This post reviews my 2025 political and cultural predictions before laying out updated predictions for 2026. More fundamentally, it documents a shift in my underlying worldview away from high-frequency culture-war engagement and toward an Abraxas god-image that treats the escalating horrors, contradictions, and predations of modernity as structurally intelligible rather than anomalous. The piece uses prediction as a grounding discipline rather than a performative exercise, situating politics, economics, censorship, and geopolitics within a broader metaphysical frame concerned with individuation, psychic endurance, and clarity under conditions of accelerating neoliberal feudalism.

Welcome back, and happy upcoming New Year.

This post is a review of my 2025 political and culture predictions – what was accurate, what was not, and how I have updated my worldview in light of inaccurate predictions as part of my recursive honing of worldview, as well as offering my 2026 predictions. The way my perspective works is that I make predictions about the future and, to the extent they are wrong, I update my worldview to better account for the inaccuracies. This process serves as a grounding mechanism, and using one, whether this method or others (such as to test one’s metaphysics against phenomenological living, as I also do) is critical to keep one’s views tethered to reality. I expect this yearly tradition to continue for as long as I blog. However, my politics and culture war tracking is now down 90-95%+ from prior levels; instead of being triggered and horrified at the endless lies, hypocrisy, and predation in this realm, I have come to see it merely as a reflection of a God image of Abraxas, the horrifying synthesis of all good and all evil, combined, where he wants to experience the lived, split opposites in order to add to his horrifying totality, no matter how good or how bad things are – he is indifferent. I am increasingly writing not to persuade others but to write to those few who find resonance within the phenomenological, lived reality of the crucifixion of opposites. Still, it is somewhat helpful to continue to track these social/economic developments to make sure that I stay grounded as much as possible.

Credit for this tradition goes to Zman (RIP – covered here), who would do yearly posts reviewing his prior predictions and making new ones for the year ahead. I thought about doing a post covering his 2025 predictions and reviewing them, but I’ll review them in a footnote instead. Before doing so, I want to comment on how horrifying life is: here’s a guy who did a post a day five or six days a week since at least 2013, it was his baby, his pride and joy, and yet pretty much right after his death he’s been almost completely forgotten. Such is life, though, no? He would be remembered if he had a family, participated in his community, was well connected among the elites, perhaps – but he was kind of a loner, doing it out of passion, and the world simply didn’t care. This is why focusing on a life of wholeness, having a complete pie-of-life is important, although ultimately everyone is forgotten: even Plato will be forgotten at some point, so how long we are remembered is not a great metric. Rather, one may see the work that we do as intrinsically valuable, that it enriches the soul in some unquantifiable and hopefully immortal capacity, as Ernst Junger argued.1

Regarding Zman’s 2025 predictions, follow this footnote if you want to review them.2 Overall his predictions were a mixed bag, but he didn’t use his format to update his worldview recursively the way I did – he was stuck in a paleocon, racialist geopolitik “realism”’ model that had sporadic and inconsistent predictive capacity about future events.

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Review of 2025 Predictions

Circling back to my 2025 predictions, let’s review them and see how they held up.

