abraxian ontology does not remove the demand, it removes the specific framework through which the demand is being met. This is the most dangerous moment in the process: the individual has lost the load-bearing structure without yet having developed a replacement.

    P21. This is why the Abraxian intervention without the next structural layer produces not liberation but destabilization – nihilism, predation, or regression to a cruder offloading structure such as conspiracy cult affiliation, ideological extremism, or antinomian acting-out. The temptation during this destabilization window is to fill the void prematurely with whatever offers relief – a new authority, a new movement, a new moral framework. Resisting that temptation is the specific discipline the interval requires. The intervention is incomplete without what follows.

    VI. The Rebirth of the Gods as Structural Replacement

    P22. If totality cannot be inhabited, and if the privatio boni load-bearing structure has been recognized as metaphysically false, the individual faces the base-layer problem directly: the crucifixion of opposites must still be borne somewhere. It does not disappear because its previous container has been dissolved.

    P23. The structural solution is the rebirth of the gods within the psyche – the differentiation of totality’s energy currents into personalized functional positions that can be related to without identification. The specific symbolic vocabulary used for this differentiation – gods, planetary archetypes, psychological complexes, or other frameworks – is a heuristic interface rather than a metaphysical claim. What matters structurally is that the energy currents are differentiated and related to without identification rather than projected outward onto external authorities or discharged through acting-out. If MBTI, Big Five, or another mapping system provides an accurate somatic guide to one’s specific energy currents, it serves the same structural function (though typically with less symbolic depth than mythic or archetypal vocabularies, which carry greater load-bearing capacity for extended periods of psychic pressure). The map that produces accurate self-knowledge and keeps one on one’s constitutionally specific path is the operative criterion, not the symbolic vocabulary used.

    P24. This differentiation is load-bearing in the specific sense required. The differentiated energy currents – whatever vocabulary is used to name them – carry the tension the individual is constitutionally aligned with. Relating to them without identifying with them provides internal structural containment that does not require external institutional mediation, does not require the privatio boni metaphysical framework, and does not require the noetic commons to function.

    P25. The individuation process – the ongoing discipline of holding the crucifixion of opposites without collapse, allowing the transcendent function to produce provisional orientations from within – is the operational form this takes in lived experience. It is not the adoption of a new belief system, it is the development of a working relationship with energies that were previously projected outward onto external authorities or suppressed into unconscious acting-out. The path chooses the walker; the walker’s only real choice is to align with it or resist it. Resistance does not produce freedom, it produces intensifying psychosomatic friction as the gap between lived experience and highest-order belief widens.

    P26. The individuation process cannot be universalized without destroying its function. The specific energy currents that emerge within a given psyche are constitutionally determined – they are not chosen by the ego but recognized as already operative. The distribution of psychic capacity for bearing the crucifixion internally is a pressure-dependent threshold: for most constitutions, the cost of not offloading has not exceeded the cost of bearing it internally, making offloading the rational equilibrium choice. For a specific constitution – those for whom somatic incoherence between lived experience and highest-order belief produces pain that exceeds the cost of bearing the crucifixion internally – individuation becomes a metabolic necessity rather than an election. This is not a moral distinction, it is a structural one.

    VII. Political Implications (Constrained)

    C1. The above does not entail the collapse of elite power.

    C2. Soft power via noetic commons management is cheaper than hard power but not necessary for domination. Elite power has operated historically through polytheistic cultures, tragic cosmologies, and feudal hierarchies that did not require perfectionist moral teleology. The current regime’s preference for soft power is historically specific, not structurally required. What made modern soft power anomalously cheap relative to historical precedent was precisely the privatio boni’s universalist and perfectionist mutation, the claim that history has a moral arc toward which all legitimate subjects must align. Tragic and polytheistic regimes never made that claim, which is why they could not achieve the same scale of self-policing compliance.

    C3. The upper elites are already shifting toward a blended model. The transition is not from cheap soft power to expensive hard power in the classical sense, it is from moralized soft power (compliance achieved through the subject’s internalized moral framework) to procedural and algorithmic hard power (compliance achieved through automated exclusion from the resource base without moral alibi). The distinction is that soft power operates when the subject experiences compliance as virtue, while hard power operates when the subject experiences exclusion as punishment. Algorithmic social credit scoring, financial exclusion, automated credentialing, and LLM-mediated digital footprint surveillance have drastically reduced the marginal cost of the latter. The elites are retiring the moral alibi because the cost of hard compliance infrastructure (comply or be excluded from the resource base) is becoming as cheap to administer as utilizing soft power – it no longer requires the population to police itself when it can be policed automatically.

    C4. The Abraxian intervention does not dissolve elite power, it increases the cost of one control mechanism – moralized self-policing – while the elites shift investment toward procedural and algorithmic enforcement. The systemic outcome is indeterminate. The presence of a visible minority who have exited the moral compliance structure creates cognitive dissonance for those still inside it, which is why such individuals are typically ignored, pathologized, suppressed via censorship, or made examples of. The system does not need to engage with the argument, it only needs to make the social cost of the exit position visible, which is itself a demonstration of hard power rather than soft.

    C5. The noetic commons will not dissolve even if the Abraxian framework spread widely, because the base-layer demand – the universal psychological need to offload the crucifixion of opposites – would simply reconstitute it around different authorities. Most people do not want to individuate, they want better institutions to bear what they cannot bear themselves. This is not a moral failure, it is a constitutional fact about the distribution of psychic capacity under ordinary conditions, and it means that even successful Abraxian metabolization by a non-trivial minority produces a different noetic commons rather than the absence of one.

    C6. A further political consequence worth naming: the predatory structure of the system means that even for those constitutions for whom offloading the crucifixion of opposites is the rational and efficient choice, the quality of life declines intensely over time. The toll collectors extract more as the road deteriorates, where systems optimized for elite extraction and sustained by offloading demand have no internal constraint against increasing extraction as long as the offloading mechanism holds. The efficiency of offloading the crucifixion to institutional authorities does not protect against the material consequences of living inside a predatory system, it only makes those consequences easier to bear without psychic collapse, until they aren’t. This does not make individuation more accessible to those constitutions, it does mean that the choice between offloading and bearing the crucifixion internally is not a choice between comfort and pain but between different distributions of pain across time. Internalizing the crucifixion of opposites does not protect oneself from this process either, but it makes the process more legible.

    VIII. The Claim – Psychological Rather Than Political

    The argument is intended as a psychological theory, not a political one.

    Even if procedural and algorithmic hard power renders moralized soft power unnecessary for the elites – even if social credit scores, financial exclusion, and automated compliance make noetic commons management redundant – it remains psychologically better not to be manipulated by it.

    Why better? The individual captured by the noetic commons is operating from a falsified highest-order belief layer. Their god-image contradicts lived phenomenological data. This produces a specific pathology: contradiction climbing upward through belief levels, producing psychic instability, projection of shadow onto approved enemies, and moral conscription into redemptive projects that serve elite coordination while feeling like personal virtue.

    The individual who has metabolized the Abraxian framework and developed the internal load-bearing structure of differentiated energy currents operates from a highest-order belief layer coherent with lived data. This does not protect one from hard power – such people can still be financially excluded, algorithmically suppressed, and socially isolated, but they cannot be made to police themselves through internalized moral compliance. The soft power mechanism has no purchase on a psyche that no longer accepts its metaphysical premises and no longer needs external institutional mediation to bear the crucifixion of opposites.

    This is asymmetric in a specific way: hard power is visible and therefore legible, the individual subject to hard power knows they are being coerced, while the individual subject to soft power via noetic commons control often does not – they experience their compliance as virtue, their mobilization as conscience, their participation in the control architecture as moral agency. The Abraxian intervention converts invisible soft power into visible hard power for those who undergo it. It doesn’t remove the force, but it removes the anesthesia.

    Ironically, the elites’ shift toward procedural and algorithmic hard power is already removing the anesthesia involuntarily for the population at large – the moral alibi is being retired by the system itself as it no longer needs it. The individual who has undergone the Abraxian intervention is prepared for that visibility, while the population that has not undergone it is not. The difference is not that one group is protected and the other isn’t, it is that one group can read what is happening to them while the other cannot.

    IX. The Recursive Danger

    The argument must acknowledge its own vulnerability to the totalizing replacement problem. This framework denies moral universalism but asserts universal ontological contradiction, universal psychological finitude, and universal tragic structure. It is a meta-universal claim even while rejecting first-order universalism.

    The specific danger is that if people rally around anti-perfectionism as a perfection of realism – if Abraxian ontology becomes a mobilizing myth, a team to join, a new noetic commons – it recreates the control structure under a different banner. The sign that this has occurred is identical to the sign of mere intellectual adoption described in P20: the framework becomes a source of superiority rather than a source of incommensurability, a new moral high ground rather than a different scale entirely.

    The only structural protection against this is that the framework cannot be mass-adopted without destroying its function. The individuation process is constitutionally specific and pressure-dependent, and it requires a psyche already in sufficient somatic distress from incoherence that recognition rather than mere information transfer becomes possible. It cannot be marketed, institutionalized, or scheduled. The moment it becomes a movement it becomes another institutional response to the crucifixion of opposites – another offloading structure – and loses its counter-current function entirely, much like Jungian therapy has become a mere therapeutic. The framework’s structural immunity to capture is identical to its limitation in reach.

    X. Formal Summary

    The crucifixion of opposites is permanent and must be borne somewhere. This is the foundational structural fact from which everything follows.

    There are three responses: institutional offloading, antinomian acting-out, and individuation. The vast majority of people across all historical periods have chosen the first because the cost of not offloading has not exceeded the cost of bearing the crucifixion internally, making offloading the rational equilibrium response to an unbearable psychological demand.

    The noetic commons is the aggregate expression of that universal demand. It is not primarily an elite construction but a structure the population generates spontaneously, which elites then capture and instrumentalize as toll collectors on a road the population already demanded.

    The privatio boni is one particularly scalable and stable Western encoding of the offloading function, load-bearing because it promises that the crucifixion of opposites is temporary and will be resolved cosmically. Its advantage over other encodings was mobilizability and universalist scope, which made it anomalously cheap to administer as a soft power mechanism.

    Abraxian ontology disrupts all three layers of the noetic commons simultaneously but unevenly – most directly at the top two layers, least directly at the base-layer psychological demand which it removes the container for without removing the demand itself, producing a destabilization window that must be navigated without premature refilling.

    The rebirth of the differentiated energy currents within the psyche – gods, archetypes, complexes, or whatever heuristic vocabulary maps accurately to the individual’s constitutionally specific energy configuration – is the structural replacement for the dissolved container, providing internal load-bearing that does not require external institutional mediation.

    This does not collapse elite power. The elites are already shifting from moralized soft power to procedural and algorithmic hard power, reducing the marginal cost of coercion through automated exclusion rather than internalized moral compliance. The distinction between soft and hard power is visibility and moral alibi: soft power operates when the subject experiences compliance as virtue, while hard power operates when the subject experiences exclusion as punishment.

    The intervention is therefore primarily psychological: it converts invisible soft power coercion into visible hard power coercion for those who undergo it, removing the anesthesia without removing the force and preparing them for the involuntary withdrawal of anesthesia already underway as the system retires its moral alibi.

    The framework’s immunity to capture and its limitation in reach are identical – it cannot spread without destroying its function. The post-intervention relationship to those still in the noetic commons is not superiority but incommensurability: a different scale rather than a higher position on the same scale.


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    Somatic incoherence here refers to the persistent psychophysiological friction produced when highest-order belief systematically contradicts lived phenomenological data across multiple domains – relational, vocational, moral, perceptual – such that offloading no longer reduces distress but amplifies it. It is distinguished from ordinary stress or contradiction by its persistence across domains and its resistance to resolution through lower-level belief adjustment.

  • From Pisces to Aquarius: Jung, Archetypes, and the Coming Age

    This essay explores Jung’s conception of historical ages, particularly the transition from Pisces to Aquarius, through the lens of archetypes, Christian symbolism, and astrology. Drawing on Jung’s Aion, Edinger’s interpretations, and mytho-historical analysis, it examines how the Christ/Antichrist dialectic of Pisces shaped the past two millennia and how the Aquarian age invites individuation, integration of opposites, and conscious human participation in the unfolding of the divine.

    “The approach of the next Platonic month, namely Aquarius, will constellate the problem of the union of opposites. It will then no longer be possible to write off evil as the mere privation of good; its real existence will have to be recognized. This problem can be solved… only by the individual human being, via his experience of the living spirit, whose fire… was handed onward into the future….” – Jung (1959)

    Welcome back. In many posts I’ve discussed the transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, relying on a combination of the science underlying astrology, Jung’s conception of astrological ages, Guenon’s belief in the Kali Yuga and the increased “solidification” of the world, while projecting current trends of ratcheting centralization and censorship into the digital panopticon and what appears to be the upper elites sprint toward Agenda 2030, curiously timed exactly 2,000 years after the death of Christ in 30 AD (although some scholars say he died in 33 AD).

    Here, I would like to elaborate on Jung’s conception of astrological ages in his sprawling Aion (1951), which he wrote as part of his esoteric turn after his 1944 near-fatal heart attack, and as interpreted by Edward Edinger in his The Aion Lectures (1996). Both Aion and Edinger’s interpretation are not what I expected – I expected a direct link between the past two thousand years and the esoteric interpretation of the Age of Pisces, and then an extension into what the transition to Aquarius entails. There is an element of this, but it is a small portion of the book; rather, Jung focuses in great detail, with a tremendous number of citations, on linking Christianity to the individuation process throughout the age of Pisces via symbol and myth. His target audience was a skeptical mid-20th century secular and academic elite, not for the layman, and Edinger’s explanations for the modern audience are helpful.

    Regarding the portion that interests me, Jung argues that the twin fish symbolism of Pisces – one fish facing upwards, one fish facing downwards or sideways depending on the image – represent the dual figures of Christ and the anti-Christ. They are represented psychically in two almost schizophrenic polarities and which arose due to competition within the early Church.

    The early Church developed the privatio boni view of evil – where evil was considered the absence of good, and God was all good – in order to counter Manichean dualism, which was a very real and looming threat to Church leaders.1 This, in turn, created certain unexpected problems. Jung, following Meister Eckhart, saw the privatio boni development as violating basic common sense because consciousness requires differentiation, while God is unity: “Union of opposites is equivalent to unconsciousness, so far as human logic goes, for consciousness presupposes a differentiation into subject and object and a relation between them. Where there is no “other,” or it does not yet exist, all possibility of consciousness ceases.” He states in Answer to Job: “The naive assumption that the creator of the world is a conscious being must be regarded as a disastrous prejudice which later gave rise to the most incredible dislocations of logic. For example, the nonsensical doctrine of the privatio boni would never have been necessary had one not had to assume in advance that it is impossible for the consciousness of a good God to produce evil deeds. Divine unconsciousness and lack of reflection, on the other hand, enable us to form a conception of God which puts his actions beyond moral judgment and allows no conflict to arise between goodness and beastliness.”

    The adoption of the privatio boni pushed humanity’s evil into the suppressed unconscious because Christians wanted to be “good” in order to go to Heaven after death, so they ran, terrified, from their darker selves, projecting it onto the Other for destruction. From a psychological perspective – and Jung insisted publicly (for good reasons, but not entirely truthfully) that his perspective was informed by psychology, not metaphysics – the suppressed unconsciousness of mankind would have to manifest at some point down the road, culminating in the figure of the Anti-Christ (which I addressed from a different angle in a prior post). As Jung explains:

    A factor that no one has reckoned with, however, is the fatality inherent in the Christian disposition itself, which leads inevitably to a reversal of its spirit – not through the obscure workings of chance but in accordance with psychological law. The ideal of spirituality striving for the heights was doomed to clash with the materialistic earth-bound passion to conquer matter and master the world. This change became visible at the time of the “Renaissance.” The word means “rebirth,” and it refers to the renewal of the antique spirit. We know today that this spirit was chiefly a mask; it was not the spirit of antiquity that was reborn, but the spirit of medieval Christianity that underwent strange pagan transformations, exchanging the heavenly goal for an earthly one, and the vertical of the Gothic style for a horizontal perspective (voyages of discovery, exploration of the world and of nature). The subsequent developments that led to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution have produced a world-wide situation today which can only be called “antichristian” in a sense that confirms the early Christian anticipation of the “end of time.” It is as if, with the coming of Christ, opposites that were latent till then had become manifest, or as if a pendulum had swung violently to one side and were now carrying out the complementary movement in the opposite direction….The double meaning of this movement lies in the nature of the pendulum. Christ is without spot, but right at the beginning of his career there occurs the encounter with Satan, the Adversary, who represents the counterpole of that tremendous tension in the world psyche which Christ’s advent signified….Both strive for a kingdom: one for the kingdom of heaven, the other for the principatus huius mundi (the rule of the world). We hear of a reign of a “thousand years” and of a “coming of the Antichrist,” just as if a partition of worlds and epochs had taken place between two royal brothers. The meeting with Satan was therefore more than a mere chance; it was a link in the chain.

    Edinger adds, “To underscore what Jung says here, the advent of Christ represented psychologically the split of the opposites in the God-image into two irreconcilable halves, Christ and Satan. This was a necessary step in the development of consciousness, but it has led to a profound one-sidedness and to a dissociated condition that now has to be corrected.” This is Jung’s concept of enantiodromia, where when something is pushed to its extreme, it morphs into its opposite.

    Historical Manifestations of the Piscean Dialectic

    Jung therefore saw that the age of Pisces would begin with a spiritual Christ-focused era and end with the fullest manifestation of the anti-Christ, which is a secular, materialist, anti-spiritual energy. Because he thought the Self relates to wholeness, not goodness, and because he linked the Self to mandalas and quaternities2 which represent such wholeness, he applied that framework to the Age of Pisces: the first 1,000 years was considered the Christian era (with Christian expansion 0-500 AD and the deepening of faith through the system of monasteries and monks from 500-1000 AD or so starting with St. Benedict of Nursia) and the next 1,000 years was/is the anti-Christian era with scholasticism slowly rationalizing faith and a flowering of cults and heresies such as the Cathars, leading to full onset materialism and secularism via the printing press, Protestantism, technological innovation, material exploitation and then the French Revolution, communism, etc. (1500 AD-2000 AD). This anti-Christian era coincides with Spengler’s conception of the Faustian spirit, which occurred in the early medieval West with Romanesque and Gothic Christianity as its first great expression.

    Astrological Roots of Pisces and Aquarius

    While Christianity was linked to the fish symbol early in its history, the symbolism of the Twin Fish for Pisces and the Water Bearer for Aquarius has deep ancient roots, primarily in Greek and Babylonian traditions. While zodiacal symbolism are very old, astrological ages as a schema only become possible after Hipparchus’ discovery of precession (2nd c. BCE). Pisces, depicted as two fish swimming in opposite directions, originates from the Greek myth of Aphrodite and her son Eros, who were transformed into fish to escape the monster Typhon. This imagery is also found in Babylonian astrology around 2000 BCE, where the fish represented duality and fluidity, themes associated with the sign. By the Hellenistic period (around 200 BCE – 100 CE), Pisces was firmly tied to the Twin Fish symbol.

    Aquarius, represented by the Water Bearer, comes from the myth of Ganymede, a Trojan prince abducted by Zeus to serve as the cupbearer to the gods, often depicted pouring water. While Aquarius is not a water sign in the traditional sense (it is an air sign), the Water Bearer symbolizes the flow of knowledge and the collective consciousness. The link between Aquarius and water can be traced back to Babylonian astrology, where a water-related constellation was associated with the sign. By the Hellenistic period, the Water Bearer symbol for Aquarius was solidified, influenced by both the myth of Ganymede and ancient astronomical interpretations.

    The modern conception of the ages dividing roughly into 2,000-year periods, with Pisces from 0–2000 AD and Aquarius from 2000–4000 AD, only became more solidified in astrology and popular consciousness in the 20th century by the Theosophy movement, Dane Rudhyar, and the New Age movement. Pisces was generally accepted as starting around the birth of Christ, and Aquarius was thought to be beginning in the early 2000s, largely based on the precessional cycle and the movement of the vernal equinox into the Aquarius constellation. Jung was projecting, then, a psychological narrative onto symbols whose “Age” function was not fully operative until quite recently, which is why he had to lean into symbolic and mythic analysis as much as he did to dampen academic criticism about his ideas. Per Jung, “Astrologically the beginning of the next aeon, according to the starting point you select, falls between A.D. 2000 and 2200. Starting from star “O” and assuming a Platonic month of 2,143 years, one would arrive at A.D. 2154 for the beginning of the Aquarian Age, and at A.D. 1997 if you start from star “a 113.” The latter date agrees with the longitude of the stars in Ptolemy’s Almagest.”

    A question quickly arises under this conception: do Ages cause events, or do they merely influence people’s thoughts, ideas, and actions, but people retain elements of free will? I lean toward the latter, much as I see other knowledge systems like physiognomy (discussed previously here and here) as influencing but not compelling action. This is because the speck of God within each of us, the Self, changes under observation – it cannot be fully controlled, much like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. When one becomes aware of the influences affecting oneself, one retains an element of free will in order to change it – conscious awareness of symbols gives a person the free will to choose how one responds to that influence, but not to an infinite degree. No matter how much you train you will never be Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods or Tom Brady; we have free will within our physiognomy, but only to whether to embrace or reject our own unique path. And while Ages don’t cause events, they constellate archetypal fields. This means the Christ/Antichrist dialectic of Pisces was not mechanically fated, but its archetypal resonance with its emphasis on faith, inner transformation, and duality, mirroring the tension between the higher and lower aspects of the Self made such a trajectory almost inevitable unless consciously integrated.

    The Aquarian Age: Water Bearers and Conscious Agency

    Archetypally, the Age of Aquarius brings themes of individuation, collective consciousness, technology, and the integration of opposites. Symbolized by the Water Bearer who pours out knowledge and life, it emphasizes awakening, innovation, equality, and the union of spirit and intellect, as described further in this Jungian center article on Aquarius. This age may challenge rigid structures and dogmas inherited from Pisces, urging humanity toward greater self-awareness, psychological integration, and responsibility to the collective, with a different God-image: that of God as both all good and all evil, all-encompassing, which is horrifying, and because God is an unconscious being (as consciousness arises from navigation of the crucifixion of the opposites as a partial, finite being), it is humanity’s role to bring consciousness to God. As Edinger states in The Aion Lectures, “God…as a term used by Eckhart, is a consequence of consciousness; it is born in the human soul. This is the basic theme of Eckhart’s teaching – that God is born in the human soul, in a process parallel to the nativity of Christ. He does not exist, really, until he is born there. This is the idea that Jung found so appealing, that God requires conscious man in order to come into existence.” Shadow aspects of Aquarius include depersonalization/loss of individuality in mass systems, cold rationality, abstraction, decentralization and simultaneity, the dominance of networks over hierarchies, and the dissolution of the old Piscean forms of mediation (church, nation, monarch, experts, institutions).

    At its best, this new era invites the conscious realization of the Self as part of a shared human evolution, and Jung was the first to recognize this. Per Edinger:

    I think that…Jung is the first representative of the new aeon…what I call and what I think will in the future be called the Jungian aeon. Jung could not have perceived and summarized the content of the aeon of Pisces unless he was already outside it. You can not see something in its totality, objectively, until you are already out of it. Jung was already in the next aeon, so to speak. Just as Christ was the first person to enter the aeon of Pisces, so Jung is the first to inaugurate the aeon of Aquarius.

    This leads us to inquire, at least briefly, what the qualities of the aeon of Aquarius might be; we have been talking about the aeon of Pisces until now.

    The term “Aquarius” has three different interpretations that I know of. It is called “water man,” “water carrier” and “water pourer.” Aquarius is pictured as a human figure carrying a jug of water. Sometimes he is pouring water from the jug and sometimes he is carrying it. This suggests three different things. First, Aquarius is a human figure, not an animal or fish, suggesting that the aeon of Aquarius is going to be of a human nature, not less. Further, the figure is carrying water rather than being immersed in it like a fish. That suggests that the two aeons will have a totally different relation to the psyche; it is the difference between being a fish immersed and being a carrier and pourer. Third, we have the image of a vessel, an allusion to the symbolism of the alchemical vessel and to the capacity to contain the psyche, rather than be contained by it. Instead of being a fish contained in a psychic fish pond, the individual becomes a conscious carrier and dispenser of the psyche.

    Both Mark and Luke recount that Christ directed two of his disciples to make preparations for the last supper. He said “Go into the city and you will meet a man carrying a pitcher of water. Follow him.” (Mark 14:13; Luke 22:10, JB)

    This man leads the disciples to the house in which they are to go to the upper room for the Passover meal or last supper. This is an image of the aeon to come 2,000 years later, visible even at the opening of the aeon of Pisces. It corresponds also to certain symbolic aspects of Christ. Christ was pictured as a water bearer and water dispenser. To the Samaritan woman at the well he said that if she had asked him for a drink, he would have dispensed eternal living water for her. (John 4:10)

    Also there is the image of a stream of water flowing from Christ’s belly when his side was pierced at the Crucifixion. These images indicate that in a certain sense Christ foreshadowed Aquarius as a water dispenser. But the water he dispensed did not generate more dispensers; it generated fish rather than water carriers because the church became the water carrier, the fish bond in which the faithful fish could swim. Who discovered water? We know who did not discover it – the fish. We can now say the person who discovered it was Aquarius. Jung discovered water.

    If my reading of the symbolism is correct, the aeon of Aquarius will generate individual water carriers. The numinous reality of the psyche [i.e. the crucifixion of opposites] will no longer be carried by religious communities – the church, the synagogue or the mosque – but instead it will be carried by conscious individuals. This is the idea Jung put forward in his notion of a continuous incarnation, the idea that individuals are to become incarnating vessels of the Holy Spirit on an ongoing basis.

    Given the collapse of public faith in institutions – media, experts, education establishments, organized religion – people are increasingly being asked to carry their own psychic loads, which is very painful to do, and which is why most people lean into the Current Thing narratives as a surrogate religious replacement (a weak and poor one), why people bounce back and forth between ideologies (I think of young men attracted to Eastern Orthodoxy for a bit) and why mental instability and depression is rapidly increasing. If Jung and Edinger’s framing is accurate, solutions will not be found through experts or institutions – one is increasingly required to carry the crucifixion of opposites internally, without external mediation. This is a horrifying conception given institutions exist precisely to protect people’s psyches from the horrors of the void. Many people will collapse during this transition; this doesn’t make those who adapt properly “better”, just more able to carry the current of this aeon’s transition.

