This essay explores Emil Cioran’s philosophy, revealing how his reflections on pessimism, suffering, and the human condition offer a radical form of freedom. Through his life and aphorisms Cioran challenges conventional views of hope, progress, and meaning where, without the burden of progress or idealized outcomes, life becomes more open to unexpected joys and surprises. His thoughts serves as a guide to live without the constraints of conventional optimism, embracing life in its complexity and unpredictability.

This is a post about an extreme philosophical pessimist: Emil Cioran.

Cioran is known as one of the great writers of aphorisms (i.e. short, fragmented ideas communicated within a few paragraphs) who became famous for his A Short History of Decay (1949). I felt reluctant to cover him because his writing leaves a sour taste in the mouth, a claustrophobic dread, as a brutally pessimist author who basically used his writing as a therapy tool so he wouldn’t kill himself or go mad. “A book,” said Cioran, “is a suicide postponed.” Indeed, Cioran believed that by coping directly with the horrors of this world it would strip away illusion and perhaps make life worth living. “Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?”

Many authors use writing as a coping tool; I do as well. But my outlook is not as relentlessly bleak as Cioran’s, even though it’s bleaker than most other Substacks. The intent here is not to lean into the pessimism as much as he did; rather, the question is where can one find hope and meaning in a world of intensifying neoliberal feudalism and ubiquitous nihilism? (And I do see some, also here.)

So why did I want to cover Cioran? Three reasons. First, to highlight the many themes he covers which overlap with this Substack; second, because I enjoy reviewing strange figures who march to the beat of their own drum – it is by following our intuition (within reason, in a measured capacity) that we can become who we are really meant to be; and third, as a limit to how far one can push their pessimism. I don’t want to be as pessimistic as Cioran; it is too much. So is the approach of the infamous “Nothing Good Has Ever Happened” Will Martin for that matter – I feel like I should perhaps dedicate this post to him, lol.1 An element of “maybe” from the Chinese farmer story is a healthier approach, even though pessimism is a nice baseline – I would rather be pleasantly surprised to the upside than to the downside.

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Cioran’s background

Cioran was a Romanian born in 1915 to a Greek Orthodox priest father and who supported the far right during the rise of Fascism, including Hitler and the Iron Guard.2 He moved to France, refused to be drafted by Romania to fight Russia in the Soviet Union, and became somewhat disillusioned with politics after the Axis lost. He lived in Paris for the next fifty-some years where he refused to work a “real” job, wrote a couple dozen pessimistic books and then died of Alheizmer’s in 1995 at 84 years old (after planning to kill himself as his mental facilities declined but he waited too long3). He was the friend of other famous writers such as Eugène Ionesco and Mircea Eliade. He said nothing good comes from getting old, though: “One doesn’t become better on the moral plane with old age.  Nor wiser.  Contrary to what people think.  One gains nothing in getting old.  But as one is more tired, one gives the impression of wisdom….There is no progress in life.  There are small changes.” He was an anti-natalist and had no children, something I see as foolish and decadent.

His break from the mainstream perspective began from the unrelenting insomnia he suffered as a teenager.4 He wrote his famous A Short History of Decay, which included dozens of aphorisms about decay in all its forms, by forcing himself to learn to write French in his late 20s and 30s. It was a very difficult process which he ended up re-writing three times. Cioran described the process of learning French as “the most difficult task of my life”, comparing it to “putting on a straitjacket”.

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Overlapping themes

What are the overlapping themes between Cioran and this Substack?

1. Cioran was a 20th century gnostic according to professor Costica Bradatan:In his books, Cioran never stopped berating the gods, except, we might say, for the god of failure, the demiurge of the Gnostics. There is something distinctly Gnostic about Cioran’s anti-cosmic philosophy and the manner of his thinking. Gnostic insights, images, and metaphors permeate his work, as scholars of Gnosticism have noticed. A Short History of Decay, The Temptation to Exist, and The New Gods, writes Jacques Lacarrière, are “texts which match the loftiest flashes of Gnostic thought.” Just like the Gnostics of old, Cioran sees creation as the result of a divine failure; human history and civilization are for him nothing but “the work of the devil,” the demiurge’s other name. In A Short History of Decay, he deems the God of this world “incompetent.” “Of all that was attempted on this side of nothingness,” he wonders, “is there anything more pathetic than this world, except for the idea which conceived it?” The French title of one of his most influential books, which in English has been published as The New Gods, is telling — Le Mauvais démiurge (1969): “the evil demiurge.” Here, with unconcealed sympathy, Cioran calls the Gnostics “fanatics of the divine nothingness” and praises them for having “grasped so well the essence of the fallen world.”
2. He had a strong interest in esotericism and mysticism. He disliked exoteric religion and considered becoming a Buddhist before rejecting it – “What attracted me to Buddhism is the statement that everything is illusion, that nothing is real.  It’s perhaps the negative aspect of Buddhism that I liked, the statements on life that it makes.”
3. He believed deeply in philosophical pessimism, tying in nicely with gnosticism and esotericism. Cioran was heavily influenced by Nietzsche in his youth (h/t Max V. Carp) although he later came to pity him5; he loved Schopenhauer and despised Heidegger.6 I discussed philosophical pessimism in depth here.
4. Cioran was unique and stood out from the crowd – he was a Jungerian-esque anarch, keenly following his intuition — where are these figures today? Has the ubiquitous conformity brought about by mass media and high technology simply killed it? Or do they still exist, lurking in the shadows but not generating the public’s attention of yesteryear?Cioran with Junger
5. He also had strongly anti-democratic leanings which did not dissipate later in life and he distrusted the notions of so-called “progress”.
6. Cioran refused to work as a wagecuck where he would have been enslaved: he would rather be dignified and poor, much like Diogenes of Sinope.Cioran would do anything, except take up a job. Doing so would have been the failure of his life. “For me,” an older Cioran remembers, “the main thing was to safeguard my freedom. Had I ever accepted to take up an office job, to make a living, I would have failed.” In order not to fail, then, he chose a path most would consider failure embodied, but Cioran knew that failure is always a complicated affair. “I avoided at any price the humiliation of a career […] I preferred to live like a parasite [rather] than to destroy myself by keeping a job.” As all great idlers know, there is perfection in inaction: Cioran was not only aware of it, but he also cultivated it all his life. When an interviewer asked him about his working routines, Cioran answered: “Most of the time I don’t do anything. I am the idlest man in Paris […] the only one who does less than I do is a whore without clients.”
7. He was also critical of success, echoing thoughts offered on this Substack.7 “There is something of the charlatan in anyone who triumphs in any realm whatever,” [Cioran] wrote. One has to sell out to the powers that be, to squelch your independent thought, to ally with an existing power center (as Rurik Skywalker states) to have mainstream success at anything. Cioran turned down most awards, refused almost all interviews and led a quiet and poor life. He also studied the concept of failure thoroughly. Per the Los Angeles Review of Books, “[Cioran] knew how to appreciate a worthwhile case of failure, how to observe its unfolding and savor its complexity. For failure is irreducibly unique: successful people always manage to look the same, but those who fail fail so differently. Each case of failure has a physiognomy and a beauty all of its own, and it takes a subtle connoisseur like Cioran to tell a seemingly banal but in fact great failure from a noisy yet mediocre one.”8 And: “[Cioran] can measure, for example, the depth of someone’s inner life by the way they approach failure: “This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success.” How so? Because failure, Cioran thinks, “always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.” Show me how you deal with failure, and I will tell you more about yourself. Only “in failure, in the greatness of a catastrophe, can you know someone.” (As an aside, Peter James has a nice post on failing at standup and another one on the lessons he learned from the experience.)
8. He thought that one should only be writing if compelled. In other words, to write for writing’s sake or for attention will not achieve the desired effect: “In my opinion, a book should be written without thinking of others.  You shouldn’t write for anyone, only for yourself….Everything I’ve written, I wrote to escape a sense of oppression, suffocation.  It wasn’t from inspiration, as they say.  It was a sort of getting free, to be able to breathe.” He also stressed the importance of writing in accordance with temperament: “A writer mustn’t know things in depth.  If he speaks of something, he shouldn’t know everything about it, only the things that go with his temperament.  He should not be objective.  One can go into depth with a subject, but in a certain direction, not trying to cover the whole thing.  For a writer the university is death.” (This is relevant in an age where everyone can write, but very few are well read per ARX-Han here).
9. Unlike Nietzsche, who believed only the acceptance of contradictory ideas could result in a higher-level synthesis and come closer to truth, Cioran believed that it was not man’s responsibility to synthesize such information but rather to articulate what we feel in the moment, regardless of whether we may think or feel something else later. Contradiction was simply irrelevant:When they read a book of aphorisms, they say, “Oh, look what this fellow said ten pages back, now he’s saying the contrary. He’s not serious.” Me, I can put two aphorisms that are contradictory right next to each other. Aphorisms are also momentary truths. They’re not decrees. And I could tell you in nearly every case why I wrote this or that phrase, and when. It’s always set in motion by an encounter, an incident, a fit of temper, but they all have a cause. It’s not at all gratuitous.As Bradatan explained, “With [Cioran], self-contradiction is not even a weakness, but the sign a mind is alive. For writing, he believed, is not about being consistent, nor about persuasion or keeping a readership entertained; writing is not even about literature. For Cioran, just like Montaigne several centuries earlier, writing has a distinctive performative function: you write not to produce some body of text, but to act upon yourself; to bring yourself together after a personal disaster or to pull yourself out of a bad depression; to come to terms with a deadly disease or to mourn the loss of a close friend.”

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Select aphorisms

Below are a handpicked number of select aphorisms (or parts of aphorisms) that stood out to me. I whittled it down to ten (the last being my favorite). If they catch your interest, A Short History of Decay is available for free online here.

1. Fanaticism vs Skepticism (“Genealogy of Fanaticism”)

….Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation. The ages of fervor abound in bloody exploits: a Saint Teresa could only be the contemporary of the auto-da-fé, a Luther of the repression of the Peasants’ Revolt. In every mystic outburst, the moans of victims parallel the moans of ecstasy. . . . Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith—of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.

What is the Fall but the pursuit of a truth and the assurance you have found it, the passion for a dogma, domicile within a dogma? The result is fanaticism—fundamental defect which gives man the craving for effectiveness, for prophecy, for terror—a lyrical leprosy by which he contaminates souls, subdues them, crushes or exalts them. . . . Only the skeptics (or idlers or aesthetes) escape, because they propose nothing, because they—humanity’s true benefactors—undermine fanaticism’s purposes, analyze its frenzy. I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity. In the fervent mind you always find the camouflaged beast of prey; no protection is adequate against the claws of a prophet. . . . Once he raises his voice, whether in the name of heaven, of the city, or some other excuse, away with you: satyr of your solitude, he will not forgive your living on the wrong side of his truths and his transports; he wants you to share his hysteria, his fullness, he wants to impose it on you, and thereby to disfigure you. A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable. Look around you: everywhere, specters preaching; each institution translates a mission; city halls have their absolute, even as the temples —officialdom, with its rules—a metaphysics designed for monkeys. . . Everyone trying to remedy everyone’s life: even beggars, even the incurable aspire to it: the sidewalks and hospitals of the world overflow with reformers. The longing to become a source of events affects each man like a mental disorder or a desired malediction. Society—an inferno of saviors! What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent man. . .

It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say “we” with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke “others” and regard himself as their interpreter – for me to consider him my enemy. I see in him a tyrant manqué an approximate executioner, quite as detestable as the first-rate tyrants, the first-rate executioners. Every faith practices some form of terror, all the more dreadful when the “pure” are its agents.

2. To get over fear of death, one must become acquainted with it (“Variations on Death”)

And it is death, the most intimate dimension of all the living, which separates humanity into two orders so irreducible, so removed from each other, that there is more distance between them than between a vulture and a mole, a star and a starfish. The abyss of two incommunicable worlds opens between the man who has the sentiment of death and the man who does not; yet both die; but one is unaware of his death, the other knows- one dies only for a moment, the other unceasingly. . . . Their common condition locates them precisely at each other’s antipodes, at the two extremities and within one and the same definition; irreconcilable, they suffer the same fate. . . . One lives as if he were eternal; the other thinks continually of his eternity and denies it in each thought.

The man who has not given himself up to the pleasures of anguish, who has not savored in his mind the dangers of his own extinction nor relished such cruel and sweet annihilations, will never be cured of the obsession with death: he will be tormented by it, for he will have resisted it; while the man who, habituated to a discipline of horror, and meditating upon his own carrion, has deliberately reduced himself to ashes—that man will look toward death’s past, and he himself will be merely a resurrected being who can no longer live. His “method” will have cured him of both life and death.

3. Salvation as death, the end of being. (“Annihilation by Deliverance”)

A doctrine of salvation has meaning only if we start from the equation “existence equals suffering.” It is neither a sudden realization, nor a series of reasonings which lead us to this equation, but the unconscious elaboration of our every moment, the contribution of all our experiences, minute or crucial. When we carry germs of disappointments and a kind of thirst to see them develop, the desire that the world should undermine our hopes at each step multiplies the voluptuous verifications of the disease. The arguments come later; the doctrine is constructed: there still remains only the danger of “wisdom.” But, suppose we do not want to be free of suffering nor to conquer our contradictions and conflicts— what if we prefer the nuances of the incomplete and an affective dialectic to the evenness of a sublime impasse? Salvation ends everything; and ends us. Who, once saved, dares still call himself alive? We really live only by the refusal to be delivered from suffering and by a kind of religious temptation of irreligiosity. Salvation haunts only assassins and saints, those who have killed or transcended the creature; the rest wallow—dead drunk—in imperfection. . . .

The mistake of every doctrine of deliverance is to suppress poetry, climate of the incomplete. The poet would betray himself if he aspired to be saved: salvation is the death of song, the negation of art and of the mind. How to feel integral with a conclusion? We can refine, we can farm our sufferings, but by what means can we free ourselves from them without suspending ourselves? Docile to malediction, we exist only insofar as we suffer. A soul enlarges and perishes only by as much insupportable as it assumes.

4. On metaphysical rebellion against reality itself (“The Model Traitor”)

Since life can be fulfilled only within individuation—that last bastion of solitude —each being is necessary alone by the fact that he is an individual. Yet all individuals are not alone in the same way nor with the same intensity: each occupies a different rank in the hierarchy of solitude; at one extreme stands the traitor: he is an individual to the point of exasperation. In this sense, Judas is the loneliest being in the history of Christianity, but not in the history of solitude. He betrayed only a god; he knew what he betrayed; he betrayed someone, as so many others betray something: a country or other more or less collective pretexts. The betrayal which focuses on a specific object, even if it involves dishonor or death, is not at all mysterious: we always have the image of what we want to destroy; guilt is clear, whether admitted or denied. The others cast you out, and you resign yourself to the cell or the guillotine. . . .

But there exists a much more complex modality of betrayal, without immediate reference, without relation to an object or a person. Thus: to abandon everything without knowing what this everything represents; to isolate yourself from your milieu; to reject—by a metaphysical divorce—the substance which has molded you, which surrounds you, and which carries you.

Who, and by what defiance, can challenge existence with impunity? Who, and by what efforts, can achieve a liquidation of the very principle of his own breath? Yet the will to undermine the foundations of all that exists produces a craving for negative effectiveness, powerful and ineffable as a whiff of remorse corrupting the young vitality of a hope. . .

When you have betrayed being you bear with you only a vague discomfort; there is no image sustaining the object which provokes the sensation of infamy. No one casts the first stone; you are a respectable citizen as before; you enjoy the honors of the city, the consideration of your kind; the laws protect you; you are as estimable as anyone else-—and yet no one sees that you are living your funeral in advance and that your death can add nothing to your irremediably established condition. This is because the traitor to existence is accountable only to himself. Who else can ask him for an accounting? If you denounce neither a man nor an institution, you run no risk; no law protects Reality, but all of them punish you for the merest prejudice against its appearances. You are entitled to sap Being itself, but no human being; you may legally demolish the foundations of all that is, but prison or death awaits your least infringement of individual powers. Nothing protects Existence: there is no case against metaphysical traitors, against the Buddhas who reject salvation, for we judge them traitors only to their own lives. Yet of all malefactors, these are the most harmful: they do not attack the fruit, but the very sap of the universe. Their punishment? They alone know what it is. . .

It may be that in every traitor there is a thirst for opprobrium, and that his choice of betrayal depends on the degree of solitude he aspires to. Who has not experienced the desire to perpetrate an incomparable crime which would exclude him from the human race? Who has not coveted ignominy in order to sever for good the links which attach him to others, to suffer a condemnation without appeal and thereby to reach the peace of the abyss? And when we break with the universe, is it not for the calm of an unpardonable crime? A Judas with the soul of a Buddha—what a model for a coming and concluding humanity!

5. A flourishing mankind paradoxically only comes from turning one’s back on the universal (“The Flower of Fixed Ideas”)

So long as man is protected by madness, he functions and flourishes; but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined. He begins to accept everything, to wrap not only minor abuses in his tolerance, but crimes and monstrosities, vices and aberrations: everything is worth the same to him. His indulgence, self-destroying as it is, extends to all the guilty, to the victims and the executioners; he takes all sides, because he espouses all opinions; gelatinous, contaminated by infinity, he has lost his “character,” lacking any point of reference, any obsession. The universal view melts things into a blur, and the man who still makes them out, being neither their friend nor their enemy, bears in himself a wax heart which indiscriminately takes the form of objects and beings. His pity is addressed to . . . existence, and his charity is that of doubt and not that of love; a skeptical charity, consequence of knowledge, which excuses all anomalies. But the man who takes sides, who lives in the folly of decision and choice, is never charitable; incapable of comprehending all points of view, confined in the horizon of his desires and his principles, he plunges into a hypnosis of the finite. This is because creatures flourish only by turning their backs on the universal . . . To be something—unconditional— is always a form of madness from which life—flower of fixed idea—frees itself only to fade.

6. We see a man’s last words as the summation of his life (“History and Language”)

When, at the dying man’s bedside, his nearest and dearest bend over his stammerings, it is not so much to decipher in them some last wish, but rather to gather up a good phrase which they can quote later on, in order to honor his memory. If the Roman historians never fail to describe the agony of their emperors, it is in order to place within them a sentence or an exclamation which the latter uttered or were supposed to have uttered. This is true for all deathbeds, even the most ordinary. That life signifies nothing, everyone knows or suspects; let it at least be saved by a turn of phrase! A sentence at the corners of their life —that is about all we ask of the great—and of the small. If they fail this requirement, this obligation, they are lost forever; for we forgive everything, down to crimes, on condition they are exquisitely glossed—and glossed over. This is the absolution man grants history as a whole, when no other criterion is seen to be operative and valid, and when he himself, recapitulating the general inanity, finds no other dignity than that of a litterateur of failure and an aesthete of bloodshed.

In this world, where sufferings are merged and blurred, only the Formula prevails.