1. Inflation: Real inflation is likely to stay around or above 20% annually. The high national debt and deficit leave the Fed with limited options: raising rates would lead to a market crash, while lowering them would further exacerbate inflation. The debt to GDP ratio is at an all-time high. Trump wants to lower taxes and he can’t cut enough government waste even with DOGE and tariffs – the vast majority of government spending is entitlement spending (Medicair, Medicaid, Social Security) and defense spending, and Trump will not be able to touch any of those. As such, people’s quality of living will continue to massively decrease. I would not be surprised if the fake economy numbers painting a rosy picture were revised downwards in order to give Trump political trouble.
   1. Directionally aligned but materially fuzzy – the Fed has limited options and hasn’t budged rates much at all in the past year, government waste was not cut, people’s quality of life continues to decrease. The 20% was a heuristic and the cost of living increases, especially pertaining to food, insurance, clothing, etc., have been very high. This wasn’t much of a prediction, to be fair.
2. Deficit: The deficit will remain massive no matter what Trump or Musk does.
   1. Accurate.
3. Immigration: Trump’s immigration expulsions will be a failure. Attempting to go hard on expulsions will galvanize the left and lawfare, many RINOs won’t go along with it, while all he would have to do is withdraw financial support from the illegals (they live in the country in free housing and receive debit cards with many thousands of dollars on them), criminally punish employers who hire them (laws already on the books!) and offer illegals one way ticket homes and mass emigration could be carried out humanely and cheaply.
   1. Accurate, a lack of non-performative immigration enforcement. Yes, the number of new illegals have dried up, but the number of deportations have been very low and the administration’s heavy-handed approach has intentionally galvanized widespread opposition.
4. Immigration continued: Expect Trump/Musk his tech supporters to dramatically expand legal immigration.
   1. This hasn’t happened, but it also hasn’t decreased – the H1b flood continues.
5. Censorship: As part of the flip to dramatically expanded legal immigration as well as other nefarious “counter elite” priorities expect to see censorship wrapped up massively against the right on Twitter.
   1. The elites have focused on the ADL’s “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach”, shadow banning and other throttling tactics as a temporary approach, but the censorship policies under a false “protect the children” requiring biometric age verification are around the corner. They have been rolled out in the UK and Australia in 2025 and will be coming here soon enough. I rate this as inaccurate for 2025 but still very much on the agenda.
6. Censorship continued: Anti-free speech measures under the guise of public safety will be passed, but with the real intent of preventing populist messaging on the internet, much like Australia just passed under the false guise of protecting minors.
   1. We’re seeing this rolled out in the UK, Germany and other countries now, and I still think it’s coming here in the U.S. shortly.
7. Anti-semitism: Just like last year’s prediction, anti-semitism will continue to grow even as the ADL forces its blackmailed politicians to eviscerate the First Amendment with anti-free speech laws.
   1. Anti-semitism increases in a controlled fashion fairly consistently now, giving rise to Charlie Kirk’s aborted turn on Israel, Candace Owens, and the Nick Fuentes phenomenon. Keep in mind Owens/Fuentes and other such discussion is being allowed on Jewish owned platforms (YouTube is owned by Google), which should be useful in understanding that it is being allowed and encouraged on these platforms – and then the next question is why?
8. Palantir: Palantir will dramatically expand it’s spying operations on American citizens on behalf of the U.S. government, which is their core function.
   1. This seems to be happening behind the scenes, reflected in an unjustifiable, bubble-tier stock market valuation.
9. Election reform: There will be no meaningful election law reform with respect to vote-by-mail fraud, ballot harvesting fraud, electronic voting machine fraud or direct ballot stuffing fraud. Even though the upper elites let Trump win this time, they will maintain this current structure so they can simply decide elections moving forward.
   1. Accurate.
10. Rule by hard power: Right wing populist movements will continue to be crushed as the West continues it’s transition from a managed model via propaganda and election “influencing” to a formal boots-on-face model. This is a process that will not resolve in a year but we will continue to see further steps in this direction.
    1. Semi-accurate; our elites have not yet resorted to hard power, but right wing populism as “MAGA” is at its lowest level of support ever.
11. Populist rage to increase: At the same time, populist rage against the elites will intensify – much like the public’s reaction to Mangione’s assassination of the UHC CEO, the dynamic will shift to an extent from Republican vs. Democrat to populist vs. elitist (and Trump/Musk, despite put in place to redirect populism into ineffective ends, will have trouble managing it).
    1. This prediction was inaccurate; the public’s collective mind seems to have been broken into confusion, paralysis and despair instead of rage.
12. Corralled dissent: Our elites will try to bring back a form of Q-level Trust the Plan/Operation Trust via the curated “counter-elite” BAP/Moldbug/Thiel/HP Lovecraft network and their associates but it won’t work very well this time; disenchantment with Trump is already growing on the right.
    1. This is what they’re trying to do with Owens, Fuentes, and Carlson, but I don’t think it’s working so well. The grim reality of things constantly getting worse materially and socially is overwhelming the attempt to corral stable coalitions, which are fractured and depressed instead, which the elites are also okay with.
13. Major negative events incoming: I expect at least one of the following to occur over the next four years and Trump will be blamed for it: war with Iran (or a CIA-initiated internal “rebellion” against it to overthrow it), World War 3, civil war and/or a stock market crash.
    1. War with Iran happened, although it didn’t result in Iranian leadership overthrow. I expect us to revisit these events.
14. Trump as a “peace president”: Trump will not be known as a “peace president” by the end of his second term, if he survives it. One of the things he agreed to behind closed doors to be allowed to win the entirely elite-controlled 2024 election was to turn warmonger, and everyone in his cabinet is a Zionist neocon.
    1. Accurate, he’s known as a warmongering puppet now. He had developed a reputation in his first term as a “peace president” (even though he bombed Syria and assassinated Iranian officials), which is now out the window.
15. Greater Israel: The Greater Israel project will continue at lightning speed…Israel will annex the West Bank and Trump will formally recognize it. The Gaza population will be permanently ethnically cleansed from at minimum north Gaza although there will likely be successful attempts to expel Gaza’s population elsewhere, probably into the West.
    1. The project continues rapidly between the Gaza ethnic cleanse, seizure of parts of southern Lebanon and much of Syria. This trend will continue.
16. Stock market: The stock market a year from now will likely be significantly lower than it is today, in line with this Note.
    1. This was wrong, and I’ll discuss it further in my 2026 predictions.
17. Crypto: The CIA/NSA plan to backstop the horrific, flimsy and obvious Tether scam (discussed here) with public funding will likely be successful based on Trump’s personnel decisions such as Howard Lutnick. It seems that under this scenario that crypto prices will continue to do well.
    1. This was accurate. Crypto has metastasized like a cancer (where even pension funds have invested in it) to the point it will likely be backstopped by the public in the event of price collapse.
18. CBDC: CBDC implementation will continue apace both in the U.S. and worldwide. This is/will be horrific as discussed in my post about the digital panopticon.
    1. Yes, and it’s being rolled out in Europe now – U.S. to follow, although it will be in the false form of a couple of different “stablecoins” here, mimicking in spirit the tactics used a century ago to enact the Federal Reserve.3
19. Populist legislation: As the Senate is 53-47 Republican but only 15 or so of those Republicans are even quasi-MAGA (previously discussed here), Trump will not be able to pass meaningful populist legislation. Again, there may be some weak figleaves like some minor funding to build some portion of the southern wall, but nothing major. Tax cuts for the ultra rich will pass.
    1. Accurate.
20. Ukraine: Either Trump does not stop the Ukraine war which may escalate further, or if he does it will be as a temporary measure and major loss to Russia with NATO right on Russia’s doorstep and the next round of fighting around the corner.”
    1. Accurate.
21. The dissident right will sour on Trump while the left/centrists warm to him: The dissident right will sour on Trump and grow more blackpilled as he implements whatever backroom deal he worked out with the upper elites, with a silver lining that it is necessary pain to lead to increased spiritual depth. Elites will attempt to funnel that dissatisfaction into the BAP/Moldbug/Zero HP Lovecraft “counter-elite” network as they have been successfully doing, but those tactics will be less effective over time. Normal lower-information MAGA Republicans will be torn and confused – inflation will continue to make them poorer which they will desperately try to shift blame away from Trump, but at the same time our elites will continue to back off of DEI and in-your-face race baiting in the hopes of luring these suckers to buy back into the system they were growing weary of and especially rejoin the military to go get their legs blown off in another Middle East war. It is possible that liberal and “moderate” voters continue to warm to skin-suited Trump.
    1. Accurate insofar as the right has soured on Trump and the left/centrists have not been nearly as bloodthirsty against him as they were in his first term.
22. Race-blind policies: Trump will continue to pivot toward race-blind policies, going for a big tent strategy appealing to blacks, hispanics, and homosexuals with whites ignored and Jews emphasized and promoted.
    1. Accurate, with some tiny astroturfed figleafs like trying to help white South Africans flee their country (I don’t think there has been follow through on this).
23. Gold/silver: Gold and silver prices will continue to rise longterm (perhaps not in 2025).
    1. Accurate.
24. No justice: There will be no justice brought against Fauci or the other COVID perpetrators in part because that would make Operation Warp Speed head Trump look bad.
    1. Accurate.
25. Musk: Despite not being a big fan of his….he will continue to lead a charmed life, which will last the rest of his life.
    1. Accurate. He’s become a culture warrior polarizer, but other than that it’s easy street for him – he just received a $1 trillion pay package from Tesla.
26. Greater bloc integration (added 12/29): There has already been some chatter of the U.S. integrating/absorbing Canada (see here and here). This seems silly on it’s face, yet there is more to this than meets the eye, as long-term trends point toward future consolidation along the lines of Orwellian continental blocs.
    1. This hasn’t happened, at least not yet, it was silly culture war slop. But there may be a push for larger scale integration blocs in the future (I am ambivalent).
27. Unprecedented, blatant corruption (added 1/20): Part of Trump’s caving behind closed doors to the international elite requires them to make him much richer than he currently is. We can see this with the extreme corruption involved with Trumpcoin, unveiled two days before his inauguration, explained here, and Bezos’s $40 million bribe to Trump regarding a stupid Melania documentary, explained here. This is just the start and it’s going to both get much worse and be completely shoved in the public’s faces, with no consequences.
    1. Accurate.