    Note that the transition from one age to another does not occur in a day, a week, a month, a year, or even a lifetime; while Christ’s death ushered in the Age of Pisces, this wasn’t clear to people of that time and it took centuries for Paul’s epistles, the gospels, Christianity’s spread, and the culmination in Constantine’s formal adoption of Christianity as the official religion of empire. As such, Aquarius, despite an upcoming coronation event in the horrors of a worldwide centralized anti-Christ system, may not manifest fully during a long transitionary period, which we are already in.

    Symbolic Literacy and Elite Manipulation

    The question this framework naturally generates is how it connects to the elite sprint toward 2030, and specifically, where does the symbolic and astrological literacy come from that would make such timing meaningful rather than arbitrary? Their panic over Trump’s surprise 2016 win was not so much about Trump himself but about how his win could derail their timeline (which is unfortunately back on track). From my current vantage point, it looks like they have an astrological and occult understanding of the changing aeon, where upper elites versed in the Kabbalistic framework which treats cosmic timing as strategic, riding the currents of archetypal change and aligning with inevitable astrological and symbolic movements to consolidate power. The principle is simple: the current moves, and those aligned with it move faster than others, allowing opportunities for power accumulation. Unlike mystics or ascetics, these actors do not seek self-transcendence but rather map cosmic inevitability onto social and political engineering.

    Because humans have an element of free will, while at the same time this astrological change is inevitable, what they are seeking do is channel the water, the flow of the changing age for their own purposes. In other words, the Aquarian archetypal tide of transparency, networks, leveling is being instrumentalized by elites to build centralization, surveillance, CBDCs, etc.

    How did the upper elites gain the knowledge of astrological synchronicity? Given my prior structural analysis about how elite power structures naturally converge on a Talmudic/Kabbalistic framework, the focus here should be on the Jewish tradition. Within Jewish intellectual tradition there has always been a live conversation about cosmic timing, destiny, and the human role in channeling it.3 The Talmud contains debates about astrology: some rabbis saw stars as influencing fate, others rejected determinism, still others accepted that the stars incline but do not compel. Rabbis explicitly argued whether “mazal” (constellation/fate) governs Israel. Some said “there is no mazal for Israel” – i.e. Jews are above astrology through Torah observance. Others acknowledged stars incline fate, but covenant and merit can override them. There is a strand of Orthodox opinion, drawing on Deuteronomy’s prohibitions against divination and the Talmudic position that Israel is not subject to astrological fate, that treats astrology as forbidden. Maimonides was particularly forceful on this: he considered astrology a form of idolatry and pseudo-science, and his rationalist strand of Judaism rejected it categorically.

    This produced a live dialectic: fate vs. free will, stars vs. covenant. Later Kabbalah took cosmic symbolism further, linking it with divine emanations and repair. Kabbalistic tradition, particularly Lurianic Kabbalah and the Zohar, integrated astrological symbolism extensively regardless of the halachic prohibitions – the Sefirot map onto planetary energies, the Lurianic system explicitly connects cosmic cycles to historical unfolding, and practicing Kabbalists have always worked with astrological frameworks. The Zohar and Lurianic Kabbalah folded astrology into a grand symbolic system of divine emanations and cycles of exile/redemption where cosmic timing is tied to the actual unfolding of history (tikkun, messianic epochs, shattering and repair). Lurianic Kabbalists frequently connected planetary and zodiacal cycles with mystical processes, meaning there is a framework for timing actions to “align” with macrocosmic flows. The idea is not deterministic but strategic, that the currents exist and knowing their rhythm can amplify effects. The Sabbatean/Frankist strand, which my companion series identifies as the operative apex theology, explicitly transgressed halachic restrictions as a matter of theological principle, so the prohibition would carry no weight for these actors.

    Those with this understanding may not be “slaves to an astrological calendar,” but inherit lineages of symbolic literacy, knowing how to ride the archetypal currents; kabbalah did not necessarily develop more advanced astronomical/astrological science compared to Islamic philosophers4 or Christian scholastics5, but it cultivated a more continuous, inward-facing symbolic hermeneutic where astrology was directly tied to law, fate, and the collective destiny of Israel. That gave Jewish thought a distinctive depth in treating how symbols shift across time. It’s distinctive feature is that Jewish mysticism treated cosmic symbols as mutable and dialectical – sparks hidden in shells, letters and constellations shifting roles through cycles, which is closer to Jung’s idea of archetypes evolving over time. It is this accumulated symbolic literacy, inherited through lineages that connect Lurianic Kabbalah to the Frankist underground to the secularized eschatological networks documented in the companion series, that positions certain apex networks to recognize and instrumentalize the Aquarian transition before the broader culture perceives it.

    What Comes Next?

    As I wrote in my post about the anti-Christ, due to the concept of enantiodromia – any energy over time eventually becomes its opposite – the spiritual, other-worldly Christ energy at the start of the Piscean era must fully manifest into its opposite – pure materialism, pure secularism, pure anti-soul. Those who already mastered the symbolic in Pisces through textual interpretation, financial code, and the manipulation of law and image will not surrender that mastery, they will reframe it into Aquarian modes: AI as the new rabbinic commentary, blockchain as Talmudic ledger, predictive modeling as the new halakhic casuistry. The result will be a techno-messianism that fulfills the eschatological line while appearing secular, progressive, and rational. The fate of Aquarius – dissolution of borders, collective hive structures, the dominance of the mental-symbolic over the earthy-sacramental – is made to look like a cunning plan, but the plan only succeeds because it rides the tide of inevitability.

    So the convergence says to expect (1) the full exteriorization of the “invisible text”: databases, archives, code as scripture, (2) a dialectical play where “anti-Semitism” is used to consolidate Jewish return to Zion and Greater Israel, but the true Aquarius move is all peoples made diaspora within the digital panopticon, and (3) the cunning to become more Aquarian in mask with AI priesthood, global technocracy, and “humanitarian” control. The deeper irony is the egregore of Yahweh, globalized through Christianity and Islam, becomes Aquarianized, turned into an operating system for humanity itself.

    With this said, there are risks of failure in the elites’ plan through several inherent paradoxes: first, their overextension of symbolic control is fragile; while Aquarius operates on abstraction and digital systems, these cannot account for the irrationality and unprogrammable nature of human life, leading to a potential breakdown of their complex systems akin to a modern-day Tower of Babel. Indeed, their closed system explicitly excludes all factors that cannot be quantified and controlled, as cyberneticist Ross Ashby explained here. Second, instrumentalizing forces like anti-semitism as a tool for political ends can backfire as hatred can become uncontrollable, causing the very forces they manipulate to turn against them. Third, Aquarius’s imperative to dissolve veils and create an “open society” may eventually expose the hidden mechanics of their cunning plan, causing them to lose power as their facade is revealed – the horror show of so-called “COVID”, with draconian shutdowns, free speech suppression and forced “vaccinations” rolled out worldwide in lockstep created an urgency in some to understand the deeper levels at play. Finally, the eschatological paradox ensures that by trying to become the authors of prophecy and force its fulfillment (such as the assembly of Greater Israel), the elites risk an unintended inversion of their goals, becoming servants of the very inevitability they sought to master – the Kabbalistic/Talmudic scheme works best in the shadows, and how will its practitioners and the world ultimately react to an externalized, in-your-face dominance scheme fully manifested? In this grand scheme, both the inegalitarian right and the egalitarian left, unaware of the symbolic forces at play, are pawns in a dialectic they do not understand, pushing against each other while remaining confined within the larger, inevitable Aquarian frame. The risks also explain why those like Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg have extensive underground bunkers prepared if their plans fall apart (the upper elites will certainly destroy the world if their plans fail and then retreat from the chaos, blaming the victims for their own nefarious plans and deeds, although neither Altman, Thiel nor Zuckerberg are at that level).

    Conclusion: The Battle for Meaning in the Aquarian Aeon

    Very few people outside of the upper echelons of power understand how symbols work, how they are embedded within language itself and manipulated dialectically over time in a Fabian fashion in order to achieve longterm goals. If the Aquarian archetype invites the integration of opposites and a collective awakening, then the battle over meaning itself – over who controls the symbols, the myths, the language – may be the most important struggle of all. I delved into the importance of the meaning behind language here, and Saoirse By Sinead has a strong post on this topic here. Without recovering symbolic literacy, humanity risks becoming the raw material of our upper elite’s nefarious control grid. But their prior panic was a tacit admission of impotence: they can surf inevitability for a time, while 2030 functions like an occult firewall – an attempt to crystallize the Aquarian age into their own image, to pre-structure the flood before it spills out – but the very need for such a firewall betrays that they know it’s not guaranteed. If inevitability were on their side, they could afford to wait. The rush is the tell. With that said, given there is a direct and inverse correlation between power and spirituality, I do not have hope that a system of hollow, apex predatory actors will be overthrown by better actors.

    For the individual, individuation and the conscious holding of opposites holds the key to freedom. Aquarius is the water-bearer – not the water itself, but the vessel, and the archetype is about carrying the collective flood without drowning in it. The masses will drown in data, in ideology, in dialectical manipulation, and this transition between ages is very painful. As Jung stated in a letter to Adolf Keller, “Transitions between the aeons always seem to have been melancholy and despairing times, as for instance the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt… between Taurus and Aries, or the melancholy of the Augustinian age between Aries and Pisces. And now we are moving into Aquarius, of which the Sibylline Books say: Luciferi vires accendit Aquarius acres (Aquarius inflames the savage forces of Lucifer). And we are only at the beginning of this apocalyptic development! Already I am a grandfather twice over and see those distant generations growing up who long after we are gone will spend their lives in that darkness…” Yet each dominant age contains a mystery religion representing it’s inverted energies in the sign opposite to it on the Zodiac as its structural complement, the thing the age cannot produce from within itself. In the age of Taurus, the mystery religion was Scorpio: the Eleusinian mysteries, Isis and Osiris, initiation through death and transformation as the hidden counter-current to Taurean emphasis on material abundance, fertility, and earthly permanence. The bull worshippers were taught that what is accumulated must also be lost. In the age of Aries, the mystery religion was Libra: Ma’at, the weighing of souls, cosmic proportionality as the counter-current to pure martial conquest. The warrior cultures were taught, through their mystery traditions, that force without measure destroys itself. In the age of Pisces, the mystery religion was Virgo: the disciplined vessel, the body as sacred container, the contemplative traditions and the Marian cult as counter-current to Piscean oceanic dissolution and self-sacrifice. The fish were taught that the sacred must be held, not merely swum in.

    Per Leo M.J. Aurini (discussed here), in Aquarius the mystery religion is in the sign of Leo. Aquarius dissolves individual identity into collective networks, data architectures, abstract universalism, and the counter-current is the one who cannot be anonymized – not through rebellion, which is reactive and therefore predictable and therefore capturable, but through genuine interiority that has no interface for the control architecture to grab. The digital panopticon requires legibility, that a person broadcast on frequencies the system monitors, but the Leo counter-current simply doesn’t. Leo represents personal sovereignty, embodied authority, and individuation; holding the crucifixion of opposites without collapse into a polarity until the transcendent function takes place is something received, not controlled, which means the individual stops being predictable within the Aquarian dialectic. This is a different structural position, not a superior one. That transformation cannot be mass-produced, institutionalized, or timed to anyone’s agenda, and it arrives when the Self’s own pressure makes it necessary, which is why it functions as a mystery religion rather than a movement – the moment it organizes collectively it becomes Aquarian and loses its counter-current function entirely.6 A Leo mystery religion rejects moral outsourcing and mass anonymity in favor of visible, unified being – liberation through the solar integrity of a singular soul.7 The individuated individual doesn’t “solve” the opposites but becomes a container strong enough to bear them without collapse into mass hypnosis nor into reactive opposition. See this Note, and the subsequent conversation with Bios Logos, for more on this point.

    In this frame, phenomena such as end-times prophecy, technological centralization, and geopolitical maneuvering are expressions of archetypal currents. The world can be deciphered, patterns discerned, archetypes followed, but decipherment is not protection: the Leo counter-current offers no material defense against predation, no collective organization, no political leverage, and no guarantee that clarity produces anything other than a more precise understanding of one’s own exposure. The crucifixion of opposites is permanent – it is the condition of consciousness, not a passage through which consciousness travels toward resolution. Understanding the structure of what is happening does not stop it from happening, the water-bearer still gets wet. So why focus on it at all? Well, for certain uncommon constitutions coherence is preferable to consolation even when coherence is bleak; for most, this framework will simply remove the last available buffers without replacing them with anything.8 This kind of clarity has very significant costs: an inability to organize collectively, difficulty sustaining ordinary hope, a growing incommensurability with almost everyone in one’s life. Whether those costs are worth bearing depends entirely on whether the alternative – living inside contradiction that cannot be acknowledged – is still available to you. For most people it is, but for those for whom it is not, this framing is simply a colder and more accurate description of the situation they are already in.

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    1

    The early Church saw Manichaeism as a major threat because it challenged core Christian metaphysics on the nature of evil, the unity of God, and salvation. Mani presented his religion as a universal revelation blending Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism with its own scriptures, clergy, and global ambitions, and its radical dualism posited two eternal principles, Light and Darkness, making evil a co-eternal force rather than a privation of good – this undermined Christian monotheism by implying God was not all-powerful. Manichaeism also promoted a cosmic pessimism, viewing the material world as a prison for divine sparks, contradicting the Christian affirmation of creation and the Incarnation. Its strict ascetic ethics among the “Elect” created a spiritual elite rivaling the Church’s structure. Augustine, once a Manichaean Hearer, developed his theology (including the privatio boni) in direct opposition, and his influence ensured Manichaeism’s legacy as the arch-heretical system. The Church feared it as a rational, missionary faith offering a compelling rival explanation for suffering and evil.

    2

    Jung’s quaternity is a symbolic structure of wholeness, expressed as a fourfold pattern (e.g., elements, directions, functions, or aspects of the self). The number four is complete because it embodies totality and balance – unlike three, which implies dynamism or tension, four allows the reconciliation of opposites and the integration of all directions or aspects. In Aion the quaternity mediates between conscious and unconscious, providing a symbolic framework through which the psyche can achieve balance, resolve conflict, and approach psychic wholeness.

    3

    I am offering a symbolic-historical reading, not an assertion of a unified plot. Jewish textual traditions from rabbinic debates about mazal to Lurianic meditations on tikkun cultivated a language for thinking about historical timing and repair. That symbolic literacy may be instrumentalized by actors of many kinds; in practice some influential figures/institutions draw selectively on esoteric resources to frame long-term projects, but instrumentality is not identical to monolithic conspiracy: influence is often distributed, tacit, and mediated through law, finance, ritual, and narrative. My claim is that symbolic fluency confers strategic advantage, it is not a claim that all who are Jewish, or all elites, act from a single text or single will.

    4

    In Islam, astrology found a more integrated place, particularly within philosophical schools. Thinkers like Avicenna, al-Farabi, and Averroes embraced and rationalized Ptolemaic cosmology, treating astrology as a legitimate scientific pursuit. Esoteric Islam, particularly in Sufi traditions and writings of groups like the Ikhwan al-Safa and mystics like Ibn Arabi, developed rich symbolic cosmologies that connected celestial cycles to spiritual development. A distinctive feature of Islamic astrology was its technical sophistication and mystical depth, though it emphasized eternal correspondences over symbolic evolution. Symbols were more fixed, reflecting timeless truths rather than changing meanings through history.

    5

    The early Church Fathers largely rejected astrology as a pagan practice incompatible with doctrine. During the medieval period, scholastic thinkers allowed for a limited role of astrology, recognizing its influence on temperament, weather, and medicine, while maintaining that the soul remained free and untouched by celestial determinism. However, the symbolic richness of astrology was minimized, with efforts focused on reconciling natural astrology with divine providence. In the Renaissance, esoteric streams of Christianity such as those influenced by Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and figures like Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno developed more spiritually rich forms of astrology. Yet these were syncretic, blending Christian elements with pagan and philosophical traditions rather than emerging from Christianity’s theological core. While Christianity deeply spiritualized its own symbols like the cross, Christ, and sacraments, its mainstream theology did not foster astrology as a dynamic tool for evolving archetypes.

    6

    The mystery religions understood this structural constraint. Their transmission mechanism wasn’t doctrine or argument but a prepared experiential clearing, ritual conditions under which knowledge already present somatically in the initiate could become conscious and articulable. The Eleusinian initiates already knew the Persephone myth, but what the rites did was move that knowledge from narrative – something that happened to someone else in mythic time – to direct interior recognition. Death and return stopped being a story about Persephone and became a legible fact about the initiate’s own psyche. The writing that functions as Leo counter-current in Aquarius is doing structurally identical work without the ritual container, without the community of fellow initiates, without the preparatory stages the mystery traditions provided, and without the death-rebirth myth that offered the initiate hope for life after death – in other words, the Aquarian mystery religion does the clearing without the consolation, which is colder, more exposed, and a bigger demand on the psyche than anything the Hellenic mystery traditions asked of their initiates. This outreach reaches people individually and in isolation, which is why transmission is slow, diffuse, and dependent on finding readers already close enough to the threshold that recognition becomes possible rather than mere information transfer. This is why the audience is necessarily small, because the clearing work requires a reader already carrying the somatic knowledge that needs articulating, and most people aren’t, and furthermore the mysteries could draw people who needed the consolation alongside those who could bear the cold, but this can only draw the latter. Those few who find resonance with this work experience something different from ordinary reading: not persuasion but recognition, which is the only transmission mechanism the Leo counter-current has available to it in the absence of institutional container or ritual support. See this comment from Griptoe Guy in Training for a bit more on this point.

    7

    Whether the mystery religion’s specific manifestation shifts within an age as the dominant current shifts is an open question. Jung’s fourfold periodization of Pisces suggests it does – the Virgo counter-current in early Pisces expressed as desert monasticism and bodily asceticism against oceanic spiritual dissolution, while in late Pisces it expressed as psychological discernment and embodied intelligence against materialist abstraction. Same sign, different emphasis, tracking the dominant current’s shadow rather than remaining fixed in content. If so, the Leo counter-current’s specific manifestation in early Aquarius – personal sovereignty against network dissolution and anonymization – would shift as the dominant Aquarian current itself shifts across the full 2000-year period.

    8

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

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

  • The Fork in the Architecture of the Soul

    This essay examines a single decision point that determines the entire architecture of one’s relationship to reality: where is the crucifixion of opposites borne? Institutional authority, Sabbatean antinomianism, and Jungian individuation are examined as the three most historically significant responses to this fork, each following coherently from the same metaphysical premises while arriving at radically different destinations.

    Welcome back. In this post I would like to discuss how one’s response to the crucifixion of opposites changes the entire nature of one’s relationship to reality. The disclaimers applying to the prior three part series apply here as well.1

    Let’s briefly lay out the logic chain:

    1. Reality is made up of pairs of opposites where any category only makes sense in terms of its opposite – there can be no good without evil, light without darkness, happiness without sadness, life without death. Good and evil, matter and spirit, love and hatred, greed and asceticism, short term versus long term, light and darkness, persona vs shadow, masculine vs feminine, rational vs irrational, action vs. reflection, justice vs. mercy, order vs. chaos, hope vs. lucidity, there are an infinite number of such pairs.
    2. God must be the unity of all opposites, because to deny parts of the opposites to God would be to argue that God is not infinite, not total, not all powerful.
    3. This means that God’s unity includes evil, not merely that evil is a deprivation of God (the privatio boni of Christianity).
    4. The only thing that totality lacks under this conception is lived experience of navigating the opposites from a limited relational standpoint (the crucifixion of opposites), because the opposites are otherwise united within totality.
    5. God is an unconscious being, because consciousness arises from limitation (i.e. navigating this and not that).
    6. Given that God is totality and unconscious, it does not necessarily “care” like a personal God would about how living creatures navigate the opposites, as that would smuggle the privatio boni back through the backdoor.
    7. It is humanity’s role – and perhaps the role of all life – to provide fullness to totality by navigating the crucifixion of opposites from their limited perspective.

    This is a horrific logic chain if one sits with it, because it means that God does not care about us individually and that all experiences, good and bad, add to totality. The starving African child and ruling the world as a Rothschild are both experiencing contributing to totality’s fullness. The question then becomes how does one bear this conception of God as totality, not as God as loving kindness? The structural question this generates is architectural: where does the processing of unbearable reality occur, who holds this terrible knowledge? A useful analogy is urban waste management. A centralized sewage system is efficient, coordinated, and scalable, but it concentrates toxicity in one place and is vulnerable to catastrophic failure. Alternatively, distributed composting is resilient and adaptive, but it cannot coordinate at scale. The crucifixion of opposites works the same way. The question is not whether it happens but where, and this single placement decision determines everything that follows.

    There are three possible responses to the crucifixion of opposites:

    1. To contain the horrors of the void within institutions. One can see this within religious institutions of all faiths (other than Buddhism) and in secular forms (belief in ideology or government, “experts” or “science”, news orgs broadcasting the Current Thing2, etc.). In other words, institutions tell believers how to act, the believer accepts and internalizes the messages, and the authorities bear the agony of the crucifixion of opposites so that the believers do not have to. We can see this in the Catholic Magisterium, where the Church acts as the ‘Vicar of Christ’ to resolve the paradoxes of sin and grace for the believer. Just as the Lurianic system uses Rabbinical guidance to navigate the Sefirot, the Catholic hierarchy functions as a spiritual ‘load-bearer.’ By claiming the sole authority to interpret divine will, the institution absorbs the crucifixion of opposites – the paralyzing weight of moral uncertainty – so the individual can focus on communal life and obedience. This is the essence of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: the elite few accept the terrible burden of freedom and the knowledge of good and evil so that the many may live in a state of peaceful, humble happiness.
    2. Antinomianism, where if God is totality then why strive toward the good? One can see this impulse in strands of Jewish thought such as Sabbateanism and Frankism, where descent into the “kelipot” (the evil material world) was seen as necessary to “repair” the Godhead.
    3. The most recent approach, which is the Jungian individuation process. One accepts the crucifixion of opposites internally, individually, with answers given to one provisionally via the transcendent function (i.e. one holds the opposites without judgment, with the answer provided provisionally and mysteriously as intuition from within or without). This results in an expansion of consciousness because decisions are not offloaded onto others and decisions are made without ego choosing one polarity over another, which would otherwise collapse the rejected pole into the unconscious to be projected onto the Other for destruction. Under this ontology “good” is what expands consciousness (because it is the one thing that totality lacks) and “bad” is what contracts consciousness.

    Let’s delve into these options more carefully.

    The Institutional Response to the Crucifixion of Opposites (Choice #1)

    Historical evidence confirms the structural incompatibility between individuals and institutions holding the crucifixion of opposites; institutions which tried to bridge the divide were outcompeted by those who embraced the role. “Pagan” systems such as Greek city-states and Germanic tribal cultures were structurally weaker with respect to sustained imperial coordination because their gods functioned as internal load-bearers: each warrior or citizen had a personal relationship with the divine that distributed rather than centralized interpretive authority. There was no rabbinical class to monopolize meaning, no covenant binding everyone to a single external reference point, but these approaches were structurally weaker in maintaining unified hierarchical governance versus the competition which arose from Christianity. This is not a moral judgment, it is a structural constraint. Just as the Roman Empire eventually adopted a centralized Christian hierarchy to stabilize its internal tensions, the move from distributed sovereignty (paganism) to externalized crucifixion (the Church or the Rabbinate) is a structural advantage for hierarchical governance, not a moral superiority. This is why Julian the Apostate intended to centralize regional Hellenic priests to compete against Christianity, while insisting that such institutions implement almsgiving, although his efforts failed as a rearguard, losing action.

    But Christianity was ultimately outcompeted by a Talmudic/Kabbalistic framework3 within the ranks of the upper elites – as covered in this three part series, with the world barreling toward a digital panopticon with power centralized in Greater Israel – so understanding it’s approach to who bears the crucifixion of opposites becomes important. While the Torah and Talmud promoted a hierarchical rabbinical structure from inception, it was 16th century Lurianic Kabbalah that provided metaphysical meaning to the average Jewish adherence to the mitzvot. Quoting Gershom Sholem in The Messianic Idea in Judaism,

    The Galut [Isaac Luria’s] Kabbalah saw as a terrible and pitiless state permeating and embittering all of Jewish life, but Galut was also the condition of the universe as a whole, even of the deity. This is an extremely bold idea, and when the Lurianic Kabbalists came to speak of it, they shuddered at their own audacity, hedging it with such deprecatory expressions as “one might suppose,” “as it were,” “to stun the ear.” Nevertheless, the idea was developed through the three central conceptions which shape the Lurianic system: limitation, destruction, reparation…God did not reveal Himself overtly in creation, but confined and concealed himself, and by doing so enabled the world to be revealed. Then came the second act, the fashioning of the universal “emanations,” the creations of the worlds, the revelation of the divine as mankind’s deity, as the Creator, as the God of Israel.

    In other words, under Luria’s system God is totality, a totality comprising all good and all evil (Ein Sof, akin to but not the same thing as Abraxas4), but then a lesser being became the “God of Israel.” Roughly, the First Cause = Ein Sof = the hidden unknowable totality = Abraxas, while Yahweh = Yaldabaoth = the Demiurge = the lesser tribal God who emerged from that totality and claims to be the only God while actually being a subordinate emanation. This is is structurally identical to the Gnostic critique of Judaism which the early Gnostics were making from outside the tradition two thousand years ago.5 This is why Gershom Scholem once described Gnosticism as, per Wiki, “the greatest case of metaphysical anti-Semitism”, because a Godhead of totality does not favor one tribal group over another, demand obedience to whims, or express rage or disappointment – such an entity can only be a subordinate entity to the totality, which dynamites the metaphysical floor on which the scheme rests. The Sabbatean belief makes this explicit as an internal Jewish theological position: the radical Sabbateans acknowledged that the God of the philosophers – the true infinite ground – is not the same as the tribal God of Israel. This is a stunning internal confirmation of the Gnostic framework, coming from within the tradition’s own most antinomian strand.6

    The sefirot of the Tree of Life was the response to the identification that this reality is determined by pairs of opposites. Under Luria’s scheme one could “repair” the world through the adherence to mitzvot as mediated by rabbinical guidance, and navigate the opposites through the sefirot system. The purpose was ultimately to “repair” God itself, per Sholem:

    We all work, or are at least expected to work, for the amendment of the world and the “selection” of good and evil. This provides an ideology for the commandments and the life of Halakhah – an ideology which connects traditional Judaism with the hidden forces operation int he world at large. A man who observes a commandment is no longer merely observing a commandment: his act has a universal significance, he is amending something….The new Kabbalah had a very important function in restoring to the Jew his sense of responsibility and his dignity. He could now look upon his state, whether in Galut (exile) or in the Messianic hope, as the symbol of a profound mystery which reaches as high as God, and he could relate the fundamental experiences of his life to all cosmic being and integration.