7. Introspection as the mark of a society’s death (“Advantages of Debility”)

…“Inner life” is the prerogative of the delicate, those tremulous wretches subject to an epilepsy with neither froth nor falling: the biologically sound being scorns “depth,” is incapable of it, sees in it a suspect dimension which jeopardizes the spontaneity of his actions. Nor is he mistaken: with the retreat into the self begins the individual’s drama—his glory and his decline; isolated from the anonymous flux, from the utilitarian trickle of life, he frees himself from objective goals. A civilization is “affected” when its delicate members set the tone for it; but thanks to them, it has definitively triumphed over nature—and collapses. An extreme example of refinement unites in himself the exalté and the sophist: he no longer adheres to his impulses, cultivates without crediting them; this is the omniscient debility of twilight ages, prefiguration of man’s eclipse. The delicate allow us to glimpse the moment when janitors will be tormented by aesthetes’ scruples; when farmers, bent double by doubts, will no longer have the vigor to guide the plow; when every human being, gnawed by lucidity and drained of instincts, will be wiped out without the strength to regret the flourishing darkness of their illusions…

8. Psychology as having killed the hero (“Faces of Decadence”)

Nothing monumental has ever emerged from dialogue, nothing explosive, nothing “great.”….The clear-sighted person who understands himself, explains himself, justifies himself, and dominates his actions will never make a memorable gesture. Psychology is the hero’s grave. The millennia of religion and reasoning have weakened muscles, decisions, and the impulse of risk. How keep from scorning the enterprises of glory? Every act over which the mind’s luminous malediction fails to preside represents a vestige of ancestral stupidity. Ideologies were invented only to give a luster to the leftover barbarism which has survived down through the ages, to cover up the murderous tendencies common to all men. Today we kill in the name of something; we no longer dare do so spontaneously; so that the very executioners must invoke motives, and, heroism being obsolete, the man who is tempted by it solves a problem more than he performs a sacrifice. Abstraction has insinuated itself into life—and into death; the “complexes” seize great and small alike. From the Iliad to psychopathology— there you have all of human history.

9. History confirms skepticism but only fanaticism makes for strong societies (“Views on Tolerance”)

Signs of life: cruelty, fanaticism, intolerance; sighs of decadence: amenity, understanding, indulgence. .. . So long as an institution is based on strong instincts, it admits neither enemies nor heretics: it massacres, burns, or imprisons them. Stakes, scaffolds, prisons! it is not wickedness which invented them, but conviction, any utter conviction. Once a belief is established the police will guarantee its “truth” sooner or later. Jesus—once he wanted to triumph among men—should have been able to foresee Torquemada, ineluctable consequence of Christianity translated into history. And if the Lamb failed to anticipate the torturer of the Cross, his future defender, then he deserves his nickname. By the Inquisition, the Church proved that it still possessed enormous vitality; similarly, the kings by their “royal will”. All authorities have their Bastille: the more powerful an institution, the less humane. The energy of a period is measured by the beings that suffer in it, and it is by the victims it provokes that a religious or political belief is affirmed, bestiality being the primal characteristic of any success in time. Heads fall where an idea prevails; it can prevail only at the expense of other ideas and of the heads which conceived or defended them.

History confirms skepticism; yet it is and lives only by trampling over it; no event rises out of doubt, but all considerations of events lead to it and justify it. Which is to say that tolerance—supreme good on earth—is at the same time the supreme evil. To admit all points of view, the most disparate beliefs, the most contradictory opinions, presupposes a general state of lassitude and sterility. Whence we arrive at this miracle: the adversaries coexist—but precisely because they can no longer be adversaries; opposing doctrines recognize each other’s merits because none has the vigor to assert itself. A religion dies when it tolerates truths which exclude it; and the god in whose name one no longer kills is dead indeed. An absolute perishes: a vague glow of earthly paradise appears, a fugitive gleam, for intolerance constitutes the law of human affairs. Collectivities are reinforced only under tyrannies, and disintegrate in a regime of clemency; then, in a burst of energy, they begin to strangle their liberties and to worship their jailers, crowned or commoners.

The periods of fear predominate over those of calm; man is much more vexed by the absence than by the profusion of events; thus History is the bloody product of his rejection of boredom.

And my favorite, the Felicity of Epigones:

Is there a pleasure more subtly ambiguous than to watch the ruin of a myth? What dilapidation of hearts in order to beget it, what excesses of intolerance in order to make it respected, what terror for those who do not assent to it, and what expense of hopes for those who watch it . . . expire! Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when beliefs wither, when their articles and their precepts slacken, when their rules collapse. Every period’s ending is the mind’s paradise, for the mind regains its play and its whims only within an organism in utter dissolution. The man who has the misfortune to belong to a period of creation and fecundity suffers its limitations and its ruts; slave of a unilateral vision, he is enclosed within a limited horizon. The most fertile moments in history were at the same time the most airless; they prevailed like a fatality, a blessing for the naive mind, mortal to an amateur of intellectual space. Freedom has scope only among the disabused and sterile epigones, among the intellects of belated epochs, epochs whose style is coming apart and is no longer inspired except by a certain ironic indulgence.

To belong to a church uncertain of its god—after once imposing that god by fire and sword—should be the ideal of every detached mind. When a myth languishes and turns diaphanous, and the institution which sustains it turns clement and tolerant, problems acquire a pleasant elasticity. The weak point of a faith, the diminished degree of its vigor set up a tender void in men’s souls and render them receptive, though without permitting them to be blind, yet, to the superstitions which lie in wait for the future they darken already. The mind is soothed only by those agonies of history which precede the insanity of every dawn.

This reminds me of a statement by the Jungian psychologist James Hollis in his Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, where he states: “Wherever certainty is brandished so vehemently, it is generally in compensation for unconscious doubt, and therefore is dishonest. Our anxieties lead us to grasp at certainties. Certainties lead to dogma; dogma leads to rigidity; rigidity leads to idolatry; idolatry always banishes the mystery and thus leads to spiritual narrowing. To bear the anxiety of doubt is to be led to openness; openness leads to revelation; revelation leads to discovery; discovery leads to enlargement.”

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Conclusion

Despite the darkness and despair of Cioran’s work, it’s a breath of fresh air when one gets sick enough with the bullshit of modern society – he pulls no punches and he writes for no one else. His insights are top notch and his writing strong. I was uncertain if I would continue reading his works after finishing A Short History of Decay because it was so downbeat, but a number of months later I returned to him with his The New Gods (1969) which deals with gnostic themes, which I enjoyed and will cover in a future post. Cioran’s work doesn’t offer the comforting illusion of progress or meaning, but that’s exactly what makes it liberating. The absence of expectation frees you from the weight of constant striving. I’m going to keep reading his other works, but sparingly, as a palette cleanser when my feeling of societal nonsense becomes too strong. There’s something freeing in accepting life as it is, and Cioran helps remind you of that in his uncompromising way.

Thanks for reading.

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1 Will goes around Substack spamming this message to anyone who will listen, and many who don’t or won’t. I think he may have been suspended for spamming previously, which is a very hard thing to accomplish on Substack at this time. I think he may be trolling in part — his response to a Note about the Chinese farmer story was too over-the-top not to be.

2 From here: “A further glimpse into Cioran’s peculiar manner of political thinking, in a letter he sent to Mircea Eliade in 1935: “My formula for all things political,” he writes, “is the following: fight wholeheartedly for things in which you do not believe.” Not that such a confession brings much clarity to Cioran’s involvement, but it places his “ravings” within a certain psychological perspective. This split personality characterized the later Cioran, and it makes sense, for a philosopher who sees the world as a failure of grand proportions, to mock the cosmic order (and himself in the process) by pretending that there is some meaning where there is none. You know that everything is pointless, but by behaving as if it wasn’t, you manage to articulate your dissent and undermine the designs of the “evil demiurge.” And you do that with boundless irony and humor, which is rigorously meant to counter the divine farce. He who laughs last laughs hardest.”

3 Id. “In a sense, however, he had already left before he died. For the last several years he had suffered from Alzheimer’s and had been interned at the Broca Hospital in Paris. Fearing precisely such an ending, he had planned to commit suicide. Cioran and his longtime partner, Simone Boué, were to die together, like the Koestlers. But the disease was faster, the plan failed, and Cioran had to die the most humiliating of deaths, one that took several years to do its work.”

4 “But that was a precise period, about six or seven years, where my whole perspective on the world changed.  I think it’s a very important problem.  It happens like this:  normally someone who goes to bed and sleeps all night, the next day he begins a new life almost.  It’s not simply another day, it’s another life.  And so, he can undertake things, he can express himself, he has a present, a future, and so on.  But for someone who doesn’t sleep, from the time of going to bed at night to waking up in the morning it’s all continuous, there’s no interruption.  Which means, there is no suppression of consciousness.  It all turns around that.  So, instead of starting a new life, at eight in the morning you’re like you were at eight the evening before.  The nightmare continues uninterrupted in a way, and in the morning, start what?  Since there’s no difference from the night before. That new life doesn’t exist.  The whole day is a trial, it’s the continuity of the trial.  While everyone rushes toward the future, you are outside.  So, when that’s stretched out for months and years, it causes the sense of things, the conception of life, to be forcibly changed.  You don’t see what future to look forward to, because you don’t have any future.  And I really consider that the most terrible, most unsettling, in short the principal experience of my life.  There’s also the fact that you are alone with yourself.  In the middle of the night, everyone’s asleep, you are the only one who is awake.  Right away I’m not a part of mankind, I live in another world.  And it requires an extraordinary will to not succumb.”

5 From here: “What I consider his most authentic work is his letters, because in them he’s truthful, while in his other work he’s prisoner to his vision.  In his letters one sees that he’s just a poor guy, that he’s ill, exactly the opposite of everything he claimed….It’s because that whole vision, of the will to power and all that, he imposed that grandiose vision on himself because he was a pitiful invalid.  Its whole basis was false, nonexistent.  His work is an unspeakable megalomania. When one reads the letters he wrote at the same time, one sees that he’s pathetic, it’s very touching, like a character out of Chekhov.  I was attached to him in my youth, but not after.  He’s a great writer, though, a great stylist.”

6 Id. “The German influence in France was disastrous on that whole level, I find.  The French can’t say things simply anymore….it’s the influence of Heidegger, which was very big in France.  For example, he’s speaking about death, he employs so complicated a language, to say very simple things, and I well understand how one could be tempted by that style.  But the danger of philosophical style is that one loses complete contact with reality.  Philosophical language leads to megalomania.  One creates an artificial world where one is God.  I was very proud being young and very pleased to know this jargon.  But my stay in France totally cured me of that.”

7 i.e. see the second half of this post: “In a society hyper-focused on enforcing conformity via the Overton Window or risk being cast out, jumping from one fake meta-narrative to the next to keep the public entertained, only the Loser clique loser, the lowest of the low, the most socially awkward, the worst performer financially, the eternal outsider, can discern the truth of the state of society and dream of a course correct.  It is, indeed, the only thing they are good at.  This is because when other cliques achieve financial success or academic prominence or excel at sports – really any activity not associated with being a Loser – such success comes with strings attached that require one to compromise one’s views in order to retain their social status.  Only the Loser, lacking any success at all, can afford to grasp and promote viewpoints that lack social status.”

One may also note that Carl Jung felt the same way about failure, where he wrote in an essay Aims of Psychotherapy: “The psychologist learns little or nothing from his successes. They mainly confirm him in his mistakes, while his failures, on the other hand, are priceless experiences in that they not only open up the way to a deeper truth, but force him to change his views and methods.”

8 Tolstoy posited a similar analogy in his novel Anna Karenina : “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

This post criticizes cryptocurrency as a negative reflection of the world’s increasing corruption and material “solidification”. It outlines three increasingly subtle methods of analyzing the space: first, as revolutionary technology; second, as a fraud-ridden space, notably with Tether; and third, as a controlled system used by elites to test technologies for central bank digital currencies. It argues that the crypto fraud will eventually be offloaded onto the public, leading to even higher inflation as the West shifts toward a more controlled, manipulative system that consolidates power and erodes freedom. It is a follow up to a 2023 post criticizing crypto.

In the entertaining and thought-provoking short story The Minority Report (1956) by Philip K. Dick – who’s mind-expansive, gnostic-leaning short stories I loved growing up and which I recommend1 – the protagonist, John Anderton, works in a law enforcement role within a “precrime” unit. This unit relies on three psychics known as “precogs” who predict crimes before they happen with great accuracy. Using their predictions, the police arrest criminals before they commit the offense. However, when the precogs foresee that Anderton himself will commit a murder, he is shocked and goes on the run, with his former colleagues following closely in pursuit. (Spoiler alert) In the end, Anderton discovers that the precogs were split in their predictions: two predicted he would commit the murder, while one dissenting precog believed he would not. Anderton tracks down the dissenting precog’s report, which becomes crucial to clearing his name. The decent movie adaptation (2002) introduces a debate about free will versus fate, ultimately concluding that free will can alter the future.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/lG7DGMgfOb8?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

(As an aside, I miss the era of films before smartphones became ubiquitous around 2012, when many movies began to lose their quality. The rise of smartphones marked a new epoch per Erik Hoel, in a way similar to the predictions of the Mayan calendar – transforming society as we knew it.)

The story’s ending, in my opinion, is far superior to the film’s. In the short story, the precogs’ predictions are not just about Anderton’s actions but also considers his knowledge of those predictions. This nuance is largely ignored in the movie. Here’s how the story’s predictions worked:

• The first precog predicted that Anderton would commit the murder.
• The second precog predicted that Anderton would be aware of the first precog’s prediction and would decide against committing the murder.
• The third precog predicted that Anderton would learn about the first two predictions and, realizing the paradox, would choose to commit the murder anyway.

Thus, there was a 2-1 split in favor of Anderton committing the murder, but each precog’s reasoning was different. When Anderton became aware of this, he chose to follow the third precog’s prediction (although he could have changed his mind), reinforcing the concept of free will in light of knowing the future. This presents an interesting twist: free will only exists when one is aware of the predictions ahead of time. It’s a subtle but powerful commentary on choice and destiny.

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The Levels of Cryptocurrency Analysis

In many ways, the situation in The Minority Report mirrors the paradoxes we face in understanding cryptocurrency. Just as the precogs predict an inevitable but conflicting future, we too are confronted with conflicting, paradoxical truths about crypto – its potential for revolutionary change, its susceptibility to corruption, and the realization that it may be controlled by forces beyond the public’s understanding. The truth depends on the level of understanding and perspective one brings to it. Just as Anderton is faced with differing predictions about his future, we are confronted with three distinct narratives about cryptocurrency:

1. Cryptocurrency as Revolutionary Technology: Cryptocurrency, with its blockchain technology, offers a new way of transacting that cuts out intermediaries like banks and governments. The transactions are private, verifiable, and secure. Unlike gold or silver, cryptocurrencies solve the logistical issues of storage, transfer, and counterfeit prevention. Julian Assange, for example, recommended cryptocurrency to Google’s executive chairman and lizard-man Eric Schmidt as early as 2011, as recounted in the book When Google Met WikiLeaks, after WikiLeaks found itself cut off from the financial system.
2. Cryptocurrency as Fundamentally Corrupted and Controlled: I have previously discussed how the entire crypto space has been corrupted by Tether. This $100 billion operation, run by known fraudsters, has never undergone a proper audit, and there is strong evidence suggesting that it has artificially inflated the crypto market by printing vast amounts of funds out of thin air and buying digital coins with them. The daily trading volume of Tether is greater than the trading volume of the top ten coins combined. The Tether scam, which was suspected as early as 2017, raises doubts about the legitimacy of the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. Governments, I believe, could easily crash the market by targeting Tether or by shutting down fiat on/offramps like Coinbase. I felt uneasy about investing in crypto for these reasons – why would governments allow a viable alternative to fiat currency to flourish, especially when crypto is often used in illicit activities? Erik Wikström discusses this a bit in this comment. Bitfinexed on Twitter has also focused on the details of Tether with sustained energy for years.2
3. Cryptocurrency as a Positive Investment Because It’s Corrupted: This perspective sees the crypto corruption as a plus, with the CIA and NSA backing Tether to prevent its collapse (the Russian term for this kind of protection is a krisha). In this manner the elites felt comfortable with growing the space because they control it – they could pump or crash the market at their leisure. By allowing the crypto space to grow, these agencies were able to test blockchain technology in preparation for upcoming Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which are poised to result in the greatest loss of personal freedom in history, discussed previously here. Crypto has also allowed these elites to enrich themselves and bolster CIA black operations. With research into CBDCs basically finished and ready for rollout – either gradually (via Musk/Trump $5,000 payments to people via CBDC, perhaps?) or rapidly as a dialectical solution to a contrived financial crisis – the primary objective of privately owned crypto has already been accomplished. It seems the exit strategy of our elites will be to offload the massive cost of this privately owned crypto Ponzi scheme onto the public through government-backed cryptocurrency reserves and other bailouts. This third stage is far more cynical and disillusioned than the second, which still held some belief in the rule of law and the ability of institutions to control fraud. I’m convinced that if the elites hadn’t been able to dominate and control the crypto space, it would have collapsed much sooner.

Thus, these three levels of understanding – cryptocurrency as worth investing in, as not worth investing in, and ultimately worth investing in again – mirror the logic of the precogs in The Minority Report: the initial belief in cryptocurrency as a revolution, followed by a realization of its corruption, and ultimately an acceptance of it because the ecosystem is controlled by those in power. Two out of three, investment wins and those who did early got amazingly rich from it! But as I wrote in a Note, I know at least three young-ish cryptocurrency investors who are worth over $100 million from their “investments” and all three are idiots stuck at the first stage. When I talked to them early about what a flimsy scam Tether was all three stuck their heads in the sand and ignored it. As I wrote:

So from my perspective these abject, shallow, utter morons have fallen ass-backwards into immense wealth, beneficiaries of a long-term, giant scam that they have no knowledge of, while I stayed out of it because I thought something deeper was afoot. As the famous saying goes, “Man plans, God laughs” and these 100 IQ scammers are now driving around in Maseratis while I eat the equivalent of dog food.

Oh well.

But the story of cryptocurrency doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Its rise and fall are part of a broader societal transformation – one that encompasses everything from how we interact with technology to how political power operates in the digital age. The advent of smartphones and social media has not only reshaped our daily lives but also set the stage for the next phase of digital control. In many ways, the crypto space serves as a microcosm of this larger shift, where power, technology, and society intertwine in ways that were once unimaginable.

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The Pivot to Dump Crypto Onto the Public as an Exit Strategy

Cryptocurrency is at the stage now of in-your-face violent, intense fraud. The cryptocurrency industry backed Trump to win the election and has heavily capitalized on it; investigations into the endless number of crypto scams have been shut down, Howard Lutnick – an arch-criminal heavily involved in the Tether scam – is now the Secretary of Commerce, the investigation into corrupt Coinbase has been shut down after they donated tens of millions to his campaign (and the CEO’s sister now works for DOGE), the investigation into also arch-criminal Justin Sun has been shut down after his enormous contributions to Trump, Trump himself has benefitted from the enormously in-your-face corrupt TRUMPCOIN (launched two days before his inauguration where he made billions of dollars from it!) and MELANIACOIN, and each time crypto starts falling in price a new narrative is released to re-pump the price (such as Trump pledging to introduce a governmental crypto reserve). Corporate transparency has also been banished by executive fiat. All while the IRS is being cut in half (something I am not opposed to in theory, but when combined with the above it’s clearly being done to facilitate fraud).