Overall my predictions were strong, although I did miss some events like the Charlie Kirk assassination (which is still quite bizarre) and my call for the stock market to decrease was wrong. I don’t think I need to update my worldview much based on 2025 occurrences, although I’ll be more tentative about any stock market predictions, and I think I should weigh a bit more that the upper elites may allow a lackey to stay in power (Putin, Iranian ayatollahs) so long as they are playing ball on their agenda (CBDCs, lockdowns, heart attack jabs, open borders in Russia, toothless response to Israel from Iran, etc.), although it’s a tenuous bargain.

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2026 Predictions

There was a major update to my worldview in 2025, and not caused by wrong predictions: I’ve come to see the horrifying figure of Abraxas as a God image limit condition, where he wants to experience the split opposites of all energies in order to add to his totality, that life and especially humanity offer him the one thing he lacks – consciousness arising from navigating the agony of split opposites – and therefore from a structural level the endless horror show predation makes more sense to me now (I do not condone it). This replacement God image is in the process of restructuring all of my low and mid level beliefs, and we will see how that shapes up.

Furthermore, regarding the archonic material rulers of this world, discussed recently here and here, I’ve come to see the upper elites as tied together in Old Testament eschatology, where they are using the Old Testament as both a binding agent to prevent internal dissent and also as a blueprint for future action. Yahweh is not Abraxas – he is more of an arbitrary, demanding, controlling figure with a specific Chosen than the horrors of the unity of all good and all evil, with the differences discussed further here – but Yahweh offers a God image that licenses elite predation in a way that competing beliefs do not. Elites use Yahweh as a moral monopoly for in-group solidarity, I use Abraxas for structural intelligibility. Neither is necessarily true – they’re functional.

I discuss their long-term goals in this post, or see this Note, but basically they want to check the boxes of eschatological Torah predictions (as interpreted by the Talmud and Kabbalah) including to (1) effectuate a return of the Jewish diaspora to Israel, caused by controlled but rising anti-semitism levels, (2) cause a war between “Gog” and “Magog” (i.e. Europe/U.S. vs. China/Russia), wiping out much of humanity, which the East wins, and (3) establish Greater Israel and proclaim a “messiah” with a legal body Sanhedrin which will then rule the world using the Mark of the Beast of woke AI and CBDCs. That’s what I observe as their coordinating mythology, because it provides in-group cohesion and rationalizes asymmetric power, not because it is “intrinsically true”. Whether they “believe” it the way we normally think of belief is irrelevant; it functions as their god-image. But again, under an alternative limit God image of Abraxas these archon energies are not surprising to me anymore.

With that in mind, here are some 2026 predictions:

1. The Democrats will overwhelmingly win 2026 elections. Trump is already sub-40% approval and if the stock market falls or if his war mania (on behalf of his handlers) continues, he will sink below his all time low support. They will likely win 2028 as well, after which we will see parabolically increasing levels of brown race communism. Trump is trying to bribe voters with $2,000 “tariff rebates”, which will make the deficit and inflation worse, but that is insufficient to stem the decline of his popularity even if if it passes, which is unclear.
2. Nick Fuentes will continue to be astroturfed and elevated as the “leader of the right” – The upper elites are uplifting this federal asset on their social media platforms as they assess the potential for him becoming a Hitler-esque fall guy and to use him as a scare tactic to promote the ingathering of the Jewish exiles (Adam Green is on to the scent, also note this The Atlantic puff piece (lol), this Chuck Schumer tweet4, and J.D. Vance also uplifting him by mentioning him by name). Height (5’5”), sexual pathology (homosexual and possible pedophelia), and social awkwardness may limit mass appeal, but elite platform access and rhetorical skill could compensate. Tracking as test case for channeling authentic grievance through compromised vessel, but I think he caps out early.
3. Gold and silver will continue to do well, although there may be some weakness if a big stock market fall happens. The U.S. Debt Clock places the current real value of silver at between $1,100-1,500/oz based on historic ratios to the dollar (see the far right side of the link) and gold at $9,000-12,500/oz.
4. The Greater Israel project will continue apace. By this I mean the continued assemblage of the lands in Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza for eventual formalized control and with room made for the upcoming ingathering of the diaspora, using whatever propaganda is necessary for cover. Jordan, Egypt lands will be later.
5. Anti-semitism will continue to increase but in a controlled manner, sponsored by the Jewish-owned and controlled social media platforms (Google’s YouTube, Musk’s Twitter/X controlled by the ADL, etc.).
6. In line with #5, there will be further public revelations about the nature of the so-called “deep state” (following the manipulated Epstein files and stuff like Department of Homeland Security’s Twitter account being based in Israel) – not because there is a power struggle going on, but because they are so far ahead in their analytics and control (via A.I., control of the internet, election systems, the propaganda apparatus) that they feel comfortable encouraging loss of faith in the system dialectically for their end goals (Greater Israel, ingathering of diaspora, war, collapse of the West into formal controlled, destroyed serf colonies).
7. National debt will continue to increase parabolically; Republican efforts to narrow the deficit will meet with total failure. (easy prediction)
8. CBDC rollouts will continue worldwide and steps will be made toward its implementation in the United States. Easy prediction, but I am not sure exactly how it will be unveiled in the U.S. – doing the Japan approach would be easy (i.e. pop the greatest stock market bubble of all time, create mass panic, offer CBDC as a “safe” dialectical solution much as Japan switched onto their Rothschild central bank model after popping their bubble), but they could do it other ways such as with the fake-decentralized stablecoin model discussed above.
9. There will be continued efforts to crack down on free speech throughout the West and including the United States. Substack will increase its shadow bans and algorithms disfavoring dissident content (Keir Starmer just joined the platform and Chris Best is publicly compromised); we are already seeing this now, but it will get worse (the ADL’s “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach”, which they forced down Twitter’s gullet applied here). The removal of anonymous speech under the false guise of “child protection” will make inroads in the U.S. If a major war breaks out, the elites will use the war as a pretext for dramatic increases in censorship.
10. Real inflation will remain high and average quality of life will continue to decrease in line with neoliberal feudalism. (easy prediction)
11. The Ukraine/Russia war will either still not end or if it does (and Ukraine/Russia’s rulers are, per , saying it will end by January 15), it will merely be a Minsk-style false ceasefire where military buildup intensifies and fighting informally continues. The wise Igor Strelkov makes similar points from prison as translated in this post. There will be no real peace there because our upper elites love the ongoing slavic genocide and are making a tremendous amount of money while doing so.
12. Tensions with China will continue to rise in line with eschatological requirements for a Gog vs. Magog war.
13. There will continue to be no justice against Fauci, the 2017-2020 deep state plotters, or traitors like Mayorkas, who let in 20 million illegals from 2021-2025.
14. 2026 may be elevated by FBI/CIA-backed protests (think BLM/antifa) leading up to elections, but it won’t be necessary as the demoralized right stays home. Trump himself, as a fully skinsuited stooge of the Zionist international finance elites serving under a krisha (Russian for “roof”, i.e. elite protection) will be fine personally, as will his family.
15. I am tempted to call again for a market crash given the Buffett indicator is at an all-time high and there is no relation whatsoever between Nvidia, xAI, Oracle, and Microsoft and other whale tech companies and their underlying values, resulting in a $610 billion circular and obvious finance fraud5 (to the extent Michael Burry made a major bet against them, puts expiring in April 2026), but I am hesitant to do so and will refrain – the 2025 miss taught me that elite capacity to sustain obvious fraud through collective delusion exceeds rational prediction models. Bubbles can extend far longer than fundamentals suggest when all major players benefit from the fiction, and I underweighted psychological/coordination factors relative to material reality. Update to my worldview: factor in shared psychosis as a load-bearing structure, not just economic fundamentals. A market crash, if one happened, would juice such Democrat election gains (see item #1) to massive proportions, and would result in a taxpayer-funded bailout of tech AI companies authorized by skinsuited, marionetted puppet Trump, per here and here, and also a bailout of the fraud crypto space.
16. Political influencer grifter reputations will get worse than they are even now, and continue to bleed attention; they will become objects of derision.
17. Those behind/above Trump will continue rolling out the National Guard, ICE and Homeland Security, nation-wide militarization, under the false guise of immigration restrictionism, but it’s intent is to ultimately be used against dissidents to the system.
18. Actual immigration enforcement will continue to be weak (i.e. not making a meaningful dent on the 20 million illegals brought in by Biden’s handlers 2021-2025, let alone the 30-50 million other illegals in the county), hyped up but toothless and used to justify #17.
19. Many more people – who have been faced with mounting economic and mental health pressures – are going to crack psychically in 2026more than in previous years (people cracked during COVID from fear, but this time it will be from despair and insufficient regulatory stabilizers). The effects of psychic pressure increases are cumulative – there are no social or institutional supports anymore to hold people’s psychic charge (religious, community, ideological), but with AI now pressuring both jobs and humanity’s understanding of reality itself, mental and emotional breakdowns will become common.
20. Interest in philosophical pessimism, gnosticism and individuation will increase, but not quickly; this is because it is the only perspective that is properly poised to weather the storm of increasing neoliberal feudalism and permanently decreasing material quality of life moving forward, but the perspective is not well suited for an American secular, optimistic, extroverted psyche.

Lastly, to end this post, I didn’t have very many email conversations with Zman, but in his final email to me back in April he wrote: “I am much more optimistic [than you]. The truth is like a body. No matter how much you weight it down, it tends to pop back to the surface. Over the last several decades, our rulers have sunk a lot of bodies in the economy. Now they will start bobbing back up.” Under privatio boni, Zman’s perspective made sense – truth eventually surfaces because goodness is ontologically primary. Under Abraxas, though, truth surfaces and is ignored because power doesn’t require truth-alignment to function. Bodies float up; no one cares.

I hope you found this post helpful, and I hope that 2026 turns out to be a better year than I expect. Thanks for reading.