    In other words, the crucifixion of opposites as a lived reality underneath the horrors of Abraxas was placed into a safe context, funneling reality into a power dominance scheme with rabbis serving as the “clearinghouse” for morality, which works because people are desperate to offload the crucifixion of opposites elsewhere.7 David Berger in The Rebbe, The Messiah and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference states an apparently well known phrase on p. 78, Ofor ani tachoas kappos raglei hageonim hatzaddikim (“I am as dust beneath the feet of the erudite and pious rabbis”), which encapsulates in a single phrase how willing people are to turn off their critical thinking facilities and offload the horrors of existence onto “experts” to tell them what to do. This also explains Chabad’s eagerness to equate Menachem Mendel Schneerson with God, p. 87: “The Rebbe has progressed in the eyes of one faction within the movement from being a navi [prophet] to being the most likely candidate for Moshiach to being ‘bechezkhas’ Moshiach [presumptive Messiah], to being Melech HaMoshiach [the King Messiah], to being a dead Moshiach who has not died, to being ‘omniscient’, ‘omnipotent’ and being ‘the Essence and Being [of God] enclothed in a body’!” This progressive logic chain makes sense because it feels so much better to offload the crucifixion of opposites onto the representative of the Godhead itself than to a mere mortal, who could otherwise be wrong. It feels so much safer! And it feeds the power of the institutional authority too, as Schneerson publicly argued that, per Berger p. 162, “since a rebbe is a ‘connecting intermediary’ [who does not interrupt the divine flow], a unity is established between the hasid who is one with the rebbe and the rebbe himself, who is ‘the Essence and Being itself placed into a body’. All are one.” Berger’s bitter critique is that, ironically, the Chabad approach to Schneerson mirrors the Christian approach to Christ, and that by removing the historic core objection to Christianity – that a Jewish messiah must complete the ingathering, third temple reconstruction, and “peace” to the nations while alive – that it becomes much easier for Jews to convert to Christianity. This offloading dynamic is not unique to the Jewish tradition – any elite coordination system must externalize the crucifixion of opposites to maintain hierarchical stability across generations, because internal crucifixion produces distributed psychological sovereignty that is structurally incompatible with centralized command. Catholicism is a good example of this – rigidly hierarchical, confessional for the absolution of sin. Protestantism represents a decentralized variant of the institutional response.8

    A critical divergence separates the Lurianic institutional response from its Christian and secular competitors. The Christian doctrine of privatio boni – evil as the mere absence of good – does not make one’s shadow disappear, it severs it from consciousness and is suppressed into the unconscious, where what cannot be acknowledged internally must be projected outward. The suppressed pole finds its outlet in the scapegoat (the heretic, the unbeliever, the political enemy) whose destruction temporarily relieves the pressure the system cannot metabolize internally. This is Jung’s diagnosis of Christian psychological pathology, and it persists in secular form: progressive ideologies inherit the privatio boni architecture intact, identifying the collective with the Good and projecting darkness onto the deplorable, the reactionary, the enemy of progress. The Lurianic system is more sophisticated precisely because it acknowledges the sitra achra – the other side – as a functional component of reality rather than suppressing it. The shadow is managed through legal boundary enforcement and hierarchical mediation rather than righteous annihilation, which makes it internally more stable. It does not make it less dangerous, as the dominance scheme the system produces demonstrates; indeed, Judaism suppresses the humanity of the non-Jew, rendering them into a permanent Other, which is also a form of consciousness suppression.

    The organizational consequences of theology

    The offloading of the crucifixion of opposites onto authority has organizational consequences. A system that contains the crucifixion of opposites within institutional mediation seeks to expand its reach and neutralize threats because in a world without cosmic moral accounting – God as totality, not as Goodness – power is the only guarantee against predation. If Abraxas is indifferent to human suffering then it becomes critical to establish a power dominance scheme, because it is better to eat than to be eaten – the Kabbalistic power framework, and the smuggling in of the tribal God under the Ein Sof, follows logically from that specific theological premise. Luria’s system built off the Zohar, which was written in the last quarter of the thirteenth century and which established a dominance scheme where, according to Scholem,

    The Gentiles (who are designated Esau or Edom)…receive their light in this world at a single stroke, but it will depart from them gradually until Israel shall grow strong and destroy them. And when the spirit of uncleanliness shall pass from the world and the divine light shall shine upon Israel without let or hinderance, all things will return to their proper order – to this state of perfection which prevailed in the Garden of Eden before Adam sinned.

    Per Shahak, “One of the basic tenants of the Lurianic Cabbala is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.”

    Boundary Enforcement

    Jews who opposed this dominance scheme were labeled heretics and, as threats to the system, could be destroyed under the law of the pursuer, “Din Rodef”, and the law of the informer, “Din Moser”. According to Shahak, to what extent punishment is meted out against heretics depends on the extent of Jewish power in a given territory; when rabbis have extensive authority heretic enforcement punishments are severe, up to and including amputation, banishment, or murder; when rabbis have less authority, they do what they can get away with without risking wrath from non-Jewish authorities. This relates to religious enforcement in general, which always depends on political and social factors. Chabad, for example, which was apolitical for decades as a way of promoting Jewish outreach, is increasingly leaning into a political role – allied with Itamar Ben-Gvir, who kept a portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his living room until recently (Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994 and is venerated in certain religious Zionist circles as a martyr). This shift reflects underlying dynamics – demographic growth, network maturation, and perceived status increase – that have moved in Chabad’s favor per this Haaretz report.

    Heretics may be antinomians – those who reject the power of the rabbis – or they may be those who advocate for systems outside of a particular hierarchy – see Baruch Spinoza who was harshly excommunicated, the most that could be enforced under Christian rule.9 Shahak quotes Maimonides – who is the most authoritative legal codifier in Jewish history, meaning these positions represent normative rather than fringe halachic opinion – in Law of Murderer and Preservation of Life (chapter 4, rules 10-11)10, where he wrote:

    The [Jewish] heretics are those [Jews] who commit sins on purpose; even one who eats meat not ritually slaughtered or who dresses in a sha’atnez clothes (made of linen and wool woven together) on purpose is called a heretic [as are] those [Jews] who deny the Torah and prophecy. They should be killed. If he [a Jew] has the power to kill them by the sword, he should do so. But if he has not [the power to do so], he should behave so deceitfully to them that death would ensue….Deaths of non-Jews with whom we are not at war and Jewish shepherds of sheep and goats and similar people should not be caused, although it is forbidden to save them if they are at the point of death. If, for example, one of them is seen falling into the sea, he should not be rescued. As it is written: ‘Neither shall you stand against the blood of your fellow’ (Leviticus 19:16) but he [the non-Jew] is not your fellow.

    In Laws of Idolatry, chapter 2, rule 5, he states further:

    Jews who worship idolatrously are considered as non-Jews, in contrast to Jews who have committed [another] sin punishable by stoning; if he [a Jew] converted to idolatry he is considered to be a denier of the entire Torah….In regard to the heretics who follow their own thoughts and speak foolishly, it is forbidden to talk with or to answer them, as we have said above [in the first section of the work] so that they may ultimately contravene maliciously and proudly the most important parts of the Jewish religion and say there is no sin [in doing this].

    Per Shahak, “An idolatrous Jew, including one who converts to Christianity, accepts another religious discipline, while a heretic follows his own views and is thereby considered to be more dangerous.” He quotes Maimonidies further in Laws of Idolatry, chapter 2, rule 3:

    “And it is not only forbidden to think about idolatry but [about] any thought that may cause a Jew to doubt one principle of the Jewish religion. [The Jew] is warned not to bring it to his consciousness. We shall not think in that direction, and we shall not allow ourselves to be drawn into meditations of the heart, because human understanding is limited and not every opinion is directed to the real truth….It is about that issue that the Torah warned us. As it is written: “And that you seek not after your own heart and after your own eyes that you are using to prostitute yourselves” (Numbers 16:39) [This verse is included in the third passage of “Kry’at Sh’ma,” one of the most sacred Jewish prayers that is said daily in the morning and in the evening.].” This means that every Jew is forbidden to allow himself to follow his own insufficient knowledge and to imagine that his own thoughts are capable of reaching the truth. The sages have said: “after your own heart” means heresy; “after your own eyes” means prostitution.

    Per Shahak, “such prohibitions of any independent thinking (which some Haredim apply to some of Maimonides’ own writings) were common in post-talmudic Judaism and have persisted to date in part of Orthodox Judaism….In addition to advocating that heretics be killed, whenever possible, by employing one method or another, traditional Judaism directed that heretics while still alive should under all possible circumstances be treated in a worse manner than non-Jews or Jews who converted to another religion.” Such boundary enforcement is naturally necessary to maintain the structure of the religion itself; if heretics were not punished harshly then it would encourage more independent thinking and more defections from the religion. So boundary enforcement makes sense under the structure’s own logic.

    Going back to the waste treatment analogy where the crucifixion of opposites (the pain of reality) is treated as toxic sludge, the rabbis (or priests) are the sanitation workers who process this sludge so the laity don’t have to, and the “heretic” is not a sinner but a polluter – someone who refuses to use the designated bins, thereby creating a biohazard for the community. As Shahak argues, “Our firm belief is that a fundamentalist Jewish regime, if it came to power in Israel, would treat Israeli Jews who did not accept its tenets worse than it would treat Palestinians.”

    The institutional response to the crucifixion of opposites doesn’t require formal enforcement to operate, however; it operates at the psychological level in people who have never consciously held the theology and would reject its explicit formulations. The critical aspect is that it is not institutions forcing this solution to the crucifixion of opposites onto the masses except in boundary enforcement cases; rather, the vast majority of people do not want to experience the crucifixion of opposites, because to stare into the void is horrifying and would break most people’s minds. Most people want religious leaders (or secular leaders, or so-called “experts”) to tell them what to do. From this vantage-point the offloading of the crucifixion onto such experts of whatever religion or secular institution is not a horror or an injustice but a mercy, which was the inquisitor’s position in the Grand Inquisitor.

    The Tribal Boundary

    This is not ancient history; the same psychological structure operates in the present. A concrete illustration: a successful Jewish man known to me does a lot of good deeds in his community, both with respect to Jews and to non-Jews. He is a kind and caring person who shirks back at personal injustice, and I’ve seen examples of him extending himself and treating others fairly without expectation of reward. Yet he also casually favors bombing the electrical infrastructure of Iran, which would kill tens or hundreds of thousands of Iranians over a period of months. How does one explain this contradiction? This is the ontological hierarchy operating at the psychological level in someone who doesn’t consciously hold the theology; the in-group has become the relevant moral universe. The Iranian people aren’t fully real to him in the way that the people in his immediate life are because the tribal formation has drawn the circle of genuine moral consideration at a boundary that excludes them by default.

    This is not conscious theology but an inherited psychological formation. The ontological hierarchy doesn’t require the Tanya to be real as a lived psychological reality, it just requires that the people inside the circle are people and the people outside it are abstractions – responsible for their leaders, deserving of their fate, not quite fully present as beings whose suffering registers with the same weight.

    The specific thought process – “they support a terror state, therefore they bear responsibility, therefore what happens to them is acceptable” – is the secular translation of kelipot logic. Not consciously held, not theologically articulated, but functionally identical in its psychological operation. The circle of genuine moral consideration stops at the tribal boundary and everything outside it gets processed through a different, thinner moral register that can accommodate casual advocacy for mass civilian death without cognitive dissonance.

    What makes it so difficult to engage is that the kindness is real while the casual advocacy for lethal force toward those outside the circle is also real. They coexist without friction because the formation that produced them keeps them in separate compartments that never have to meet. He doesn’t experience himself as someone who advocates for mass civilian death, he experiences himself as someone who supports Israel’s security and opposes Iranian nuclear ambitions. The civilian deaths are an abstraction downstream of a position that feels entirely reasonable and even morally required from inside the formation. The chain of causation between the casual advocacy and the child starving in the dark is long enough, indirect enough, and populated with enough intermediate steps that the connection never becomes viscerally real. The electricity plant is a military target, the military target is a strategic necessity, the strategic necessity serves security, security protects the in-group. The child who dies three months later from contaminated water because the pumping station lost power is several steps removed from the casual dinner conversation about bombing infrastructure. If he saw the chain play out directly his position would likely change because it would collapse the abstraction into something the tribal formation can’t process cleanly – his genuine local kindness would activate. The child in front of him is a child. The tribal boundary doesn’t hold against direct visual encounter with specific suffering in the way it holds against statistical abstraction of distant consequences. This is why war propaganda has always worked by keeping the consequences abstract and distant for domestic populations while making the enemy’s actions viscerally concrete. People who would be horrified by the direct visual chain consistently support policies that produce that chain when the connection is sufficiently mediated.

    The distance between my position and his isn’t primarily intellectual, the distance is in where the circle of genuine moral consideration is drawn, and that circle was drawn by a formation that operates below the level of conscious argument. One can’t argue someone out of a boundary they didn’t argue themselves into.11 Note that this psychological formation is not unique to Jewish identity; it operates identically in American nationalist, Chinese communist, or corporate tribal formations. The specific content changes; the structural mechanism of compartmentalized cruelty remains the same.

    Antinomian Externalization of the Crucifixion of Opposites (Choice #2)

    If one rejected rabbinical rule but accepts a God of totality and the Lurianic system, the push for antinomian action is strong. Sabbateanism and Frankism believed that the way toward “repair” of the world was to externalize the crucifixion of opposites, to delve into “evil” in order to then “rescue” the shards of godliness within. However, externalizing the crucifixion of opposites rather than bearing it internally produces the same problem as the institutional response, just in the opposite direction – it collapses consciousness as I discussed previously here, where I wrote:

    If God is not good but all good and all evil, he is indifferent to human suffering, why not be a predator? What does morality matter then?

    There are four non-theological constraints, and none of them are sentimental.

    Constraint 1: Individuation is incompatible with compulsive predation. Predation can be instrumental, but compulsive predation fractures the psyche. Why? Because individuation requires holding opposites consciously. Predation collapses tension by externalizing shadow outward. The predator does not contain evil; he discharges it. That produces inflation, dissociation, eventual psychic rigidity, and finally possession by the very archetypes he thought he wielded. Predation is anti-individuative, not immoral per se. This is a structural limit, not a moral one.

    Constraint 2: Predation narrows consciousness, and Abraxas wants consciousness (or rather, consciousness is the logical telos of the Abraxian process of differentiation, even if Abraxas has no intention). This is subtle and important. Abraxas does not care about good or evil, but consciousness is the one thing he lacks. Predation simplifies reality, it reduces others to objects, it flattens complexity, it trades awareness for efficiency. If humanity’s function is to increase consciousness, then predation is counterproductive even within the Abraxas logic. Not forbidden, but inferior.

    Constraint 3: Total predation destroys the field that individuates anyone. A purely predatory system annihilates trust, continuity, symbol, and memory. That produces short-term dominance, long-term sterility. No individuation occurs in total collapse; only survival loops. Thus even without a good God, predation undermines the very psychic ecosystem that makes higher differentiation possible. This is why elites can exploit but never fully burn the system down, and why they already live post-privatio boni while pretending otherwise.

    Constraint 4: Suffering becomes yours once projection is gone. Under privatio boni, one can justify cruelty as obedience, necessity, destiny, or righteousness. Under Abraxas, there is no such alibi. If you harm, you own the harm. Not morally – existentially. Many people cannot bear that weight, and it breaks them faster than guilt ever did.

    In other words, under Abraxas predation is metaphysically permissible, but it is psychologically corrosive. Predatory action increases unconsciousness, not wholeness. Why? Because individuation is not about expressing power, it is about holding opposites without collapse. Predation collapses the tension by identifying fully with one pole. The predator becomes unconscious of the victim, pole dependency, vulnerability finitude. Unrestrained predation collapses differentiation, reduces complexity, annihilates future consciousness, erodes the very field in which opposites can be held. Excess predation collapses differentiation because it reduces others to means, flattens interiority, simplifies the world into resource and obstacle. The predator becomes less differentiated as he dominates, his consciousness narrows, his symbolic range shrinks. He becomes repetitive, compulsive, mechanical. What happens then? Meaning thins, time collapses into repetition, the world becomes boring, hostile, or unreal, violence escalates because it no longer satisfies. This is why predation is self-defeating even in a godless cosmos. Not because it is immoral, but because it is anti-consciousness. Predation simplifies the psyche while individuation complexifies it.

    So the restraint against predation is not moral law, it is not “goodness”, not divine command but psychic consequence – structural fidelity to the conditions of consciousness. This is energetic economy. You do not need a higher good god above Abraxas, you need the fact that consciousness is fragile and easily lost. Excess predation is anti-Abraxian, not because it is evil but because it is stupid at the level of totality. Abraxas does not reward goodness, but unconsciousness punishes predation internally. That’s colder, and truer. This produces an ethics of stewardship of differentiation, damage limitation, preservation of psychic and social complexity; not obedience, not righteousness not salvation – maintenance.

    This is the irony: privatio boni licenses predation through moral projection, while Abraxas limits predation through structural realism. When no cosmic referee exists harm is final, loss is irreversible, destruction is not redeemed elsewhere. This creates practical restraint, not nihilism. Cold gods often produce warmer ethics because they leave no room for moral outsourcing.

    The institution suppresses a pole of independent thought, the antinomian acts out another pole (treating the Other instrumentally), neither actually holds the horrible tension of the crucifixion. These systems collapsed externally – with Sabbatai Zevi converting to Islam and Frank converting to Catholicism – because their results were so societally horrific, especially in relation to sexuality (including orgies and incest) but also with respect to community dissolution, mass apostasy, and the social chaos that followed Sabbatai’s conversion, although their perspective remained highly influential in subterranean currents. Alternatively, as I argued here, the antinomian perspective is very likely held by those occupying the apex of power today.

    Jungian Individuation as the Internal Response to the Crucifixion of Opposites (Response #3)

    The alternative to the institutional system or to externalized antinomianism is the individual acceptance of the crucifixion of opposites with provisional resolution via the transcendent function. Because one cannot identify with totality as a limited being – it leads either to psychic inflation, collapse, or paralysis – and because the crucifixion is so painful and difficult to sit inside, it ultimately requires a rebirth of the Gods within the human psyche, as discussed in this series here (i.e. because one cannot remain identifying with totality, one must instead identify with one’s specific energy currents, and these currents must be personalized as Gods and planetary energies in order to interact with them without identifying with them). The individuation process keeps the pairs of opposites in suspense without the ego deciding on one polarity over the other; it is the act of listening, of accepting a provisional answer mysteriously which arises after sustained crucifixion from either an internal or external source which separates it from institutions holding that tension or antinomianism acting out the tension.

    As a counterweight, I would note that the individuation process is a luxury of a stable society; Jung himself lived in an individualist, safe, wealthy society. If times were different, if there was an intense competition for resources and territory on a group basis, it would be much harder to sustain the individuation process and not get swept up within the collective itself.

    The personal cost of the individuating path in an environment structured by the first option is not incidental but constitutive. The person who cannot compartmentalize – who cannot keep the tribal boundary and the universal moral consideration in separate rooms that never meet – pays in zero status, reputational exposure, and the specific suffering that clarity adds to isolation. The successful operator within the coordinating system is not less intelligent; he is more efficiently adapted to the actual environment, having learned which contradictions to metabolize and which to keep separated. His costs are invisible to him, while the individuating person’s costs are visible to themselves, which is the additional penalty clarity extracts. This is not a moral superiority claim, it is a description of what the structural incompatibility between consciousness expansion and collective coordination costs at the individual level, paid in real time, without cosmic compensation. This should be kept in mind so that one does not develop a sense of superiority that one is above the masses (as Ernst Junger did).

    Conclusion

    Ultimately, the logic surrounding Abraxas as totality is, to me, very strong, how consciousness arises from the navigation (and crucifixion) of endless opposite energies. The choice is how one deals with its horrors, whether one offloads it to an institution to bear its pain and uncertainty, whether one internalizes it but then collapses into antinomian predation, or whether one internalizes it in order to increase consciousness. The individual and the collective have incompatible needs when processing unbearable reality, which is the structural tragedy the essay has been circling: not that one path is wrong and the other right, but that the path that preserves consciousness destroys coordination and the path that enables coordination contracts consciousness. There is no resolution that preserves both simultaneously, only the honest acknowledgment of what each path costs. The choice between these responses is ultimately a choice about what one thinks consciousness is for. The institutional response treats consciousness as something to be protected from the void, the antinomian response treats consciousness as an instrument for descent, while the individuating response treats consciousness as the one thing totality lacks – the only genuinely creative act available to a finite being in an indifferent universe.

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    1

    i.e. the detailed focus on Talmudic/Kabbalistic responses in this essay follows directly from the structural argument developed in the preceding three-part series: apex elites facing multi-generational coordination problems converge, via selection pressure rather than ethnic conspiracy, on the metaphysical framework that most efficiently supplies non-redemptive theology, infinite interpretive flexibility, and ontological hierarchy. This essay examines what its internal logic implies for the crucifixion of opposites. It is not a claim about ‘Jews’ as an ethnicity or about ordinary adherents of any tradition; it follows from an analysis of a specific legitimation technology that the model predicts elites of any background would adopt or instrumentalize.

    2

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

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

    3

    The structural incoherence of combining Christianity’s privatio boni framework with Kabbalistic material is demonstrated historically by the Christian Kabbalah movement of the Renaissance – figures like Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin attempted to synthesize Kabbalistic symbolism with Christian theology, primarily as an apologetic project to demonstrate that Jewish mystical tradition secretly confirmed Christian claims about the Trinity and Christ. The attempt failed structurally rather than merely theologically. Kabbalah’s operative depth derives precisely from its honest acknowledgment of divine totality including the dark dimension where the Ein Sof contains the sitra achra as a genuine cosmic force, the Lurianic rupture as a real catastrophe requiring human participation in repair. Christianity’s privatio boni suppresses exactly this acknowledgment. Christian Kabbalah attempted to borrow the symbolic apparatus – the sefirot, the divine names, the emanation structure – while maintaining the Christian suppression of divine darkness, which emptied the symbols of their operative content. The result was elaborate decorative mysticism without functional depth: you cannot have the benefit of acknowledging the dark dimension of the divine while simultaneously insisting God is all good. The two operations cancel each other. Christian Kabbalah is therefore a clean historical demonstration of the structural incompatibility this essay identifies, not merely a cultural difference between two traditions but a genuine logical contradiction between the privatio boni framework and the crucifixion of opposites that Kabbalah honestly acknowledges and routes through institutional mediation. Scholem’s scholarship on Kabbalah’s specifically Jewish origins as depicted in his highly academic Alchemy and Kabbalah (1977) – contra Jung’s tendency to treat it as a variant of a universal mystical tradition – is relevant here: the specifically Jewish theological context, including the tradition’s honest engagement with divine darkness that the privatio boni forecloses, is precisely what gives the Kabbalistic system its distinctive depth and power which Christian appropriation of its symbolic vocabulary without its theological premises could not replicate. The connection between alchemy and Jewish kabbalah were forced per Scholem on p. 23, as “within Judaism practical alchemy was only rarely pursued in kabbalist circles. These two areas did not fit well together and, as we will see, were connected relatively late. I have not been able to find alchemical recipes related to the Great Work in any Hebraic kabbalist book or manuscript before 1500. Those recipes found in older manuscripts (from the fourteenth or fifteenth century) have nothing to do with Kabbalah and did not originate in Jewish tradition.” And p. 42, “I am not sure that it is necessary to resort to the more far-reaching psychological hypothesis of archetypes of the soul, as developed by C.G. Jung in his respective works.”

    4

    This is a heuristic and Ein Sof and Abraxas are not exactly the same. While Ein Sof (the Infinite) and Abraxas are functionally identical as placeholders for the Absolute Totality, they represent different psychological orientations toward that Totality. Ein Sof is the Godhead prior to any self-expression – a silent, infinite void that is strictly trans-moral. In the Lurianic system, the Ein Sof undergoes Tzimtzum (contraction) to allow for a world of opposites, but the tension of those opposites is immediately managed through the structured emanations of the Sefirot.

    By contrast, Abraxas – as revived by Jung in The Seven Sermons to the Dead – is the God above God who explicitly embodies the active, violent union of opposites. Where Ein Sof is the Ground of Being that remains hidden behind the curtain of the Law, Abraxas is the Effect of the Whole that the individuating soul must confront directly. Structurally, both systems posit a First Cause that contains the roots of what humans call rvil (Sitra Achra in Kabbalah; the Darkness in Abraxas), but the Lurianic framework focuses on the institutional repair of that fracture, while the Jungian framework focuses on the individual endurance of it.

    5

    While the Gnostic identification of Yahweh as Demiurge is structurally correct, the standard Gnostic model posits an all-good God above the Demiurge, smuggling the privatio boni back in through the back door which an understanding of God as the unity of all opposites forecloses.

    6

    Per Scholem, “the five distinguishing beliefs of “radical” Sabbatianism are:

    1. The belief in the necessary apostasy of the Messiah and in the sacramental nature of the descent into the realm of the kelipot [unclean].
    2. The belief that the “believer” must not appear to be as he really is.
    3. The belief that the Torah of atzilut [the “true” Torah which has been in a state of concealment for the entire period of Jewish exile] must be observed through the violation of the Torah of beriah [a word denoting every aspect of the old life and its institutions].
    4. The belief that the First Cause and the God of Israel are not the same, the former being the God of rational philosophy, the latter the God of religion.
    5. The belief in three hypostases of the Godhead, all of which have been or will be incarnated in human form.”