There’s also enormous insider trading going on — the day before Trump introduced the governmental crypto reserve idea someone bought $200 million of Bitcoin and Ethereum on 50x leverage and made $1.5 billion of profit in a single day. Someone sent me the below image from a Telegram chat or elsewhere, I cannot speak to it’s origin but the bet must be from someone deeply connected within the administration.

Michel de Cryptadamus noted a smaller (still seven figures) but similar trade at 50x leverage here. This is so wrong and gross. And we’re only two months into this administration! Imagine where we will be as a country with four years of this (or longer if Vance wins in 2028) – it boggles the mind.

Anyway, I’m too disturbed by what’s unfolding in this space to keep focusing on the details. Cryptadamus is doing an excellent job of exposing the staggering extent of in-your-face corruption so check out his Substack Notes for more information. The wolves are in the henhouse now, and there’s no longer any fear of prosecution from the authorities. The CIA/NSA-backed Tether scam will eventually be offloaded onto the public who will bear the cost through inflation. CBDCs are ready to roll out, and a woke, sinister AI is being fine-tuned to usher in a digital panopticon, where everyone’s behavior will be micromanaged on an individual level. The head of the Bank for International Settlements, Agustin Carstens, brags about what is coming soon with their micromanaged CBDC control grid and dramatically decreasing quality of life for most:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/rpNnTuK5JJU?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

One can see these pigs at the trough rushing to get rich so that they are on the ruling end of this rapidly progression transition to neoliberal feudalism.

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Conclusion

Despite all this, I’m still not invested in crypto. I do, however, ironically have a tip jar set up with it because I don’t fully trust Stripe as a payment processor. Even though it’s probably still a decent investment bet, considering the intense push to legalize all the criminal activity and shift the costs onto the public, I just don’t feel comfortable contributing to this mess at this point. There’s always the possibility of a rug pull — who knows? Regardless, cryptocurrency is definitely not an investment in the traditional sense; it’s just a wager on more corruption and fraud.

Technology, like anything else, is a double-edged sword. What appears beneficial now will have negative repercussions down the road. For example, Rome’s destruction of its arch-enemy Carthage ushered in an age of unprecedented decadence and laid the groundwork for Roman dictatorships. Similarly, the benefits of technology — from social media to search engines to artificial intelligence to cryptocurrency — are evident now, but the drawbacks of technological advancement will only become fully manifest in future generations, as digital slavery becomes a horrifying reality. While the elites have been planning this outcome for centuries, the masses are focused on short-term survival, unaware of the dangers ahead. Humanity is a violent, bloodthirsty species, and the decades of prosperity since World War II have accumulated a psychic toll that will soon be cashed in by the Demiurge, affecting humanity in ways deeper, more negative, and more profound than ever before.

Ultimately, this world continues its descent into the “solidification” of the material realm as described by René Guénon with his conception of the Kali Yuga — which increasingly seems to be culminating in the rise of an Anti-Christ figure. The failure of this scheme, after worse horrors than we can possibly imagine, may then give way to the Age of Aquarius and a new paradigm.

Thanks for reading.

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PS: While I have not enabled paid subscriptions at this time, I am going to try out crypto if you found my work helpful and would like to donate (yes, I recognize the irony of this in this post). Posts are and will remain free. This is an experiment and is subject to further changes:

Bitcoin: bc1qh6cdaagqwcmp7ctqt9gdj6y6xjr88a7pz7fgpg

Ethereum: 0x30DB893613D032cdcE3B4F6De86aF921A236a7C3

Monero: 43CX9B3nfmJcmrD624pTq86gNRFeEk2eMMWjWtMy59afX8Szrxt88VkXRw6ez3LKWXcLtZxWjGgrk9Kecv9xvqsvGJcGrVa

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1 I recently watched the pretty good adaptation of A Scanner Darkly (2006), reviewed here.

2 But the people who listened to him ended up poor. He also never revised his views to the third level, which led me to believe he might be controlled; when I asked him some basic questions about his positions years ago on Twitter he immediately banned me.

Jung’s Answer to Job presents a radical reinterpretation of the Book of Job, suggesting that God is not omniscient in the way traditional theology assumes but rather an unconscious being who evolves through human self-awareness. Jung argues that Job’s suffering forces God to confront his own moral failings, ultimately leading to the incarnation of Christ as an attempt to redeem Himself rather than humanity. While Jung’s theory provides an intriguing psychological framework for understanding religious evolution, it also raises major philosophical and theological issues, particularly regarding divine omnipotence and the nature of evil. The post explores these ideas, comparing Jung’s interpretation to gnostic and exoteric Christian perspectives while questioning whether his approach truly resolves the problem of suffering or merely reframes it.

The first Jung book I read a couple years ago was his Answer to Job(1952), a stream-of-consciousness work he wrote feverishly during an illness. The moment he completed it his symptoms vanished. In hindsight this book was not a great place to start my exploration of his oeuvre; it was dense and difficult to follow without the knowledge of his more introductory works. I had anticipated a gnostic interpretation of Job given Jung’s reputed affinity for gnostic themes, but instead he sought to synthesize the God of both the Old and New Testaments through the lens of Jungian psychology. In Answer to Job classical Christian doctrine is upended: Jung posits that the purpose of Christ’s incarnation was not to redeem humanity from sin but rather to redeem God for his transgressions against Job.

I think the attempt doesn’t quite work, but it’s worth covering because it is an interesting alternative to both exoteric Christian approach to the problem of evil and the traditional gnostic interpretation.1 For reference, the problem of evil is well encapsulated by the Epicurean paradox, flowcharted in an easy-to-understand manner as follows:

Just like I tried to steel-man my argument about the central bank owners by addressing conflicting alternatives here and here, by addressing competing theories to the gnostic perspective my hope is to steel-man that theory as well (unless it persuades me to change my mind).

This wasn’t something I planned intentionally. Why did I begin my exploration of Jung with Answer to Job? The question is a bit backward: Job and Ecclesiastes are my two favorite books of the Bible and I wanted to dive deeper into them. I’m drawn to Job because it grapples with the problem of evil and to Ecclesiastes because of its philosophical pessimism, arguing that everything humans do is fleeting, destined for dust, and based on “vanity.” I might discuss Ecclesiastes in a future post, though I touched on it briefly in my previous post about philosophical pessimism. In any case, I decided to write a post about Job and discovered that Jung had written an analysis of it.

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The story of the Book of Job

Most of you already know the story of Job (written sometime between 600-400 BC), but for those who don’t the story is as follows. Job is the most righteous man in the land of Uz, and he is also successful and has a wonderful life and family. The devil tells God Job is only righteous and loves God because of the things he has, and they make a bet that if these things are taken away job will curse God for his plight. God agrees and lets Satan kill Job’s children, ruin his livestock and health. Quite a few of the commandments that God had given to the Jewish people were broken by God here. Job is perplexed and repeatedly prays to God asking why all this is happening to him, but in his torment he does not become unrighteous – he curses the day he was born but does not curse God. Three friends visit Job and argue that he must have sinned to cause such misfortune, but Job rebukes them.

Having finally had enough of Job’s prayers, a wrathful God appears in a whirlwind before him and demands to know why Job dares to question His actions. God offers no explanations for His deeds but instead rages about His immense power and Job’s insignificance. He lists the marvels of creation, highlighting the wonders of the earth, the mysteries that Job can never hope to understand, and the monstrous forces at work – like Behemoth and Leviathan – that Job has no control over. Terrified, Job shrinks in fear and apologizes, much like someone would if confronted by a menacing bully.

Satisfied that Job no longer dares to question His actions, God restores Job’s family, health, career, and reputation. Satan faces no punishment for initiating the wager, and the story leaves unaddressed its central issue: God’s all-knowing, omnipotent nature, which should have meant He knew Job’s heart and could foresee the outcome of the bet without being manipulated by the devil. And with that, the story ends.

It’s a compelling narrative that vividly portrays the God of the Old Testament as flawed – haughty, petty, capricious, unjust, and vulnerable to manipulation by Satan, revealing a deep lack of self-awareness. The story was likely included as a lesson to accept God’s judgment with humility and grace (a point emphasized by Jungian therapist James Hollis2). However, from a modern perspective the takeaway is vastly different: God is to be feared not because humanity behaves unjustly, but because God himself acts as an imperfect, capricious bully, lacking self-understanding.

The gnostic poet and painter William Blake has a series of paintings inspired by the story of Job, which you can see here. Jasun Horsley takes his inspiration from this story. The binding of Isaac by Abraham is another story that portrays God in a very poor light, as Sotiris Rex explains here.

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Jung’s take

Jung wrote Answer to Job in 1952 in one furious burst of energy when he was seventy-five years old while he was plagued by an illness. Once finished he felt well again. Unlike his other books which were apparently much more measured, Jung intended this book to be a subjective rant, an approach I can appreciate. He knew it would be very controversial so he pared the language and tone back from its initial rough draft, and he was hesitant about publishing it:

“The many questions from the public and from patients had made me feel that I must express myself more clearly about the religious problems of modern man. For years I hesitated to do so, because I was fully aware of the storm I would be unleashing. But at last I could not help being gripped by the problem, in all its urgency and difficulty, and I found myself compelled to give an answer. I did so in a form in which the problem had presented itself to me, that is, as an experience charged with emotion.”

Jung felt that what he wrote about in this book was the unfoldment of “the divine consciousness in which I participate, like it or not.” 

When he finally published the book it aroused a lot of controversy; some loved it, some hated it, and he lost friends over it. Still, he was extremely proud of it. Many consider Answer to Job to be his most important work. Jung said that if he could he would go back and re-write all of his books except for the Answer to Job. This was likely hyperbole to upset his detractors.

Jung’s interpretation was grounded in psychology, not religion. For his purposes, whether the Bible is literally true is simply irrelevant. The Bible deals with miracles that are contrary to the laws of nature, otherwise they would be subject to regular studies of history and physics. What matters to Jung is whether the Bible resonates with man on a psychological basis, both consciously and unconsciously. To him specific religions and ideas caught on so strongly in society because they spoke psychological truths to man, it nourished him and gave him a sense of peace in a crazy world, regardless of whether they were literally true. However, just as man over time evolved to become more sophisticated based on experience and societal, cultural and technological changes, man’s conception of God (the “god-image”) evolved too, either because God actually changed or man perceived him in a different way due to his own evolving psychology. Jung looked at the tales within the Old and New Testaments as psychologically true, an approach both the religious and irreligious should be able to appreciate. I know I do. This is a great merging of opposing viewpoints into a higher level synthesis, where this coincidentia oppositorum is at the core of spiritual growth.

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The Unconscious God

According to Jung, God’s omniscience inherently precludes self-awareness – being omniscient, God has no distinct, focused self to recognize. Being a part of everything, God has no opportunity to distinguish self from non-self which is necessary for consciousness — as such, he is an entirely unconscious being. However, through the thoughts of his creations he can experience what self-awareness is and grow through this process. According to Paul Levy’s analysis,

In this book Jung interprets world history as a dreaming process of a greater being (which we call God), whose origin lies outside of time and yet is manifesting—and revealing itself—in, through and over time. Jung writes, “the imago Dei (God-Image) pervades the whole human sphere and makes mankind its involuntary exponent”. In other words, an atemporal, eternal process is manifesting itself historically in, through and over linear time, which it did not only two thousand years ago, but, as Jung realized, events in our world today are the current reiteration—and revelation—of the same deeper archetypal process of the incarnation of God in human form. This time, however, instead of appearing in one man—in projected form outside of us—this is a process in which all of humanity has gotten drafted into participating….

As Jung wrote in Answer to Job, due to our littleness and extreme vulnerability, there is one thing that humanity possesses that God, because of his omnipotence, doesn’t possess – the need for self-reflection. As Jung poetically expresses it, in the human act of self-reflection, God becomes motivated to step off his throne, so to speak, and incarnate through humanity in order to obtain the uniquely precious jewel which humanity possesses via our self-reflection. In other words, the act of deepening our realization of the Self has an effect upon the Self that we are realizing.  

Our reflecting upon ourselves is the very role that we are meant to play in the divine drama of incarnation. Self-reflection is the best service we can offer to God—not to mention ourselves and the world. It should get our highest attention, as Jung elucidated in Answer to Job, that evil—personified in the story of Job by Satan—is the very catalyst for us to reflect upon ourselves. This brings up the question of who Satan works for—is he an emissary of the darker forces, or is he a secret agent for the light? The answer to this question depends upon whether we recognize what is being revealed by—and through—the darkness. 

Jung expanded on this idea in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, where he wrote:

The ritual acts of man are an answer and reaction to the action of God upon man; and perhaps they are not only that but are also intended to be “activating,” a form of magic coercion. That mans feels capable of formulating valid replies to the overpowering influence of God, and that he can render back something which is essential even to God, induces pride, for it raises the human individual to the dignity of a metaphysical factor.

Or see Jungian psychologist Edward Edinger’s five minute explanation reflecting the same idea:

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

As an aside, this take kind of reminds me of the great Ori villains in Stargate: SG1, who live in a different dimension but feed off the worship and attention of their followers.

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Flaws with Jung’s theory

I have mixed feelings about Jung’s explanation. His attempt seems flawed because it makes major assumptions about how consciousness applies to God. See this June 10, 1991 Time magazine article by Lance Morrow, who states that one could agree with any two of these three propositions, but not all three: (1) God is all-powerful. (2) God is all-good. (3) Terrible things happen. You can believe that there is an all-powerful God who allows terrible things to happen, but this God could not be all-good. On the other hand, there might be an all-good God who lets terrible things happen because he does not have the power to stop them; thus he is not all-powerful. At the beginning of his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas admitted that the existence of evil is the best argument against the existence of God.

Jung assumes that while God is omnipotent he is not truly omniscient – or, at least, that he is not in tune with his own omniscient aspect. In the story of Job Yahweh is not split but is a totality of inner opposites, and this Jung identifies as the coincidentia oppositorium, the conjunction of opposites. A God outside of space and time but infused in every aspect of existence (panentheism) would not necessarily have a need to grow consciously within space and time as it is infinite outside of it, so it seems like Jung is taking a leap in logic. On the other hand, the exoteric Christian idea that God is all light and all good and everything that’s evil is the absence of light/goodness (the privatio boni theory of evil) I find to be limiting of God’s abilities, as does Jung — He is everything, and that ultimately includes the evil side as well. Compare this with Plato, who inspired exoteric Christianity with his form of the good, which notably excludes the form of the bad. Jung saw this evil side of God as the missing fourth element of the Trinity, which he believed should be supplanted by a Quaternity. Victor White, an English Dominican priest who Jung conversed with, accused Jung of being a Manichean dualist. Seeing God as containing evil is not a pleasant perspective, though: Marie-Louise von Franz reports that when Jung was asked how he could live with the knowledge he had recorded in Answer to Job, he replied “I live in my deepest hell, and from there I cannot fall any further.”3

To Jung, the story of Job is a highly embarrassing one for God. It paints God as an un-self aware bully. As the story took hold in society, it stimulated something in God to grow and respond to the accusations that he was unjust: it signaled the return of Sophia, the goddess of wisdom, to assist God in this process. This culminated in God deciding to become man through Christ in order to experience humanity’s suffering himself. In other words, the collective response to the story of Job forced God into growing his consciousness. His desire to become man was signaled in the Book of Enoch and also the Book of Daniel. The major plus from a perspective like this is it assigns to man a role of cosmic importance: to stimulate God to develop his consciousness in order to evolve alongside mankind. If embraced by society at large, this perspective could restore humanity’s divine significance, providing meaning to our existence and perspectives, effectively banishing nihilism. And that would be incredibly powerful. This is apparently similar to the Kabbalistic view of man’s role to benefit God as represented in the Zohar.4

But what kind of God needs to atone for the sins of man (or his own) by manifesting as human in order to form a blood sacrifice? What kind of father is he who is appeased by murdering his own son? After Christ’s return the Apocalypse of John signals that God’s unconscious will return in the future — but in the form of the anti-Christ.

Ultimately, the idea of God expanding his consciousness while seemingly setting aside his omnipotence—if I’m understanding Jung’s framework correctly—feels forced and limited to me. There’s a lot of mental acrobatics involved, even though Jung’s perspective could restore humanity’s cosmic significance and push back against nihilism, which would certainly have value. It seems simpler to attribute the flawed and painful material world – full of imperfections, evil, suffering, and sociopathic dominance – to the creation and management of an imperfect, blundering Demiurge, while the God of light and justice exists beyond this realm. This approach offers a more straightforward solution to the problem of Job. It also raises the question of whether the God of light is superior and more powerful than the Demiurge, or if they are equally strong, as in Zoroastrianism (or maybe the Demiurge is more powerful?). But that’s a whole separate issue. Perhaps, though, this approach is just shifting the problem and the Demiurge is merely an inferior aspect of the Divine Whole, bringing us back to Jung’s view. Scholarly reactions to Jung’s ideas are mixed, but they continue to spark serious debate and discussion.

I’d like to end with gnostic Bishop Stephan Hoeller about the four steps toward actualizing consciousness, discussed previously here:

The first step in the actualization of the myth of consciousness is that we permit the destruction of the universe in which we have existed. More often than not this involves primarily a “relativation” of our “personal” reality. The word ‘personal” means that just as our perception of reality is our own, so too its altering must be confined to our own selves. “Relativation” implies that this process is not an extinction of old values, but rather a process which renders relative the concepts and values which we previously considered to be absolute. Specific values increase while general values decrease. Concrete realities become more important than abstract principles. While this may seem a terrible thing to say, as a result of this process we become in a certain sense unprincipled. What actually happens is that when reality takes over abstractions are reduced to their proper size. When we enter the practical realm of the myth of consciousness we enter the fluid, mercurial realm of psychic reality where all rules engraved in stone are inappropriate. Attachment to rigidly held abstractions, to theories and doctrines of any variety diminishes and eventually vanishes. What remains is the living reality of the deeper psyche operating from its own vision and guidance….

The second step in the enactment of the myth is the entry of the psyche into the process of creative conflict. This means that we must leave behind our attachment to the current overvaluation of tranqulity or lack of conflict and also to the overvaluation of health, wealth and power. One of the ways that this change may be approached is by contrasting the conditions of a static state with those of a process. We must recognize that tranquility, peace, health, wealth and power are all descriptions of states or conditions. They are not processes. Consciousness, on the other hand, is a process, not a state of being. This brings up the issue of commitment. To what is an individual committed in an active pursuit of the myth of consciousness? The commitment must always be to the process and never to the outcome. Persons, symbols, ideas and ideals can all find their proper places within the process but the process itself must be regarded as primary, other goals as secondary….The sense of the drama of the soul is growth through conflict. The creation and enlargement of consciousness cannot take place without the creative alchemy of conflict…in the conflict we may need to experience defeat and lamentation before the archetypally facilitated resolution can occur. If the process is interrupted when it becomes dark and painful the chances are lessened that the resolution we desire will come about.

Thus by the conflict of will and counterwill, of yes and no, affirmation and negation, and in the ultimate resolution of these conflicts brought about by the wisdom of the archetypal psyche, consciousness is born and expands. Moral opposites are very much part of this process so that the psyche is forced to make choices that are not dictated by external commandment but by individual, conscious insight. The objective of this process is not moral goodness but conscious wholeness of the psyche.