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

2

1. “In 2024, we moved from “securing the border” to “mass deportation now” as the growing sentiment against immigration of all types finally broke through. The 2025 issue will be the collapsing birth rates around the world. It is a thing that gets discussed in certain circles, but 2025 will be the year it goes mainstream.”This didn’t happen, and the so-called mass deportations are tiny. Dementia Joe’s handlers let in 20 million illegals between 2021-2025, and Trump in Year 1 will deport maybe 600,000, while at the same time his handlers have implemented and normalized ICE teams snatching people off the street (totally unnecessarily) – this structure will eventually be turned against dissidents, which is the whole point of it.
2. “But by the end of the year, the educated debate will settle on the four D’s of human destiny. Diet, Development, Divinity and Deracination will be the focus for what is causing the fertility collapse.” There has been an increase in Christian religious talk and a slight uptick in white racial consciousness (see the Sydney Sweeney fake controversy), but not on diet (except for Ozempic) or “development”, whatever that means, and none of that is tied to fertility collapse.
3. “A long ignored issue related to the immigration debate and related to the birth rate debate, is the collapse of middle-class wages relative to the labor productivity gains of the last thirty years. A thing everyone has sensed for a long time is finally getting hard numbers attached to it. The truth is the fruit of the microprocessor revolution went primarily to the economic elites. Meanwhile, the middle-class has seen themselves turned into wage slaves…” This is neoliberal feudalism in action, yes, there is an uptick in discussion about it as things continue to get worse (both of which will continue, the increase in discussion and things getting worse), but nothing has or will be done about it.
4. “One immediate upshot in the changing nature of the online right will be the long overdue marginalization of the influencer. These pests who jump into every issue hoping to score attention, while pretending to lead the debate will finally run out of road with the audience. They will not go away completely as there is always a supply of suckers for them to grift, but in 2025 the label “influencer” will become synonymous with the word “grifter” for the online right…” Zman is on point about this one, nice prediction. I discussed this change in my post here.
5. “Once Trump ascends the throne, he will pardon all but a handful of the January 6 victims, leaving the edge cases for review…. There will be no retribution from Team Trump. He will avoid going down this road for political reasons…” He pardoned them all, and yes, there has been no retribution from Team Trump. Pretty good prediction.
6. “In February, the Republican Party will try to focus Trump on passing another tax scheme like they did in his first term. This will be part of a scheme to run the clock until the midterms, which they plan to throw to the Democrats. Having learned his lesson, Trump will squash this idea before it gets going. Look for Trump to be much tougher with his own party this time around.” Pretty good prediction, they passed the terrible Big Beautiful Bill and plan to throw 2026 to Democrats. However, Trump has caved and offered no resistance to his paymasters at all. Mixed result.
7. “In the run up to the German elections, the government will begin arresting AfD members on the grounds they are coordinating with Russia….In defense of democracy, the German ruling coalition will seek to take the public out of the process…” Germany has been occupied by the U.S. since the end of World War 2 with over 100 U.S. military bases in the country. There is a zero chance or opportunity for Germans to shrug off American military domination of the country; their only chance is if the U.S. collapses.
8. “The unrest in Syria will begin to spill over into other countries. Jordan will be the first crisis as the government has been unpopular for a long time but has also been weakening for a long time. They have the same problem as the Assad government, just without American sanctions. Similarly, the Egyptian government will begin to crack in the face of new activity by the Muslim Brotherhood and the spill over from the Israeli war on the people of Gaza.” No, the overthrow of Assad was an Israeli/CIA coup and they have enough land to absorb between southern Lebanon, southern Syria, and Gaza before they later move on to Egypt/Jordan as part of the Greater Israel project – but not yet. Same with Zman’s prediction about Turkey – it’s a later issue for them.
9. “Despite his promise to end the war in Ukraine within 24-hours, Trump will find that there is no deal to be made in Ukraine. Zelensky and his European backers will never agree to a deal and the Russians are in no mood to help Trump, so the result will be a slow burn of Ukraine until it collapses this summer.” Also mixed – Trump is a toothless puppet and had no ability to end the war, and anyway his handlers would not let him do it even if he could. The real purpose of the Russia/Ukraine war is to provide political justification for Slavic genocide.
10. “Trump will begin talks with China that will evolve into a grand bargain to not just include Taiwan, but the long-term economic relationship between the Western hemisphere and the Chinese.” No, nothing; increased tariffs and plans for a future war, I suppose.

3 The Federal Reserve isn’t federal and it isn’t a reserve, and it is centralized in it’s New York branch even though it contains multiple other branches to provide the illusion of decentralization. The Jekyll Island conspirators passed the legislations bare bones in the dead of night, and then filled it in the details in dozens of amendments over the subsequent years. I discussed this further in this post.

4 Although on the surface the tweet condemns Nick Fuentes and his “white supremest” views, that’s not what Schumer is doing here. He is intentionally and slyly elevating Fuentes by naming him to his audience, increasing Fuentes’ brand recognition, while lumping the right in with him – this is what one does in order to smear a movement using a controlled asset. This is also why Trump talked about him by name around the same time. If Fuentes was a threat he would be utterly ignored by mainstream figures and cut off from access to those platforms. Owen Benjamin understands the dynamics and discusses it here.

5 This is the circular flow of capital con of the highest valued public tech companies: they invest in, buy products from and loan funds to each other, increasing the valuations of each in an obvious and fraudulent ratcheting scam. The game will end at some point, after which they will lean on the corrupt government to bail them out. Per Michael Burry: “Every company listed below has suspicious revenue recognition. The actual chart with ALL the give-and-take deals would be unreadable. The future will regard this a picture of fraud, not a flywheel. True end demand is ridiculously small. Almost all customers are funded by their dealers. If you can name OpenAI’s auditor in 1 hour you win some pride.”

This essay picks up where the previous post left off by confronting the implications of Jung’s gnostic cosmology. If the Abraxas God-image is taken seriously – if good and evil are ontologically co-equal and suffering is no longer provisionally redeemable -then familiar moral, spiritual, and psychological assurances collapse. What follows is an examination of what remains once those guarantees are removed: what kind of responsibility, discernment, and individuation are possible in a world that cannot be theologically redeemed without remainder, and what kind of psyche can endure that recognition without retreating into denial, predation, or false consolation.

Welcome back. In my previous post – which is required background reading or the following discussion won’t make sense – I discussed the metaphysics and ontology of the terrifying figure of Jung’s vision of Abraxas, which he outlined in his Liber Novus1 and moved toward in his oblique Answer to Job during a sickness he experienced late in life.2 I had covered the book back in March, but I have felt especially crucified between opposite energies since then which has deepened my understanding of the world, and my understanding of Abraxas continues to develop phenomenologically over time – including its horror. Properly conceptualizing Abraxas and the crucifixion of opposites, writing these thoughts and feelings down as they arise, and publishing it all have different effects upon my psyche, and I don’t know what they will be until I undergo them. While I think I properly articulated Jung’s conception of Abraxas, he explicitly kept his understanding within a psychological register3, whereas I am extending that logic to the metaphysical realm.4

While I believe that the metaphysics and ontology laid out in the previous post is clear and logical, tightly argued5, it does raise many questions about what adopting this new God image would entail – its strengths and weaknesses (because every God image has weaknesses), what kind of psyche is fit for absorbing it and which kinds (the vast majority) are not, its conception of good and evil, whether cosmic justice exists at all, and many others. These are provisional articulations of my thoughts and I don’t claim that any other person or figure, including Jung, agrees with them. My views on the following may also change substantially down the road. I feel that I must discuss this for my own intellectual, spiritual, and emotional journey, even though the audience for this particular material is small. I am going to offer these clarifications in a question and answer format instead of my usual essay style. Also, note that I used LLMs for this piece, not just for editing but for dialectical sparring. The material is subtle enough that having an interlocutor (even synthetic) helped sharpen distinctions that would otherwise not have been steel-manned, which is critical for something like this. The ideas remain mine; the LLM functioned as Socratic mirror. Take of this what you will.