    7

    The mechanism by which this offloading operates at the level of individual transaction – rather than only at the level of theological system – is the dispensation (heterirn) apparatus. The individual brings the unbearable tension to the institutional layer: a prohibition exists, the economic necessity exists, they cannot both be honored simultaneously, and the crucifixion of opposites cannot be resolved from within. The rabbi assesses the situation against the standard, issues the dispensation, and clears the transaction. The individual is released from the weight of having had to decide. The crucifixion of opposites – the paralyzing question of what to do when reality cannot be navigated without moral compromise – is processed through the institutional clearinghouse rather than borne internally. The standard remains intact, the clearing layer does the work of accommodation invisibly, and the individual never has to experience the contradiction directly, which means the crucifixion of opposites never has to be metabolized individually. It is processed institutionally, at scale, by the authority class whose function is precisely to bear what the laity cannot. The rabbi who issues the dispensation has absorbed the tension, the individual who receives it has been relieved of it. This is the structural genius of the system: infinite practical flexibility – any economic necessity can be accommodated, any prohibition routed around – while the appearance of unwavering adherence to an inviolable standard is maintained. The authority class derives its power from controlling the layer that determines what is legitimized; whoever operates that clearing layer governs the system without owning any of its components.

    8

    By rejecting the papal magisterium and affirming the priesthood of all believers, it appears to shift the crucifixion of opposites onto the individual. However, the individual is not asked to hold the tension internally; rather, the tension is externalized onto sola scriptura – the Bible as the sole infallible authority. The believer is not required to metabolize the contradiction between divine goodness and worldly evil; they are required to submit to the text and its (often pastorally mediated) interpretation. The crucifixion is still offloaded, not to a hierarchical priest, but to a closed canon and a personal relationship with a God who remains within the privatio boni framework (all-good, evil as absence). This creates a different psychological economy: the Protestant carries the weight of direct accountability to God without a human intermediary, but the weight is still borne by an external reference point. The result is greater doctrinal fragmentation (each denomination becomes its own institutional clearinghouse) and a tendency toward moral certainty that can be more brittle than Catholic casuistry. Protestantism does not produce individuation in the Jungian sense because the opposites are still externalized – they are projected onto the text, the conscience, or the personal relationship with Christ – rather than held internally without resolution. It is institutional containment without a centralized sanitation worker, which often means the believer ends up doing more of the psychological work themselves, but still within a framework that forecloses genuine confrontation with the void.

    9

    Per Shahak, 131: “It may be instructive to compare the Frankist heresy incident with what Baruch Spinoza had to endure in Holland about a hundred years earlier. Because of the relatively tolerant modern Dutch regime, the Jewish community of Amsterdam could only excommunicate Spinoza. As much as members of that community desired to do so, they could not flog or kill Spinoza; they could not compel Spinoza to make public confession in the synagogue that he had sinned in his commentaries and statements about Judaism. The Jewish community could only excommunicate Spinoza and forbid him from attending the synagogue. A few years before Spinoza’s excommunication, the Jewish community of Amsterdam excommunicated Uriel D’Acusta for similar reasons….A comparison between the fates of Spinoza and D’Acusta suggests two lessons for contemporary Jews who do not wish to submit to the tyranny often prevalent in Jewish orthodoxy: 1) An intellectual compromise with Jewish orthodoxy is no more possible than is an intellectual compromise with any other totalitarian system. 2) An apologetic approach to the Jewish past, which is in reality false beautification and falsification of one part of Jewish history and is intended to remove the horrors and persecutions that Jews suffered at the hands of their own authorities and rabbis, only increases the dangers of a developing Jewish “Khomeinism.” In Israel such compromise increases the danger of a Jewish state that could become dominated by rabbis who will not hesitate to punish other Jews as did their revered predecessors when not prevented from doing so by an outside power.”

    10

    Shahak’s translations are contested by Orthodox authorities, but the structural claim here does not depend on precise wording but on the functional outcome: boundary enforcement against heretics is necessary to maintain any hierarchical religious system, and the severity of enforcement correlates with institutional power.

    11

    I would also note that this man is smarter in navigating the real world than I am, he is better calibrated to the world as it actually operates – the world where tribal alignment with the apex network is rewarded and where the costs of departing from it are real. His worldly intelligence is correctly adapted to that environment, while my formation produces the clarity to see what that environment is and the inability to navigate it comfortably. His success depends on a certain energetic economy, i.e. not spending processing power on contradictions that don’t need to be resolved in order to function effectively. The crucifixion of opposites is genuinely expensive. Holding simultaneously that you are a kind person who helps those around you and that you casually advocate for infrastructure bombing that will kill children through slow attrition requires either resolving the contradiction – which would mean either changing the advocacy or revising the self-image – or keeping the two compartments from ever meeting, which is what the tribal formation enables.

    The successful real-world operator has learned, not always consciously, which contradictions to metabolize and which to keep compartmentalized. The ones that don’t affect his functioning get compartmentalized, the ones that would cost him real-world position if unresolved get metabolized into whatever position maintains the functioning. This is not stupidity or psychopathy, it’s a specific and highly adaptive cognitive economy that the real world selects for and rewards. He pays for his compartmentalization with blindness, I pay for my inability to compartmentalize with zero status, reputational exposure, and isolation of work that almost no one can receive. The difference is that his costs are invisible to him and mine are visible to me, which adds the specific suffering of clarity to everything else.

  • On Iran

    This post examines the ongoing Iran war through a structural lens that the standard and dissident frameworks cannot provide. Beginning with a series of unanswered questions – why the war was launched with almost no public justification, why Israel’s stock market is at all-time highs despite purported Iranian retaliation, why every Israeli enemy in the region has been systematically eliminated while Israeli allies remain – it argues that the war is not a geopolitical conflict but a single integrated operation with five simultaneous outputs. The post then situates this operation within a deeper framework, arguing that the degradation of the Western population is not a byproduct of the system but its calibrated output and that the Iran war marks the acceleration toward the formalization of covert hierarchy into overt control.

    Welcome back. In this post I am going to discuss the ongoing Iran war, because the ramifications of the war seem to be extending beyond a Current Thing – which I am loathe to cover except in throwaway Notes, if that – and providing signs of possibly morphing into a COVID-19 type scenario, with lockdowns and upcoming panic on the basis of energy crisis instead of a rebranded flu.

    Let’s start with some questions about the war. Trump attacked Iran last year and purportedly destroyed or set back substantially its nuclear weapons program, with many generals, scientists, and other prominent regime officials assassinated – what was the need to attack them again? Why did the Trump regime not really attempt to sell the American public on the war – some wishy-washy, contradictory statements about the threat Iran posed, its rebuilding of its nuclear program, whatever, which was a very weak attempt, certainly far, far weaker than Colin Powell’s WMD lies about Iraq? Why did Trump have endless meetings with Netanyahu in the leadup to the war? Why does Trump and his administration release endless numbers of contradictory statements about escalation versus de-escalation? Who is the Trump administration negotiating with in Iran – all the news reports are about unnamed “Iranian officials” or the “Iranian government response” – even though the Supreme Leader and much of the top political and military officials have all been targeted and are dead, to the point Trump himself said he has no idea who is running the Iranian government (“”Nobody knows who to talk to,” President Donald Trump said Tuesday at the White House, describing what he portrayed as both chaos and opportunity inside Iran’s leadership”)? Why have top military officials been fired by Hegseth? Understanding that Iran would control the Strait of Hormuz, and its effect on the oil market, especially if the war continued for a long period, is extremely elementary facts – why did the Trump administration not care? Why does the administration seem to not be concerned about upcoming 2026 elections, which appears to be a massive blue wave, assumedly leading to an impeachment attempt if Democrats win? Why do they not seem to care that the public support for the war is very low and Trump’s popularity is now at the lowest level ever from either of his presidencies? Why is Israel’s stock market, despite the purported “pummeling” Iran is giving Israel, near its all time highs, 3x the level it was a year ago? Why have all of Israel’s enemies in the region been destroyed in the past couple years and decades – starting with Iraq, but recently Hamas, Hezbollah, Assad, Yemen, and now Iran, with only Israel allies – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan – remaining untouched? To increase the puzzle further, the Iranian mullah regime was originally established by the U.S./U.K. national security elite1, it went along fully with the COVID lockdowns and forced “vaccinations” and it has been deeply involved in CBDC research – in other words, they were loyal adherents to the global system despite their public-facing chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” – what was the need to remove these figures?

    I could go on, but these questions are not resolvable from a standard or dissident framework. The standard framework is about “defeating the Iranian regime” and “preventing it from having nuclear weapons”, but the Iranian nuclear program was already destroyed or heavily set back last year – and what interest does America other than Israel have in overthrowing the Iranian regime? So-called prominent “dissident” Substackers – I’m not going to name names as I don’t have interest in a pissing match, but you should be able to identify who these people are (see the comments) – gave internally contradictory and weak analysis about how great it was that America’s “enemy” was defeated, while hedging against possible retaliation and blowback, analysis that generates no predictive accuracy and asks no structural questions. The standard and culture war dissident perspective has no idea why this war was launched, why it was launched now, for what reasons, and they have no understanding of where it is headed.

    A couple perceptive folks correctly ascertained that one of the objectives is the furtherance of the Greater Israel project. One simply can’t look at a map of the region without understanding how heavily Israel benefits from these wars or that Trump is beholden to Kushner, Chabad, Lutnick, that he pardons Orthodox criminals in return for bribes, and that his administration is fully staffed with Jews and Noahides.2

    But these people also fail to ask the deeper questions, even though they are much further along than culture war “dissidents.” These deeper questions include: why are these Zionists in control of the Trump administration, and before that the Biden administration and all administrations going back decades? Does this relate to the concept of egregores and of Christianity itself – that by adopting Yahweh as their God gentiles put the Jewish vision at the center of their universe with all that entails? (Nietzsche certainly thought so.3) What about the Jewish perspective provides this kind of vision and power to create this kind of result, how does it differ from other visions out there, despite Jews being such a tiny percent of the world population? What does Greater Israel entail, what results from that and on what basis and for what purpose, how far back does it go? What is it about the nature of reality itself that has allowed this system to propagate and succeed?

    What I am trying to explain here is that political contradictions naturally lead to a questioning and greater understanding of culture contradictions, which naturally leads to a questioning and greater understanding of religious and belief contradictions, which then naturally leads to a questioning and greater understanding of our conception of the God image and base reality conceptions.

    But this only happens if one is willing to wrestle with the contradictions at the layer one is analyzing, which most people are wildly loathe to do, with good reason – because to do this is uncomfortable, it requires separation from group thought, it requires diminished status, it requires greater risk, and none of this comes with increased material payoff. If you want status and money then you better stick to the politics and culture war level, even though it has zero predictive ability and very low understanding of the world, because that’s where the masses are – the masses want to be told everything will be okay, they want to be told to focus on the shiny Current Thing, to alleviate their boredom, their concerns about this reality and the world. They want an authority to tell them what to think and what to fear. Make them uncomfortable instead? No money for you, no attention for you, no status for you. There is also a deeper reason beyond incentive structure: to drill down past the political and cultural levels requires tolerating genuine uncertainty, the absence of a redemptive narrative, the possibility that the structure is more total than any available opposition can address. Most people will accept almost any lie rather than sit with that, it is the normal human response to the contemplation of the void, and the abnormality belongs to those who cannot stop drilling regardless of what they find.

    My answers to these questions have been addressed in prior posts (here on the God image, here on why there is a direct and inverse correlation between spirituality and power that is built into the nature of reality itself). The political level Current Thing is meant as a poor religious surrogate replacement, the culture war level is meant to keep the masses infighting on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, and religion so they won’t focus on upper elite financial theft. The religious level is that, despite many benefits and reasons for its success, both Christianity and Islam are Noahide religions that puts Yahweh at the center of their worldview, thereby enabling the current structure, but they outcompeted their “pagan” rivals for specific reasons too (for Christianity, for example, it centralized power in the hands of regional bishops, it focused on almsgiving which was popular, and its conceptions of Heaven and Hell were hugely incentivizing toward action – all innovations over Hellenism). The Jewish religion possesses certain features that are naturally upper elite encoded – non-redemptive theology (where power doesn’t need to justify itself via outcomes), infinite interpretive flexibility (where any action can be reframed as necessary), and ontological hierarchy (with exploitable lower tiers without moral contradiction) – that provides justification for the upper elite predation and domination even if they also use those tactics against common Jews who are not in on their schemes and are often the victim of those schemes. And ultimately, beneath and behind all of this, the vast majority of people do not want to think for themselves, being told what to think and what to focus on is what almost everyone wants, because the alternative is so horrifying – the contemplation of the Void, the lack of moral certainty, the permanent crucifixion of opposites, the uncertainty of the afterlife, is simply too horrible and awful for most people to accept. It is too painful, so believing any narrative, no matter how ridiculous, no matter how much they are detrimental to oneself and one’s progeny, is better than staring into the void.

    With that said, as I explained in a Note, the Iran war has the following objectives:

    1. to level Iran permanently so it isn’t considered a threat for upcoming Greater Israel investment (possibly to include bombing civilian electrical infrastructure per Trump’s public threats – including on Truth Social on 4/5, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”), which would be, if carried out, a war crime and indirectly result in tremendous numbers of civilian casualties by cutting off electricity to hospitals, water supply and other vital civilian needs); this is perhaps why the unprovoked attack was launched days (2/28) before Purim (3/3), the holiday celebrating preemptive elimination of a perceived existential threat through court access and political manipulation;Esther Denouncing Haman (1888) by Ernest Normand
    2. to shift oil transportation to Europe from Hormuz to pipelines through Israel via the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), giving Israel clearinghouse leverage over all of Europe, as ESC Key discusses here,
    3. to hurt China’s access to oil (it gets 50% of its energy through Hormuz4),
    4. to likely game the stock market both up and down so Trump and his inner circle can make billions through shortdated options (based on unsubstantiated posts like this, however, the gutting of the SEC, the rollout of Trumpcoin and Melaniacoin, and Trump accepting massive “donations” for pardons provides substantial credibility to the allegations), and, unfortunately,
    5. potentially to cause an energy crisis leading to COVID-level lockdowns / agricultural shortages leading to a preapproved CBDC “solution”.

    These five objectives serve as a single integrated mechanism: the pipeline infrastructure (1) enables Greater Israel’s economic consolidation while (2) severing China’s primary energy artery, (3)weakening the only viable alternative national level pole (although China is also subservient to the apex financial structure, see the discussion here about it under the “What about China” heading), (4) the market operation funds the inner circle and demonstrates that geopolitical events can be manufactured for financial extraction at will, and (5) the energy crisis pretext advances the control infrastructure that makes all subsequent operations irreversible. The available evidence suggests that the Iranian leadership is a theatrical opposition (see footnote 1) that has served its function – providing the pretext for military expenditure, regional destabilization, and the consolidation of Israel’s enemies into a single manageable target – must eventually be retired when the next phase of the program requires different regional architecture (I discussed the phases of integration into the global order in this prior post). The mullah regime was a stage prop whose removal was always scheduled, not an enemy whose defeat was uncertain – this is why Netanyahu has been “warning” about Iranian nuclear weapons being imminent for many decades now.

    With this said, the war is going perfectly for them, there is no daylight at all between Trump and figures like Netanyahu despite media reports to the contrary (fed by nefarious parties to keep the public hooked on uncertainty), and popular opinion no longer matters – this is due to the American voting apparatus being fully controlled, audio/text/visuals domination via AI crushing the ability for the public to organize on the internet, and the closeness of the materialization of the Mark of the Beast system – programmable central bank digital currencies and social credit scores via AI scanning everyone’s digital footprints via Total Information Awareness – being ready for deployment, with digital IDs being rolled out in the EU and Russia now. The world public utterly failed the COVID test, putting up with the most ridiculous lies and injecting themselves with untested mRNA heart attack jabs (and the lesson elites drew was not that the public can be manipulated under sufficient pressure, which they already knew, but that the public will actively participate in its own degradation and thank the architects for the opportunity), giving the upper elites the confidence they have as they sprint to implementing Greater Israel, the rebuild of the Third Temple, and the proclamation of their fake “messiah”, after which they will rule the world formally with the masses of the world predated upon on an individual level to an extent never seen before in human history. As the Israel stock market is basically at an all time high and fatalities are close to zero, Iran’s hyped “retaliation” is a total joke and anyone who tells you otherwise is mistaken or deliberately misleading you to make the “war” seem closer than what it is.

    This is where it’s all heading and I don’t personally see anything that can be done to stop it – voting provides legitimacy to the system and you are given false choices (Trump v. Biden, Trump v. Kamala, Vance v. Newsom?), the public is demoralized and shattered and America probably has ~50 million+ illegals and children of illegals within it, tech advancement by this system is too extreme, debt levels are too high, morals are too low, and almost everyone is obese, tattoo’d and ruined.

    The choice one has at this time is whether to drill down from the political and culture war levels to the metaphysics underlying this system, or to put one’s head in the sand as the ruination continues to ratchet higher. This is not a call to action in any conventional sense; there is no political action available that does not validate the system it purports to oppose, no coalition to build among a population whose interior resources have been systematically evacuated, no institution to capture that has not already been captured. What remains is the individual confrontation with what is actually happening – not the Current Thing version, not the dissident culture war version, but the full structural reality including its metaphysical foundations, all based on a recursive prediction model (for example, see my posts a year ago that Greater Israel was being implemented, or my 2026 or 2025 prediction posts). This is not comfortable and it does not resolve into hope or despair but into something more difficult than either: holding the crucifixion of opposites without collapsing into one polarity versus another, resolved provisionally via the transcendent function, which is the only position from which the structure can be seen clearly and the only position from which anything resembling sovereignty remains available. Prior posts of mine address the metaphysical foundations. It is not light reading, but if the political level questions that open this post cannot be answered from the political level – and they cannot – then the answer is elsewhere.

    What the prior series establishes is that the degradation of the population is not the byproduct of market logic, not the unintended consequence of ideological capture, not mere elite indifference to collateral damage; rather, the Lurianic cosmological framework and the Sabbatean/Frankist value inversion the apex elite utilize treats the gentile population as kelipot – husks whose proper function within the cosmic economy is substrate maintenance for the hierarchical apparatus above them.5 The obesity, the tattoos, the shattered attention spans, the spiritual vacancy, these are the outputs of the system, not its failures, calibrated to produce a population degraded enough to be incapable of organized resistance but functional enough to continue generating the substrate the hierarchy requires. The Iran war ultimately points to the next phase of a program whose endpoint is the formalization of what has until now been covert. When the Third Temple is rebuilt and the “messiah” proclaimed and the CBDC infrastructure deployed and the social credit apparatus activated, the covert hierarchy becomes overt. The masks will come off when the control infrastructure has become sufficiently total that the fiction of democratic governance is no longer necessary to maintain. At that point the kelipot question resolves itself practically rather than cosmologically: a population that has been systematically evacuated of the interior resources required for resistance will not resist, they will blow away in the wind as the “empty husks” they have been forced to, in a slow-moving Fabian fashion, based at their understandable unwillingness to contemplate the void and to put their trust in authorities, to become. The drilling down this post recommends is the only remaining act of sovereignty available to someone who can still do it – the refusal to become a husk while there is still something left to refuse with.

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    1 As I wrote elsewhere: “Several claims, patterns, and circumstantial data points have led some analysts, historians, and conspiracy theorists to suspect indirect facilitation or strategic tolerance of Khomeini’s rise by Western intelligence, particularly in light of the following:

    • Publicly Known and Less Controversial Facts
      • Khomeini lived in the West before the revolution: He spent over a decade in exile, including time in France, where he had unrestricted access to media and communication tools. His sermons were recorded and broadcast into Iran with a degree of tolerance that raised some eyebrows. From Neauphle-le-Château, Khomeini’s messages were widely disseminated, including through BBC Persian, which gave extensive and sympathetic coverage to him during the revolution, unlike its previous treatment of dissidents. Some interpret this as passive Western support, particularly from France and Britain.
      • The Carter administration’s behavior: Some American officials saw Khomeini as less dangerous than the radical leftist groups in Iran. Declassified CIA assessments suggested Khomeini was not hostile to U.S. interests and that a clerical regime might be less volatile than other revolutionary alternatives. The Shah himself claimed that the United States was “betraying him” during the final months of his rule, and several memoirs from the period, including those by U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan, show a lack of support for the Shah from Carter’s inner circle.
      • The Shah’s downfall: The 1979 revolution was not seriously opposed by Western powers despite the fact that Iran was a major Cold War ally. Some view this as benign neglect or a managed transition, with Khomeini allowed to return under carefully watched conditions.
    • Claims, Suspicions, and Conspiratorial Readings
      • French Socialist Party figures, particularly François Mitterrand, allegedly had ties to revolutionary clerical circles. Some researchers claim Western powers preferred an Islamic revolution to a leftist or Soviet-aligned alternative.
      • F. William Engdahl, in books like Full Spectrum Dominance, and other authors from the anti-globalist right and left, have claimed that the revolution was allowed to proceed in order to restructure Iranian society in a way more compatible with a bifurcated East-West system — i.e., to maintain oil flow but destroy the Shah’s aspirations toward full independence.
      • Some Middle Eastern political theorists, especially in Egypt and Syria, have long alleged that both Khomeini and the Muslim Brotherhood were permitted or aided by Western intelligence as a counterweight to Arab nationalism (Ba’athism, Nasserism), which was more secular and economically independent. See the devastating Iran/Iraq war launched shortly after the Ayatollahs took over which resulted in half a million dead, very useful for collapsing birthrates for both countries and dealing a heavy blow to masculine Islam on both sides.”

    2 Tucker Carlson’s interview with U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee was revealing as how intense Huckabee supports the Greater Israel project as a Noahide evangelical desperately hoping to bring about the “end dates” for the Second Coming. As I wrote elsewhere regarding Trump’s first term (while the same would apply to Biden’s administration),

    Among the Trump administration, also per the above Jerusalem Post link, there were also a large number of Jews. Among them included Jared Kushner, son-in-law and senior advisor; Elliot Abrams Special representative for Venezuela, then Iran; David Friedman, Ambassador to Israel; Jason Greenblatt, Special Representative for International Negotiations, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; Steve Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury; Stephen Miller, Senior Advisor, Policy; Gary Cohn, Director, White House National Economic Council; Reed Cordish, Assistant to the President, Intragovernmental and Technology Initiatives; Avrahm Berkowitz, Deputy Advisor to the President; Rod Rosenstein, Deputy Attorney General; Elan Carr, Special Envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism; Ellie Cohanim, Deputy Special Envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism; Jeffrey Rosen, Attorney General; Morgan Ortagus, Spokesperson, State Department; David Shulkin, Secretary of Veterans Affairs; Lawrence Kudlow, Director National Economic Council; Ivanka Trump, daughter, Advisor to the President; John Eisenberg, National Security Council Legal; Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; Len Khodorkovsky, Deputy Secretary of State and Senior Advisor to the US Special Representative for Iran.

    3 From Genealogy of Morality, as discussed here: “Let’s bring this to a conclusion. The two opposing values “good and bad,” “good and evil” have fought a fearful battle on earth for thousands of years. …The symbol of this battle, written in a script which has remained legible through all human history up to the present, is called “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome.” To this point there has been no greater event than this war, this posing of a question, this contradiction between deadly enemies. Rome felt that the Jew was like something contrary to nature itself, its monstrous polar opposite, as it were. In Rome the Jew was considered “guilty of hatred against the entire human race.” And that view was correct, to the extent that we are right to link the health and the future of the human race to the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, the Roman values.

    By contrast, how did the Jews feel about Rome? We can guess that from a thousand signs, but it is sufficient to treat ourselves again to the Apocalypse of St. John, that wildest of all written outbursts which vengeance has on its conscience…

    The Romans were indeed strong and noble men, stronger and nobler than any people who had lived on earth up until then or even than any people who had ever been dreamed up. Everything they left as remains, every inscription, is delightful, provided that we can guess what is doing the writing there. By contrast, the Jews were par excellence that priestly people of ressentiment, who possessed an unparalleled genius for popular morality…

    Which of them has proved victorious for the time being, Rome or Judea? Surely there’s not the slightest doubt. Just think of who it is that people bow down to today in Rome itself, as the personification of all the highest values — and not only in Rome, but in almost half the earth, all the places where people have become merely tame or want to become tame — in front of three Jews, as we know, and one Jewess (in front of Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the carpet maker Paul, and the mother of the first-mentioned Jesus, named Mary). This is very remarkable: without doubt Rome has been conquered.”

    4 From Forbes: “Perhaps surprisingly, China can withstand 300 days of no oil shipments from Hormuz and more than 100 days of no exports at all, thanks to its 1.3 billion barrel strategic petroleum reserve–despite the fact that 45% of China’s more than 11 million bpd of total oil imports pass through the strait. “China has intentionally capped Middle Eastern dependence near 50% and built substantial shock absorbers through diversified oil sourcing, pipeline gas, domestic production, and large inventories,” says analyst Lloyd Byrne at Jefferies.”

    5 This framework did not originate with Luria. As Israel Shahak – son of Holocaust survivors, professor at Hebrew University, and among the most rigorous internal critics of classical Judaism – documents in Jewish History, Jewish Religion, the fourfold hierarchy of rabbis, Jews, righteous gentiles, and those outside the covenant predates Kabbalistic metaphysics, embedded in Talmudic legal practice as behavioral differentials toward in-group versus out-group across centuries of documented application. Significantly, the hierarchy is structural rather than racial: the heretic category – Jews who reject rabbinical authority – receives treatment comparable to those outside the covenant entirely (with heretics being harshly excommunicated, whipped, or murdered – what happened to Spinoza, for example, was a mild case reflecting decreases in rabbinic power due to social and cultural changes in broader Europe), demonstrating that the hierarchy organizes compliance with authority rather than ethnic essence. Lurianic Kabbalah then provided the metaphysical scaffolding that made this existing behavioral structure feel cosmologically redemptive, i.e. participation in the fourfold hierarchy became tikkun, cosmic repair, generating genuine subjective meaning for participants at every level while extraction flowed upward. This is the mechanism that explains ordinary Jewish participation in and defense of a structure that also exploits them: the framework produces genuine meaning, not merely cynical compliance.

    Therefore, the argument operates at two distinct levels that should not be conflated: at the distributed level, the Talmudic-Kabbalistic structure generates behavioral outputs consistent with kelipot maintenance through ordinary religious practice without requiring conscious coordination; at the apex level, a specific network of actors with explicit Lurianic and messianic self-understanding – documented in the Chabad network, in Schneerson’s explicit statements about the messianic timeline (“After 3307 years, everything necessary has been done. The table is set – and we are sitting at it. The feast of Moshiach is being served with the Ancient Wine, the Leviathan, and the Wild Ox” from here), in the Bakst material on the techno-serpent (as discussed in the same link) – consciously deploys the framework as a program. The system requires only that the structural incentives are real and that apex actors understand the framework generating them.