At this point, we come to another predicament. Since in the course of the pursuit of the myth of consciousness we cannot follow the accustomed moral impulse to espouse one opposite as against another (not even good against evil), we no longer have the luxury of feeling righteous. We are, in fact, no longer “good” men and women….Instead, we must become alchemical vessels in which light and darkness, good and evil, male and female struggle, embrace, commingle, fuse, die, and are born. All our cherished ethical beliefs – monotheism, the belief of Jews and Calvinists that they are chosen people, predestined for righteousness – vanish before our eyes. Our moral superiority also evaporates. Not only are we no longer able to condemn others we may consider unrighteous but we are also not able to condemn that side of ourselves that we have been taught to despise and abominate….

The third step in the actualization of the myth is the conjuction of the opposites which follows their conflictual interaction. This step represents the best mechanism for the generation of consciousness. When the union of opposites occurs consciousness is born…leisure and work, altruism and self-love, youthful energy and mature wisdom, idealistic self-sacrifice and common sense frequently wrestle and conjoin within us, thus bringing us to more highly developed states of consciousness….

The fourth and last step of the myth is…”the transformation of God”…unlike the gnostics who remained silent about the possibility that the Demiurge could be redeemed, Jung time and again affirmed that the Creator-God could be redeemed by becoming conscious, and that this process could be facilitated by humanity. While mainstream Christianity holds that God redeems human beings, Jung held that humans could redeem God. The question is how can this redemption be accomplished?

God’s unconsciousness, Jung said, has one primary manifestation – the loss of its feminine side. In Answer to Job, Jung wrote that the Creator-God once had a feminine side who was his sister, consort and possibly his mother all at once and that her name is Sophia, which means “wisdom”.” By losing contact with Sophia God became unwise or, in psychological terms, unconscious. Thus it is evident that the Creator-God’s way to consciousness leads to the feminine which he needs to recognize and to rehabilitate, and with which he must achieve union….

The significant conclusion that needs to be drawn for our purposes is that, while the wholeness that needs to be brought to the Creator requires rescuing and elevating the Divine Feminine, this task need not be wedded to historical and anthropological theories which are highly speculative. Thus, bringing wholeness to the lonely, irascible and in part unconscious male Creator-God is not a political task but a psychological one and even a spiritual one. The problem with this task, as Jung very bluntly stated, is that “America is extroverted as hell.”…Money, prestige and power are goals that appeal strongly to the extroverted psyche; psychological transformation does not….

Thus we must recognize that the issue of God versus Goddess is not about class warfare or political power, but rather about psychological and ultimately metaphysical wholeness. Those people who recognize this clearly and are willing to act upon it will be the true heroes of consciousness. They will help to restore wholeness and create consciousness in the souls of men and women and, beyond that, in the subtle, metaphysical dimensions of gods and goddesses. To quote Edinger…”As it gradually dawns on people, one by one, that the transformation of God is not an interesting idea but is a living reality, it may begin to function as a new myth. Whoever recognizes this myth as his own personal reality will put his life in the service of this process.”

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1 The gnostic take is that the God of the Old and New Testament are simply different Gods — where the God of the Old Testament is the Demiurge, the malevolent but bumbling creator and maintainer of material reality, while the God of the New Testament, the one of love and pacifism, is entirely a spiritual God who is far removed from the material plane.

2 In Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, Hollis writes: “When God does appear to [Job], as a voice out of a metaphoric whirlwind, He tells Job that He does not have to answer to Job’s idea of the agreement between them. It seems that the God of the universe will be bound by no contract, at least not one struck by humans. Job experiences a revelation, a transformation of perspective, and declares that his widely proclaimed piety was based on a hubristic assumption that his compliant behavior compelled God to treat him well. Job realizes that there is no deal, that such a deal is a presumption of the ego in service to its now familiar agenda, which promotes its own security, satiety, and continuity….But such deals with the universe are our fantasy alone, and have little to no bearing on reality….Sooner our later, life brings each of us not only disappointment, but something worse, a deep disillusionment regarding the “contract” that we tacitly presumed and served to the best of our abilities….As deep as the suffering may prove in our outer world, this other spiritual suffering, this loss of one’s fundamental understanding of the world and how it works shakes the foundations of beliefs even more…..Such a crisis is an existential wounding and a spiritual wounding as well….This betrayal by the other – by God, by our lover, by our friend, by the corporation – is a betrayal of our hope that the world might be manageable and predictable…As the child once fantasized that heroism could manage to do it all, so the person in the second half of life is obliged to come to a more sober wisdom based on a humbled sense of personal limitations and the inscrutability of the world….We learn that life is much riskier, more powerful, more mysterious than we had ever thought possible. While we are rendered more uncomfortable by this discovery, it is a humbling that deepens spiritual possibility.”

3 As reported from David Hiles’s essay, “Jung, William Blake and our answer to Job” here.

4 The Zohar’s theurgical approach argues that not only does God redeem man but man redeems God offers parallels to Carl Jung’s work. Both the Zohar’s theurgical approach and Jung’s psychological framework suggest that humanity’s actions, whether through spiritual practice or psychological growth, play a role in an unfolding divine process. In the Zohar this involves the human soul repairing the divine cosmos through its actions, essentially “redeeming” God from the hidden or fragmented state of creation (although “tikkun olam” in the way it is commonly used seems, to a significant extent, to be both destructive to mainstream society and to advance elite interests). In Jungian terms, this could be seen as making the unconscious aspects of God (or the divine archetypes) conscious, integrating hidden aspects of the divine and allowing for a more complete, conscious relationship with the divine.

This post reflects on the long-term consequences of divorce on children based on Judith Wallerstein’s influential study. It argues that while divorce might seem like a solution to an unhappy marriage, it often has detrimental effects on children, particularly when it comes to their ability to form healthy, lasting relationships. Drawing from personal experience and societal trends, the piece suggests that staying in a marriage for the sake of children is often a better choice than divorce unless there is extreme abuse involved. It also critiques the current state of divorce laws and the societal influences that encourage divorce, emphasizing the importance of considering the impact on children before making such a decision.

A wise man once told me don’t get divorced once you have children. Now, he had what looked like an exemplary marriage from the outside, but he ended up divorced anyway after his wife cheated on him. He died shortly thereafter out of shame, but regardless, the principle he was articulating was correct. Humans are fallible and we don’t always measure up to our principles, but it doesn’t mean the principles themselves are incorrect.

The gold standard of divorce research is the Judith Wallerstein study California Children of Divorce. Beginning in 1971, she followed 131 middle class white children between the ages of 3 and 18 from 60 divorced families in Marin County, California for twenty five years, with intensive interviews conducted every five years. She also followed a control group of white middle class children from families who did not get divorced. The study itself is not very long and is an easy read, which is available here.

Wallerstein started this study after divorce rates tripled within a few years starting in 1960, which were caused by increasing secularism, atomization, female participation in the workforce1, the egalitarian ratchet effect, and increased material prosperity (as material prosperity and decadence go hand in hand):

Scenes like this depicting marriage tension in the 1950s via Mad Men were common:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Bs3YlDgPYLw?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

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Results of the Study

The results of Wallerstein’s study were unequivocal: No matter how bad a marriage was or how easy a divorce was, children of divorce almost universally had worse outcomes than children whose parents stayed together. These outcomes generally began manifesting itself during the teenage years when these children were beginning to form relationships with the opposite sex, but the effects were lifelong and multi-faceted. I’ll quote at length from the central findings because they are important:

The central finding of this study is that parental divorce impacts detrimentally the capacity to love and be loved within a lasting, committed relationship. At young adulthood, when love, sexual intimacy, commitment, and marriage take center stage, children of divorce are haunted by the ghosts of their parents’ divorce and are frightened that the same fate awaits them. These fears, which reach a crescendo at young adulthood, impede their developmental progress into full adulthood. Many eventually overcome their fears, but the struggle to do so is painful and can consume a decade or more of their lives. In addition to overcoming their fear of failure, they have a great deal to learn about the give and take of living with another person, about how to deal with differences, and about how to resolve conflicts. This is knowledge that children acquire from growing up with both parents in reasonably harmonious, intact families. As our study ended, 60% of the women and 40% of the men had been able to establish reasonably gratifying and enduring relationships that included a satisfying sexual relationship. Close to 40% had opted for parenthood. The remainder said they were not interested in having children. A good number enjoyed successful careers but suffered from severe loneliness. Because most of these people were still in their 30s, we may yet see changes in their attitudes toward relationships and parenthood.

One third of the men and women were openly pessimistic about marriage and divorce and sought to avoid both. “If you don’t marry, then you don’t divorce,” was their mantra. Only a few were outright cynical. The majority were eager, even desperate, for a lasting relationship, and fearful that they would never achieve it. They did not want the lives their parents had. Their message was clear: “My parents’ divorce is still incomprehensible to me. They met in college. They fell in love. They were compatible in their tastes and values. So, what is to keep the same fate from happening to me?” Over and over, they told us, “I’d love to get married, but I’m sure that I’d jinx it.” Or, “Any relationship I’m in will dissolve.”…

As the study ended, 42% of the men had never married or cohabited for longer than 6 months, compared with 6% in the comparison group. Half of the single men in the divorce group led sad, isolated lives. One young man went so far as to discipline himself to go without dinner so that he could avoid the misery of eating alone. Another group of men were inordinately hurt by the failure of a first love affair and withdrew from the dating scene for years thereafter. Many were astonishingly passive in their relationships with women and altogether clueless in responding to the woman’s wishes or complaints when they lived together….

By contrast, members of the comparison group, even those raised in disappointing marriages, were hopeful that sooner or later they would meet the right person and enter into a satisfying, committed relationship, usually involving marriage. Considering the high incidence of divorce in our culture, we expected more doubts, but only a small minority admitted to worry. “I never doubted I’d marry and have a family” was a typical comment. They expected ups and downs in their relationships, but they did not expect to fail, if they chose carefully. The issue of choice of partner, which was so baffling to the children of divorce, was where the comparison group told us they put their greatest efforts. Their confidence that things would eventually work out well enabled most to survive heartbreak and to delay marriage until they felt ready. Often they drew on their family of origin for images of what they wanted. “I didn’t want a volatile lady like my mom.” Many men and women mentioned that they wanted someone who would be a good parent to their future children. Asked how she chose her husband, one woman laughingly answered, “Besides his being devastatingly good looking, you mean? I wanted someone who wasn’t too serious, who would treat me well, who would be a good father, and was someone I’d like to wake up with 50 years later.” This way of thinking, which came easily to many of those raised in intact homes, was omitted from the voices of the women in the divorce sample….

The wide differences in the incidence of marriage and divorce between the children of divorce and the children of intact families are in line with national data (personal communication, Norval Glenn, November 1997, based on figures from the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1997, for adults ages 18–44). By the end of our study, 60% of the divorced group had married, as compared with 80% of the comparison group and 84% of the national sample. Fifty percent of those married before age 25. Of those, 57% divorced. In the comparison group, only 11% married before age 25, and of those, 25% divorced. The overall divorce rate by the end of the study was 40% for the children of divorce as compared with 35% nationwide for persons in that age group, but only 9% for our comparison group. The outcomes of later marriage, for both the divorce group and the comparison group, are unpredictable. In looking at these delayed marriages, the majority seem to have improved. Several went out of their way to marry people from intact families. “He has no baggage,” one woman declared triumphantly in describing her spouse. “No one has ever been divorced in his family.”

The study ended in the mid to late 1990s. The effects of decadence, nihilism, entitlement and feminism have become more widespread and entrenched since then, and its effects even worse with society completely falling apart on many levels.

The chart below traces the “divorce, separated, or in second or later marriage” trend between 1960, 1980 and 2017 cohorts. People were much more likely to get divorced at a younger age in prior decades, but that’s just because people delay marriage until much later now. You can see how divorce in 2017 becomes higher starting at age 40 and massively spikes thereafter compared to earlier cohorts, thereafter remaining at a rate double that of earlier generations:

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Personal Experience

I’m going to speak from experience as to the veracity of Wallerstein’s study: my parents divorced when I was young, and it had an extremely negative impact on my life as well as negatively impacted ways I interacted with women, even if it took years for those effects to manifest. The comment “Several went out of their way to marry people from intact families” very much applied to me, and I actively sought out women who came from healthy, intact families because I knew my own background was so screwed up. I had not been modeled strong, healthy relationships growing up, so I had no one to model my own relationships after. Although I also had other reasons for a then-failure to launch.2

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The Impact of COVID

Many marriages ended during COVID, as women in the smartphone era became increasingly liberal and erratic. This was amplified by the constant feedback loops they found on platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, where they encouraged one another in narrow echo chambers. Highly educated urban women began enforcing establishment ideology at home, creating tense situations. During COVID, they frequently complained and panicked about things like mask mandates, vaccinations, and going outside. As Orwell wrote, “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.” These women are currently in zombie idle mode because Trump is doing what the elites want him to do, but our overlords may flip the switch and make them hysterical again at their whim, which creates an underlying uneasiness and instability about long-term relationship planning. Who knows what our elites will get these dancing marionettes to do in the future? If they will inject themselves with untested, experimental mRNA “vaccines”, they will do anything they are told.

This is a novel and unusual situation, a result of mass smartphone use. Men were using the internet long before the smartphone era, but women were not really using it much prior to 2012:

The Mayans were correct and 2012 signified the start of a new era—one that marked the rise of extreme liberalism. See this post by Erik Hoel for more on this point.

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On Happy Marriages

Happiness within marriage is a luck of the draw, although happy marriages are anecdotally fairly uncommon. Many couples will stay married for the benefit of the kids (which they should be doing absent extreme abuse), even if they are not happy. You can do everything to search for red flags ahead of time but that doesn’t mean other problems won’t develop later. Reading famed psychologist Hans Eysenck’s autobiography – who wrote a book on astrology I covered previously – I noticed he had a bad first marriage and got divorced long before it was societally acceptable, but the effect it had on his son was very negative:

Why did our marriage break up? It is difficult for me to say – people often drift apart without any obvious reason. I was still young and immature when we were married; it is well known that early marriages seldom last. As an enemy alien [a German living in England] I had to make my career against great odds – I had to give all my time to research, writing and lecturing, to reading, thinking and testing. That left little time for marital togetherness. I cannot blame Margaret for getting fed up with me, particularly when conditions were hard in the war and its immediate aftermath. When I fell in love with [his second wife, who he was happily married to for over fifty years] the decision to end what had become a loveless marriage was inevitable; I knew that my whole happiness depended on it. Margaret was young and attractive enough to have many suitors. Leaving Michael [his son] behind was worst; we always had a good understanding. Human affairs are always messy and involved; I was truly worry about what I was doing, but I could see no real alternative.

This is unfortunately a sad and very common experience.

Julius Evola wrote in 1945 that American women base their relationships on trading sex for material goods3 and that divorce heavily favors them:

The much-vaunted sex appeal of American women is drawn from films, reviews and pin-ups, and is in large print fictitious. A recent medical survey in the United States showed that 75% of young American women are without strong sexual feeling and instead of satisfying their libido they seek pleasure narcissistically in exhibitionism, vanity and the cult of fitness and health in a sterile sense. American girls have ‘no hang-ups about sex’; they are ‘easy going’ for the man who sees the whole sexual process as something in isolation thereby making it uninteresting and matter-of-fact, which, at such a level, it is meant to be. Thus, after she has been taken to the cinema or a dance, it is something like American good manners for the girl to let herself be kissed – this doesn’t mean anything. American women are characteristically frigid and materialistic. The man who ‘has his way’ with an American girl is under a material obligation to her. The woman has granted a material favour. In cases of divorce American law overwhelmingly favours the woman. American women will divorce readily enough when they see a better bargain. It is frequently the case in America that a woman will be married to one man but already ‘engaged’ to a future husband, the man she plans to marry after a profitable divorce.

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Conclusion

If you’re in a bad marriage with kids, think about Wallerstein’s study before you end it even if it is painful to stick with it, at least until they’re grown up and out of the home. Biblical Man has a similar and strong post on not getting divorced here, calling it the initiation of a generational curse. It’s tempting to think “oh, my wife and I fight a lot, isn’t it setting a toxic example for the kids if we stay together? Isn’t it better for them to see each of us in a loving relationship with someone new? They can model my better behavior in my second attempt!” If Wallerstein’s study is to be believed, the answer is an unequivocal no absent extreme abuse. All states today recognize no-fault divorce, but it is an abomination at least if children are involved (if you’re married and don’t have kids, go ahead and get divorced quickly if you want with no judgment from me). Divorce laws are so favorable to women that they initiate 70% of divorces in America. After all, many think “oh, I can end this marriage, get alimony and child support, find a new man and have the best of both worlds!” A terrible, noxious perspective, but one the government and society encourages. Taking into account the impact of divorce on the psyches of children should be more widely understood within society as a whole, and no-fault divorce should be ended.

Divorce involving children may still occur for some, but it should be a far more challenging and serious decision due to the significant negative impact it has on them. This is a harsh and challenging world where evil thrives and the good suffer, a world rooted in philosophical pessimism. However, when you have children your foremost responsibility is to shield and protect them from this, not to add to their burden and perpetuate a cycle of suffering.

For further reading on male/female relations, see the following posts: On the inversion of male and female forms, The different conceptions of marriage in patriarchal vs. matriarchal societies, and Prominent pickup artists: Where are they now?

I’ll end with Blink-182’s 2002 song Stay Together For The Kids, composed by guitarist Tom DeLonge, who based its lyrics on his parents’ divorce and its effect on him:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/k1BFHYtZlAU?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

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Addendum 1: Someone linked me to this strong 1993 article from The Atlantic, which discusses the Wallerstein study along with other data and argues, “The social-science evidence is in: though it may benefit the adults involved, the dissolution of intact two-parent families is harmful to large numbers of children. Moreover, the author argues, family diversity in the form of increasing numbers of single-parent and stepparent families does not strengthen the social fabric but, rather, dramatically weakens and undermines society.” Furthermore:

According to a growing body of social-scientific evidence, children in families disrupted by divorce and out-of-wedlock birth do worse than children in intact families on several measures of well-being. Children in single-parent families are six times as likely to be poor. They are also likely to stay poor longer. Twenty-two percent of children in one-parent families will experience poverty during childhood for seven years or more, as compared with only two percent of children in two parent families. A 1988 survey by the National Center for Health Statistics found that children in single-parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two-parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems. They are also more likely to drop out of high school, to get pregnant as teenagers, to abuse drugs, and to be in trouble with the law. Compared with children in intact families, children from disrupted families are at a much higher risk for physical or sexual abuse.

Contrary to popular belief, many children do not “bounce back” after divorce or remarriage. Difficulties that are associated with family breakup often persist into adulthood. Children who grow up in single-parent or stepparent families are less successful as adults, particularly in the two domains of life–love and work–that are most essential to happiness. Needless to say, not all children experience such negative effects. However, research shows that many children from disrupted families have a harder time achieving intimacy in a relationship, forming a stable marriage, or even holding a steady job.