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1. If Abraxas is the unity of all opposites – good and evil, matter and spirit, love and hatred, greed and asceticism, short term versus long term, light and darkness, persona vs shadow, masculine vs feminine, rational/scientific vs irrational/spiritual or mystic – then how can Abraxas be an unconscious figure – wouldn’t it also contain the union of consciousness vs. unconsciousness within itself?

Abraxas contains the potential for consciousness, but the actuality of consciousness requires differentiation – a limited standpoint from which opposites are experienced as unreconciled. Abraxas is unconscious not because he’s blind, but because there’s nothing outside him to perceive. Consciousness arises only when totality fractures into perspective through finite beings.

2. What are the strengths and weaknesses that would arise from adopting the God image of Abraxas as opposed to the privatio boni notion of God as all good?

This invites a long and detailed response. Benefits include the following:

1. A radical reduction of projection. By focusing internally on integrating one’s own darkness via the individuation process instead of projecting it outwards onto the Other for destruction, people stop needing villains to purify themselves, scapegoats to stabilize meaning, or moral theater to feel aligned. This is stabilizing for a certain kind of psyche (not for everyone or even most), to be discussed further below.
2. Increase in inner honesty. Shadow material no longer threatens cosmic collapse; one can say “this too belongs”. This produces calm, not despair, in people already accustomed to darkness.
3. Increased tolerance for ambiguity. The psyche stops demanding resolution. This stabilizes paradox instead of erasing it, and the increased in bandwidth for paradox and ambiguity may provide greatly enhanced analytical and problem solving abilities.
4. Deepened responsibility. Without divine arbitration, one’s choices become heavier, not lighter. No appeal, no ledger, no appeal court – this is it, and justice won’t be enforced in the victim’s favor in the afterlife.
5. Freedom from moral conscription. Political, religious, and ideological scripts lose their hypnotic force. The psyche can no longer outsource evil. Enemies become mirrors into our own psyche, which ends crusading psychology permanently. One may feel relief in clarity even as hope diminishes – again, for a certain personality type.
6. Exit from metaphysical infantilization. No more “if I am good, the universe will reciprocate.” Under privatio boni morality is outsourced upward: God guarantees justice, meaning, and final accounting. Under Abraxas, no cosmic parent is coming, and one stops behaving as if the universe owes moral restitution. This forces psychic adulthood and maturity. It is also structural clarity, where the world stops appearing insane – horror becomes intelligible without being justified.
7. Increased humility: Not “I am sinful,” but “I am partial”. Privatio boni humility states: “I am fallen; I need grace to become good.” Abraxas humility states: “I am one finite tension-point in an infinite field; my view is always partial, my action always incomplete.” This is epistemic humility, not moral shame. It fosters listening over judging, curiosity over certainty, collaboration over conversion.
8. Immunity to moral blackmail. If evil is not an anomaly but structural then catastrophe does not imply meaninglessness, suffering does not require justification, and no one can conscript you with “this must be good because God.” This is psychologically stabilizing for a small class of people – those who were already breaking under moral incoherence.
9. Precision about power. Abraxas dissolves fantasies about “evil anomalies” and reveals power as ontological, not accidental. This sharpens perception and it removes the naïveté that gets people eaten. Moral authorities will recognize immediately that this perspective is not atheism, it is not secularism, it is not heresy in the ordinary sense – it is worse to them. This is because it does not deny God, it denies God’s moral monopoly.
   1. To delve into this more deeply: when you deny God outright (atheism) religious elites know how to respond; when you secularize God (liberal theology) they know how to absorb it; when you commit a recognizable heresy they know how to anathematize it. All of those still preserve God’s moral monopoly, which is the exclusive right of the God-image (and its institutional custodians) to define what counts as good, what counts as evil, what suffering means, how it will be compensated, and who has standing to judge whom. The privatio boni model is not just a metaphysical claim; it is a jurisdictional claim. It says: all goodness flows from here, all evil is a deviation from here. That makes God – and by extension the Church, clergy, theologians, moral authorities – the final court of appeal.The Abraxas framing does something far more dangerous. It says: Good and evil are not monopolized by the God-image, they are structural opposites within reality itself. That has several consequences religious elites will grasp: God is no longer the guarantor of moral repair, suffering is not promised retroactive justification, evil is not guaranteed to be “accounted for.” This removes the Church’s role as the broker of cosmic reassurance. Moral authority can no longer be externalized upward; if God contains both poles, then moral clarity cannot be outsourced. The believer cannot say, “God wills this, therefore it is good.” Under Abraxas judgment collapses back into lived responsibility and sin loses its clean bookkeeping function. Under privatio boni evil = deviation, repentance = erasure, grace = ledger correction, but under Abraxas nothing is cosmically “balanced”, and this annihilates sacramental control. Heaven and hell stop functioning as leverage; if Heaven is not guaranteed compensation and Hell is not guaranteed punishment, then fear and hope can no longer be administered institutionally. God becomes unownable. This is the core threat to moral authorities. A God who is all-good can be represented, but a God who contains evil cannot be spoken for safely. No priest, no theologian, no hierarchy can say, “We stand closer to God than you.” Because proximity to Abraxas is not sanctity, it is exposure. That is why this position would feel worse than heresy to them; heresy still plays on the same board, it argues about what God is like. This move changes what God is for. It strips God of his role as moral insurer, cosmic accountant, narrative redeemer, institutional anchor. What remains is a God-image that cannot be used to govern souls. Religious elites do not fear disbelief – they fear a God who cannot be made safe, as it makes their mediating role structurally obsolete.