  • I Watched “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” in Two Minute Increments Over Two Months

    For two months I subjected myself to the cinematic experiment of watching How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998) in micro-doses, roughly two minutes a day. What follows is the liveblog of that odyssey.

    Here is the film’s trailer:

    0-6 minutes: I just watched the first 6 minutes of Stella. The first 2 minutes is entirely comprised of cast cards. The next scene is Stella as high powered stock market boss woman, short scene, silly. The next scene was Stella and friends getting facials/massages. It was an overlong scene at ~3 minutes providing some background color to her friends (one sassy, one pregnant). I am now 6 minutes into it, enough for today.

    6 – 8 minutes: Stella is at the airport in a business suit, her young son is going on a trip. She’s divorced, the father is apparently fat. Son is sassy, tells her to have fun and not just work. Heartfelt music, she smiles and kisses after him as he goes on plane, then sighs. Corny scene.

    8:00-10:00 Stella is at home, a wealthy and expensive home, playing piano – a cultured black woman! Sad, she’s alone 🙁 Now she’s look through photos reminiscing, she’s in an oversized sports shirt and perfectly coifed hair and makeup even though she’s at home by herself. She sees a TV advertisement for a vacation to Jamaica; she pictures herself going on it, transfixed. She receives a phone call for a perspective suitor, a judge, but she’s totally transfixed by her vacation and barely talking to the suitor on the phone. She’s going to get her groove back on a trip to Jamaica! Yes!

    10:00-12:00 Stella is calling her friend while dancing to uplifting music, she wants her friend to go with her. The call goes to voicemail and she leaves a message; she then immediately leaves another voicemail backing out, Stella has too much on her plate – uh oh, the adventure is over before it begins!

    Or is it?

    Stella also has a garden, it’s raining outside, her friend calls her back and says we’re going to Jamaica and you can’t back out! The friend is Whoopi Goldberg, wow, and she’s busy stuffing scarves into mannequin’s genital areas as she works for Calvin Klein, multitasking as she talks to Stella, haha! What a hip and happening woman! Stella has too much work but Whoopi talks her into it.

    Stella is played by Angela Bassett – a sassy black woman who can appeal to sassy white women too. A multi-demographically targeted film, these studio execs are so clever!

    I am increasingly concerned that Stella only lost her groove because she doesn’t have a man, which is very retro feminist and misogynist – in the post-Me Too world women don’t need a man to complete them. Can’t Stella have her groove without needing a man?

    13:00-15:00. Stella is on the plane to Jamaica! Jamaican music plays, the light is on her face (supposedly sunlight, but really just an artificial light placed on her face) – she’s Going Home. “Welcome to Jamaica” the staff at her high-end hotel say over and over. What a fantasy! She checks into her beautiful hotel, Whoopi greets her. They hug, it’s so nice, together again! Stella wants her first drink. Two black guys on vacation with Superbowl rings check them out. Whoopi has already promised to connect them. Stella doesn’t want to be a slut, though. Oooh, yet another handsome man welcomes them to Jamaica, they are so excited! Haha! Jamaican music plays again as the scene pans out to beautiful golf courses and a giant resort. Wow!

    Unfortunately, her groove has apparently (and troublingly) been lost because she has no man and works too much. The movie, in effect, is saying if she had a man then she would still have her groove – this is a very troubling message! Regardless, there are signs that Jamaica may lead to the love life the movie creators believe she desperately needs, and there is hope that she may indeed find her lost groove. Yasss queen!

    I can’t wait to see what happens next!

    15:00-1700 Whoopi and Stella are trying on clothes in their room; they compliment each other. Whoopi isn’t feeling great though. It’s a filler scene, this could have been cut with better editing but, because the film is from 1998, Whoopi was kind of a bigger star in this period so they probably kept it in to give her more airtime. Politics!

    17:00-23:00 (contains a long extended scene) Stella and Whoopi are stretching on the beach. Why is Stella in pants? Whoopi is out of shape. Jamaican music again. Stella runs in pants by herself on the beach. Now Stella’s at breakfast, oooh she sees a hot athletic black man who is staring at her. They exchange looks. Oh, it’s Taye Diggs! This must be the love interest who will help her Get Her Groove Back. She asks if he’s a rapper, he gives his famous smile, says no. He’s much younger than her. He wants to join her – oh, this will be a long scene. They exchange pleasantries. He makes a bad joke about therapy. He’s flirting, she asks about his age. He’s 20! She says she’s 40 but she’s likely older. Awkward! Will it end before it begins? She keeps checking him out, licking her lips. He asks her to the pajama disco at night, he wants to dance with her. She plays hard to get. “Baby I’m old enough to be your mother!” He ignores her (correctly), says he will meet her there at 10pm. She says no and walks away – but does she mean it?

    23:00-25:00 Stella is relaxing on the beach and swimming in the clear ocean. Her body looks pretty good for 40. Whoopi introduces Stella to the retired NFL players. He has a lame pickup line. Whoopi wants to set up dinner. The retired NFL player is fat and ugly and creepy. Stella doesn’t want to go to dinner. The other retired NFL player has a stutter, Stella and Whoopi are a little stunned, pause and ignore it. Whoopi wonders if she missed something by not appearing at breakfast (she did, the Young Stud!). Whoopi is going to take her NFL player to the porn shop.

    Overall an awkward scene demonstrating Stella only wants a Black Chad, while Whoopi is OK getting railed by someone lower tier.

    The actress playing Stella is basically a white shrew played by a black woman.

    25:00-28:00 Stella trying on sex clothes in her hotel room, sexy music playing. Stella looks out at the beautiful view, she’s in contemplation. Head arches back, exposing vulnerable neck. She wants a Man. Hot Scene. New scene: Stella went out to meet Young Hot Man at night at the party! Her tits are popping out, squeezed together. But Taye Diggs doesn’t seem that much taller than her! Oh, shit! I looked him up and he is a measly 5’10” – and that is his listed height, so he’s probably 5’8” or shorter. This is a disastrous update! Men under 6’1” Do Not Exist to women, oh no, the film is falling apart. I looked up Angela Bassett’s height and it’s listed at 5’4” – in heels, 5’8”. He’s done for! Is the movie arguing she would pick a Runt over a former 6’4” NFL player??? Stella’s breasts look good, though. They don’t have real chemistry, he’s too short. Oh, the film has fallen apart. They dance awkwardly together. Diggs grabs her hands, she is into it in the film (not in real life). Sexy music plays.

    28:00-32:00 (long continuous scene): The party continues. Whoopi is dancing with both the retired NFL players but she notices Stella with Taye Diggs dancing together. She walks over, unhappy that Stella ditched her; Stella is really into Diggs. This is a fake scene, the beats don’t work, Angela Bassett is overacting here (she’s not actually drunk and Diggs is 5’8”). Everyone is getting naked now at the party, Whoopi is bisexual and can’t believe what’s going on. Stella decides to leave with Diggs.

    He is in a red see-thru shirt at the party, very sexual, but no shirt off yet. He appears shirtless in the movie poster. I expect he will get naked in multiple upcoming scenes, at least his top half, aimed at getting the juices flowing of the female audience. If only he were taller.

    32:00-34:30: Whoopi is knocking on Stella’s door, Stella opens it. Diggs is 20 years old, almost 21, but he’s not there! No sex yet even though they left together late? Whoopi is upset that Stella kept Diggs info from her, but says he is cute. All he and Stella did was dance “all night long.” Whoopi says she was a “chicken-shit” and should have “fucked him.” Whoopi: “We in Jamaica girl! We in Jamaica. Have an affair! I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.” Stella is thinking about what she said, pondering it…hmmm…if her friend tells her to be a SLUT, then maybe she can do it and not be judged by it? Will people find out back home?

    34:30-37:00 Pool scene, Stella is in a bikini. Looks good for her age. Taye Diggs is by the pool, shirt off – he’s in good shape! Jamaican music playing. Diggs get in the pool with her, compliments her. She asks him if he wants to have sex with her, he says yes, she says OK. She wonders if it’s going to be illegal because he’s so much younger, he says to calm down. She smiles, looks sexy. It’s on, baby!

    I don’t know why this didn’t happen the night before while they were drunk and dancing – so she doesn’t look like a total slut to the audience, I guess, she had to be in doubt about whether to move forward for dramatic tension.

    I will note we’re only 37 minutes into the 2 hour movie, so I assume a one night/day stand with Diggs will not be enough on its own for Stella to Get Her Groove Back. What will be the impediments thrown at her by the script to hold her back from her Groove for another hour and a half?

    I’m concerned, based upon the latest scene, that they’re making poor short Diggyboi a virgin. That would make sense, though.

    It’s becoming apparent that the “groove” is a placeholder for the hamster running in the female brain as they navigate the cock carousel.

    37:00-39:00 Stella and Diggs are GETTING-IT-ON! (Chris Farley). They are kissing all sensitive like. Soul music playing, great lighting, sunset in background – all designed for Tingles in the female audience. Suddenly, Diggs drips cold water onto her back, breaks the mood! Oh no, Diggs what did you do?? This is why she didn’t get her groove back at this point in the movie – cold water! Lame plot device. Stella is laughing at what happened. Diggs is in the bathroom, feeling shaken up and insecure. Could he be a virgin??

    39:00-43:30 It’s night time. Diggs and Stella go to bed – I guess they have sex after all! No virgin plotline, good. Sexy music plays. They Tenderly Make Love (gross). It’s filmed darkly. Stella is experiencing Pleasure, close-cuts to her face. She stares at the camera – this could be you, ladies! Now it’s pillow talk. He wants to be a doctor, but postponed medical school. They share emotional intimacy. She wanted to build furniture but went into money markets. This scene is too long, I don’t care about this – give me sex and drama and beach! Piano, soft music continues to play. Yawn.

    This scene should have had brighter lightening and been half as long, with some jokes thrown in.

    She’s found her man, she’s had her sex, there are no unfolding plotlines currently for further drama. The movie could basically end here with her going home and happy. It’s strange and a poorly developed script that there is no ongoing dramatic tension at this stage.

    One may note that this film is based on a novel of the same name. The real life-author later discovered the guy was gay and using her for a green card. The screenplay is attributed in part to the woman who wrote the underlying book, it happened to her: “McMillan was credited with having introduced the interior world of Black women professionals in their thirties who are successful, alone, available, and unhappy.”

    43:30-46:00 Stella is contemplating and happy that she has had sex, smiling to herself. Diggs announces he has been hired as assistant to the head chef, she is happy for him – but he starts immediately so he has to go 🙁 She asks what time he gets off tonight; he says he’s busy tonight, tomorrow, and rest of the week. Stella then breaks up with him. He wants to see her before she leaves. She resists; he kisses her. She says lets say goodbye now, he says no, she gives in.

    Bad scene – so the drama at this point is that his new work is cockblocking them? This is a disaster, total failure of dramatic tension.

    46:00-47:30 Whoopi wonders if Stella thinks she got played as they stare out at the ocean. Stella is pouting and pissed. Diggs sexed her and ran? Whoopi asks if it was good at least, “better than that” Stella said. He’s been calling her and Whoopi tells her to call him back, that Stella isn’t fooling anybody. The character of Whoopi basically embodies the contrasting emotions that one may feel; stay or go, engage or disengage? All of this could be happening inside Stella herself, but Whoopi exists as an external springboard so this internal conversation can be verbalized for audiences. The film is leaning heavily on the Jamaican scenery, almost as a crutch to cover the flimsiness of the plot.

    47:30-52:00 Stella calls Diggs at his work, who is not there! She tears up his number, oh dear. In the next and overlong scene Stella is back from her vacation now, her friends are waiting for her, they make fun of her for having sex with a 20 year old. They think she’s glowing. This is a light and kind of fun scene but again, where is the narrative momentum? This is disastrous.

    52:00-53:30 Stella is back at work, yaassss baby! She’s dressed in a power suit. But uh oh – Stella has been forced out of her job! Is this RACISM??? Why was the BLACK FEMALE targeted as opposed to any other top executive??? Oh no you didn’t!!!! She threatens to sue, but she doesn’t use the black or female card – where’s your use of leverage, girl? She storms out.

    But now she will have more free time to chase after Diggs??

    53:30-55:00 Stella is with her son who is making breakfast for her; he’s upset she was fired. They say grace quickly and mechanically. He wants to do a vacation to Jamaica, she says no. But perhaps she will change her mind again and reconnect with Diggs???

    Because it seems like many black women raise children without a man, the film is really leaning into that single black mother motif – will the audience sympathize?

    55:00-57:45 Stella is stretching in tight clothes before a run – so that’s how you stay in shape, girl. Diggs suddenly calls Stella, wow! She is excited he called. He wanted to say goodbye, he is at work. She’s been thinking about him. He says he misses her. She is very excited. Romantic music plays. He wants to see her. He can take a sick leave, Stella will go back to Jamaica with her son.

    But where are the STAKES??? I expected so much more from a film called How Stella Got Her Groove Back, like some disco dancing or something.

    And we’re only halfway through.

    57:45-59:40 Diggs, riding a little moped in Jamaica, leans back into the beauty of the country. Drone or helicopter footage of the countryside. Stella greets him in a spacious villa on the beach in an abrupt transition. They are back in Jamaica, with her son. They hold hands in front of him. The son isn’t enthusiastic. Diggs takes off his shirt — oooh honey! He jumps into the pool. Stella likes how they all immediately get along.

    I am groaning at this point; scenes are becoming a chore.

    59:45-1:02:40 Stella is happy and cheerful on the beach with Diggs, they drink alcohol. The bartender, who seems to maybe know Diggs (ex girlfriend?), calls him Stella’s son. They make out in front of her to prove her wrong, but then Diggs legitimately doesn’t seem to know who the bartender was – this is a confusing scene and improperly developed. Later at night he tells her he quit his job. She tells him she got fired and might sue. They are being emotionally intimate. Who is watching after Stella’s kid during this romance?? Is he just wandering the resort with no supervision? Soft music plays.

    1:02:40-1:05:20 Whoopi calls her as she’s relaxing; Diggs is out playing with her kids (again, where were the kids while they were out on their date?). Whoopi is in the hospital, uh oh! What’s wrong with her?? Stella is Glowing – is she in love?? Whoopi wants her to feel OK with dating a 20 year old, but Stella says he hasn’t even had his heart broken before.

    This was a wholly unnecessary scene – I guess Whoopi has to be Dying to inject some tension? The strange thing is Whoopi looks exactly the same in the hospital – no weight loss, they didn’t even apply makeup to make her look pale or whatever. She is just chilling in the hospital bed, looking as normal as ever.

    1:05:20-1:08:05 Stella, Diggs, and the kids pull up to a spacious mansion with horses – it’s Diggs’ parents house, they’re rich! He surprises her. Diggs has on an ugly shirt. The parents are regal and dignified; the father is smoking a cigar (it makes me want one). Classical music plays in the house; they have servants. Stella has a heart to heart with the mother; the mother is upset at Stella’s age. The mother is 41, Stella is 40! The mother is right to be upset – Stella isn’t going to be giving him children or the mother grandchildren. Cradle robber! Barren womb-er!

    A good and true scene – Stella’s friends were ribbing her about it before, but this is the first one to actually hold her to task. Finally a little real tension. How will it develop further? The parents put their foot down – you can’t be with Stella! – and he breaks it off with her, then changes his mind to be with her at the end? We’ll see!

    1:08:00-1:11:00 Stella is humiliated, staring out at the ocean. Diggs empathizes with her, apologizes. He just wanted her to meet his family, that she was important to him. She’s upset that he didn’t ask her first, which was immature. He’s upset she’s scolding him like a child – “you didn’t think I was such a child last night.” Oooooh, sick burn. He says he will take her back to the hotel, they’re finished here. Trouble in paradise! Another good scene, let her get PWNed for cradle robbing. He takes them back to the hotel, there’s a note for Stella on the door. She calls the hospital – UH OH IS WHOOPI IS IN TROUBLE??? Whoopi is facing a medical emergency, she has cancer which has advanced. Oh, I thought the doctor would say she would be dead, now she gets to have more mopey emotional scenes – bummer. The doctor advises her to go home to see her. Diggs is worried, will she tell him?

    1:11:00-1:17:30 Stella on the plane back; it looks like she brought her kid and niece with her at least. She is worried about Whoopi. Stock cut of NYC, then Stella is in the hospital with Whoopi. They’re making small talk, Whoopi is acting like she’s drugged up, but they didn’t put makeup to look her pale and she didn’t lose any weight, she’s just squinting her eyes and talking with a croak. Stella is trying to keep her cheerful. I don’t like Stella’s hair here, it’s natty. Whoopi asks for a hit of morphine, Stella gets sad. This was a way overlong scene and probably the worst scene of the film pacing wise so far – my attention wandered hard. They probably kept it so long because of Whoopi’s star power, wanted to give her a chance to “act real good.”

    Whoopi’s death will surely make Stella realize the importance of living in the moment, no delay, seize the day (i.e. jump headlong into uninhibited sex with Diggs) because life is short and death is near! Thank you, Whoopi, for teaching Stella this important example through your courageous fight with cancer! You are not a slut, not a cradle robber, carpe diem! And you, too, female audience, can experience this for yourself too without guilt!

    1:17:30-1:20:50 Oh shit, next scene Whoopi is DEAD, she’s DEAD! Wow, that was a quick cut. Church scene, Stella is giving a speech – oh, as she’s about to speak Diggs shows up! It’s on, baby, and it’s serious! He loves her! Did Diggs and Whoopi even meet? This seems like a strange move – Diggs received a visa to attend his booty call’s best friend’s funeral? I guess he wasn’t working so why not? Stella’s blue dress is retro, I don’t really like it. Music is soft and soulful. Damn, daddy – Whoopi she DEAD! Onto the next film payday in the sky. Stella meets with Diggs outside the church, they share a hug and tender moment – “thank you for coming.”

    1:20:50-1:24:30 Diggs is contemplative, tells Stella he loves her. She says no you don’t, you can’t. He reiterates it, wants to go with her. Oh shit he wants the green card!!! Is a 90 Day Fiance situation incoming? They introduce Diggs to her family, although she is reluctant – and oh, Stella’s ex-husband is there! How will that go down? The Relationship is Deepening!!!

    But honestly this film is dragging. Bring back Diggs’ mom to disapprove of Stella for being a cougar!

    12:24:30-1:27:30 At the family party we finally meet Stella’s ex, who is middle aged and nondescript, looks like an average black man; he is spiteful at first, meets Diggs and gives him some manly advice about how Stella is stubborn and she needs a man to keep her in place – this would have been a good cameo opportunity for someone famous and scene chewing and funny, missed opportunity (Chris Rock?). Diggs is acting charming, Stella is receiving mixed feedback from family, then tells Diggs she loves him – it’s getting deep! Her son is watching this and giving the stink eye.

    1:27:40-1:33:00 Back at Stella’s very nice and spacious place; her son wants to show Diggs around. He shows him Stella’s furniture making office, Diggs is impressed; clearly Stella will go back to doing this by the end of the film, having “gotten her groove back” with her new man and the furniture passion. The son tells Diggs not to break Stella’s heart, tender music sways – sigh, could they have skipped this scene? “If you break her heart you have to deal with me”…too cliche. Of course in real life the guy who Diggs played might have said if he was being truthful, “I’m gay and doing this for the green card and money.” Next scene they’re cooking together acting “happy” and kissing…there is no narrative tension. Oh, now Stella is crying at night – is it about Whoopi? Yeah, Whoopi. I’ll note this is 1.5 hours into the movie, another 30 minutes to go – couldn’t they have truncated this thing into 1.5 hours total? Romcoms are not supposed to be 2 hours.

    1:33:00-1:37:30 Diggs bonding with Stella’s son, dog next to them – how idyllic (boring)! Women check out Stella and she feels insecure and old, this could have been highlighted more. Stella’s old work colleagues meet Diggs and it is awkward, Diggs is too young and inexperienced/immature. This is reiterated in the subsequent scene.

    1:37:30-1:40:45 They’re at a fancy dinner, Diggs wants to pay but he can’t really afford to – lol. I guess his rich parents aren’t covering his expenses due to their relationship? They fight over the bill, he insists on paying anyway. Stella looks good here, tight black dress and neck tie, tits hanging out. They fight over whether she wears the pants or he does, and that he seems immature. Trouble in paradise (no fight about Diggs’ character being secretly gay, though). They then fight over whether Diggs does enough chores and how well he does them. He doesn’t want to be scolded. This is a good and resonant scene, women turn sour after awhile – my mentor told me women give the best they have to offer at the beginning, then after awhile all you’re left with is the bone and gristle. Diggs thinks she’s ashamed of him because of his age, that she won’t bring him around her friends. He suggests maybe they should break up – lawdy lawdy! He storms out, and she is kind of impressed that he stood up for himself. Very good scene.

    1:40:45-1:51:51 Stella and Diggs are sleeping apart, uh oh! Even though both are awake. Oh, she apologizes, a de-escalation. Booooo, less drama. He shows her that he cleaned up her garage and made it nice again for her to do woodworking, nice gesture, I knew this was coming. He bought her expensive machinery – how did he have money for this? He’s unemployed and cut off financially. An unasked and unanswered question. Next scene, the white bosses at work invite Stella back, $275,000 to start plus incentives, wow! Will she do woodworking and follow her heart, or take the money and abandon it? She turns them down! She questions her decision, he supports her. What is Diggs doing all day with his life, just sitting around? His Jamaican accent is starting to get annoying. He proposes – he really wants that green card! Sweet piano music plays. They kiss. She says she wants to think about it.

    They’re still 15 minutes left in this film, including credits. Sigh, this is dragged out. Stella is hustling, Diggs is sulking, she doesn’t have an answer to the marriage proposal, Stella’s son defends her. Now you see Diggs’s muscular butt while he’s showering, he and Stella have sex in the shower. Will she now say YES to marriage & green card? Sexy music plays. She orgasms. Long and drawn out sex scene, very focused on their faces, especially Stella’s.

    1:51:45-2:00:00 OK I’m going to sprint to the finish here. “Winston, we need to talk.” “I know.” I forgot what’s happening at this point, are they fighting or in love? It’s all blurring together into a stream of nonsense due to a total lack of dramatic tension / forward momentum. Diggs is thinking maybe he isn’t the right fit for Stella between the age difference, money, but he still wants her (and children? She’s 40!). He wants to go to medical school and is going home today. He says he loves her and she doesn’t respond – oooh, burn. 9 minutes left of this, less with credits. But does Stella really have her groove back yet? No man, hasn’t done her woodworking business, how will everything wrap up into a bow? Where’s the groove, baby? It’s got to have some quick scenes where they get back together then she’s happy & successful in woodworking, I think. Will it happen? Diggs is at the airport in the rain – oh shit, there’s Stella waiting for him! How did she get there before him, that doesn’t make any sense. “Ever consider Stanford?” OK, they embrace, now we still need the woodworking scene of success. Oh, she says yes to marriage – she got her man, groove box checked off! Soulful music plays. What? It jumps to credits – where is her woodworking success story??? A scene totally missing from the end to wrap it up in a bow, big miss here.

    Lots of narrative threads left unprofessionally and sloppily dangling – shouldn’t they have a nod to Whoopi at the end, perhaps have her wave like the ghosts in Star Wars? Do his parents accept Diggs for his decisions? Who is watching Stella’s son when she sprints to the airport? What will her friends think? Is her woodworking business successful? Will he become a successful doctor?

    I hope you have found this journey through the world of Stella and her groove to be education and entertaining. Oh, and there might be a sequel – Grandma Gets Her Groove Back?

    Thanks for reading.

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  • Why Elite Power Structures Converge on Talmudic-Kabbalistic Frameworks: A Structural Analysis, Part 3

    This essay continues the structural analysis of upper elite beliefs by examining two paradoxes the framework generates. The first: if upper elites converged on a Talmudic/Kabbalistic eschatological framework as binding technology and engineered WW2, why did that process destroy precisely the most religiously observant Jewish communities as the primary carriers of the tradition they supposedly operated within? The second: what explains the survival and rise of Chabad – small, poor, and marginal in 1951 – into a worldwide political force whose influence now touches Trump, Putin, Zelensky, and Palantir simultaneously? The resolution of both paradoxes turns on a single principle: in a sufficiently centralized power environment, networks are neither preserved nor destroyed by accident.

    Welcome back. In this post I would like to continue my structural exploration of upper elite beliefs. In Part 1 I argued, using IF-THEN logic, that IF there were an upper elite who possessed centralized power and guided world affairs, THEN, based on an understanding of human nature and incentive structures, it would naturally converge on a legitimization framework with certain features. These features would be necessary to justify elite rule both to themselves and to others, to keep themselves united in a shared vision, and to provide longterm goals to organize around. Secular ideology and the pursuit of power for its own sake would not be sufficient binding glue to keep such upper elites from infighting; people want to think of themselves generally as the “good guys”, and to act against an underlying ontology would create cognitive dissonance which builds up over time and finds uncontrolled outlets. Therefore they would constellate around the following attributes in a religious, not a secular context:

    1. non-redemptive theology (where power doesn’t need to justify itself via outcomes),
    2. infinite interpretive flexibility (where any action can be reframed as necessary), and
    3. ontological hierarchy (with exploitable lower tiers without moral contradiction).

    Most Western traditions lack one or more of these: (1) Christianity is redemptive, universalist, and weak dialectically, (2) Islam is redemptive, interpretively closed, with a universalist ummah, (3) Marxism is redemptive (classless society) and ends at revolution, (4) liberalism is redemptive (progress) but denies hierarchy. A Talmudic/Kabbalistic framework uniquely provides all three: (1) Yahweh as a God-image containing both good and evil (destruction is divine, not error), (2) Tikkun olam and pilpul (permanent incompletion plus infinite recursion), (3) Rabbis → Jews → Righteous Gentiles → Kelipot (ontological stratification); therefore, elites seeking maximum power-legitimation would converge on this framework not because of ethnic conspiracy but because it’s structurally optimal for their needs. This perspective discounts the argument that the Anglo elites of the United Kingdom or the U.S. are in the apex power position, and that the apex is held by the central bank owners.

    Part 2 of the essay extended this logic to what specific end goals this shared vision would likely be structurally, which is based on Jewish eschatology: the ingathering of the exiles/diaspora, the manifestation of Greater Israel, the rebuild of the third temple and the proclamation of the Messiah, and that this vision would rule the world formally and externalized via a combination of central bank digital currency, woke artificial intelligence scanning everyone’s digital footprints and assigning social credit scores, where those with poor scores will be cut out of society and their funds stolen from them. It is this longterm, multi-generational vision combining religion and power that would be able to unite the upper elites, give them a shared vision, prevent infighting, and address any psychological issues caused by domination as part of God’s will/plan (It also explains why, apparently, much of the critical infrastructure of the West is designed in Israel).