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1 This is due to the nature of female hypergamy, where women only want a mate who is higher status than she is. Female participation in the workplace raises the social status of women, as does higher education achievement, higher earnings, etc., which shrinks the supply of men who are higher status than the woman is. A woman whose status moves up with grow dissatisfied with her current man if her previously lower status becomes higher than his. Women would rather be alone and childless than be with a lower status male. This is the backdrop for understanding the amazing Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew, covered previously here, begging highly educated men to marry highly educated women in the Great Marriage Debate — men didn’t want to because men care about youth more than a woman’s status, and high status women are more demanding, so they were ending up alone – which Lee Kuan Yew hated because he wanted eugenic birthrates based on IQ and not dysgenic ones. Singapore today has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world and the highest unhappiness rate despite it’s material wealth.

2 These reasons included being excessively praised for character traits instead of praised for accomplishments in childhood, which led to a massively oversized ego with nothing to substantiate it, being Loser clique (defined in the second half of this post), and negative progressed astrological influences (astrology in general is discussed here). Clique theory will be the subject of it’s own future post and there will likely be another on failing to launch.

3 Of course it works both ways; men trade material goods for the expectations of sex.

This post argues that elites are manipulating the masses through the current populist right narrative, using figures like Trump and tactics such as QAnon to create false hope and distraction while pushing agendas that ultimately serve elite interests. It suggests that the populist right, far from offering true resistance, is part of a carefully crafted strategy to control public opinion. The solution lies in individuation—embracing personal growth and intuition to break away from the collective mindset and the distractions of the “current thing,” ultimately achieving a deeper understanding of oneself and gaining freedom from the elites’ influence.

Welcome back. I have many posts planned on various topics, but when inspiration strikes – thoughts coming out of nowhere demanding attention – I follow my individuation process and write a draft to stitch them together. If I don’t, I feel unpleasant psychic and other forms of feedback.1 As the wonderful pessimistic philosopher Emil Cioran wrote, “Everything I’ve written, I wrote to escape a sense of oppression, suffocation. It wasn’t from inspiration, as they say. It was a sort of getting free, to be able to breathe.” Spilling out these thoughts also gives me room to breathe. Or as Ernst Junger alternatively stated, “[Special insights] come from authentic intuition, which itself exists outside of time. This struck me in regards to On the Marble Cliffs, which was triggered by a dream in a single night. But after the flash of intuition, it can take me an entire year to work it out. That’s why I often jokingly say to my wife, “Pray to heaven that I don’t get an idea!” Because then you become the slave of your own idea, and that’s the worst kind of slavery. If a work has to attain a certain rank, it goes back to that initial flash of intuition; then the implementation either succeeds or fails, but in any case, it demands quite a long time.”

Here, I’ve been tasked with pushing the following point: Trump’s administration is hardcore Zionism wrapped inside an empty shell of white nationalism, modeled after a combination of Q-Anon “Trust the Plan” and Ukraine’s Azov Brigade. In some ways this post will be a follow-up to my recent Fool’s Gold: How Trump’s Populist Return Is a Trap for the Naive. Although I prefer to stay above the fray of daily politics, I feel a need for this follow-up because the narrative of Trump’s term is being shaped now. There’s a strong push by “populist” gatekeepers – promoted by the regime due to their moral and financial compromise – to silence dissent against the “Trust the Plan” cheerleading for Trump and his agenda by hand-waving away inconvenient information. Therefore, now is the time to frame this administration properly, just as the proper narrative for early 2021 was to frame Biden as an illegitimate president, the heir to a CIA- and FBI-controlled stolen election. To understand what Trump would need to accomplish this term to avoid being seen as a pawn of the elites in my eyes, refer to this post.

I’ll get to explaining what “Zionism wrapped inside an empty shell of white nationalism” means, but let’s start with some background and iconic images.

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Symbols and omens

There have been a couple of iconic images since the start of Trump’s administration. The first occurred at his inauguration when Trump, standing next to Melania dressed in strange funeral garb, was sworn in – but not on a Bible (he had sworn in on a Bible in 2017, which was a long-standing, unbroken tradition until now):

Perhaps Trump was rushed or distracted and it may not be fair to focus on this detail. His inauguration was moved indoors at the last minute reportedly due to a drone attack threat. Alternatively, as I believe, he may have been coerced by the elites behind closed doors to avoid prison and subconsciously knows that the agenda he’s being forced to push is wrong. Perhaps Melania, too, is subconsciously in mourning by the way she dressed. Regardless, this moment is both a symbol and an ominous omen which will color this administration.

The second image involves Trump pushing in Netanyahu’s chair like a house servant, taken from this video and discussed here:

This photo is iconic and in my opinion will be referenced for years to come. It shows that Trump is merely Netanyahu’s Shabbos goy, a pawn in his master’s hands. It carries the same weight and explanatory power as my profile photo of Evelyn de Rothschild pointing his finger at Prince Charles—an image that speaks volumes about the modern world’s power structure, illustrating who is in charge and who is subservient:

One may note that Netanyahu presented Trump with a macabre trophy at their meeting:

Do you think it was bugged this time?

Iurie Rosca has two strong posts on Trump being an Israeli puppet, one relating to this golden pager incident where is as much of a trophy as it is a warning to Trump not to fall out of line, and the other relating to both Trump and Putin’s obedience to the Chabad Lubavich network.2 I hope there’s an upcoming English translation of Pierre Hillard’s Comprendre l’empire Loubavitch: Une dynastie royale et missionnaire (“Understanding the Lubavich Empire: A Royal and Missionary Dynasty”).

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The Agenda Ahead

In the latest developments, Trump is reportedly negotiating with several countries to relocate all Palestinian Gazans in order to ethnic cleanse Gaza (though the idea of U.S. boots on the ground in Gaza has been partially walked back). This plan would make space for Jared Kushner’s infamous Gaza highrises, which Trump has grotesquely called a “real estate deal for the future.” It also involves the planned Ben Gurion Canal, Middle Eastern oil and gas pipelines to Europe, and is part of the ongoing Greater Israel project. The preliminaries of this project is nearing completion with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Assad destroyed, Palestinians in the West Bank being increasingly displaced, and Iran as the last major obstacle. Trump and Israel have labeled Gaza “unlivable,” claiming that ethnic cleansing is the “humanitarian” solution, despite the fact that Israel has killed over 60,000 people in Gaza and bombed nearly every building in the region. Curtis Yarvin enthusiastically supports this ethnic cleansing outcome. Trump is pressuring various countries to accept the Palestinians: Egypt, Jordan (threatening to withhold foreign aid and possibly forcing them to yield), while the UAE has added to the pressure. He is also urging Albania, Ireland, and Saudi Arabia to accept them with rumors suggesting the U.S. might take some in as well. Only 13% of Americans support this plan, but a lack of public approval has never stopped the elites before. For instance, the American public was strongly opposed to both World War I and World War II, yet they were manipulated into supporting them. It’s important to note that my perspective on Gaza differs significantly from most anti-Israel critiques.3

Beyond Gaza, Trump is reinstating his maximum pressure campaign against Iran and plans to either invade them, overthrow them via a combination of sanctions and a CIA-backed uprising, or otherwise inadvertently trigger a U.S. invasion of Iran based upon a CIA-backed and Israel approved false-flag assassination of Trump (discussed in a previous post here). Though Netanyahu has called Trump Israel’s best friend, and despite the fact that Trump’s children are all married to Jews and his grandchildren are Jewish, he is viewed as a sacrificial Noahide gentile. He may be sacrificed to further a broader agenda, much like the Jewish victims of the 10/7 false flag were used to push the same agenda. It’s worth noting that even though Trump moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and strongly supported Israel, Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to endorse Biden’s CIA-backed 2020 election coup, betraying Trump in the process – a point Trump himself has complained about.

Trump was brought back onboard by our upper elites to sell this reality to the right-wing masses, who have been resistant to this agenda under liberal leadership. This isn’t just about the Greater Israel project; there are other goals as well: (1) The re-emergence of an Orwellian superstate integration, which began with NAFTA and has been slowly advancing through the concept of a North American Union, a topic you can read more about here. This has long been a goal of the elites. For example, a January 2005 leaked diplomatic cable reveals U.S. government officials discussing the best approach to North American integration based on their assessment of Canadian views. The National Post’s Robert Hiltz described the cable as discussing “the obstacles surrounding the merger of the economies of Canada, the United States and Mexico in a fashion similar to the European Union.” We can see that such a repackaged strategy is on the agenda (including Greenland) because Google – an ultra-liberal company that fought Trump during his first term – has eagerly jumped on board. This is evident in their promotion of the ominous Gulf of America rebrand, as well as their compliance with the new anti-DEI culture shift:

Trump is also expected to (2) further the corrupt, transnational CIA-backed cryptocurrency project controlled by our elites via Tether fraud; (3) advance the development of central bank digital currencies, which will result in the greatest loss of freedom in human history; (4) promote extreme surveillance of American citizens led by the criminal Palantir organization, discussed by Political Economist here (one may also note that Palantir’s stock has risen 400% in recent months), as well as Musk’s DOGE, which is far more sinister than it appears (discussed by The Solari Report here), paving the way for the digital panopticon; (5) formalize BAP/Yarvin-esque Jewish Nietzschean will-to-power with no checks and balances (e.g., Trump has just formally legalized corruption); and (6) attack free speech while consolidating the far-left social gains of the past two decades, including gay marriage, transsexual acceptance (with a possible exception in the military to boost readiness for war with Iran, Russia, or China – hardly a good sign), and the influx of tens of millions of non-white illegal immigrants into the country. I previously discussed these developments in a post titled The Consolidation Phase of the Egalitarian Ratchet Effect. An example of such consolidation can be seen in the 2025 Super Bowl, which appeared to be about 80% black, featuring countless interracial ads and various social deviations. Despite this, the public accepted it without question, making it feel like the “new normal.” The decay within Western institutions has advanced so far that political leaders now feel comfortable openly calling for white erasure.

It’s also possible that (7) Trump could be used as the scapegoat to discredit nationalism, especially if the elites choose to burst the largest stock market and asset bubble in history.

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Trump’s Role in This Agenda

Trump was brought back into the fold after Ron DeSantis faltered in early trials, tasked with selling these policies to the right-wing masses. Left-wingers are generally already on board with global governance, the erasure of white identity, and rule by “experts.” However, they tend to be more skeptical of Israel and more supportive of Palestinians than the right, a point we will revisit later. A key point I frequently emphasize is this: While the insightful Guido Preparata (whose works I’ve covered here, here and here and interviewed here) argues that the elites create narratives that the masses simply accept unquestioningly and that’s how it’s always been, I believe there’s a more complex interplay. The elites craft these narratives to distract the masses through “bread and circuses” as they continue their financial exploitation. However, the masses do possess some power—they can reject the messaging by tuning it out and ignoring it. This forces the elites to shift to the next narrative in order to capture public attention. For example, the COVID narrative ended when only 50% of the public received the booster, compared to 80% who got the initial shot. This decline in compliance necessitated a shift in focus, paving the way for a new narrative.

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The predecessors of the current narrative

Trump, as the skilled media manipulator and carnival barker he is, must execute these anti-MAGA agendas without alienating his MAGA base or having them tune out.4 How does one do this? How can he manage this? There are two recent examples that come to mind: the Q phenomenon and the Azov brigade phenomenon.

Q (or “QAnon”) was a far-right conspiracy theory that emerged in 2017. Modeled after the Soviet Operation Trust, it centered on an anonymous figure called “Q” who claimed to be a high-ranking government insider with access to classified information. Q’s messages, known as “Q drops”, were posted on online forums like 4chan and 8chan, offering cryptic clues and predictions about a supposed battle between President Donald Trump and a “deep state” of powerful elites who control global events. Key elements of the QAnon theory included the idea that a global cabal of pedophiles, involving prominent politicians, business leaders, and celebrities, secretly runs the world, the belief that Trump was working to expose and dismantle this deep state, and the idea that events like COVID-19, the 2020 U.S. election, and various political crises were part of a larger plan orchestrated by this elite group. In reality, Q was likely a CIA or FBI operation designed to redirect populist anger toward the “deep state” into complacency and passivity, much like the earlier Soviet Operation Trust, and it succeeded wildly in this aim. I knew almost immediately that the Q phenomenon was a scam because a true dissident movement doesn’t merely predict but also explains the logic behind the prediction, leaving it up to the reader to agree or disagree with the reasoning. Q made predictions, didn’t offer the logic behind them, and then either promptly forgot about the prior failed predictions or kicked the can down the road. Do not put your faith in anyone or anything else, not elected officials, not bloggers, not me – listen to the arguments and then do a gut check and make up your own mind. But if whoever you’re listening to does not explain the logic behind their arguments they should be immediately written off.

In this way, a deliberately crafted cult of personality has formed around Trump – not just among his core supporters, but also through Musk-boosted online personalities, creating a new Obama-esque “hope and change” or Q-esque “trust the plan” movement. “Oh, don’t agree with what Trump is doing? “You’re a bitter black-piller trying to drag people down into depression! You are wrong and you should be ignored!” Most of the Trumpenproles care about feeling like they’re winning much more than they care about winning itself, where the first step required to win is to soberly understand the actual game being played (which is a painful, dark and scary experience). The hopium is like a drug addiction where detractors from the addiction are lashed out at in fury. Whoever crafts and pushes the biggest feel-good drug hit “wins”. As Whitney Webb states:

I also find the narratives that deviating from the “trust the plan” stance is deemed “blackpilling” and as peddling “paralytic” “hopelessness” very telling, as it frames “trusting the plan” as the only solution for facing the problems of today.

Even though I do offer solutions that I think are helpful, I am still often told I offer none because “trust the plan” is not one of them. If “trusting the plan” is the only way to be considered an optimist or solution-minded person to you, the scope of solutions you are willing to consider is both extremely myopic and q-flavored.

I’ll have another post analyzing how these right wing influencers/bloggers are paid shills and this is how our elites have always operated, using these lower hirelings to manipulate public opinion, but if you fall for it the simple answer is: you’ve been duped. You can see John Carter’s February 8, 2025 highly popular post “The Blitzkrieg Through the Institutions: We’re the Regime Now” if you want to read something stomach churning – I would not be surprised if he was being paid and supported by regime elements at this point. I won’t link to it, though. There are also those who have naively bought into the cultural pendulum swing such as N.S. Lyons here, who is far too credulous and not nearly conspiracy-minded enough. Even Kevin MacDonald has been suckered. Catherine Austin Fitts of the Solari Report has a much better understanding of what is going on as America continues it’s transition from a soft power model to a hard power model (which is not to be applauded, although hard power is more expensive to maintain than soft power). Wyatt Peterson at Unz also understands the game afoot, as does Jasun Horsley here.5

The second example is that of the Ukraine’s Azov brigade which came to prominence during the ongoing Ukraine/Russia war. The Azov brigade were nominally neo-Nazis whose hero was the war criminal Stepan Bandera (whose main goal in World War 2 was to kill as many Russians and Poles as he could, including civilians). However, one should note that Ukraine was and remains headed by a homosexual Jewish actor acting on behalf of trans-national Jewish central bank interests. In effect, the “far-right” and “neo-Nazi” emblems were used as a skinsuit6 to fool lower information far-rightests to arrive at the wrong conclusions about what was actually happening. This strategy proved highly successful. When many Azov Brigade members were captured by Russia during its failed defense of Mariupol, they were accused of extreme war crimes, including the torture and execution of Russian POWs, and were supposed to be put on trial. Despite this, they were swiftly exchanged in prisoner swaps and returned to Ukraine, enjoying luxurious accommodations. From this the higher powers behind Trump learned the effectiveness of using such a deceptive skin-suit strategy; it really confuses those being targeted for the psyop.

This demonstrates the Baudrillardian hyperreality surrounding the current Trump administration – pushing border shutdowns and mass expulsions, which serve as a dog whistle for white nationalism (even though there have only been very minor deportations). In fact, many of the few illegal immigrants arrested by ICE have been released. But do mass deportations even need to happen if elite-owned media are telling the public they are? How can the public verify what is actually happening on the ground? Most will just accept whatever the news reports. We can see ultra-arrogant and deviant Elon Musk (covered a number of years ago here), who apparently tells his four year old son that he’s the real president7, push this strategy intentionally by seig heiling like an autistic retard on television8:

Musk’s approach to USAID, though welcome, is clearly designed to capture public interest and secure new buy-in. However, he’s only scratched the surface. One might question his true intentions, especially considering that his previous transparency in revealing Twitter’s corruption—according to Matt Taibbi—was a “limited hangout” intended to signal that “new Twitter” was different from the “old Twitter” without addressing the underlying CIA/FBI control of the platform. As a result, I expect DOGE to follow the same limited hangout pattern. As I mentioned in a Note, wake me up when Musk starts targeting the following corrupt structure:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is also an obvious fraud.

We also see this strategy in the administration’s recent handling of South Africa. South Africa, which has been devastated by the elites’ white erasure agenda, protested the administration’s plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza. In response, the Trump administration attacks South Africa for white erasure, threatens to cut off its funding, and discusses (probably falsely) bringing white Boers in as refugees to the U.S. (something I actually support). But the real reason behind this? It’s simply revenge for South Africa’s stance on Gaza. Do you see? Do you understand? Expect more of this kind of manipulation in the future.

We’re now in a 2001-like environment with the odious George W. Bush in power once again. Back then, plans to invade Afghanistan and Iraq were relentlessly pushed in the media while critics were silenced – except for a few principled voices like Ron Paul, Paul Craig Roberts, and James Buchanan, representing the paleocon right. Later, when the momentum fades as it did during Bush’s second term, the left will shift back to an antiwar stance (especially if the U.S. goes to war with Iran, Russia, or China). The left will resurge once allowed, and the political pendulum will swing left again. However, political criticism of the central banking system and its owners will remain forbidden and mass censorship will persist.

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A note about our elites

When examining the power and actions of our elites, one may wonder: are they all-powerful? Are they near-gods? While I believe they’ve held power since at least the 17th century – if not much longer – I do think they make mistakes. For example, Trump’s 2016 victory was a major blunder on their part (discussed in my previous three-part series). This mistake forced the “deep state” and its upper levels to expose themselves to the public beyond plausible deniability, which was a huge loss. I also believe they made significant errors with the flimsiness of their 10/7 false flag attack from Gaza which the world rejected; Israel even had to criminalize discussion of the obvious fraud. Despite their mistakes, the narratives they create engage the public from new angles, sparking significant public interest. Even I find it difficult to disengage from these new narratives—they are both interesting and compelling. How brilliant and devious these people are to come up with the idea of pushing a skinsuited “white nationalism” to push their ulterior goals!

This isn’t to say our elites deserve all the credit. I believe they are using advanced artificial intelligence to determine the best ways to distract and deceive the public. It reminds me of scenes from a later season of Westworld (which isn’t great), where all of the world’s data is compiled through A.I. and delivered to the elites in the form of a “black box” analysis called “Rehoboam.”

One may note that Rehoboam, despite its sophisticated data-crunching abilities and predictions, is not infallible and ultimately fails in the show. The fall of Rehoboam symbolizes the show’s themes of free will, choice, and the limitations of overreliance on AI for governance.