Drawbacks include the following:

1. The evaporation of hope as a civilizational glue. Abraxas detonates hope – not cruelly, but cleanly. Christian hope sustained the weak, delayed despair, allowed injustice to be endured without revolt or psychic collapse by deferring justice to the afterlife or to the Second Coming. Abraxas replaces hope with intelligibility. This is stabilizing for a certain psyche, but destabilizing for mass systems. Civilizations are not built on lucidity alone; historically, this suggests Abraxas cannot be a mass god, it can only be an esoteric god-image or a transitional one, metabolized by a few while others cling to older myths.
2. Loneliness. Most people need a morally aligned cosmos. Abraxas strips that away. The result is fewer companions – not because of arrogance, but because of incommensurate psychic economies.
3. Psychological elitism (who can survive this vision?). Good and evil still exist phenomenologically, but their claim on the soul weakens. This produces ironic distance, aestheticization of horror, spiritual spectatorship. Jung feared this explicitly, hence his insistence on experience over doctrine. Abraxas presupposes high frustration tolerance, capacity to endure unresolved tension, ability to self-generate meaning without guarantees. That means the god-image is selective by nature, even if no one intends it to be. This creates a new inequality not of power, but of psychic survivability. Only certain constitutions can metabolize this image without collapse. Abraxas universalized would stratify humanity: those who can hold tension, those who collapse into despair, those who weaponize it. This is not egalitarian truth, it is initiatory truth. That alone is enough to make it a weakness, even if unavoidable.
4. Collapse of moral teleology / loss of directional meaning. Under Abraxas good and evil are ontologically co-constitutive, creation has no guaranteed moral arc, suffering is not “for” redemption in any assured sense. There is no progress, guarantee, eschatological arc, cosmic learning curve. There is no moral arc bending toward justice. There is only increasing differentiation, increasing complexity, increasing tension between opposites.6 Under this conception history does not “improve”, it intensifies and amplifies contradictions. Technology intensifies power, information intensifies awareness, globalization intensifies contact, psychology intensifies interior conflict. This is not progress, it is an increase in psychic pressure. Aquarian lucidity doesn’t save us, it strips illusions faster than we can metabolize them.This raises a terrifying implication: why act at all, if all outcomes feed the same totality? Individuation is a partial answer, but it is not a universal motivator. Most people need a moral cosmos. Removing it without replacement produces despair, nihilism, or regression. It stabilizes only a minority temperamentally capable of holding tension without collapsing. For the majority, Abraxas risks moral indifference, fatalism, psychic exhaustion, quiet nihilism disguised as “lucidity”. People would say: “All outcomes add to totality”, “Suffering is structurally necessary”, “Victim and predator are equally real”, and this may dissolve moral urgency worse than cruelty: indifference with metaphysical justification. Abraxas removes the eschatological leverage that keeps outrage morally energized. Under privatio boni, moral action is energized by alignment: Be good → align with God → justice eventually occurs. Under Abraxas, good and evil are both ontologically grounded and nothing guarantees cosmic vindication. Consciousness, not goodness, is what adds to the totality. This doesn’t produce overt nihilism in serious people; it produces fatigue, a thinning of moral urgency. One still acts ethically, but without metaphysical reinforcement. Ethics becomes tragic, not redemptive.
5. Love under Abraxas is no longer sanctified. Under privatio boni love is guaranteed meaning, suffering is retroactively justified, victims are redeemed elsewhere, but under Abraxas love does not save love, does not fix love, does not outweigh horror. Rather, love becomes fidelity to consciousness in the face of no guarantees, which makes it rarer and more serious, not sentimental. It becomes contingent, tragic, non-teleological. This destroys romantic metaphysics completely. It also explains why modern relationships feel structurally unstable – they are unconsciously asked to carry redemptive weight they cannot bear. Love becomes attention without alibi, care without metaphysical insurance, fidelity without reward. This is colder. It is also cleaner – nothing is being smuggled in.
6. Abraxas explains evil but does not justify suffering. This framework explains why evil exists, explains why it cannot be eliminated, explains why projection fails, but it does not answer: Why this much? Why this distribution? Why these victims? Some readers will mistake explanation for justification. This is not a logical flaw so much as a moral vulnerability: clarity feels like cruelty to those demanding justice, intelligibility can feel like betrayal; but explanation is not absolution, understanding is not endorsement. The privatio boni model filters horror, claiming that evil will be undone, it is not the final word, God will rebalance the scales. Abraxas removes the filter. The weakness here is burnout by lucidity. People do not fail morally; they fail energetically. They cannot metabolize the steady awareness that atrocities are real, irreparable, and not metaphysically “corrected.”
7. Elite instrumentalization (Abraxas as predator theology). An Abraxas god-image is compatible with elite amorality. If everything contributes to totality exploitation becomes cosmically neutral, predation becomes metaphysically justified, power asymmetry becomes “how the opposites work themselves out”. This is not a misreading – it’s a structurally available interpretation. In fact, one could argue elites already live as if Abraxas is true but without the compensatory demand of individuation or consciousness. This makes Abraxas uniquely dangerous as a public god-image: it clarifies reality without restraining power. Those with power can say: “Predation and suffering are integral to the Whole.” “Resistance is merely another polarity.” “History requires this.” This is not a misunderstanding of Abraxas, it is a selective adoption. The corrective Abraxas offers to mass moralism becomes a license for asymmetry at the top, akin to how Chabad/Kabbalists use their God image.7 This is why Jung insisted (sometimes disingenuously) on psychological modesty. He knew that ontologizing this too cleanly could collapse ethical restraints among the powerful.
8. The “beyond Abraxas” move is underdeveloped, but necessary. I introduced “hinting at a figure even beyond Abraxas” from Jung, which is also its softest point.8 Because if Abraxas is totality, what does “beyond” mean without contradiction? Either: (1) the Self emerges from Abraxas or (2) the Self participates in something beyond Abraxas. Option (2) risks smuggling back in the privatio boni, while option (1) risks total closure. Jung never resolved this, oscillating deliberately. That oscillation is a protective ambiguity, not a flaw, with reliance on apophatic escape, the unknowability of the Self, grace as non-derivable. Critics may say: “You reintroduced transcendence without grounding it.” I would answer that transcendence cannot be grounded without ceasing to be transcendence and any system that pretends otherwise becomes ideology.Furthermore, Abraxas corrects the deficiencies of the all-good God, but Abraxas is not stable either. Its weaknesses include encouraging indifference, moral silence, psychic coldness – and these almost demand a further correction. This means Abraxas may not be the final god-image but acts as a necessary passage through horror and clarity, a stripping stage. In alchemical terms Abraxas may be nigredo clarified, not redeemed. The system still awaits a coniunctio that does not erase suffering but does not glorify it either. I gesture toward this possibility with the Self beyond Abraxas, grace as received, not earned, and individuation as orientation, not salvation. This ambiguity is not a weakness – it is a sign that the system is alive rather than closed.
9. If Abraxas requires differentiation to gain consciousness, then creation is not good, not evil, but necessary violence. This collapses teleology, providence, moral authorship. Creation becomes an experiment with no guarantee. That is not nihilism, it is worse: ontological irresponsibility at the divine level. Differentiation means separation where there was unity, boundary where there was continuity, exclusion where there was inclusion. In lived terms, differentiation always entails loss (something is no longer something else), finitude (this, not that), asymmetry (inside/outside, predator/prey, agent/victim). This is structural harm: the fact that for one form to exist, another must not. Life itself is built on this: cells differentiate → other potentials die, organisms live → other organisms are consumed, consciousness sharpens → innocence is lost. Calling this “violence” is a refusal to anesthetize reality with euphemism. Differentiation means a cut a separation, a loss of unity, the emergence of inside/outside, self/other, subject/object. A newborn’s first breath is not morally violent, but it is traumatic. Likewise, consciousness arises through severance from undivided being. Differentiation is the wounding that makes awareness possible. This is why myth always encodes creation as sacrifice, dismemberment, exile, fall tearing apart of a primordial unity. Creation hurts by definition – not because God is evil, but because being aware requires separation. That is why creation under Abraxas cannot be called good in the Christian sense.If creation has no moral alibi, then no act is clean, no choice is innocent, no system is just. Ethics becomes harm minimization, containment of excess, protection of fragile differentiation; not virtue, not purity, not righteousness. This is a tragic ethics, not a nihilistic one. Violence is not ontological irresponsibility in this model. What would be ontological irresponsibility is pretending differentiation didn’t cost anything, pretending suffering was avoidable, pretending creation was clean, justified, or morally elegant. The irresponsibility belongs to privatio boni, not Abraxas. Abraxas is horrifying precisely because he does not deny the cost, he does not absolve it, he does not redeem it, he does not retroactively justify it. He simply contains it. That honesty is what collapses hope and also what makes the structure coherent. If creation is unjustifiable then suffering has no excuse, existence has no justification, being conscious is not a favor. And yet – consciousness exists anyway. This produces a final inversion: meaning is not given, it is maintained against collapse, not because the universe wants it, not because God demands it, but because without it differentiation rots.