    There are two deep paradoxes raised by this framework to a careful reader, and this is what this post intents to wrestle with:

    1. If upper elites converged on a Talmudic/Kabbalistic eschatological framework as binding technology and engineered WW2, why did that process destroy precisely the most religiously observant Jewish communities as the primary carriers of the tradition they supposedly operated within?
    2. What explains the survival and rise of Chabad – small, poor, and marginal in 1951 – into a worldwide political force whose influence now touches Trump, Putin, Zelensky, and Palantir simultaneously?

    As we will see, the resolution of both paradoxes turns on a single principle: in a sufficiently centralized power environment, networks are neither preserved nor destroyed by accident. Note that this essay is long, technical, and with many footnotes, because the answers to these specific questions require a historical understanding and framing.

    The First Paradox: Hasidic Judaism Destruction

    If apex elites are (a) Jewish in identity or converged on it as a structural optimism argument, (b) use eschatological frameworks as generational binding technology, and (c) engineered or enabled the conditions for WW2 (Guido Preparata argued convincingly that the upper elite engineered these wars in his must-read Conjuring Hitler, discussed here), then the almost total destruction of the most religiously observant, anti-Zionist Hasidic Jewish populations of Europe creates a deep structural paradox (this post is not meant to get into the details of the Holocaust – you can see the following footnote if you want my opinion1): they’re wiping out the primary carriers of the very tradition they’re supposedly animated by. How does one reconcile this paradox?

    There are four theories:

    1. The acceptable loss theory. The eschatological goal – a Jewish state as precondition for end-times fulfillment – required both the moral/political pressure that only catastrophic persecution could generate, and the elimination of diaspora as a competing “solution” to Jewish existence. The Orthodox and traditional communities of Eastern Europe were, from this angle, obstacles as much as victims: their theology was anti-Zionist (many strands of Orthodoxy considered political Zionism a violation of the divine prohibition on “forcing the end”). The destruction of Vilna, of Polish Jewry, of the yeshiva culture removed the most theologically serious opposition to the Zionist project. Acceptable loss calculus, with the scale perhaps exceeding what was anticipated or intended.
    2. The Sabbatean/Frankist strand.2 The Sabbatean/Frankist tradition is explicitly antinomian – it holds that in the messianic era, transgression of the law becomes the path to redemption, that the sacred can be reached through deliberate descent into the profane.3 Jacob Frank explicitly taught that the Torah of the new age inverts the Torah of the old. From this framework, the destruction of normative, halachic, establishment Judaism is structurally consonant with the vision, where the old Torah-world had to be annihilated for the new order to emerge.4 The apex elites operating within this strand would have had theological justification for viewing the Orthodox communities not as their own people being sacrificed but as representatives of a superseded dispensation.
    3. The identity discontinuity theory. The apex elites’ Jewish identity is nominal or instrumental, where they use Kabbalistic/eschatological frameworks as coordination technology without being bound by ethnic solidarity to Jewish communities generally. The communities destroyed were, from their vantage, not “their” people in any meaningful sense. This is coldly cynical rather than theologically motivated, but structurally it solves the paradox by dissolving the assumed solidarity. A contemporary data point that illuminates the identity discontinuity theory is that during COVID-19, Israel was among the most aggressively locked down and force-vaccinated countries in the world, alongside Australia, subjected to the same population control measures imposed on gentile populations globally. If upper elites operating through a Jewish eschatological framework maintained genuine ethnic solidarity with the Jewish population of Israel, this would be difficult to explain. It becomes explicable only if the apex network’s relationship to ordinary Israeli Jews mirrors its relationship to other populations: instrumental rather than solidary, the masses as pawns regardless of ethnic identification. The Israeli population, including its religious communities, appears to have been a test case for the digital surveillance and vaccine compliance infrastructure that the broader globalist project requires, suggesting the eschatological end goal does not extend its protections to ordinary Jews any more than to ordinary gentiles. The pyramid has many layers, and proximity to the apex, not ethnic membership, determines one’s position within it.
    4. The unintended scale theory. They opened a door – engineered conditions for persecution and displacement sufficient to drive Zionist political momentum – without anticipating or fully controlling the industrial scale of what the Nazi machinery would do. This requires believing in meaningful gaps between apex intention and implementation, which has some structural plausibility: the system had its own dynamic once set in motion. The anti-immigrationist Breckinridge Long, who was Assistant Secretary of State committed to halting refugees to America, wrote in his diary in 1944: “The Jewish organizations are all divided amid controversies…There is no cohesion or any sympathetic collaboration – rather rivalry, jealousy and antagonism”, which cuts against the idea that the upper elites controlled every aspect of the war (although Long was undermined and forced to resign after Henry Morgenthau Jr. – who proposed to genocide Germany via his Morgenthau Plan – complained to Roosevelt about Long’s efforts to keep America’s doors closed to hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Hitler; after his resignation 200,000 were allowed in via the War Refugee Board.)

    The Sabbatean/Frankist angle is the most structurally elegant resolution to the core paradox, precisely because it dissolves the assumed solidarity. The three attributes useful for the upper elites – non-redemptive theology, infinite interpretive flexibility, ontological hierarchy – are present in Talmudic/Kabbalistic Judaism generally, but Sabbatean/Frankist antinomianism adds a fourth attribute that the others lack: active sanctification of transgression as the mechanism of historical completion. Standard Kabbalistic frameworks provide the structural properties while Sabbatean/Frankism provides the operational theology, the specific permission structure for doing whatever the eschatological project requires, including destroying the old order, without experiencing cognitive dissonance. It’s not that upper elites would necessarily choose Frankism over other Kabbalistic strands, it’s that the Frankist strand provides the most complete permission structure for the specific actions apex power requires.

    If the operative theology at apex levels is indeed antinomian – if the old Torah-world represents a superseded dispensation that must be overturned for messianic emergence – then the destruction of normative Orthodox Jewry wasn’t a tragic cost to be rationalized, it was theologically consonant with the vision. The Frankist doctrine that redemption comes through the inversion and transgression of the old law provides the grammar for viewing the annihilation of halachic Judaism as participation in the mystery rather than sacrifice of one’s own. This sharpens the confluence of the theories: the “acceptable loss” theory becomes theologically motivated rather than merely strategic when filtered through the Frankist lens, and the Zionist state as eschatological requirement doesn’t just need the Holocaust political pressure, it needs the elimination of the theological competition that the Orthodox anti-Zionist world represented.

    The Transmission Mechanism

    The missing piece is the transmission mechanism. That’s where Gershom Scholem’s Redemption Through Sin becomes helpful reading, which is serious scholarship documenting the Frankist underground’s persistence and its infiltration of the Haskalah, serving as the gateway into 19th century Jewish intellectual and eventually political modernity5 (although Israel Shahak believes that Scholem hides critical information he deems would be antithetical to Judaism.6)

    Even though the Sabbatians intentionally obscured their beliefs7, the transmission mechanism from 18th-century sectarian heresy to 19th-century financial and revolutionary power is partially recoverable through specific documented cases. As Scholem writes, “Not only did most of the families once associated with the Sabbatian movement in Western and Central Europe continue to remain afterwards within the Jewish fold, but many of their descendants, particularly in Austria, rose to positions of importance during the nineteenth century as prominent intellectuals, great financiers, and men of high political connections.” Jacob Frank’s nephews, whether as believers or out of some other motive, “were active in high revolutionary circles in Paris and Strsbourg…[and] while the idea of violating the Torah of beriah remained a cardinal principle of “the holy faith”, its application was transferred to other areas, particularly to dreams of a general revolution that would sweep away the past in a single stroke so that the world might be rebuilt.”

    Moses Dobruška – Jacob Frank’s first cousin, ennobled in Vienna as Thomas von Schönfeld – provides the clearest human link. A founding architect of the Order of the Asiatic Brethren, the first Masonic lodge to explicitly incorporate Kabbalistic ritual and admit Jewish members, Dobruška later appeared in Paris as ‘Junius Frey,’ a Jacobin Club member executed alongside Danton during the Terror. His trajectory from Frankist initiate to esoteric lodge founder to revolutionar maps the precise path by which the antinomian permission structure migrated from sectarian underground to secular political modernity. The Asiatic Brethren functioned as the institutional vessel: a ‘neutral’ esoteric space where Frankist-derived theology – the old order as husk to be shattered, transgression as sacred work – was transmitted to European aristocratic and intellectual elites under the guise of Kabbalistic wisdom. By the time this current reached the revolutionary and banking frameworks of the early 19th century, the theology had been secularized with its eschatological grammar intact, its explicitly Jewish content abstracted into universal revolutionary ideology. The persistence of this network into the 19th and 20th centuries followed three distinct paths:

    1. Aristocratic integration where the mass conversions and ennoblements of the late 18th century, typified by the Offenbach baptisms, dissolved the sectarian form while preserving the network’s high-trust cohesion through specific marriage patterns that Scholem documented persisting a century after formal conversion.
    2. Financial institutionalization where the transition from court banking to international finance, most visible in the Frankfurt milieu from which both the Rothschild and Schiff networks emerged, and which culminated in the construction of the Federal Reserve architecture by figures like Paul Warburg.
    3. Intellectual migration where the absorption of the antinomian permission structure into Haskalah secularism and subsequently into the progressive, legal, and media institutions that constitute the modern interpretive apparatus.

    By the 20th century the theology had been abstracted with its eschatological grammar intact, its explicitly sectarian content invisible, its functional properties – non-redemptive, infinitely flexible, ontologically hierarchical – operating through secular institutional forms that neither their operators nor their critics recognized as carrying a specific theological inheritance. The framework’s persistence is identifiable through functional continuity, with the same three structural properties operating through successive institutional forms, regardless of what those institutions call themselves or what their operators believe about their own motivations.

    The most documentable human chain example runs through the Frankfurt Judengasse, where the Schiff family shared a communal house with the Rothschilds for decades before both families emerged into international finance in the 19th century. Jacob Schiff’s Kuhn Loeb partnership financed Japan in the Russo-Japanese War – a move that contributed to Romanov destabilization – while Paul Warburg, who had intermarried with the Schiff family, became the primary architect of the Federal Reserve system in 1913. James Warburg, Paul’s son, later told the U.S. Senate in 1950 that world government would come “whether or not we like it.” Whether these figures consciously carried Frankist theological formation cannot be documented, but what can be documented is that they emerged from the specific Frankfurt milieu where Frankist-adjacent networks operated, constructed the central banking architecture as the apex coordination mechanism, and expressed a long-term vision of global governance that maps precisely onto the eschatological end-state Parts 1 and 2 described. The theology may have been fully secularized by this point, but the functional properties it produced were identical to what a consciously Frankist-informed program would have built. The names change from Dobruška to Warburg, but the structural affordance remains, with the transmission of a specific operational software that proved more durable than any competing framework in modern history.

    The Second Paradox: The Near Destruction then Flourishing of Chabad

    But this raises another paradox. If the upper elites destroyed anti-Zionist Orthodoxy as theological competition – and this can be structural confluence rather than fully intentional8 – what explains the survival and flourishing of the Chabad movement under Menachem Schneerson, universally considered the most influential rabbi of the 20th century, which was initially non-Zionist before later pivoting to activism? Chabad is not Sabbatean and has historically been opposed to it. This question is relevant because Chabad today seems to have an unusually large amount of public influence over key political figures across the world: from Trump (via Kushner but also many other angles, including Lutnick) to Putin (Berel Lazar as Putin’s preferred Chief Rabbi9) to Zelensky (his relationship with Moshe Azman), and even to Palantir, which Chabad honored at a ceremony for its work on belief of Israel (“over 500 people, including more than 50 House and Senate Leaders and Members, ambassadors and senior diplomats, packed Washington, DC’s regal Great Hall of Union Station for the Annual Lamplighter Awards Dinner in support of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad) in Washington, DC….The magnificent event honored Dr. Alex C. Karp, Co-founder and CEO of Palantir. The Leadership Award was bestowed upon Hon. Hakeem S. Jeffries, Democratic Leader of the US House of Representatives”). The relationship of the upper elite to Chabad changed over time, and understanding how and under what circumstances it changed sheds light on the relationship between networks and power systems. To investigate this question I read Rebbe (2014) by Joseph Telushkin, a 600 page hagiography organized by topic by the son of Chabad’s accountant and which received rave establishment reviews. It’s extreme positivity about its subject reminded me of Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim (1946), which took a similarly one sided, laudatory perspective about its topic. I also read The Secret of Chabad (2015) by David Eliezrie, another Chabad insider and even more of a hagiography than Rebbe, and offset these with Israel Shahak’s highly critical Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (1994).

    One may note that structural and religious arguments overlap and blur in ways that resist clean separation. The structural argument offered here looks at the religion from the outside as an organizational approach to power, but for those on the inside the power that results from it is a natural result of doing God’s will. If Chabad and/or Kabbalah/the Talmud’s approach outcompetes its enemies based on a more accurate appraisal of reality’s incentives, human psychology, and nature, does that mean that God himself blesses these organizations, or does it mean that they are simply more optimized structures for domination based upon underlying reality without anything being God given? These perspectives are methodologically incompatible, but at least my approach is falsifiable based on recursive predictions while theirs is unfalsifiable.10

    Chabad’s Approach

    Chabad had distinguished itself from other Hasidic organizations because of its international outreach strategy embracing less observant and secular Jews through “smiles and love”, a strategy that its insular competition did not employ (although Yeshiva University professor David Berger notes “I have no doubt about their fundamental sincerity. But in the face of resistance, they engage in tactics whose ruthlessness has shaken even [those predisposed to liking them].”11 Schneerson’s predecessor, the 6th Chabad head rabbi known as the Frierdiker Rebbe, was imprisoned by the Soviets and sentenced to death in 1927 for counter-revolutionary activities (Chabad was the only organization to run yeshivas and Hebrew immersion classes under the Soviets, having a clandestine network12), but international pressure was brought to bear based on his connections and he was both released and allowed to leave the country, which was unheard of. This repeated itself: after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, the Frierdiker Rebbe was able to use American diplomatic pressure to get Nazi Germany to allow his and his family to leave the country, also highly unusual, as recounted in Bryan Mark Rigg’s Chabad sympathetic Rescued from the Reich (2004).13 These actions showed the power and reach of Chabad in terms of its cultivation of powerful political relationships despite their poverty and small size, although that power was used on behalf of its leadership.

    Menachem Mendel Schneerson, upon his ascension to power, dramatically broadened Jewish outreach. His character was unusual – apparently he had memorized the entirety of the Torah, Talmud, and Kabbalah, and could cite and cross-cite from it at will, and he had extremely strong memory retention with respect to networking – remembering names, who they were connected to, their stories, what they liked and didn’t like, etc. even decades later – and he held court for whoever wanted to talk to him, called farbrengens, at least twice a week until three or four in the morning, then arising after only a few hours of sleep to start the process over again. Schneerson’s memory retention extended beyond religion to include politics, culture, and military strategy and tactics. His astrology profile was interesting.14 His objective was to hasten the return of the Messiah, and he didn’t think there was a moment to wait – anything that could be done now should be done now, and no one should rest on their laurels, always challenge oneself to push for more. There’s a famous video of Schneerson telling Netanyahu to do what he could to hasten the Messiah’s return15:

    https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/rHBiT6eJaQQ?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

    Netanyahu later remarked “The Rebbe gave me my mission in life.”16

    What Rebbe hints at is that Schneerson had or grew into a dual role – if his primary and intense objective was “Mashiach Now”, then it would only make sense that he would be involved not just in Jewish outreach but connected to clandestine efforts to promote Judaism and Israel that could and would not be publicly disclosed, such as his deep connections to Mossad, apparently even outranking them in some matters.17 Yitzchak Rabin left a meeting in 1972, confiding to diplomat Yehuda Avner, “The Rebbe knows more about Israeli security than the 120 members of the Knesset.” There are even hints that his network had a role in Stalin’s death during Purim when Stalin was weeks away from deporting their Jewish community to Siberia, which would have been a likely death sentence.18 Schneerson later predicted the upcoming end of the Soviet Union in 1985.19 This story from Eliezrie’s book, p. 255, is worth repeating here:

    In 1968, [Ariel] Sharon visited the Rebbe in New York and was strongly urged by the Rebbe to change his return flight. Sharon complied, though he did not understand why. His planned El Al flight was hijacked by terrorists on the last leg between Rome and Tel Aviv, and diverted to Algeria. General Sharon would have been a big prize. The Israeli daily, She-arim, wrote at the time, “It seems the whole purpose of the hijacking was to get Sharon.” The Rebbe’s advise had saved his life.

    Eliezrie, of course, does not follow up at all with the pertinent questions about how Schneerson know this information. As he notes in a footnote though, p. 386, “Even today it is difficult to unveil the layers of secrecy concerning the activities of decades ago. Many of those involved have passed on and there are few written records. The Rebbe compartmentalized the work. It was all on a need-to-know basis. It seems that no one other than the Rebbe knew the broad scope of the secret efforts. Even the Rebbe’s secretaries were not privy to the vast majority of the activities.”

    Chabad under Schneerson grew and flourished as a result of his activities, and he sent his shluchim (emissaries) all over the world, who established Chabad houses near universities, financial centers, and diplomatic communities, so the network naturally intersected with mobile elites and grew into a motivated, intelligent, religious worldwide network that was deeply keyed into local communities and politics. Each node is financially semi-autonomous, maintains loyalty to the central movement, and develops relationships with local elites. As of 2021, there are over 6,500 Chabad shluchim families worldwide, operating over 3,500 institutions in over 110 countries, with 200,000 committed adherents plus hundreds of thousands of Jews who attend Chabad schools, synagogues, and study groups, and an operating budget of close to a billion dollars a year. Chabad runs the largest network of synagogues of any Jewish movement as of 2023. In network theory terms, this is a distributed high-trust diaspora network, and it would have very likely caught the eye of the upper elites over time – global geographic reach, internal trust, local embeddedness, and ideological cohesion would make the network instrumentally valuable.20

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    Group picture of Chabad Shluchim (emissaries) in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, 2022

    Furthermore, the key text of Chabad, the Tanya, directly promoted the ontological stratification (Rabbis -> regular Jews -> “Righteous among the nations” non-Jews -> “kelipot” gentile resisters) that the upper elites would have honed in on like honey. The ontological stratification embedded in Chabad theology is stated explicitly by Schneerson himself, as documented by Israeli professor Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor and civil rights activist who Gore Vidal referred to as the “latest- if not the last – of the great prophets” and whose Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel remains one of the few serious treatments of these texts from an insider-critical perspective.21 Here’s Schneerson himself:

    The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person stems from the common expression: “Let us differentiate.” Thus, we do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather, we have a case of “let us differentiate” between totally different species. This is what needs to be said about the body: the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world … The Old Rabbi explained that the passage in Chapter 49 of Hatanya: “And you have chosen us” [the Jews] means specifically that the Jewish body was chosen [by God], because a choice is thus made between outwardly similar things. The Jewish body “looks as if it were in substance similar to bodies of non-Jews,” but the meaning … is that the bodies only seem to be similar in material substance, outward look and superficial quality. The difference of the inner quality, however, is so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews]” “their bodies are in vain.” … An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness. As has been explained, an embryo is called a human being, because it has both body and soul. Thus, the difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish embryo can be understood. There is also a difference in bodies. The body of a Jewish embryo is on a higher level than is the body of a non-Jew….A Jew was not created as a means for some [other] purpose; he himself is the purpose, since the substance of all [divine] emanations was created only to serve the Jews…this means everything, all developments, all discoveries, the creation, including the “heavens and the earth – are vanity compared to the Jews. The important things are the Jews, because they do not exist for any [other] aim; they themselves are [the divine] aim…The entire creation [of a non-Jew] exists only for the sake of the Jews.”

    The Tanya’s ontological stratification – its explicit metaphysical hierarchy of Jewish souls over gentile souls, reflected also in the Kabbalah22 – maps directly onto the third criterion identified in Part 1 as structurally necessary for apex power legitimation: ontological hierarchy that permits exploitation of lower tiers without moral contradiction. This understanding of Chabad’s perspective was confirmed by pro-Chabad author Bryan Mark Riggs, although in a wishy-washy form.23 This is not incidental to Chabad’s appeal to elite networks, it is its precise structural affordance. Schneerson’s views are standard Chabad views to this day, and if you talk to a Chabad rabbi, their first question will be “Are you Jewish?” and “Are you Jewish through the mother?” They mean this racially, not religiously, affects the dynamic of how they interact with an individual – the structural parallel to Nazi racial classification is difficult to avoid.24 And Schneerson’s perspective is not niche – he was considered by a significant portion of Chabad to have been the Jewish messiah25, they hung onto his every word without question26, and as stated above, he is widely recognized as the most influential rabbi of the 20th century.

    The Noahide laws, under this perspective, which Schneerson and Chabad insist gentiles must abide by, is the demand that gentiles adopt the Jewish God or egregore as their own – because once gentiles put the Jewish God at the center of their universe, everything else follows. As noted in part 2, in 1991 US Congress passed H.J. Res. 104 recognizing Noahide Laws as “founding principles of our nation” (and in 1995 Schneerson was posthumously honored by Congress with the Congressional Gold Medal). For those who reject the Noahide laws under this conception, it is a short leap of logic to understand that they may be marked destruction so long as political, cultural, and other factors are properly accounted for27, as tactical concerns of gentile backlash are taken account.28 Chabad, which was intentionally apolitical for decades as a way of maximizing Jewish outreach, is quietly leaning into a political role – allied with Itamar Ben-Gvir, who kept a portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his living room until recently (Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994 and is venerated in certain religious Zionist circles as a martyr). This shift reflects underlying dynamics – demographic growth, network maturation, and perceived status increase – that have moved in Chabad’s favor per this Haaretz report.

    The argument, then, is that Chabad early on had a metaphysical structure and networking intent that was upper elite-encoded, but the network was only fully actualized and instrumentalized once Schneerson perfected the structure. How and under what circumstances this happened is unclear, although the Frierdiker Rebbe escapes and the Stalin story hint that it may have been substantially in place before Schneerson himself. Over time the intelligence community increasingly intersected with Chabad, donations increased, and it became the face of worldwide Jewish outreach. Without the combination of eschatology match, intelligence community match, and politics match, Chabad could have been like any number of other Jewish communities that simply stayed small and marginal or were actively crushed like the anti-Zionist communities in central/Eastern Europe.

    The precise moment of crystallization is probably unrecoverable from public sources, because the relationships between intelligence communities and religious networks of this kind do not generate documentary trails accessible to outside researchers. What Schneerson then did was not initiate the relationship but systematically expand the network whose elite connections already existed, converting latent relational capital into institutional infrastructure at a scale and speed that made the dual role increasingly legible to anyone paying attention. The obscurity of the transition mechanism is a feature rather than a bug – networks of this kind are designed to be opaque at precisely the points where their most significant functions operate.

    The Upper Elite Reaction to Organic Network Growth

    This speaks to the nature of how the upper elites work – competing networks develop naturally based on human nature over time, and the upper elites assess it and determine whether it can be absorbed or whether it should be undermined and destroyed. Recent emergent networks demonstrate a consistent selection pattern: the Alt Right movement, the Tea Party movement, Occupy Wall Street, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks are networks that were allowed to grow under higher-level observation, then undermined and destroyed once their use was over, while Trump’s MAGA movement was allowed to survive but skin suited into its opposite from within, as were environmental movements like the Sierra Club, Project Veritas, Greenpeace, Sea Stepherd, etc. Facebook provides the cleanest documented case of the cooptation mechanism, which was an emergent network that led unexpectedly to Trump’s 2016 victory (via Cambridge Analytics to an extent), and the upper elites turned the screws on them right after: they had to appoint a Soros censorship board and agree to other onerous measures or they would be broken up under anti-trust laws, and Zuckerberg tried to resist for a bit but then complied.

    Observable patterns of network manipulation include the recent cryptocurrency movement, which has been controlled by (likely CIA/Mossad-backed, as discussed here) Tether since 2017, allowed to flourish because of its global network effects and as a case study for upcoming CBDCs. One could extend the argument further, that the upper elite came into being because of their advanced network effects relative to competition – the Sephardic Jewish community which sponsored William of Orange in his successful attempt to take the British throne leading to the creation of the Bank of England, or the Rothschild network which set up banking houses throughout Europe and which were much more effective than competition.

    The apparent contradiction flagged earlier – that Chabad is historically opposed to Sabbateanism yet both appear within the same elite framework – resolves once the two are understood as operating at different levels of the same power architecture rather than as identical phenomena. Chabad provides the visible institutional layer: the worldwide network of nodes, the outreach infrastructure, the ontological hierarchy of the Tanya that the upper elites find structurally congenial. The Sabbatean/Frankist strand, operating as a crypto-underground within elite financial and intellectual families since the 17th century per Scholem’s documentation, provides the operative theology at the apex level, i.e. the antinomian permission structure that sanctions whatever the eschatological project requires. Most Chabad emissaries are exactly what they appear to be: sincere religious figures doing outreach work, with no knowledge of or connection to the apex theological layer. The network is instrumentalizable precisely because its practitioners don’t need to share the apex theology for the network to serve apex purposes. The public face and the inner core can be structurally integrated while remaining theologically distinct, which is itself the most stable possible configuration for a long-term power architecture.

    Conclusion

    Each nascent network is assessed by the upper elites on the basis of whether they can increase the centralization and power of the existing network; if they can they will be accepted and absorbed as a subsidiary level, if they are useful but difficult they may be taken over and skinsuited, or if they are unhelpful they will be undermined and destroyed. Chabad, unlike other Hasidic movements from central Europe, turned out to be an emergent network that was instrumentalized for upper elite power.

    From a broader perspective, this conversation leads back to Rene Guenon’s conception of the Kali Yuga, who believed that centralization and technological innovation would speed up time to such an extent that it would reach a terminal point where it could no longer speed up and the astrological age cycle would begin anew. Each absorbed network increases the resolution and reach of the existing system, accelerating the very process Guénon identified as the terminal signature of the Kali Yuga, where centralization compounds upon itself with increasing speed until the cycle exhausts its own momentum and the conditions for renewal, however catastrophic, finally emerge. This, in turn, raises further questions about what kind of world we live in and the nature of the God image under which we all live and operate.