On a deeper level, one may refer to the philosophical pessimism underlying material reality itself – our desires are never satisfied, if desires are attained we become bored until we develop new Kaczynski-esque surrogate activity desires, humanity naturally adheres to relationships akin to slave-making ant colonies, and one cannot live by the Golden Rule because survival in this reality fundamentally requires consuming other living creatures for sustenance. As Jasun Horsley argues, this reality appears set up to challenge souls on a fundamental and sustained level:

By my own criteria, I am not a pessimist but an optimist. I have always accepted that social or political change that is lasting and hence meaningful is an impossibility (which is actually undeniable, since at a societal level, nothing lasts); and, as someone said, what is impossible cannot be desirable (unless we wish to live inside a John Lennon song).

But if, as Keats said (probably once he knew he was dying, at 26), the world is the vale of soul-making, then its seemingly satanic, irredeemable nature (its alignment with power-abuse) is, like the forge to metal, just what the soul needs. And as Job knew, what the soul needs (not what it wants), is what the soul gets!

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Conclusion

What I want to stress from this continued analysis is that you develop your own processes for moving forward in life that are not reliant on a God Emperor Trump or anyone else to save you. Salvation may only come from within. The current narrative is devious, deviant, and brilliant, and the next “Current Thing” will undoubtedly also capture everyone’s attention and excite the public. As Baudrillard’s hyperreality suggests, separating fact from fiction has become more challenging than ever. My recommendations are:

1. To educate yourself and others about the structure of the modern world;
2. To develop a grounding mechanism to help separate fact from fiction as discussed here. The method I suggest is one of recursive prediction, where you make predictions about the future, review them, and – if they prove wrong – adjust your worldview to incorporate the new information, and to do this over and over again. Personally, I am also inclined toward gnosticism, discussed here and here, due to the nature of this world; and
3. to explore Jungian individuation so that you become more of who you were meant to be in this world – we were all put here with a predetermined purpose based upon our skillset, our way of thinking and of our interests.9 We cannot be anyone else, we can only be the best version of ourselves that we can be. The more you become yourself, the less the opinion of the masses or of the narratives of our elites matters, and the weaker their next Current Thing narrative will be. I wish I had people to guide me in this way, but I spent much of my early life lost in uncertainty, despair, and anger. As Jung believed, we cannot truly advise others about the wrongness of the current state of affairs unless we offer an alternative. I attest to the truth of this, as I’ve seen the results of individuation in my own life.

What ties these three recommendations together are that they are things that each of us can work on in our own lives without waiting for an external savior. It will help resist whatever next Current Thing our elites have planned and to help others resist it as well, and longer term it may have a spiritual impact. But for those looking for immediate political organization and action – an argument articulated recently by Andrew Parker here, which I have sympathy for – I don’t have an optimistic perspective on it succeeding at this time (such opportunities do occasionally arise such as Trump’s win in 2016 and Prigozhin’s brief window of opportunity to overthrow WEF stooge Putin).

I hope you found this post helpful in your own journey.

Thanks for reading.

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1 The individuation process began for me during the liminal phase of midlife, which I previously discussed here. In simple terms, it involves letting go of the ego to some extent and trusting intuition, following its guidance as it emerges through seemingly random thoughts and impulses. This process is balanced with one’s intellect, emotions, and senses. It focuses more on the journey itself rather than the end result, requiring a leap of faith that, over time, it will lead to greater balance, depth, and wholeness. However, the changes are often subtle and can only be fully recognized in hindsight. As a result, my personality traits have been evolving quite rapidly.

2 I have covered how Putin is a stooge to higher financial powers in prior posts on the Russia/Ukraine war here, here and here.

3 The typical perspective is represented both on the left and right by Caitlin Johnstone, who basically believes Israel is being a bully and Palestinians are mostly-innocent victims of the bully. This is a manifestation of the egalitarian ratchet effect, which basically believes that victims of oppression are morally superior to their oppressors. Yet these same people basically totally ignore Muslim Azerbaijan’s seizure of 1/3 of Christian Armenia and of the ongoing Islamic massacres of Christians throughout Africa, probably because Israel is at the heart of Christian and secular post-Christian attention as Nietzsche so aptly demonstrated regarding Christianity’s original transvaluation of values, as Laurent Guyénot discusses here, and as Adam Green so often points out. My perspective is one of American isolationist autarky and wanting an end to Team America: World Police-style interventions. Let the world fend for itself; cries about worldwide oppression are thinly veiled calls for intervention. The reason why Israel and Gaza bother me is because Zionists have totally taken control of the U.S. government, Jews are wildly overrepresented within government both among Republicans and Democrats, and because Jewish groups from the far-left to the far-right have universally historically been in favor of open borders in America and closed borders in Israel. As such, if one wants to return to American autarky one must wrestle with this factor and the issues that arise from it, and therefore addressing the Gaza issue. One may also note that the 60,000+ dead in Gaza has severely weakened Jewish/Israel’s ability to use the Holocaust as a shield against perceived anti-semitic attacks.

4 Or from Jason Christoff via Geopolitics & Empire reflecting on the structure of the structure of this world and the Current Thing:

“Each country is a corporation. It’s a franchise, and there’s a franchisor, and I think it’s the banking cartel. And what we believe are politicians, they’re staff.

These are franchises. There’s a franchise manual. I mean, I’ve investigated franchises my entire life because I’m a businessman. There’s franchise manuals. And these manuals include…all the things to maximize the profit of any franchise, and it includes poisoning the population, basically to maximize the franchise, what we call countries, there’s a full spectrum weakness agenda.

And PSYOPs start and they end. And when they start, they’re really hard to explain…reveal to the general public. Like when we started the COVID PSYOP in 2020, it’s not like it is now. Now you can post about it. You can post about deaths. You can post about heart attacks and strokes. So it started and now they’re trying to wipe it off the table.

Another PSYOP just started. It’s a Trump cult. So there’s an actor, he’s a highly paid employee, and because it’s the start of the PSYOP and not the end of it, people are still having such a real hard time wrapping their head around it, although they’ve experienced similar patterns of psychological control in the past. So people have to start understanding the structure of how the franchises work, how they maintain control.“

5 Horsley writes in part: “NLF believes there was a real “war” going on between DJT and an established “deep state,” back in 2016 and 2020, and that DJT caved some time in 2024, after which he was shoed into office. If so, then the “deep state” currently being dismantled by DJT—in what John Carter called the Second American Revolution—represents a few flimsy factions once supported by the superculture who have failed to realize that said support has been withdrawn and that they have now been hung out to dry: a kind of “Potemkin” deep state that has already been replaced by a new set of skin suits, proxy party, ideology, etc. That this ought to be obvious to serious parapolitical commentators, but somehow isn’t, indicates that they have either been so stupefied by the supercultural intoxicants of Matrix 2, or were born into them, and no longer have anything to compare them to.”

6 I thought skinsuited was a term that had a slang definition in the way I am using it, but I am not finding it with searches. To be “skinsuited” (for which I guess I should take credit?) means to incorporate the outer trappings of an ideology or organization – it’s symbols, it’s phrases, it’s mythos and heroes – while pushing core values which are diametrically opposite to that of the ideology or organization itself. Orwell touched on this concept with his conception of doublethink where he referred to such things as the Department of Defense really meaning the Department of War, for example, but the skinsuiting phraseology is more accurate and cuts to the heart of the idea better.

7 In a press conference from the Oval Office that Musk gives with Trump sitting idly by, Musk brought his highly obnoxious four year old son. The son tells Trump on camera he isn’t the president and to shut his mouth and leave. See here, underlying videos here and here. Obviously a child of this age is only parroting what he’s been told by his parents. Why is Musk giving press conferences from the Oval Office anyway?

8 Some people argue that Musk will be punished by a future liberal regime if they come back to power. First, I think that’s wrong both because Musk is personally necessary for furthering an electric future (electric cars and battery technology advancements) and also for rocketry, second because he’s willingly playing a role for higher up elites, and third because of his astrological profile: both his natal chart and especially his progressed chart for the rest of his life look extremely positive to me, although his motivations look to me like they will progressively weirder and weirder. I discussed astrology previously here.

9 This also relates to one’s fixed physiognomy, covered in this post.

This piece critiques the optimistic writers who continue to champion Donald Trump as a populist force, arguing that they fail to see his capitulation to global financial elites. It warns against blind cheerleading for Trump’s 2025 presidency which is set to advance a globalist agenda cloaked in the rhetoric of populism without actually fulfilling meaningful populist promises. To be clear, the purpose of this post is not to turn a reader anti-Trump, but rather to set very low expectations for the next four years and, ultimately, advocates not to cheerlead for a party or a man but to hold these people to higher standards. “Facilius decipere dulcedine quam dolore” is Latin for “It is easier to deceive with sweetness than with pain.”

People think of a political figure and his supporters as a monolith, but that is almost never the case. Trump ran as a far-right populist during his 2015-2016 run for president, and he was supported by aspects of the elites such as the Clinton’s who encouraged him to run in order to blow up the Republican party (which he had done during his prior run for president in 2000 by undermining the campaign of Pat Buchanan) – everyone including Trump was surprised that he won; he spent his 2017-2020 presidency slowly purging the populist elements, including Steve Bannon, and unsuccessfully trying to accommodate himself to the establishment; he spent 2021-2023 locked in a battle for his life, facing massive criminal and civil charges that could have bankrupted him and put him in prison for life; and then you have the 2024 campaign and the start of Trump’s presidency now, where I contend that Trump completely caved behind closed doors to the upper elites to do whatever they wanted so long as he could win the controlled, rigged election, get rich and avoid prison.1 I covered the Trump campaign, presidency, and his 2020 run for re-election in this three part series which delves into the details of this narrative. The clue and giveaway that Trump caved in 2024 is that, other than the fact that he was allowed to win a controlled election2, Trump’s criminal and civil trials disappeared, the elite-owned media stopped endlessly calling him the equivalent of Hitler and started treating him neutrally to even positively, and the shitlib NPC mobs were placed on idle-mode stand-down — this would literally not have happened unless they were comfortable and accepting of whatever role they now have for Trump.

This framework explains, for example, why he is now chummy with Barack Obama, even though Obama ran the wildly criminal and unpunished Spygate against Trump which made Watergate look like child’s play. They understand, on some level, that they both now work for the same people (Bill Clinton would also be friendly with him but he’s deathly afraid of Hillary, who continues to hold a massive grudge against Trump; Jon Hampton had a strong Note on this dynamic). Video of Trump/Obama laughing together is here.

In 2017 I documented in great detail the specific moves that Trump did as he shifted from populism to globalism, and I don’t plan to do that again this time around. Basically, personnel is policy and the overarching themes of Trump’s personnel choices (which, remember, also have to receive Senate confirmation, and the Senate maybe has 15 populist or populist-adjacent members as explained here) is extreme pro-Zionism (an anti-Zionist Tweet by Matt Gaetz is the reason why his nomination for Attorney General was sunk), pro-cryptocurrency3, pro-technocracy, pro-integration into an Orwellian superstate, and a pseudo-”anti-wokeness”. It’s power derives from the West Coast Straussian nationalist-level counter-elite which I went into detail about here and which INRI_07 covered well here, which is to a large extent lipstick on a pig as the upper levels of the international financial elite structure remain totally unchanged and unchallenged.

As I explained in my 2025 prediction post and in this recent Note, I expect Trump’s presidency to start with a bang of surface-level populist moves in order to build up capital and momentum among the white populist base and then that capital and momentum will be cashed in during his term in return for war with Iran (or at least a CIA overthrow of Iran), the introduction of central bank digital currencies which will result in the greatest loss of freedom in human history (i.e. the digital panopticon), unlimited H1b Jeet immigration, the furtherance of the Greater Israel project, previously discussed here, along with other actions unsupported by Trump’s base. It also brings to mind this 2023 4chan comment:

As such, various DEI initiatives with great fanfare are being put back in their bottle. Victory, the woke are destroyed! Right? Akshully, DEI was astroturfed elite-sponsored slop from the get-go and, after getting what they wanted out of it, they are phasing it out and moving on to the next stage of their plan. Otherwise how do you explain such a sudden and instantaneous spike in media attention paid to DEI after the corrupt public bailouts of major banks after the 2008 crash? It was designed to shift public attention away from class warfare so the masses would infight along the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation and not focus on the extreme elite theft! Also see Balaji noting in February 2023 that the NYT was transitioning away from woke to statism. He wrote: “NYT is transitioning from wokism to statism. Because the US establishment doesn’t want domestic chaos anymore. They’re in control. So you’ll see less riots calling for abolishing police, more funding for riot police. Less on toxic masculinity, more on troops for foreign wars.” The World Economic Forum is playing their own role in the fake drama, fake-whining, “We Have Lost To Trump!” Uh huh.

Shitlibs, who are unthinking NPC robots who simply do whatever the media and so-called “experts” tell them to, are claiming to be against DEI now because the elite switch for it has been turned off. They are now in zombie idle mode, appearing momentarily “reasonable” until the elites decide to flip another switch on. Nothing underlying this reality has changed.

With that said, let’s now assess what Trump has done in the first couple days of his presidency. In the first day he correctly let the J6’ers out of prison (although I argued that he should have pardoned them before he left office in January 2021 as it was clear that our elites were concocting a giant scam out of 1/6), starting much hyped but transparently ineffective ICE deportations (all the ugly optics with little upcoming results4), and unleashed a flurry of executive orders such as a ban on birthright immigration (which will very likely be shot down by the courts; it was immediately blocked), a sham one on banning CBDC research (sham because of the advanced state of CBDC development and because the research on the U.S. version is finished, ready to deploy as soon as the appropriate crisis is unleashed), and a 90 day suspension of foreign aid (including to Palestinians but not for Israel). The Senate suspiciously passed a bipartisan Laken Riley Act “cracking down” on illegal immigration. Meanwhile, Trump has removed sanctions on West Bank settlers and is lifting restrictions on supplying 2,000 lb bombs to Israel. He’s also supported Musk and Vivek Scammerswamy’s intense push for unlimited H1b visa immigration from India, where Musk repeatedly called the anti-immigration Middle America Trump base scum5 and which, after massive blowback, he tried to change the topic of conversation by publicly Sieg Heiling like a strange autistic retard. Trump doubled down on his support for massive H1b expansion on January 22. He is also calling for Orwellian superstate integration and has also engaged in perhaps the most egregious piece of public corruption I’ve ever seen with the launch of Trumpcoin (see here and this post by Michel de Cryptadamus) along with the cherry on top of a $40 million bribe by Bezos to Trump. On day two of his administration Trump announced support for Project Stargate, a $500 billion project by a performative Trump hater to create the AI infrastructure to create personalized mRNA vaccines, i.e. Operation War Speed on hyperdrive. Did you expect anything else from the “father of the vaccine”?

As I wrote in the above Note:

You can only meet someone at the level of their personal, spiritual, or political development. If you try to explain concepts at a higher level than where they are at, their eyes will glaze over with an almost total lack of understanding. This is why I try to avoid conversations with “normies”, because they don’t get it and it’s a waste of my time.

The current danger is not from the shitlib, who has been rendered mute into a catatonic zombie state, serving as NPCs in idle mode (turned off by their media and “expert” handlers for the moment), but rather from the Trumpenprole who will get ultra-excited by Trump’s surface-level populist moves as he works meaningfully behind the scenes toward establishing the Palantir digital panopticon, regional integration into a continental superstate, and the Greater Israel project, all while engaged in a level of graft that will be unprecedented in American history.

This brings me to the topic of today’s piece. There are certain inflection points that reveal a person’s inner character; whether to support or not support Trump in 2015/2016 was one of them. How to respond to the COVID fraud at it’s peak intensity was another one; the vast majority of public figures failed, including blubbering crybaby Jordan Peterson and “screw your freedoms” “he-man” Arnold Schwarzenegger, while creating new figures worthy of respect like Ian Smith who resisted shutdowns of his gym under intense pressure. Another narrative was one’s position on the fake Russia/Ukraine war, which is controlled on both sides by upper level elites (FYI: Trump will likely “end” the war, although it didn’t happen in 24 hours as he claimed, which will be a Minsk III-style affair and be a total and complete elite victory, despite any propaganda to the contrary, as Rurik Skywalker properly explains here). And another inflection point is now but from the opposite perspective: who can keep their wits about them, to soberly analyze a situation without blind cheerleading for one’s side, now that Trump has “won” and the “right wing populists” are “back in control”?

I did a post awhile back on dissident right Substack authors, where I put those that I covered on an optimism/pessimism and level-of-focus (metaphysical, cultural, or political) chart, which was as follows:

Basically, it’s been pretty instructive on how the authors are approaching the Trump presidency. The higher-level pessimist authors have been far more level-headed about it than the optimist authors. I hate to put these guys on blast as I’m friendly with them and my apologies in advance, but John Carter , Librarian of Celaeno, Tree of Woe, Morgthorak the Undead etc. have been extremely excited that the right is “back in the saddle” and that the astroturfed woke nonsense is being put away; Tree of Woe was in particular so excited that he called the moment the end of Faustian civilization (which has been ongoing for hundreds of years!) and the start of a new dawn of a radically different civilization (although, to be fair, he later tempered his enthusiasm with more sour 2025 predictions). Their argument is essentially: take your wins where you can get them, politics is a messy affair, wins can build on themselves, you’re too perfectionist and nitpicky and negative and if you had your way you’d never get anything done, etc. After all, there was a binary election with two choices and would you rather have Kamala as president??? (The answer is no, see footnote 1). Aristotle in Exile attacks those who sit back in their cushy chairs, criticizing thinkers who think without organizing in real life: What would you have us do, NLF, sit back and do nothing? And hey, maybe they’re right, maybe they’re right; the proof is in the pudding, though, and my contention is that the Trump of 2025 is nothing like the Trump of 2015 or 2016, that there was an orderly handoff of power from globalist left-wing secular Jews to Greater Israel religious right-wing Jews in line with dialectical realities (i.e. America was far too whipped with crushing financial pressure and ultra in-your-face intense woke nonsense; the left had served it’s purpose by putting America on an irreversible path of total destruction, so now the baton has been passed to the next phase of the agenda and the astroturfed woke stuff orderly put back in it’s cage), and the global financial order is in such control, and it’s enemies so confused and shattered, that there is nothing to be done about it at this point other than learning and educating others. By getting excited about the process, by buying into the new narrative one feeds it and gives it energy, as I previously discussed. I prefer to sit back and watch the nonsense unfold. I put my predictions in writing for 2025 here, and we will see who is correct at the end of 2025 and throughout Trump’s term.

Ultimately I don’t care about culture war goyslop, seeing it as always being a complete distraction; we live in a hierarchical global order based around privately owned central bank usury and mass communications used to keep the masses confused and broken as slaves. Trump has totally capitulated to this order, been integrated into it, and no longer serves as any kind of threat to it at all (unlike in 2017 when the upper level elites panicked and revealed themselves to the public; now, they are trying to recede back into the shadows). As J.R.R. Tolkien stated, “The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the banker of the backer.”

But just as this is an opportunity for naive writers who buy into the upper elite’s dialectical synthesis to fool their audiences, either intentionally or unintentionally, it is also an opportunity for new figures to stake out a case that Trump is now controlled and his administration will be a failure judged by his original populist promises (to understand what Trump would have to do for his administration to not be a failure in my eyes, see this post). Such new figures include Paul Cudenec here, Leo Hohmann here, Geopolitics & Empire here, Derrick Broze here, dgp here, and INRI_07 here. It’s interesting to see how after every new big narrative the people who I’ve ultimately agreed with becomes more selective, more curated – new writers to follow, many old writers to discard. Rurik Skywalker has so far been pretty consistently aligned with my perspective.

With that said, I fully expect that only a minority of the right will resist the lure of Trump 3.0 and that the Trump optimist Substackers will continue to be far more popular than the Trump “doomers”. It’s another spiritual test, only this time a spiritual test with a carrot instead of a stick – facilius decipere dulcedine quam dolore – so it’s harder in certain respects. The pull to treat politics as sports is too strong for most – “Support our team against the other team, if you’re not with us you’re against us!” – and furthermore the masses are reactive and have no political memory whatsoever. When they get screwed on a false narrative they very slowly wise up to it, but they forget the lesson when the next narrative comes down from above to hit them from an unexpected direction.

Anyway, I hope you found this post helpful and informative in your own process. As I continuously stress, one needs a grounding mechanism for which to assess endless streams of new information, and the one I recommend is one based on recursive prediction. Make predictions about the future based on your current level of understanding, and then go back and assess whether those predictions turned out to be right or not. No one is perfect, including and especially myself, and I always have a lot of new things to learn and update. We are all finite, fallible, imperfect beings, but the important thing when viewing politics, spirituality or anything else is remaining open minded and flexible to updating one’s worldview if one happens to be wrong. Do not put your faith in anyone else, no one can be your hero and if you try to make someone yours you will always be disappointed. Be your own hero. But to do that requires deep introspection and holding oneself to task.

Ultimately what is required is a transvaluation of values away from egalitarianism and the world uniting as one in overthrowing the parasitical central bank system. One requires hope in order to live, and as a “blackpiller” I personally find hope in Jung’s process of individuation as well as my exploration of gnosticism. Regarding fundamental change, though, I believe it won’t be accomplished through Trump who this time around will, as Caitlin Johnstone argues, show the empire unmasked – which, ultimately, may be necessary before more fundamental change is possible.

Thanks for reading.

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1 For clarity, I voted for Trump in 2016 enthusiastically, in 2020 reluctantly, and in 2024 at the last second solely because I thought Kamala would let in another 20 million illegals like Biden did during his term if she won. As I stated here, “This isn’t a sports match, you don’t have to pick a side and stick to it loyally. Support public figures to the extent they support the positions you care about, mock and ridicule them to the extent they don’t. Welcome to adulthood.”

2 All elections post-2020 are rigged: between permanent nationwide vote-by-mail overseen by a Marc Elias-approved Democrat post office voting “tsar”, electronic Dominion machine fraud, ubiquitous ballot harvesting, ballot stuffing in key precincts, etc, 2020 marked the end of managed elections and the institution of fundamentally rigged elections.

3 For example, Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce Secretary and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, is deeply enmeshed in Tether (which is an enormous and transparent scam). Tether is bailing out the federal government by printing unlimited amounts of dollar equivalents out of thin air and purchasing Treasuries with them – see here and here – in return for the CIA/NSA’s krisha of institutional protection and guarantees of backstopped against losses by the American public, which is these criminal’s end goal here: to trade worthless cryptocurrency for backstopped American fiat, socializing the losses and having the American taxpayer pay for it in the form of massive inflation. Really ugly stuff.

4 It’s actually quite easy to solve the illegal immigration problem without doing any actual evictions if the political will is there: you enforce already existing criminal penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants, you ban the sending of U.S. dollars abroad by illegals, and you cut off all U.S. taxpayer aid to them (they receive thousands of dollars worth of free housing, free debit cards, etc.). It’s easy and simple and doesn’t involve what many will perceive as poor optics.

5 Here is the recording. You can fast forward to 1 hour 49 minutes when Musk really starts going buckwild. Here is a description of what transpired. Even though Musk is a known shill for the elites, previously discussed here, the level of intense vitriol he spewed was still surprising.

The following offers a critique of the modern spectacle, where political and social issues are churned through a constant feedback loop of entertainment and distraction while preventing real change or accountability. It underscores a system where truth is malleable and the masses remain passive participants in their own subjugation. This was a fun post to write and I may revisit it on a yearly basis to review the narrative goyslop from the prior year.

Welcome back. The wonderful Guido Preparata likens humanity to a slave-making ant colony, which I’ve covered previously. Under this perspective our upper elites (i.e. the Rothschilds and their allies, along with select international organizations who translate their orders into policy, plus the security services worldwide who enforces their dictates at the point of a gun, all in a hierarchical structure) hate and fear the masses, but they also need them.1 If the elites don’t push hard enough against the masses revolution may occur; if they push too hard, too many people may give up into Netflix, video game, porn, and drug goyslop lethargy, to the point where not enough people are productive to maintain society. They need the population working, grinding it out in economic slavery, and satisfied enough with their lot in life not to create trouble, covered previously here. They need to maintain a fine line between the two extremes, and as part of that process they release narratives to entertain and titillate the masses as they steal from them and advance their longer term agendas. Whether these narratives are true or false is irrelevant and largely unknowable; Baudrillard’s hyperreality manifested.

Our elites, despite using high-level AI behind the scenes to help them strategize, do not know to what extent their narratives will be accepted by the public, how long that acceptance will last or how the public will evolve from it. As I wrote in an older Note: “There are three competing perspectives about the nature of [our elites]: (1) it’s fully controlled from the top, (2) it’s not controlled at all, it is a blind fungus or swarm…or (3) it’s a combination…I see it as #3.” For example, regarding COVID, “[our elites] backed off of vaccine passports, ultimately, because compliance rates were not high enough; something like 80% of adult[s]…in the U.S. got the first death jab, but compliance rates on the booster were only 50%.” There is always a push-pull dance between the elites and the masses (and underlying it is the egalitarian ratchet effect); by paying attention to their narratives one feeds them and gives them power, and by withdrawing attention (not just consent, but attention) it makes it harder for our elites to maintain their control. Jobst Landgrebe argues in this interview that the elites cannot pursue a narrative if 30% of the population opts out of it, which everyone would if they understood the parasitical nature of our ruling elites.

In order to counter the democratizing of information on the internet, our elites have flooded the zone with a huge amount of garbage (in line with Cass Sunstein’s recommendation for cognitive infiltration of disfavored groups) which has blurred the lines between truth and falsehood to such an extent that no one knows what’s real anymore. As demented cretin Yuval Harari states, “Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you’re just unable to focus.” Hence, the importance of having a grounding mechanism for which to parse new information.

In this post I thought it would be fun to revisit the dead husks of recently dead, but still perhaps smoldering, narratives fed to the masses, which they’ve promptly forgotten about as they chase the new shiny thing, no lessons learned, and where no one involved in the narratives has been punished in any way. I’ve spent plenty of time in the past heaping endless scorn on the left-wing “shitlib” non-playable character “NPCs” who imbibes endless leftist propaganda against their own interests, where they trust official figures blindly regardless of the underlying evidence or coherence, but in the upcoming age of Orange Man 2.0, who I believe will be a colossal failure judging against his previous positions and campaign promises, it is the starry eyed Trump worshipper, the Trumpenprole, who carries just as much danger from the right (danger in terms of lack of adherence to principles versus cult of personality worship). Their views are wildly divorced from reality: as Academic Agent argued, “[the online right are] entirely consumed by Baudrillard’s simulation and engages almost totally in surrogate activities in lieu of real politics.” He doubled down in a recent post about right-wing “influencers”, which applies just as much to changing narratives:

Naturally, the plebian, the average internet user, the great unwashed anon, is staggeringly stupid – rightly called stupid hobbitses by Curtis Yarvin – and therefore cannot tell the difference [between genuine versus astroturfed “influencers”]. In any case, he (or, less likely, she) does not really care because this is all a strange form of postmodern entertainment to them anyway. It is a surrogate activity like watching a soap opera, so it does not really matter if their favourite e-celebrity is an astroturfed paid shill, because to them, it makes no real difference. As I said, they do not care if their ‘discourse’ is basically fake, what matters to them is that they are fed their daily dose of slop. The clowns can change, but the show must go on.

For clarity, the following is a list of public and prominent but now dead narratives with the following elements: there was (1) no official, transparent or believable inquiry into what happened, (2) no public policy changes resulting from what happened, (3) no officials were punished for negligence or intentional improper behavior, and (4) no lessons were absorbed by the public to wisen them up. It’s almost as if these events never happened at all…

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See how many you can recognize – like Pokemon, gotta catch ‘em all!

BLM

1. NFL players kneeling during National Anthem / Colin Kaepernick
2. BLM riots during COVID destroying small businesses
3. “Defunding the Police” movement and its real-world impacts
4. Black Lives Matter’s financials and leadership lack of accountability
5. Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax
6. Blacks featured in 50%+ of television advertisements despite making up ~10% of the population; replacement of staff, coaches, quarterbacks and other players with the same sort of lopsided racial quotas

Assassinations/attempts/shooters

7. Thomas Matthew Crooks / Trump assassin attempt 1 – no real investigation, almost nothing known
8. Ryan Wesley Routh / Trump assassin attempt 2 – no real investigation, almost nothing known
9. The unsolved mass shooting at Las Vegas (Stephen Paddock)
10. Luigi Mangione (in the process of being memoryholed)
11. The murder of Seth Rich
12. The murder of Jamal Khashoggi and its international fallout
13. Political assassinations in Africa and Haiti during COVID

COVID

14. The so-called dangers of COVID-19
15. Fauci’s gain-of-function research/COVID lab leak theory/Wuhan Institute of Virology and its ties to US funding
16. “Two weeks [of shutdowns] to stop the spread”
17. The duty to wear masks while standing for safety reasons but you won’t catch COVID while eating maskless sitting down
18. School closures during COVID and their long-term effects
19. COVID vaccine adverse reactions or complications
20. The widespread censorship of anti-lockdown protestors
21. The “great resignation” and post-COVID labor shortages
22. The dancing nurses
23. Children testing positive for monkeypox

Health/environment

24. E-cigarette vaping crisis and its potential long-term health risks
25. Big Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis / the Sacklers
26. The opioid settlement funds (how they were allocated and their effectiveness)
27. The dark side of “Big Pharma” marketing strategies (opioids, antidepressants, etc.)
28. Rising sea levels and the consequences of climate change on island nations
29. The Brazilian Amazon deforestation and its international consequences
30. Environmental lawsuits against Big Oil and long-term damage settlements
31. Killer bees and their spread in the U.S. (and the fear-mongering that came with it)
32. The ozone hole

Israel

33. Israel/Gaza war
34. University protests over the war
35. The self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell
36. Israel invasion of Syria
37. Israel invasion of Lebanon
38. Hezbollah “exploding pagers”
39. Jeffrey Epstein’s associates and “client list”
40. Jeffrey Epstein’s shadowy death
41. Ghislaine Maxwell trial and her connections to powerful figures
42. Tunnel Jews in NYC

Corruption

43. Hunter Biden’s laptop – “10 for the Big Guy”
44. Biden’s classified documents scandal
45. Clinton Foundation corruption
46. Hillary Clinton’s emails (and her server)
47. “Cash-for-access” scandals involving politicians (e.g., Clinton’s speaking fees)
48. Hunter Biden’s business dealings with China and Ukraine
49. Hunter Biden’s art sold for extreme amounts
50. Jared Kushner shady business dealings with Saudi Arabia and China
51. Operation Fast and Furious and its international gun-running implications
52. Sex trafficking in Hollywood and other elites / Harvey Weinstein

Big tech

53. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon monopoly practices
54. Amazon and its labor conditions (worker strikes, warehouse injuries)
55. The rise of “cancel culture” and its impacts on free speech
56. Massive data leaks from companies like Facebook/Meta
57. Big Tech censorship and its influence on elections
58. Political bias within social media and search algorithms
59. Indian takeover of Silicon Valley
60. The rise of surveillance capitalism (Facebook, Google tracking user data)
61. The rise of autonomous vehicles and their potential dangers (e.g., Uber’s fatal crash)
62. The impact of artificial intelligence in military and surveillance operations

Politics

63. Christine Blasey Ford and the Kavanaugh rape allegations
64. Adam Schiff’s insane anti-Trump vitriol from 2017-2020
65. John Brennan’s anti-Trump vitriol until 2024
66. The Trump-Russia dossier (Steele dossier)
67. 51 former intelligence “officers” who claimed the Biden laptop was fake right before the 2020 election
68. Massive voter fraud claims (especially 2020 election)
69. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and its aftermath
70. “QAnon” conspiracy theory
71. Hillary Clinton’s role in Benghazi and its aftermath
72. Government surveillance (NSA leaks, Patriot Act concerns)
73. Media’s role in amplifying misinformation on both sides
74. The hacking of political figures’ emails (e.g., Democratic National Committee, Macron’s campaign)
75. Government contracts to develop “smart cities”
76. The role of social media influencers in shaping political opinions
77. The case of Julian Assange and the consequences for free speech

Espionage/world politics

78. The Myanmar military coup and the role of international institutions (UN, ICC)
79. The suppression of the Rohingyas in Myanmar and the Chinese Uyghurs
80. China’s social media censorship (Great Firewall, Xinjiang camps)
81. Imran Awan Congress scandal spying for Pakistan
82. Russian interference in 2016 election (and its ongoing investigation)
83. Fentanyl trafficking by Chinese nationals through Mexico
84. Trudeau invoking the Emergency Powers Act during COVID
85. China’s espionage on U.S. soil (e.g. Swalwell mistress, Senator Feinstein’s driver)
86. China’s “social credit system” and its implications
87. The US’s involvement in overthrowing foreign governments (e.g., Libya, Syria)
88. The rise of “authoritarian” leadership in Hungary and Poland
89. The mysterious deaths of Russian oligarchs and connections to the Kremlin
90. Crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo (mineral exploitation and violence)
91. The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan and its implications for human rights
92. The trade war between the U.S. and China
93. Hacking of the U.S. power grid (e.g., Russian interference in energy infrastructure)

Immigration

94. Antiwhite rape gangs in Britain and it’s coverup
95. Endless open borders immigration into Europe from Africa
96. Illegal immigration and cartel involvement
97. Migrant caravans moving through Central America to the U.S.
98. Elon Musk’s push for H1b enlargement
99. CIA/Homeland Security/governmental role in facilitating open southern border
100. Lack of border wall

“Accidents”

101. Palestine, Ohio toxic chemical spell derailment
102. Giant Hawaii fire that killed hundreds
103. Disappearance of MH370 (Malaysia Airlines flight)
104. The 2019 Notre Dame fire and subsequent lack of investigation into the cause
105. The strange case of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 (shot down over Ukraine)

Transsexualism

106. Transgender athletes in women’s sports
107. Transgender bathrooms at Target / Target boycott
108. Bud Light trans controversy
109. 2023 Nashville school shooting by transgendered person

Strange stories

110. Haitians eating cats in Ohio
111. The “Karen” phenomenon in viral videos
112. The military’s unexplained UFO sightings (Pentagon reports)
113. The ethical concerns surrounding gene editing (CRISPR, designer babies)

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Conclusions

Our upper elites are constantly managing the tension between exploiting the public and preventing unrest. The narrative-driven distractions they use are essential to maintaining control, and the public’s indifference to the truth makes them complicit, willingly feeding into a cycle of forgetfulness and manipulation. At its core, our elites engineer narratives — whether true or false — to keep society distracted and docile, using media and technology as tools of control. The rapid turnover of “shiny new things” prevents the public from reflecting on past scandals or understanding the bigger picture, while also ensuring that no meaningful accountability is ever achieved. As κρῠπτός explains,

Even though driven by the deeper currents of pre-propaganda, propaganda really begins with the news, with current events. The idea is to get the public trained to be sensitive to the latest events, to want to be constantly catching up on the current thing that is in the news.

What the news does is that it creates a perpetual present. Stories cross in and out of one’s attention. Before this item of news is digested, it is pushed aside by some new event. Your mind never has time to rest, to process this constant stream of reports and integrate them into a larger cohesive whole, to give them shape or meaning. They just come, one after the other, in a constant stream….

Whether it is a newspaper, the radio, the television, your Facebook or Twitter feed, the effect is similar….

There is immense social pressure to always be up on the latest news, whether that is in politics, sports or entertainment, whatever is valued by one’s social circles. This is itself an expression of the mythic structure of western society that we discussed in the last piece. History is supposed to unfold in endless progress. This sets up a society wide attention bias upon what is new as opposed to what is old. There is a hunger for what is new and novel. The traditional, the old is forgotten. One of the functions of the news is that is destroys our connection with the past, with tradition, with that which has been passed onto us. Why tell the old stories again when there is the news demanding your attention. And so, you now just float, bobbing and weaving, driven by a constant stream of news. You have forgotten the past and there is no future, there is just the present moment, happening now, that demands attention now. A man such as this is no longer grounded in anything. He has no continuity of existence. There is nothing to anchor him. He is now the ready target for propaganda. In this environment the idea of an objective reality or that truth is anchored in facts is meaningless.

“What makes it news is its dissemination, not its objective reality.”

Meanwhile, as these hyperreal narratives jump from one to the next, there are deeper, and far more nefarious, elite objectives at play. As I wrote awhile back on Notes,

The system of [international central bank] financial parasitism only works so long as there is a host to consume, and the host, as everyone can see (white western civilization) is dying. Unlimited economic growth is also impossible in a world of finite natural resources and a greatly expanding world population as it hits up against neo-Malthusian limits.

The central bank parasitical system is inherently unstable because it relies on constantly fooling the masses using endless fake media narratives in order to maintain their power. But over time the masses start waking up a bit (see Trump 2016) and it becomes harder and harder to maintain the illusion.

The elites must always be striving toward something, some far-off end goal, in order to keep their coalition together. Without such an end goal they will end up squabbling among themselves and the project falls apart.

The goal: They want a more stable system where they don’t have to worry about the opinion of the masses and their rule will not be subject to being overthrown. In other words, their ultimate objective is not money, but control. Money is easy to create out of thin air if they have control.

When one puts together the contradictions and instability of the system – both via increased populism and via decreased worldwide natural resources, the necessity of elite consensus, and the far-off goal keeping the elites together, and it necessarily requires a radically different system than what we currently have. It requires the physical extermination of those groups with higher IQs who would balk at this system and it requires a much lower worldwide population.