    A final observation, which the structural analysis makes unavoidable. The framework being described was built for the journey, not the destination. Two thousand years of exile, persecution, dialectical refinement under existential pressure, and eschatological longing produced a structure of extraordinary resilience and power, but that structure’s coherence depends on the tension that produced it. The tradition was optimized for minority survival in a world of competing civilizational structures. It has no internal resources for governing a world it has fully consumed because its ethical constraints are calibrated for the in-group and its ontological hierarchy treats everything outside that in-group as instrumental. When that hierarchy was one structure among many, its most extreme implications were constrained by external counter-pressure. When it becomes total (and it is rapidly heading toward total control), those constraints disappear. The commodification of every aspect of human life, the reduction of persons to data points within a surveillance and social credit architecture, the elimination of the wild and the particular and the local – these are the logical expression of a four-tier ontological structure applied without remainder to a world it has conquered. Victory, if it comes, may prove more catastrophic than any persecution the tradition survived, not only for the out-group which bears the cost first and most severely, but for the in-group itself, whose coherence and meaning depended on the wound of exile that victory finally heals. The Abraxian irony at the heart of the entire structure is this: the tradition’s power comes from the tension of incompletion, and the completion it has always sought may be the one thing that destroys it. Whether that destruction constitutes the end of the cycle Guénon described, or the painful precondition for whatever comes after, is not a question the structural analysis can answer. It is, perhaps, the question the next aeon will.

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    1 The Holocaust presents an epistemological challenge that most commentary refuses to engage honestly. That Jewish populations across Eastern Europe were subjected to large-scale deliberate persecution and mass killing is supported by convergent evidence across multiple archives and languages. That Orthodox communities (precisely those most resistant to the Zionist political project) bore disproportionately catastrophic losses is also well documented and civilizationaly significant regardless of precise mechanisms or scale.

    Where the situation becomes murky is at the level of specific claims about mechanisms, precise numbers, and organizational intentionality behind the worst atrocities. The criminalization of historical inquiry across Western Europe is itself a significant tell – genuine historical consensus does not require legal enforcement and free speech suppression, but Holocaust denial is harshly punished. These laws protect the narrative’s political function rather than its historical integrity, and the Holocaust became the moral foundation of the post-war international order in ways serving specific interests: the establishment of the Israeli state, the delegitimization of European ethnic nationalism, and the construction of a victim hierarchy with lasting political consequences. Real events get instrumentalized constantly – the instrumentalization doesn’t require fabrication, only selective emphasis and suppression of complicating detail. Whether this destruction was actively engineered or passively accepted as an acceptable loss for the broader strategic objective, the outcome remains functionally identical.

    The comparative suppression of contemporaneous atrocities is the clearest evidence of this. The Holodomor, the Armenian genocide, the Gulag system, Mao’s cultural revolution, and Soviet mass killings in the Baltic states and Eastern Poland receive a small fraction of the canonical moral weight despite comparable or greater scale. The asymmetry reflects the political priorities of the victors rather than the relative moral weight of the events.

    The most defensible position acknowledges large-scale deliberate persecution and mass death, takes seriously genuine historical complexity that criminalized inquiry has made harder to establish, recognizes substantial political instrumentalization for post-war purposes, and insists that comparative atrocities deserve equivalent moral attention regardless of political inconvenience.

    2 Sabbateanism emerged from the mass messianic movement around Sabbatai Zevi (1626-1676), who declared himself the Messiah and then apostatized to Islam under Ottoman pressure in 1666. Rather than destroying the movement, the apostasy was reinterpreted by followers as a necessary descent into impurity – the Messiah must enter the realm of evil to redeem the divine sparks trapped within it. Jacob Frank (1726-1791) radicalized this antinomian logic further, teaching that the Torah of the new messianic era explicitly inverts the Torah of the old, that transgression of traditional law is the path to redemption rather than an obstacle to it. Scholem’s essay Redemption Through Sin documents the movement’s persistence as a crypto-underground within educated, cosmopolitan Jewish families after its official collapse, infiltrating the Haskalah and 19th century Jewish intellectual modernity.

    3 Per Scholem, p. 75, “When fulfilling each commandment, the pious Jew says a blessing. But according to the new Messianic formulation introduced by Sabbatai Zevi himself, he says: “Praised be He who permits the forbidden,” a formula which the defenders of Jewish tradition rightly regarded as the epitome of this revolutionary heresy. As so often in the history of spiritualistic sects, the sexual taboos provided a point of application at which Messianic freedom – through libertinism – could find its confirmation and concrete content. Orgiastic rituals were preserved for a long time among Sabbatian groups, and in the circles of the Donmeh until about 1900….that such rituals, which anticipated the Messianic utopia, struck at the heart of the strict sexual morality of the Jewish tradition is obvious. And in fact the bitter struggle against the Sabbatians began in earnest only when the performance of such rituals, about which the Sabbatian texts could leave no doubt, became known to wider circles. Here was an obvious reversal of values that could destroy the moral structure of the Jewish communities.”

    4 Per Scholem, “the five distinguishing beliefs of “radical” Sabbatianism are:

    1. The belief in the necessary apostasy of the Messiah and in the sacramental nature of the descent into the realm of the kelipot [unclean].
    2. The belief that the “believer” must not appear to be as he really is.
    3. The belief that the Torah of atzilut [the “true” Torah which has been in a state of concealment for the entire period of Jewish exile] must be observed through the violation of the Torah of beriah [a word denoting every aspect of the old life and its institutions].
    4. The belief that the First Cause and the God of Israel are not the same, the former being the God of rational philosophy, the latter the God of religion.
    5. The belief in three hypostases of the Godhead, all of which have been or will be incarnated in human form.”

    5 Suggestive rather than conclusive, but consistent with the Sabbatean/Frankist symbolic vocabulary: Jacob Rothschild has been photographed at Waddesdon Manor standing before Joshua Reynolds’ Satan Summoning His Legions, and the 1972 Rothschild Surrealist Ball at Château de Ferrières – documented in photographs showing invitations written in mirror-script requiring inversion to read, alongside extensive occult and transgressive symbolic imagery – deploys precisely the inversion-of-sacred-and-profane aesthetic that Frankist antinomianism treats as theologically operative rather than merely decorative. Whether these represent conscious identification with the tradition, aristocratic provocation, or aesthetic coincidence cannot be determined from the imagery alone, but that they are legible within the Sabbatean/Frankist symbolic grammar is not nothing.

    6 Per Shahak, Scholem “willfully omitted reference to [Jewish supremicism]” in his works, having “employed the trick of using words such as ‘men,’ ‘human beings’ and ‘cosmic’ in order to imply incorrectly that the Cabbala presents a path leading toward salvation for all human beings. The actual fact is that cabalistic texts, as opposed to talmudic literature, emphasize salvation for only Jews.” Personally, I found Scholem to be difficult to read for precisely this reason, that he is operating as a partisan while falsely performing neutrality which produces hedged, vague, meandering, evasive prose texture, and the stylistic unpleasantness is the phenomenological signal of the intellectual dishonesty.

    This isn’t limited to Scholem and is unfortunately common in religious translations into English; in reading Rami Shapiro’s Tanya, the Masterpiece of Hasidic Wisdom: Selections Annotated & Explained, the author writes in the introduction, “While the focus of the Alter Rebbe is on Jews alone, I have widened that focus and applied what the rebbe has to say to all human beings. While Tanya is written for the rebbe’s students, all of whom were men, I have adapted the language of my version of the material to be more inclusive. To avoid the limitations of gendered pronouns, I have cast the text as a direct address to the reader….My commentary on tanya presents the Kabbalistic ideas of the text in a universalist manner; that is, I have presented the teachings of the Alter Rebbe in the light of my own understanding of and spiritual training in Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and the field of comparative religion.” In other words, Shapiro twists the text to make it feel more comfortable instead of understanding the text on its own terms and how both the Alter Rebbe and how his followers intend it to be understood. At least he was upfront with what he did instead of being sneaky about it, but this is a terrible, solipsistic method of translation.

    7 Scholem, 79: “The Sabbatian movement in its various shadings and configurations persisted with remarkable obstinacy among certain sectors of the Jewish people for approximately 150 years after Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion. In a number of countries it grew to be powerful, but for various reasons, internal as well as external, its affairs were deliberately hidden from the public eye. In particular, its spokesmen refrained from committing their beliefs to print, and the few books that they actually published concealed twice what they revealed.”

    8 The confluence model says: multiple actors pursuing their own interests and theological imperatives produced the same outcome without requiring explicit coordination at every step. The Sabbatean/Frankist apex provided theological permission. Zionist organizational pressure provided political direction. German nationalist movements provided the operational instrument. British imperial strategy provided geopolitical facilitation. Each operated from its own logic; the confluence produced the outcome. This is more plausible than a single coordinated plan and more disturbing because it doesn’t require a smoking gun.

    9 Eliezrie, 229-232: “A professor of mathematics at the University of Novosibirsk summed it up when he told me, “Putin may not be good for Russia but he is definitely good for the Jews of Russia.” Putin’s support of Jews in Russia started long before he met Rabbi Lazar and Sasha Barada. He started his political career in 1993 as vice-mayor of Saint Petersberg. A request had been submitted to the municipality to open the first official Jewish school in Russia. Saint Petersburg’s Jewish mayor feared being accused of favoritism if he permitted the school. It was Putin who stepped forward and approved the school, the very first in post-Communist Russia. This would be the first of many actions over the years to bolster Jewish life in Russia. Many were accomplished far from the public eye, without an agenda to gain favor from Western critics. When mayors in Russian cities opposed returning historic synagogues to local communities, he repeatedly intervened….Putin attended the opening of the new Marina Roscha building in 2000 and participated in the Chanukah menorah-lighting ceremony there. He donated his personal salary toward the construction of the Jewish Museum and visited after it opened….Dmitry Perkoviv says Putin “was raised with Jewish friends, and his whole life he was surrounded by Jews.”…In a private meeting, Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, thanked Putin for his assistance to Israel and support of Jewish life in Russia. Putin responded, “Whenever Rabbi Lazar comes and asks me something, I can’t refuse him because he is such a good person.”

    10 To believers, any outcome that benefits the structure gets attributed to divine confirmation, while any outcome that challenges it gets attributed to external hostility or internal failure of observance. A framework that can absorb any result as confirmation is not a description of reality, it’s a power structure protecting itself from scrutiny through theological enclosure.

    11 David Berger, The Rebbe, The Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference, xxxi.

    12 Eliezrie, 37: “[The Rebbe] established a clandestine Jewish communal and educational network. Wein notes that “Lubavitch alone among all Jewish religious organizations was able to maintain underground Jewish religious life for the entire seventy-five-year period until the collapse of the Communist system.”

    13 On the German side, the rescue was approved by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr; he was later executed for his participation in the 1944 plot against Hitler. Another Nazi, Helmut Wohlthat, chief administrator of Goring’s Four Year Plan. On the U.S. side Secretary of State Cordell Hull (whose involvement “raises questions that this book cannot definitively answer”), the U.S. State Department generally, Congressman Sol Bloom, Attorney General Benjamin Cohen, Justice Louis Brandeis, Senator Robert Wagner, Postmaster General James A. Farley all brought pressure to bear. “Lubavitch Hasidim…were conscious of the importance of political power and had maintained contacts within the American Jewish community and with influential politicians.” Riggs notes that the State Department officials conducting the investigation came to the conclusion that the Rabbi’s presence would not be beneficial to the United States, but “his damning report was ultimately disregarded, presumably because of the large number of high-ranking officials already involved in the case.”

    14 His natal Sun degree, Sepharial interpretation, Aries 27: “It denotes one of a rich and beneficent nature, who will, by his goodness of heart, attract many friends and gain great attention. It indicates success through a woman. The nature is not free from love of luxury and approbation, but it is generous and gifted, and will, by friendly counsel, meet with opportunity for expression and due reward. It is a degree of FAVOUR.” One may note that he ascended to his position because he married the daughter of the previous head rabbi. Schneerson’s other planets in his natal chart include degrees that show both genius as well as extreme dogmatism in relation to his core beliefs (although he had flexibility of tactics).

    15 Here’s Maimonides on this point, as translated by Gershom Scholem, which is not hard to imagine within a global technocratic framework overseen by artificial intelligence, social credit scores, and central bank digital currencies: “If [the potential Messiah] is then successful in rebuilding the sanctuary on its site and in gathering the dispersed of Israel, then he has in fact [as a result of his success] proven himself to be the Messiah. He will then arrange the whole world to serve only God….Let no one think that in the days of the Messiah anything of the natural course of the world will cease or that any innovation will be introduced into creation. Rather, the world will continue in its accustomed course….The sages said ”The only difference between this world and the Days of the Messiah is the subjection of Israel to the nations.”…The sages and prophets longed for the days of the Messiah not in order to rule over the world and not to bring the heathens under their control, not to be exalted by the nations, or even to eat, drink, and rejoice. All they wanted was to have time for the Torah and its wisdom with no one to oppress or disturb them. In that age there will be neither famine nor war, nor envy nor strife, for there will be an abundance of worldly goods. The whole world will be occupied solely with the knowledge of God. Therefore the Children of Israel will be great sages; they will know hidden things and attain an understanding of their Creator to the extent of human capability.”

    16 Eliezrie, p. 252.

    17 Eliezrie, p. 370: “After the First Lebanon War in 1982, the Israeli government decided that the Jewish community in Tunisia was at risk, since the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) had relocated its headquarters there. Ephraim Halevy of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, who would later become director of the agency, discovered that the local community was not willing to relocate to Israel, due to the advise of Rabbi Pinson. Pinson was following the instructions the Rebbe had given to him. Halevy flew to New York to meet with the Rebbe. Years later, he recalled it was a very interesting meeting, saying “We did not agree”. The Jews remained in Tunisia. The fact that they refused to abandon the country shows the depth of Chabad’s influence.”

    18 Per Wikipedia: “There is a tale in the Hasidic Chabad movement that Stalin became sick as a consequence of some metaphysical intervention of the seventh Chabad leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, during the recitation of a public discourse at a Purim gathering in 1953, which supposedly caused Stalin’s death and averted massive deportations of Soviet Jews to Siberia that were to take place as a result of the anti-intellectual campaign surrounding the doctor’s plot affair.” The motive was certainly there, as Schneerson did whatever he could to promote Judaism and Stalin would have destroyed it. The timing was interesting, right on Puim, and Schneerson’s network in the Soviet Union was unusual. There isn’t a causal connection I can point to – Beria and the others knew the Doctor’s Plot would be used to destroy them, they had plenty of their own motives, although Molotov’s wife was Jewish – but if Schneerson had been involved, this would have been the way to obliquely comment on it for the public record with plausible deniability. Ironically, even though the Doctor’s plot was deemed to be a flimsy pretext, the threat of Soviet Jewish deportation may have triggered such a conspiracy to manifest. Whether or not Schneerson directly influenced Stalin’s death, though, the timing and outcome served Chabad’s institutional survival, suggesting either remarkable luck or network capacity.

    19 Eliezrie, 203: “Professor Branover was astonished by the message that the Rebbe asked him to transmit to Jews in Russia: “The Rebbe asked me to inform Jews on the other side of the Iron Curtain that the Communist era would soon be over and the Soviet Union would cease to exist. A new period was beginning in which Jews would be free to immigrate to Israel – or, if they chose, to live in Russia, without any restrictions on religious freedom.”

    20 Just as one example, as recounted by Eliezrie, p. 8, during the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks which targeted the local Chabad house among others, “[FBI] agents were deeply impressed with the professionalism of the [intelligence gathering] operation mounted by Brooklyn, telling Seligson, “You have better information than we do at the FBI office.””

    21 Shahak understood the tradition he was critiquing with clarity and documented it with courageous honesty, but what he couldn’t see clearly was the tradition he was critiquing it from. Secular rationalist egalitarianism presented itself to his generation as a neutral, universally available default position, the place you arrived at when you cleared away the theological and tribal accretions from clear thinking – he didn’t recognize it as itself a historically contingent tradition with its own metaphysical assumptions, its own blind spots, and its own conditions of possibility. It turns out that traditions which don’t maintain boundaries, don’t reproduce themselves demographically, don’t cultivate in-group solidarity, and don’t provide the binding technology of eschatological purpose are not stable alternatives to traditions that do those things. He didn’t have a framework for understanding that civilizational competition is dynamic rather than static, that traditions either expand or contract like a living creature and do not stay static (ala Spengler), and that the belief structure he was operating from was in a phase of decline which would become obvious in the decades since his death.

    22 Shahak, xix: “In his book, Rachlevsky correctly claimed that Rabbi Kook the Elder, the revered father of the messianic tendency of Jewish fundamentalism, said “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of -non-Jews – all of them in all different levels – is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”…Rachlevsky pointed out that Rabbi Kook’s entire teaching was based upon the Lurianic Cabbala, the school of Jewish mysticism that dominated Judaism from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. One of the basic tenants of the Lurianic Cabbala is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary….that Kook deprecated unnecessary Jewish brutality against non-Jews should not minimize criticism of his expressed delight in the belief that the death of millions of soldiers during World War One constituted a sign of the approaching salvation of Jews and the coming of the Messiah….Jewish mysticism, the Lurianic Cabbala, Hassidim and the teachings of Rabbi Kook contain basic ideas about Jewish superiority comparable to the worst forms of anti-Semitism.”

    23 P. 253 of his book, buried in an endnote: “Although many in Chabad today distance themselves from the belief that Gentile souls are inferior to those of Jews, their philosophy teaches that they are. As the Rebbe’s newspaper wrote in December 1941, “In general and as a nation, as a whole, we are always better than the other nations.” The newspaper further explained in June 1942 that antisemitism often arose because people “begrudged the Jew his enviable higher position.” According to Chabad, Jews have both “animal” and “divine” souls, whereas Gentiles have only an animal soul. According to historian Roman Foxbrunner, Lubavitcher’s view Gentile souls as of an “inferior order” and “totally evil with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.” These souls “were created only to test, to punish, to elevate, and ultimately to serve Israel (in the Messianic Era).” Lubavitcher philosophy teaches that having a divine soul brings man closer to God, while the animal soul drags him down. Only Jews, says the founder of Chabad, Rebbe Schneur Zalman, have a divine soul since they are the “descendants of the righteous patriarchs.” Gentile souls die with the bodies, while Jewish souls are eternal. Most of these ideas are articulated in Zalman’s Tanya, which, according to Rabbi Eli S., “is quoting the Talmud, basic Jewish law. It’s not a question against Chabad, but against Judaism, as a whole. As is often the case, Chabad is now defending normative Jewish thought, a position it is comfortable with but which requires a fair chance and adequate time to achieve properly”…Zklikovsky’s view seems to be the prevalent one among many Lubavitcher’s today. To call Gentiles bad contradicts Jewish writings that maintain that everyone is created in the image of God….Rabbi Simon Jacobson adds that this topic about Jewish philosophy and Gentiles is a very complicated matter and the sources used in this note give a literal but distorted view of the issues. Jacobson claims that the Bible is full of references to the Jews being the “Chosen People,” and thus, God recognizes their special role in the world. However, Jacobson also notes that every nation has a role in God’s plan and that Gentiles can definitely have a divine spark in their souls. Also, if they honor God and keep some of his commandments, they can also have a share in the world to come.” This is disingenuous, though: in order for a gentile to have a part in the “world to come”, they must adhere to the Noahide laws – which means that they must accept Yahweh as their God, putting Jews at the center of their worldview and give approval of the hierarchical scheme – if they do not adhere to the Noahide laws, they represent “kelipot” and not subject to a share of the “world to come.” This core point is intentionally obfuscated.

    24 According to Ron Unz, “My encounter a decade ago with Shahak’s candid description of the true doctrines of traditional Judaism was certainly one of the most world-altering revelations of my entire life. But as I gradually digested the full implications, all sorts of puzzles and disconnected facts suddenly became much more clear. There were also some remarkable ironies, and not long afterward I joked to a (Jewish) friend of mine that I’d suddenly discovered that Nazism could best be described as “Judaism for Wimps” or perhaps Judaism as practiced by Mother Teresa of Calcutta.”

    25 There are multiple definitions of “messiah” in Judaism. The standard one is the individual who rebuilds the third temple and checkmarks off the other eschatological requirements, but another definition is as a “potential messiah of the generation”, one who has the characteristics of which one would think would constitute the messiah if he actually fulfills the checkmarks. Given Schneerson did not checkmark the boxes and had never actually stepped foot in Israel, the definition his followers attribute to him with this label is the latter.

    26 Per Bryan Mark Rigg, p. 21: “Rebbe Schneersohn described the love a Rebbe has for his followers as stronger than what a parent feels for a child. As for the follower, he or she should say; “Rebbe, I am yours; I dedicate myself to you completely. It’s only that the smart little fellow, who is wise to do evil – the Evil Inclination – is trying to fool me and ensnare me into a sack. Basically, that’s not what I want. I’m yours: I want to be as I ought to be. Rebbe, have pity on me: take me out of where I am, and set me up where I ought to be!” For the Lubavitchers, the Rebbe is not only a human being but also a prophetic leader worthy of total submission.” In other words, the Chabad masses collapse the individuation process – the crucifixion of the opposites – into a polarity of slavish devotion to the pronouncements of the leader (Chabad would argue that Schneerson turned followers into leaders, especially when compared to other Hasidic sects which encouraged cults of personality worship). This is very common and perhaps standard in exoteric religion; see Dostoevsky’s wonderful The Grand Inquisitor for a critique from an Eastern Orthodox perspective.

    27 As discussed in part 2, “The seven Noahide Laws function as Minimum Viable Product for global governance, integrating 8 billion non-Jews into Jewish-led eschatological framework without requiring conversion. The critical seventh law (establish Courts of Justice) requires nations to build legal systems compatible with “higher law.” This doesn’t mean every country becomes religious theocracy but rather that international legal infrastructure – ICC, trade agreements, ESG standards – eventually aligns with Sanhedrin interpretation through what could be called a snap-to-grid moment.

    The observable trajectory shows progression: In 1991, US Congress passed H.J. Res. 104 recognizing Noahide Laws as “founding principles of our nation.” Currently, global systems shift from rights-based to duty-based citizenship through social credit systems, ESG frameworks, and “responsibility-based” governance models. The prediction: a Universal Moral Charter will be presented as solution to climate crisis or unity imperative, actually functioning as final alignment mechanism where international law snaps into compatibility with rabbinic interpretation.

    This reflects a pivot from Negative Liberty (freedom from interference) to Positive Alignment (freedom to serve the collective purpose). The Noahide Laws serve as the Application Programming Interface (API) between the esoteric ‘inner loop’ of elite metaphysics and the ‘outer loop’ of secular mass management. It allows for a Modular Legal Framework where different nations keep their local ‘skin’ while running the same ‘kernel’ of rabbinic interpretive logic.”

    28 Shahak, 20: “Rabbi Yoseph acknowledged that in messianic times Jews would be more powerful than non-Jews and would then be obligated to conquer the land of Israel, to expel all non-Jews and to destroy the idolatrous Christian churches. Rabbi Yoseph, however, asserted that the messianic time of redemption had not yet arrived. He wrote: “The Jews are not in fact more powerful than the non-Jews and are unable to expel the non-Jews from the land of Israel because the Jews fear the non-Jews…the Israeli government is obligated by international law to guard the Christian churches in the land of Israel, even though those churches are definitely places of idolatry and cult practice. This is so in spite of the fact that we are commanded by our [religious] law to destroy all idolatry and its servants until we uproot it from all parts of our land and any areas that we are able to conquer…”. The quotation cited above illustrates well a part of Israel’s realpolitik. Before the 1996 election, both Peres and Netanyahu regarded Rabbi Yoseph as an important political figure and often courted him openly. This was done in spite of Yoseph’s publicly declared doctrine that Jews, when sufficiently powerful have a religious obligation to expel all non-Jews from the country and destroy all Christian churches.”

  • Eusocial Horrors: Insects, Humans, and the God-Image

    This post explores the darker structures of the natural world – slave-making ants, parasitic wasps, cuckoo brood parasites – and how they illuminate the moral and metaphysical tensions underlying human societies. Drawing on Guido Preparata’s latest book, it examines the parallels between eusocial insects and elite human hierarchies and how these comparisons challenge conventional ideas of an all-good God. By confronting the brutality built into nature, one is forced to grapple with the limits of moral expectation, the shadow of the privatio boni, and the possibility of a divine totality that encompasses both creation and destruction.

    Welcome back. In this post I will be reviewing some unusual animal species in relation to Guido Preparata’s latest book, Toward a Eusocial Empire: A Guide to the Insect Management of Sex & Race in Tomorrow’s Dystopia (2026), because such species shine an interesting light on the nature of the god image which is at the basis of so much of my inquiries. This is a subsequent post to my 2024 post Humanity as a slave-making ant colony, where I took Preparata’s observation and explored it – but that was before he formalized his argument with his book, which I recommend.

    For those who don’t know him, Guido is the author of Conjuring Hitler, which fundamentally changed how I perceived World War 1 and 2, discussed previously here, and he has discussed how the Catholic Church was skinsuited by the international establishment in the post-World War 2 era, discussed previously here, as well as covered other topics like gnosticism, elite motivations for 9/11 and the Afghanistan war, and tracing the lineage of intersectionality/postmodernism from Sade to Bataille to Foucault to the American academic world in his Ideology of Tyranny, which was elaborated on in his subsequent Reign of Discursive Terror and which I will cover in the future. Preparata was a Fulbright scholar and taught at the University of Washington, bio here, until he sustained an academic lynching for Conjuring Hitler – a lynching without basis, which occurred because his book undermined the shibboleths of the post-World War 2 moral order – and he is eminently qualified to discuss these topics.

    In Eusocial Empire, Preparata argues that the upper elites – which he sees as the Anglo-American establishment with its crux as the British monarchy, while I see it as the international owners of the world central banks with its basis as the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Schiffs, etc. – are, intentionally or not, modeling their behavior after eusocial (meaning “of an animal species, especially an insect showing an advanced level of social organization, in which a single female or caste produces the offspring and nonreproductive individuals cooperate in caring for the young”) insect colonies – ants, bees, and termites. These insects have a small elite and a vast number of sterile workers, and of note is slave making ants where they raid competing nests, kill the queen and steal their workers, using them to expand their own hives.

    The upper elites are pursuing a similar strategy: to collapse the birthrates of the masses and to render them sterile worker bots, while the upper elites themselves enjoy the benefits of the masses’ toiling. You can see how this vision has a rhythm to my arguments pertaining to ratcheting neoliberal feudalism (also here and here). Preparata argues that the elites pursue a dual sex and racial strategy: regarding sex, the elites push transgenderism, abortion, contraceptives (along with, I would say, collapsing marriage rates and spiking divorce rates, mining sexual relations with Me Too lawsuits), two working households unable to get ahead, etc., while pushing endless racial division as a divide and conquer strategy so the masses are too busy infighting to focus on upper elite theft.

    It is a strong argument, and the parallels between humanity and insect colonies are numerous. While humanity may have begun as egalitarian hunter gatherers, from the start of the agricultural revolution 10,000+ years ago humanity has naturally produced parasitical social structures – what are kings if not parasites at the top of a hierarchical nest exploiting those beneath them? There has only been a small 200-300 year period at the advent of the industrial revolution which has given forth relative egalitarianism – a period that is now ending due to technological innovations, neo-Malthusian resource pressures, or otherwise.

    The God Image

    Preparata’s focus on these amoral or immoral insect colonies implicitly shines a light on the God image. What kind of God would create such creatures? With mankind – arguably separated from the animal kingdom by the spark of reason or the creative impulse which animals supposedly lack, an argument I have doubts about – the argument is that God gave us free will and the power to choose between good and evil, but what is the point of creating such devilish creatures?

    The following are some other examples of such creatures. These were already troubling to observers in the nineteenth century and became particularly important for Charles Darwin when thinking through the implications of natural selection. Darwin’s own response is worth distinguishing from his theory: whatever one makes of natural selection as a mechanistic account of biological change, Darwin’s emotional confrontation with parasitic wasps produced something prior to and independent of his theoretical commitments – a raw metaphysical discomfort that no evolutionary explanation fully dissolves. The theory explains how such creatures came to exist; it does not answer why a creation structured this way should exist at all, nor does it quiet the intuition that something is cosmically wrong with a living host being consumed from within. It is Darwin as witness, not Darwin as theorist, that I am invoking here.

    1. Slave-making ants. As mentioned, certain ant species raid neighboring colonies, seize larvae, and carry them back to their own nests. The captured ants emerge and spend their lives working for the conquering colony – gathering food, caring for brood, and maintaining the nest. Some slave-making species become so dependent on this practice that they cannot survive without enslaving other ants to perform basic labor.Queen and brood of the social parasite Polyergus lucidus with Formica archboldi workers
    2. The ichneumon wasp. Darwin famously singled out parasitic wasps in the family Ichneumonidae. The female injects her eggs into a living caterpillar or other host. The larvae hatch inside the host’s body and slowly consume it from within, deliberately avoiding vital organs until late in development so that the host remains alive as long as possible.Hymenoptera – Ichneumonidae
    3. Parasitic wasps more generally. Across many wasp families, similar strategies appear. Eggs are laid inside or on other insects; the emerging larvae eat their host alive. Sometimes the parasite even manipulates the host’s behavior, turning it into a living bodyguard or food source for the developing young.Megarhyssa macrurus (Ichneumonidae), a parasitoid, ovipositing into its host through the wood of a tree.
    4. Brood parasites like the cuckoo. The common cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. When the cuckoo chick hatches, it instinctively pushes the host’s eggs or chicks out of the nest, ensuring that the foster parents devote all their energy to feeding the intruder. The adoptive parents raise the parasite while their own offspring die. The pejorative term cuckold or cuck, used to reference men raising the offspring of other men, comes from the cuckoo.A shiny cowbird chick (left) being fed by a rufous-collared sparrow
    5. Hyena scavenging and predation. Spotted hyenas often begin eating prey before it has fully died. Their social structure is rigidly hierarchical, dominated by powerful matriarchal lineages, and competition within clans can be brutal.
    6. Chimpanzee warfare. Long-term observations of wild chimpanzees reveal coordinated raids between neighboring groups. Patrols cross territorial boundaries, isolate individuals, and kill them, sometimes gradually dismantling rival groups through repeated attacks. Victorious groups may absorb the territory of the defeated one.
    7. Cat parasitism (Toxoplasma). The parasite Toxoplasma gondii infects rodents and alters their behavior, reducing their fear of cats. This manipulation makes the rodents more likely to be eaten, allowing the parasite to reproduce inside the cat’s digestive system.
    8. Cordyceps fungi. Certain fungi infect insects and gradually take control of their nervous systems. The infected insect climbs to a high location, clamps down, and dies as the fungus erupts from its body and releases spores to infect others.

    Taken individually each of these strategies can be explained biologically, that they are simply evolutionary solutions to survival and reproduction. Natural selection favors whatever works, but collectively they raise a deeper philosophical question about what kind of God would create these creatures. Darwin himself was disturbed by the example of parasitic wasps. In a well-known letter he wrote that he could not persuade himself that a beneficent and omnipotent creator would deliberately design such creatures whose life cycles require the slow internal consumption of living hosts. The problem, in other words, is not merely scientific but metaphysical. If the living world contains systems built around predation, parasitism, manipulation, and slavery, then the traditional image of an all-good designer crafting a harmonious creation becomes difficult to reconcile with observation. Darwin’s theory of natural selection provided a way around the dilemma: these structures need not reflect intentional moral design at all, but rather the cumulative outcome of blind evolutionary pressures. But the darker aspects of animal behavior destabilize a certain theological picture of the world – if life repeatedly produces such systems on its own, the problem is no longer simply the moral failure of particular creatures, it is the structure of creation itself.

    This argument helps to collapse the nature of an all-good privatio boni God which almost everyone in the West explicitly or implicitly accepts. An alternative is to discard God altogether toward atheism, but even there the privatio boni lurks as an implicit assumption (see Richard Dawkins as an example who retains underlying Christian metaphysics even in his atheism). Other possibilities such as soul-making theodicy, Process theology, or Open Theism have their own problems.1 The other alternative is perhaps more horrifying than everything else discussed above: the notion of God as totality, as Abraxas, the unity of all good and all evil, light and darkness, Christ and the anti-Christ/Satan, where we exist on this plane between infinite and competing forces, crucified individually between the opposites as all living creatures are, discussed previously here. These creatures aren’t an embarrassment to the Abraxian framework, they’re evidence for it. Creation that includes built-in horror is exactly what a totality-God would produce. To me, Preparata’s argument about the similarities between humanity and insect colonies merely highlights, yet again, the nature of the God image, and how the evidence we see on this plane points to a God beyond the moral binaries that we use to avoid the horrors of the void.

    With all this said, I highly recommend Guido’s book and supporting his efforts which you can buy here, and his website is here.

    Thanks for reading.

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    1 While often proposed as mediating positions, these frameworks falter under the weight of lived reality. Soul-Making theodicy, which posits suffering as necessary for moral development, collapses when confronted with the death of children or innocents who never possess the agency to “make” a soul. Meanwhile, Process Theology and Open Theism attempt to preserve divine goodness by limiting God’s omnipotence or omniscience, but in doing so, they inadvertently dismantle the privatio boni architecture undergirding Western morality: without a sovereign, all-knowing guarantor of final justice, the cosmic coherence of heaven, hell, and moral accountability dissolves. Thus, rather than resolving the tension, these models either ignore the phenomenology of innocent suffering or undermine the very metaphysical foundations they seek to save.

  • Shalamov and the Psychology of Incinerated Metaphysics

    Most people who lose their faith lose it intellectually – they argue themselves out of it, find the theodicies unconvincing, decide the evidence doesn’t support the conclusion. Varlam Shalamov lost his differently. The gulag simply burned it away, the way extreme cold burns off sensation through exposure, gradually and then completely, until nothing remained, not even the question. This is a post about his Kolyma Tales, and about what it looks like when a human being writes seriously and carefully from that position.

    Welcome back. This is a post about Varlam Shalamov’s mostly autobiographical Kolyma Tales (published in the West in individual stories 1970-1976, compiled later).

    Very few of you have likely heard of Shalamov, especially native English speakers. He published tales about the Soviet gulag, but unlike Solzhenitsyn, he remains virtually unknown. Solzhenitsyn wanted to write The Gulag Archipelago with Shalamov as co-author, but the latter refused; Solzhenitsyn had recognized both Shalamov’s talents and that Shalamov had had a much more brutal experience in the gulag system than he had, spending about 17 years in the camps (arrested in 1937, released 1951, rearrested briefly). Solzhenitsyn wasn’t in the most brutal camps; his research camp was relatively mild, and he was placed in a fairly cushiony location due to his mathematical and other talents. Solzhenitsyn writes: “Shalamov’s experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own, and I respectfully confess that to him and not me was it given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which life in the camps dragged us all.” Shalamov’s tales are short, recounted without emotion, and consistently end in a flat horror; the good are doomed, the “evil” prosper, there is no final accounting, no redemption, this is it, this is reality, accept it or don’t, but no punches are pulled.

    I’ve read the three volume Gulag Archipelago twice now, once a decade or more ago and another time a couple years ago, and it was okay (but a grind of a read, I had to force myself to finish it), truthful in its way, but it was instrumentalized by the West as a moral crusade against the Soviet system, playing into the dialectics of the upper elites (as I see it). This is why Solzhenitsyn was honored by being allowed to give a Harvard commencement speech. Shalamov criticized Solzhenitsyn for playing into this narrative drama, but, to the latter’s credit, the exposure of the gulag system did need to happen and he did explore a taboo subject with his 200 Years Together, which was heavily smeared by Western media due its controversial handling of Jewish-Russian relations and which remained unpublished in English until very recently. Shalamov’s work remained censored in the Soviet Union until after perestroika, that’s how damaging the material was (much like Gareth Jones’ covering of the Holodomor was intensely suppressed, discussed previously here). Solzhenitsyn’s narrative could be instrumentalized; Shalamov’s cannot. One offers a moral drama with recognizable roles; the other offers only this happened, and then this, and then they died. That’s harder to build a crusade around.

    The Core Disagreement

    The core disagreement between Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov was about the nature of suffering. Solzhenitsyn believed that suffering had a redemptive factor, that it purified and ennobled the soul, or that at least it could. He famously wrote:

    And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

    The is a standard theodicy: evil happens because the good aren’t good enough (the other common theodicy is “it’s all part of God’s plan”). Shalamov, alternatively, believed that prison could be ennobling where one sits inside a prison cell all day long, but not past a certain point within the gulag system where physical exertion and not incarceration is what is required of inmates. When the body is slowly starved to death in temperatures reaching -70 degrees with little food or lodging or comforts, all of the human emotions fade away except the last remaining emotion – spite. There are no friendships that form in such conditions, emotions burn off, God burns off, nothing ennobling is possible from it, there is nothing left except the total destruction of the human being – suffering as ennobling is a laughable fiction, and for Solzhenitsyn to push it meant to Shalamov that he was compromised. What’s remarkable is that this destruction was not experienced by Shalamov as loss in any conventional sense – there was no grief for the absent God, no existential crisis, no dark night of the soul as spiritual literature understands it. Those are the experiences of someone who still has enough metaphysical warmth left to feel the cold, but Shalamov was past that. The burning off of God was simply one more thing the cold took, alongside friendship, pride, and the ability to button one’s pants.

    Shalamov himself was placed into far east Siberia, where estimates of half a million to a million or more people died in his region alone – the Soviet authorities shipped people there to work in the gold mines, were underfed, had very limited clothing, were predated upon by the criminal element (which were given far more privileges than the “political prisoners” and who stole the political’s food, clothing, packages from home, etc). The political prisoners were almost all convicted on pretexts; the mines required a certain number of prisoners to do slave labor, the prisoners died or became incapacitated at certain rates, therefore more arrests were needed – it didn’t matter the reason – in order to keep the mines operational. The politicals arrested were forced to sign confessions; the Soviet organs did not release people post-arrest – you signed whatever they told you to or you were tortured until you did, or they could escalate and haul your family in too. Shalamov refused to be a stoolie in the gulag, he refused to take on overseer responsibilities which perhaps could have saved his life because it would have required him to oppress the common prisoners, and he almost starved to death; he was saved at the last minute by someone in the local hospital who, at great personal risk, placed him as a hospital orderly. The greatest danger was not the lack of food but a combination of being overworked and of the extreme cold – if you didn’t eat much but you did not have to expend massive calories by working in -60 degree temperature mining for gold, your odds of survival drastically increased. Here’s a passage from the foreword about this:

    He had been held in a virtual death camp, where – at nearly six feet tall – his weight and dropped to 90 pounds. With the new sentence he was transferred to a prison hospital and managed to regain his weight. Gold mining once more emaciated him, and he was returned to the hospital. After that he was sent to a logging camp where the convicts were simply not fed if they did not fulfill their work norms. Captured during an escape attempt, he was dispatched to a penal zone where, if they could not work, prisoners were thrown off a mountain or tied to a horse and dragged their deaths. Chance came to his aid when group of Italian prisoners were delivered to the site, replacing the Soviet conflicts. It was at that point that a physician took an interest in him and managed to have him assigned to paramedical courses – a second fortunate twist of fate that literally saved his life.

    Many millions died in the forced labor slave camps through execution, famine, forced labor, and neglect (used both to forcibly industrialize the backwards Soviet Union and as a way of silencing and murdering potential competitive elements), although estimates vary wildly, but it is mostly forgotten about in the West and pales dramatically in the media and academia’s treatment to Nazi Germany. In 1990 Soviet general and historian Dmitry Volkogonov gave an estimate of the total number of repressed persons (those imprisoned and/or murdered): 22.5 million, but non-Soviet historian estimates run higher. Regarding Kolyma itself, there is a 1949 estimate by the Polish historian Kazimierz Zaomorski of 3 million exiled there, not more than 500,000 of whom supposedly survive. Robert Conquest estimated 3 million died in Kolyma. One may note that a million German POWs in Soviet captivity died, and Russian soldiers who had been captured by the Germans were treated as criminals to be sent to the far East to die (central Europe living conditions were so far ahead of the Soviets that authorities thought that, if the truth came out, that it would dramatically hurt morale in the Soviet Union; furthermore, soldiers tended to develop a degree of courage that the Soviet leaders wanted to grind down and destroy post-war). This is why so many captured Soviet soldiers, who knew they were doomed if they returned home, volunteered for the Vlasov brigade – a brigade of the doomed, where victory of either side would have meant death.

    The gulag system. Kolyma is in the far east near Magadan.

    The God Image

    When one sees what humanity devolves to at this level, the notion of an “all good” privatio boni God – which Solzhenitsyn retained, believing that people were being punished for their or society’s sins – becomes a farce. If one were to attempt a metaphysical reconstruction after such a collapse, it would have to account for both good and evil as co-present without moral reconciliation. Shalamov does not construct an alternative theology, he does not articulate a counter-metaphysics like Abraxas; what he demonstrates is the collapse of the privatio boni model under extreme conditions. He refused metaphysics and overarching narratives entirely, which is why his stories are fragmented; he tells little vignettes of men suffering, then being destroyed and dying, and that was it – there were no lessons to be had, no cosmic lessons learned. Suffering and then death, no redemption arc, and the victims forgotten – how do you sit with that from within the privatio boni?

    So why did he write, then? It seems like he wrote both as a calling and as a remembrance to the dead, perhaps a bit like Mizushima in The Burmese Harp, reviewed here. And Shalamov refused to moralize to his audience, unlike Solzhentisyn. Per the foreward:

    Chekhov, a writer who respected the rights of the reader in the artistic process, consciously avoided drawing conclusions for his audience. Tolstoy, on the other hand (like Solzhenitsyn later), constantly lectures the reader [based on underlying privatio boni metaphysics].” The British Slavish Geoffrey Hocking wrote, “Where Solzhenitsyn writes with anger, sarcasm, and bitterness, Shalamov adopts a studiedly dry and neutral tone….Where Solzhenitsyn is fiercely moralistic and preaches redemption through suffering, Shalamov contents himself with cool aphorisms and asserts that real suffering, such as Kolyma imposed on its inmates, can only demoralize and break the spirit.

    This is the difference between writing from a privatio boni standpoint and an Abraxian one; if God (if he exists) is a combination of good and evil, then moralizing about the horrors of the world loses its metaphysical bite – one can still oppose it, but the “heat” is gone. But Abraxas is still a metaphysical position – it still posits something, a god beyond good and evil, a cosmic principle that contains both. Shalamov doesn’t even have that. His is a third position that has no real name: not atheism, which is still a stance taken in relation to a question, not a dark or dual god, simply the silence that remains after the question itself has been destroyed. The privatio boni framework didn’t get replaced or inverted – it got incinerated, along with everything else, in -60 degree temperatures in a Siberian gold mine. What’s eerie about his prose is that it retains the form of moral seriousness – precision, witness, memory – while being completely evacuated of the metaphysical foundation that would normally justify why any of it matters. He cares, rigorously, about things in a universe where caring has lost its cosmic warrant. For Shalamov, the act of writing is a biological reflex, a stubborn persistence of the nervous system that outlasts the soul itself, not a route toward healing. He witnesses because he is a recording instrument that hasn’t been broken yet. It is the “spite” he mentions transformed into prose: a refusal to let the void have the last word, even if the void is all there is.

    The Look

    Take a look at his physiognomy, look at the piercing stare:

    Shalamov in 1937

    This reminds me of a meme’d Russian World War 2 soldier before-and-after four years apart which shows a hopeful young man in the pre-war photo, and a blown out husk of a human being, shell shocked, totally destroyed and haunted with the thousand yard stare in the second:

    CDN media

    Shalamov wasn’t blown out and destroyed mentally, though; the look he gives to me is that of a man who has stepped back from regular reality to the position of an observer, and what he has seen is so horrifying that it has fundamentally changed his understanding of what this reality is. The look says: I have seen what there is, and I will not look away, and I will not console you or myself. He is level headed, inward focusing, beyond cynical – it is a very powerful look because it’s strength is both of this world (having seen all the horrors) and not of it (having lost attachment to things most of humanity takes for granted). The gaze is unadorned, it does not seek sympathy, it does not perform endurance, it does not moralize. I don’t see that kind of stare from Solzhenitsyn.

    We tend to treat the metaphysical impulse – the need for meaning, the intuition of the sacred, the sense that existence has a structure – as the most foundational thing about human consciousness, the bedrock beneath everything else. But it turns out that metaphysics is downstream of the body: downstream of calories, warmth, sleep, not being worked to death in -60 degree temperatures. Remove those conditions long enough and the meaning-making apparatus switches off, which means it was never foundational. It was always contingent on the body remaining within a survivable range. This is vertiginous because it means the feeling of metaphysical certainty – the conviction that God exists, that existence is meaningful, or even that it isn’t – may tell you less about reality than it tells you about your physical conditions. The mystic in his warm cell and the gulag prisoner are not accessing different truths, they are operating under different temperatures.1

    If God exists independently of the human apparatus for sensing him, then Shalamov’s experience says nothing about whether God is real, only that the receiver can be destroyed. But it does refute the idea that extreme suffering opens rather than closes that receiver, that it is spiritually productive, that God communicates through it. Shalamov is the empirical counterexample to that entire tradition. Past a certain threshold, suffering doesn’t deepen the spiritual sense, it destroys it permanently. Which means either God goes silent past that threshold, or the communication model was always wrong, or there is no communicator. Shalamov doesn’t choose between those options, he simply writes from the place where the signal stopped.

    Conclusion

    Shalamov eventually survived the gulag system and his work was smuggled into the West; however, he stayed within the Soviet Union and was forced to denounce his own work publicly, which his supporters in the West found correctly to be distasteful, even though he kept writing the same stuff after his denouncement. His health was destroyed by the gulag and he spent his later years in a writer’s nursing home, and he was going to be sent to a psychiatric ward (a common tactic against dissidents) when he fell ill and died, the end, no redemptive arc – except in the sense, perhaps, that a few people write about him to this day, like in this post. He survived the gulag, he recanted under pressure, he died in obscurity, but the stories remain. They offer no redemption.

    This total evacuation of the metaphysical is what made the Soviet system so effective compared to what came before. The ruthlessness Shalamov witnessed was the logical endpoint of a world that had abandoned the ‘wishy-washy’ metaphysical constraints of the tsarist monarchy. Where the Romanovs were still tethered to a fading sense of divine accountability – a tether that ultimately made them weak in the face of absolute Darwinian struggle – the Soviet Organs operated in the very vacuum Shalamov describes. They operated on the premise that the soul was a fiction that could be worked, starved, and frozen out of existence, manifesting naturally in the gulag.

    Like in The Lives of Others, one may choose to do the right thing for its own sake, but in this realm there is a direct and inverse correlation between spirituality and power – the more power you have, the less spiritual you will generally be, and to hold the apex of political power one must have no morality and to do whatever it takes to retain that power without compunction – because if you don’t then you will be outcompeted by those who will (which is why the Romanovs were ousted from power; they were not ruthless or creative enough2).

    Kolyma Tales is a good read and I recommend it. Here’s the Amazon link, but better if you buy it from somewhere else if you choose to read it. Here are some of my favorite passages:

    Cold, hunger and sleeplessness rendered any friendship impossible, and Dugaev – despite his youth – understood the falseness of the belief that friendship could be tempered by misery and tragedy. For friendship to be friendship, its foundation had to be laid before living conditions reached that last border beyond which no human emotion was left to a man – only mistrust, rage, and lies….Dugaev sat down on the ground. He was already exhausted enough to be totally indifferent to any change in his fate….he had been exhausted and hungry for a long time and that he did not know how to steal. The ability to steal was a primary virtue here, whatever it involved, from taking the bread of a fellow-inmate to claiming bonuses of thousands of rubles for fictitious, non-existent accomplishments.

    All human emotions – love, friendship, envy, concern for one’s fellow man, compassion, longing for fame, honesty – had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies during their long fasts….We’d all learned meekness and had forgotten how to be surprised. We had no pride, vanity, or ambition, and jealousy and passion seemed as alien to us as Mars, and trivial in addition. It was much more important to learn to button your pants in the frost. Grown men cried if they weren’t able to do that. We understood that death was no worse than life, and we feared neither. We were overwhelmed by indifference. We knew that it was in our power to end this life the very next day and now and again we made that decision, but each time life’s trivia would interfere with our plans….We realized that life, even the worst life, consists of an alternation of joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and there was no need to fear the failures more than the successes. We were disciplined and obedient to our superiors. We understood that truth and falsehood were sisters and that there were thousands of truths in the world…We considered ourselves virtual saints, since we had redeemed all our sins by our years in camp. We had learned to understand people, to foresee their actions and fathom them. We had learned – and this was the most important thing – that our knowledge of people did not provide us with anything useful in life. What did it matter if I understood, felt, foresaw the actions of another person? I was powerless to change my own attitude toward him, and I couldn’t denounce a fellow convict, no matter what he did. I refused to seek the job of foreman, which provided. A chance to remain alive, for the worst thing in camp was the forcing of one’s own or anyone else’s will on another person who was a convict just like oneself….Our inability to use certain types of ‘weapons’ weakened us in comparison with certain of our neighbors who shared Berts with us. We learned to be satisfied with little things and rejoice at small successes.

    Friendship is not born in conditions of need or trouble. Literary fairy tales tell of ‘difficult’ conditions which are an essential element in forming any friendship, but such conditions are simply not difficult enough. If tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship, then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great. Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friends. Only real need can determine one’s spiritual and physical strength and set the limits of one’s physical endurance and moral courage….A human being survives by his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to blot out the bad and retain only the good…We had all been permanently poisoned by the north, and we knew it.

    The intellectual convict is crushed by the camp. Everything he valued is ground into the dust while civilization and culture drop from him within weeks. The method of persuasion in a quarrel is the first or a stick. The way to induce someone to do something is by means of a rifle butt, a punch in the teeth.

    The intellectual becomes a coward, and his own brain provides a ‘justification’ of his own actions. He can persuade himself of anything, attach himself to either side in a quarrel. The intellectual sees in the criminal world ‘teachers of life’, fighters for the ‘people’s rights’. A blow can transform an intellectual into the obedient servant of a petty crook. Physical force becomes moral force.

    The camp had dried up my brain, and I could not, I just could not squeeze another word from it. I was not up to the job – and not because the gap between my will and Kolyma was too great, not because my brain was weak and exhausted, but because in those folds of my brain where ecstatic adjectives were stored, there was nothing but hatred. Just think of poor Dostoevsky writing anguished, tearful, humiliating letters to his unmoved superiors throughout the ten years he spent as a soldier after leaving the House of the Dead. Dostoevsky even wrote poems to the czarina. There was no Kolyma in the House of the Dead.

    My favorite story was Condensed Milk. In this story the main character is enticed by a man named Shestakov, who has a fairly cushy position, toward an escape attempt; the main character sees through the act immediately, because there is no real plan in place. Shestakov must be in trouble with the authorities and he promised other people’s hides to get out of his trouble. The main character goes along with the sham initially so long as Shestakov provides him with some condensed milk; Shestakov provides it to him, the main character consumes the condensed milk, then immediately backs out of the plot.

    ‘You know, I said, carefully licking the spoon, ‘I changed my mind. Go without me.’ Shestakov comprehended immediately and left without saying a word to me. It was, of course, a weak, worthless act of vengeance just like all my feelings. But what else could I do? Warn the others? I didn’t know them. But they needed a warning. Shestakov managed to convince five people. They made their escape the next week; two were killed at Black Springs and the other three stood trial a month later. Shestakov’s case was considered separately ‘because of production considerations.’ He was taken away, and I met him again at a different mine six months later. He wasn’t given any extra sentence for the escape attempt; the authorities played the game honestly with him even though they could have acted quite differently. He was working in the prospecting group, was shaved and well fed, and his checked socks were in one piece. He didn’t say hallo to me, but there was really no reason for him to act that way. I mean, after all, two cans of condensed milk aren’t such a big deal.

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    1 It also brings to mind Phinneas Gage, a worker where a metal pole went through his brain and fundamentally altered his personality, making him highly aggressive, an entirely different person, discussed previously here. Who are we if physical trauma results in radical personality change? Who are we if we fall to dementia or old age and become a shell of ourselves? What is there to survive death, what unchanging inner core?

    2 What was required was total ruthlessness without compunction against their enemies, not wishy-washiness, along with a heavy focus on technological innovation – it was Lenin who stated that the monarchy’s last chance was through Stolypin’s reforms, discussed previously here. Stolypin was considered a butcher by his detractors, smeared in the anti-tsarist media, but his law-and-order measures were a thousanth of the brutality inflicted by the Soviet regime. Eastern Orthodoxy and the monarchy ultimately lacked the underlying metaphysics required for domination, technological innovation, and sophisticated dialectics – they never had a chance.