To compare where we are today with where we were politically a decade ago represents a stark difference. When Trump unexpectedly won the presidency in 2016, the so-called “deep state” and their higher level financial owners panicked. The “alt-right” populist movement surged, and there was a real energy in the air for a little bit of dynamism, of danger, of possibility for meaningful change; do you feel even slightly the same energy in the air now? It is a very clear and stark no: Trump has been absorbed, they no longer fear him or his followers who have been destroyed and cast to the winds, with it’s leadership replaced by astroturfed guys like CIA affiliate or agent Tucker Carlson, skin-suited Joe Rogan, retard Don Jr., squished prole face J.D. Vance, homosexual, hypocritical deviant Peter Thiel and “dark elf” Curtis Yarvin. We are a world away from the 2017 energy and possibilities. But the trends also show how much Baudrillard’s hyperreality has softened the opposition to our elites; violence in the West in the modern era is highly performative. As Ross Barkan wrote pre-election,

Not long ago, I speculated on whether a Trump victory could trigger another great “awokening” in the United States. This refers to the period, from 2016 through 2020, when social justice politics were most in vogue, the anti-Trump resistance was at its height, and identity concerns, often shallow, were fretted over most. It was the peak of performative radicalism. Unlike the 1960s, the 2010s and 2020 did little to inculcate genuine radicalism, except perhaps on the far-right when it came to the deluded Trumpists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. There were no neo-Weathermen, no neo-Black Panthers, nothing like the domestic terrorism that flared up in the nation in the late 1960s and 1970s. No one was blowing up government buildings or plotting violent kidnappings. The right-wing, too, lacked the ferocity of groups like the Minutemen, which may have produced the Zodiac killer. Antifa, with its call for punching Nazis, was a frail echo, at best, of the Maoists, Marxists, and Black separatists who mobilized a half century ago.

When one looks at January 6 or Charlottesville, where one person died at each, and the subsequent crackdown by the elites, it took them only minimal physical effort, and instead a giant reliance on manufacturing the hyperreality of the event, blowing them way out of proportion in the media, in order to reach their desired goals. Compare that to the early Soviet Union which required imprisoning and murdering millions of people to effectuate their desired goals. Technological development both makes the elite more secure in their positions, and also results in much less physical violence.

I hope this has been an interesting exercise for you in the nature of our elite’s cycling narrative propaganda, and that the best way to fight it is both to tune out of it and to assist others in recognizing the process so that they tune out as well.

Thanks for reading.

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1 At least historically, and for now, although labor has been consistently devalued with technology development; we’ll see how things develop with AI.

This is a post about the simulated nature of modern political reality, especially involving war.

“All those journalists who set themselves up as bearers of the universal conscience, all those presenters who set themselves up as strategists, all the while overwhelming us with a flood of useless images. Emotional blackmail by massacre, fraud. Instead of discussing the threshold of social tolerance for immigration we would do better to discuss the threshold of mental tolerance for information. With regard to the latter, we can say that it was deliberately crossed.” – Jean Baudrillard

I recently re-watched Wag the Dog (1997) after a couple decades, which I reviewed here (along with some scenes from the dreadful The West Wing as a counterpoint). In the film black operatives concoct a fake war to distract from the president’s sex scandal at the peak of election season. Their media allies build an entire narrative out of thin air, creating a closed feedback loop and snowball effect between media-government-spook state to achieve the desired result. It was a powerful film with an important dissident message, and real life events shortly thereafter mimicked it when Bill Clinton distracted from his own sex scandal by bombing Afghanistan and Sudan. The Atlantic summed up the film’s message well in it’s review:

It’s a common trope in films and shows about politics: the one person, standing up to the Hollywood-produced machinery of Washington. The individual, fighting for authenticity in a political culture that wants nothing more than to be fake. What Wag the Dog suggests, though, is something both gentler and infinitely more cynical: Here, there is no one to push back. Here, there is no one to stand up for authenticity or truth or the empowerment of the individual. Here, it’s all a production; we citizens double as audiences. And the thing of it is that, in the movie’s dark vision, there is no difference between the two.

To me, the film raised the questions: is there a limit to elite propaganda? Does it have to be based in reality at all, especially in the modern era? Under what circumstances does it need to be based in reality, or at least to adjust itself to feedback received from the audience/masses? It’s a really interesting question and one worth exploring.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) explored this question in his short book the gulf war did not take place (1991). The book is stupidly expensive ($30.00 on Amazon) even though it clocks in at less than a hundred pages, apparently because it had a limited print run, although there are lots of free versions online such as here. I found it to be poorly written and poorly argued, meandering, unstructured and disjointed (to which Dr. Monzo agrees) in a typical French style. I also tried reading his travelogue America (1986) but it was even more poorly written and essentially unreadable dreck, although I gave it a fair chance. Regardless, the particular ideas he explores in gulf war are worth commenting on.

Baudrillard is most well known for his Simulacra and Simulation (1981) where he introduced the ideas that he would later explore in the gulf war and which inspired The Matrix. It was better than America but worse than gulf war1; THE LETHAL TEXT liked it better than I did. In the book Baudrillard referenced the term simulacrum, where in his formulation there are four stages of reality: (1) basic reflection of reality; (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretense of reality (i.e. masking that there is no reality); and (4) simulacrum, which “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever” which is also known as hyperreality. This is an example of what he means by the four stages:

Baudrillard associates each of those distortions of reality with periods of increasing technical sophistication:

1. Stage one and two: Associated with the premodern period, it’s representation is an artificial placemarker for the real item. The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as real and signification gropes towards this reality.
2. Stage three: Associated with the modernity of the Industrial Revolution where distinctions between representation and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities. The commodity’s ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the authority of the original version, because the copy is just as “real” as its prototype.
3. Stage four: Associated with the postmodernity of late capitalism where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulation, and originality becomes a totally meaningless concept.

We are currently deeply enmeshed in Baudrillard’s conception of stage four and can see it’s manifestation in all sorts of ways. In all of the following cases the relationship between the underlying event, if one even exists, and the hyperreality created are entirely different things: the created hyperreality both supplants actual reality and then morphs actual reality into something totally different. Examples can be seen in advertising (the Bud Light tranny controversy comes to mind), in media narratives which are deployed for political purposes and then vanish once their use is over (Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting Ben Rhodes bragged about this2), after 9/11 where we stayed in Afghanistan for twenty years to wash money out of the U.S. taxpayer basis back into the hands of the transnational security elite and to control the world’s heroin production while invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam even though he had nothing to do with it, in the COVID narrative where the entire hysteria around it was concocted for political reasons and then discarded (including the creepy dancing fake nurses), in the stock market which is held up by unlimited Federal Reserve monetary printing despite it no longer bearing any relation between profitability and stock market prices. We can even see it in the establishment’s reaction to the 1/6 protests which was called an attempt to overthrow the government even though it was FBI-led and initiated (and they had a fake bomb plot as a backup in case it didn’t work), no one died other than a protester, Ashley Babbitt, no weapons were involved, and there was no way to transition a protest at the capitol into seizing political power. In this sense, Baudrillard argues, we live in a hyperreality which results from the fusion of the virtual and the real into a third order of reality. As Baudrillard argues in his article on the 1989 Romanian revolution, the indignant attempt to maintain a moral defense against the principle of simulation which governs all forms of representation misses the point: “The image and information are subject to no principle of truth or reality.” What matters to our elites is controlling the production and interpretation of information in a given context. The MAGA right unfortunately seem to totally fail to understand this point and engage with the simulation on it’s own terms, per Academic Agent where he argues that “[the online right are] entirely consumed by Baudrillard’s simulation and engages almost totally in surrogate activities in lieu of real politics.”

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The Gulf War did not take place

This also happened during the Gulf War, which was perhaps the first full manifestation of a created hyperreality during war. While prior wars were heavily manipulated and controlled – I think of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Vietnam war in general, or FDR’s foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor (which he pushed Japan into by cutting off their access to oil) – but the Gulf War was the first war which allowed the instantaneous media-government-spook state feedback mechanisms that allowed for hyperreality to manifest itself:

It was not the first time that images of war had appeared on TV screens, but it was the first time that they were relayed “live” from the battlefront. It was not the first occasion on which the military censored what could be reported, but it did involve a new level of military control of reportage and images. Military planners had clearly learnt a great deal since Vietnam: procedures for controlling the media were developed and tested in the Falklands, Grenada and Panama. As a result, what we saw was for the most part a “clean” war, with lots of pictures of weaponry, including the amazing footage from the nose-cameras of “smart bombs,” and relatively few images of human casualties, none from the Allied forces. In the words of one commentator, for the first time, “the power to create a crisis merges with the power to direct the movie about it…Desert Storm was the first major global media crisis orchestration that made instant history.”

Here, it was not a war at all: Saddam was tricked into invading Kuwait by the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie (the above L.A. Times article hints at the confusion and fog-of-war around the underlying incident, which should tell you all you need to know about the actual reality), Iraq had no ability to fight against the vastly technologically superior air forces of the United States, and the U.S. killed up to 100,000 people without suffering almost any casualties of their own – in other words, it was a one sided massacre initiated by the United States! Yet it was called a “war” and hyped up as a “war” despite having nothing to do with the underlying reality. Then the U.S. stood idly by as Saddam brutally crushed incipient rebellions by the Shia and Kurds under his rule and re-established his control – what kind of war was this exactly? “State-of-the-art military power is now virtual in the sense that it is deployed in an abstract, electronic and informational space, and in the sense that its primary mechanism is no longer the use of force. Virtual war is therefore not simply the image or imaginary representation of real war, but a qualitatively different kind of war, the effects of which include the suppression of war in the old sense.” And:

The most widespread belief is in a logical progression from virtual to actual, according to which no available weapon will not one day be used and such a concentration of force cannot but lead to conflict. However, this is an Aristotelian logic which is no longer our own. Our virtual has definitively overtaken the actual and we must be content with this extreme virtuality which, unlike the Aristotelian, deters any passage to action. We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual.

Here, the progress of the hyperreal war is measured not by objective war achievements but by it’s ability to hold the public’s attention, to draw ratings:

The media promote the war, the war promotes the media, and advertising competes with the war. Promotion is the most thick-skinned parasite in our culture. It would undoubtedly survive a nuclear conflict. It is our Last Judgment. But it is also like a biological function: it devours our substance, but it also allows us to metabolize what we absorb, like a parasitic plant or intestinal flora, it allows us to turn the world and the violence of the world into a consumable substance. So, war or promotion?

The war, along with the fake and presumptive warriors, generals, experts and television presenters we see speculating about it all through the day, watches itself in a mirror: am I pretty enough, am I operational enough, am I spectacular enough, am I sophisticated enough to make an entry onto the historical stage?….

In the absence of the (greatly diminished) will to power, and the (problematic) will to knowledge, there remains today the widespread will to spectacle, and with it the obstinate desire to preserve its spectre or fiction.

The purpose of the spectre is to produce “consensus by flat encephalogram. The complement of the unconditional simulacrum in the field is to train everyone in the unconditional reception of broadcast simulacra. Abolish any intelligence of the event. The result is a suffocating atmosphere of deception and stupidity. And if people are vaguely aware of being caught up in this appeasement and this disillusion by images, they swallow the deception and remain fascinated by the evidence of the montage of this war with which we are inoculated everywhere: through the eyes, the senses and in discourse.” We are ultimately responsible for this as we desire it, we demand it: “We have neither need of nor the taste for real drama or real war. What we require is the aphrodisiac spice of the multiplication of fakes and the hallucination of violence, for we have a hallucinogenic pleasure in all things, which, as in the case of drugs, is also the pleasure in our indifference and our irresponsibility and thus in our true liberty. Here is the supreme form of democracy. Through it our definitive retreat from the world takes shape.”

Baudrillard maintains that we do not have the objective information necessary to assess what information the media provides us is real or false even if we wanted to. Therefore, a default high level of suspicion toward any information is appropriate:

The author of The Persian Gulf TV War, Douglas Kellner, recounts his herculean efforts to obtain and cross-check information about the Gulf War. Despite this, his book opens with an admission of failure: he cannot decide conclusively for or against the conspiracy theory according to which the US enticed Iraq to invade Kuwait since “other accounts are also plausible.” It is the desire to avoid this kind of informational aporia which lies behind Baudrillard’s injunction: “Resist the probability of any image or information whatever. Be more virtual than the events themselves, do not seek to re-establish the truth, we do not have the means, but do not be duped, and to that end re-immerse the war and all information in the virtuality from whence they came…Be meteorologically sensitive to stupidity.” Not only does the real vanish in the virtual through an excess of information, it leaves an archival deposit such that “generations of video-zombies…will never cease reconstituting the event.”…Indeed, the tone and argument of Baudrillard’s essays is entirely directed against the complicity which results from the failure to question the reality and the nature of these events.

This goes back to the importance of having a grounding mechanism by which one can ascertain truth even in light of massive disinformation and propaganda. There are at least two such mechanisms: (1) the scientific method where results can be repeated by third parties and (2) using recursive predictions to gradually refine and update one’s view of the world; the more one is proven wrong about predictions, the more one should refine one’s worldview. This is my preferred approach. Through trial and error, making a fool of oneself, one may achieve clarification about why and how this world actually operates – one will never achieve total understanding or predictive ability, of course; there is always room to grow, but one can get much closer to the truth using this method than one might get otherwise. This is complicated by the fact that paradoxically the more information we receive, the greater the corresponding loss of meaning associated with it.

Clausewitz famously said “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means” but here, simulated war is the politics of persuasion by other means. Who/what was the target? According to Baudrillard it was not Saddam, ultimately, but Islam itself:

The use of force remains carefully circumscribed, a lever of last resort employed only to the extent that is necessary to bring the recalcitrant party into line. The crucial stake in the Gulf affair, Baudrillard argues, was the subordination of Islam to the global order [later continued with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq under George W. Bush]: “Our wars thus have less to do with the confrontation of warriors than with the domestication of the refractory forces on the planet…All that is singular and irreducible must be reduced and absorbed. This is the law of democracy and the New World Order.”

There are other but complimentary ways of looking at our elite’s control mechanisms: Rurik Skywalker discusses the Wallerstein theory of geopolitics here where the third world acts basically as slaves and provides the first world with products and natural resources for consumption, and Julian Assange’s perspective that the third world goes through a three phase process of integration into the global world order, which I will cover in a separate post:

1. Install a strongman who will supervise the implementation of a security state to suppress populism,
2. Develop industry within the nation to assist in suppressing economic unrest further, and
3. Transition from/overthrow the strongman so the country can be controlled via neoliberal debt practices.

The speed of transition from one step to the next depends on the particular characteristics of each nation, and sometimes there are failed transition attempts (such as Egypt reverting to El Sisi after our elites overthrew Mubarak and installed the Muslim Brotherhood). Because dictators do not understand how this process works, they are surprised when their former benefactors viciously turn on them and destroy them: Saddam, who was backed by the West for many decades to fight Iran, was very surprised to be given the green light to invade Kuwait by the U.S. and then backstabbed.

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The Ukraine War did not take place

This brings us around to the Ukraine war. I’ve covered it twice before in May 2023 and February 2024 and I think they hold up quite well if you decide to read them, but basically it is a perfect example of Baudrillard’s conception of hyperreality, touched on briefly in this UnHerd post. The real objectives of the war are nothing like the official explanations for it, and the information allowed out of the conflict zone has been and remains tightly constricted on both sides. There are basically no reporters allowed in the area and our elites murdered Gonzalo Lira (whose understanding was lousy) for even trying to report from Kharkiv. There’s a bunch of gore porn released of drones murdering hapless Russian soldiers, but other than that the information released is incredibly propagandized and distorted. Some of the best information which Rurik Skywalker covered was from Prigozhin, the head of the Russian mercenary outfit Wagner, who complained that the Ministry of Defense was sending his soldiers to die in frontal assaults against heavily fortified positions without sufficient artillery or other support, until he too was murdered, and also from the Russian patriot Igor Strelkov, who was thrown in prison for asking razor-sharp questions about the nature of the war on a nonsensical pretext. Now very little information that isn’t approved by either Russia (where Putin is a globohomo lackey) or from the West reaches the public. Have any of you guys following Simplicius gotten tired of the ridiculous hopium coverage promising Russian victory at-any-moment even as the war drags to year four and even as Ukraine has invaded Russia and is utilizing state-of-the-art Western arms after breaching Russia’s fifteenth or whatever red line with no response? Baudrillard is directly on point about the pundits on both sides:

While one fraction of the intellectuals and politicians, specialists in the reserve army of mental labour, are whole-heartedly in favor of the war, and another fraction are against it from the bottom of their hearts, but for reasons no less disturbing, all are agreed on one point: this war exists, we have seen it. There is no interrogation into the event itself or its reality; or into the fraudulence of this war, the programmed and always delayed illusion of battle; or into the machination of this war and its amplification by information, not to mention the improbable orgy of material, the systemic manipulation of data, the artificial dramatisation…If we do not have practical intelligence about the war (and none among us has), at least let us have a skeptical intelligence toward it, without renouncing the pathetic feeling of its absurdity.

But there is more than one kind of absurdity: that of the massacre and that of being caught up in the illusion of massacre. It is just as in La Fontaine’s fable: the day there is a real war you will not even be able to tell the difference. The real victory of the simulators of war is to have drawn everyone into this rotten simulation.

As Rurik’s tagline states, “The wars are fake, but the massacres are real.” Our elites own both Russia and the West, and it has multiple goals for the Ukraine war none of which are publicly acknowledged.3 We can see, then, that the media information provided in this “war” is heavily managed and controlled, and the propaganda fed to the public has very little or nothing to do with the underlying reality, which is meant as a winless grind-fest to maximize casualty rates on both sides. Welcome to hyperreality.

I hope that you’ve found this post helpful as you navigate trying to determine what is real and what is fake. I suggest you adopt a grounding mechanism if you don’t have one already – my recommendation is recursive prediction – because without one you will be forever blowing in the winds of whatever fake elite narratives they decide to throw at you.

To end on a positive note, as Baudrillard wrote, “the more the hegemony of the global consensus is reinforced, the greater the risk, or the chances, of its collapse.”

Thanks for reading.

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1 I got carried away with the concept of hyperreality when I came across it and bought three of Baudrillard’s books at the same time, which in retrospect I regret because he’s such a terrible writer. Dr. Monzo argues that he was writing in the style he was describing. HamburgerToday believes that Baudrillard’s style is “counter-seductive.”

2 Rhodes gave a rare look into the process of creating media echo chambers to further policy goals, bragging about how adept the administration was in building a circular reporting echo chamber to increase support for the 2007 Iranian nuclear deal: 

“We created an echo chamber. They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,” he admitted in the Times interview when asked about the plethora of “experts” praising the deal in the press. The Times article, which will appear in the paper’s Sunday magazine, notes Rhodes, who has a writing degree from NYU, was skilled as a “storyteller.” “He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials,” reporter David Samuels writes. “He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives.” 

Asked about his misleading version of the deal, Rhodes said, “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like [the anti-nuke group] Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked. We drove them crazy,” he said of Republicans and others who opposed the deal, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Rhodes bashed the media for not properly reporting on foreign affairs and revealed how he fed information to reporters such as Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, a respected “Beltway insider,” as the Times called him. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” Rhodes’ assistant, Ned Price, gave an example of how they would shape the news by feeding a narrative to their “compadres” in the press corps and letting it echo across social media. “I’ll give them some color,” Price said, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”

3 These goals include emptying out the Slavlands and genociding white Christian slavs on both sides, being able to test new weapons of war technologies, using Ukraine as a way to wash many hundreds of billions of dollars out of the U.S. taxpayer basis back into the hands of the transnational security elite, and possibly betraying Putin in accordance with Assange’s three phase process of integration described above in order to be able to more directly exploit Russia’s trillions of dollars worth of natural resources. I go into these reasons in my prior posts above.