3. These strengths and weaknesses reveal why Abraxas isn’t universal. But they also raise a deeper question: if every god-image is provisional, correcting for prior deficiencies, what makes Abraxas necessary now?

The Abraxas image is imperfect like all other God images, but it is psychically necessary at this time because the privatio boni model has failed catastrophically. When mass atrocity is industrialized, innocence is repeatedly annihilated, justice fails generation after generation, the all-good God becomes psychically dishonest. Abraxas is not chosen for Aquarius, it is what consciousness backs into when moral fiction and the all good God collapses. That is why elites already live there functionally, they just don’t name it.

What would break Abraxas? Three possibilities: (1) discovery of a non-totalizable remainder (grace, Self, consciousness-source) that can’t be absorbed into the opposites – this would require further god-image evolution, (2) lived experience that contradicts the framework (e.g., undeniable cosmic justice, verifiable afterlife rewards), (3) a psyche metabolically incapable of holding tension who nonetheless achieves wholeness through a different structure – this would prove Abraxas isn’t universal even for coherence-types. I haven’t encountered any of these yet, but the framework remains falsifiable in principle, which is why it’s phenomenological reporting rather than dogma.

4. What is the conception of Heaven and Hell under the Abraxas God image?

Under privatio boni, God is all-good, evil is lack or privation, justice is deferred, Heaven and Hell exist to repair moral asymmetry after death.9 Politics is an extension of the privatio boni.10

Under Abraxas God contains all good and all evil, no cosmic repair mechanism exists, no moral accounting system can reconcile the damage. Therefore, Heaven and Hell cannot be compensatory realms. Instead they become states of psychic organization.

Under this conception Hell involves folding the psyche into one polarity and suppressing the other pole, having it leak out uncontrollably with one unable to bear the tension of opposites. That is Hell in this ontology – not punishment, but structural collapse. More precisely, Hell manifests when one pole is absolutized (good, purity, justice, power, transcendence, reason, instinct, domination, withdrawal), its opposite is denied, split off, or projected, and the denied pole returns autonomously and destructively. This produces compulsion, possession, ideological rigidity, predation justified as necessity, victimhood absolutized into ressentiment, or ascetic withdrawal that becomes sterile negation. Hell is not just suffering, it is suffering without mediation. This is why Hell is lived here, politically, psychologically, interpersonally. Heaven, by contrast, is not bliss or moral purity, it is the temporary achievement of held opposites, conscious endurance of contradiction without collapse, a livable equilibrium where shadow is acknowledged but not enacted blindly. Heaven is therefore fragile, temporary, non-guaranteed, personal rather than cosmic. It is closer to grace than reward and, crucially, it can vanish without explanation. That is why it cannot be promised.

Once Abraxas is admitted, any traditional afterlife faces a problem. If all acts feed totality, no moral arc corrects injustice, consciousness arises only through differentiation and suffering, then a compensatory afterlife would reintroduce privatio boni through the back door, restore moral bookkeeping, undermine the tragic structure of consciousness itself. So the ontology does not deny an afterlife outright, but it refuses to assign it moral purpose. If there is persistence beyond death, it would be non-judicial, non-compensatory, possibly non-personal in the egoic sense, more like continuation of psychic process than verdict. Jung himself stayed deliberately ambiguous here – and that ambiguity is not cowardice, it is structural honesty.

Here resurrection becomes individuation, not eschatology. What Christianity projects into the end of time, this model internalizes into life: judgment becomes self-confrontation, resurrection becomes integration, salvation becomes individuation, damnation becomes psychic disintegration.

The apocalypse is not coming, it is repeating, with every life reenacts it privately. This framework removes cosmic vindication for victims, removes cosmic punishment for perpetrators, removes cosmic apology, removes narrative closure – but it does not remove meaning. It relocates meaning to maintenance under impossible conditions. That is why it is palliative rather than redemptive. Not “this will be made right,” but “this makes sense, even if it cannot be justified.”

The final consequence (which few accept) under this ontology: Heaven and Hell are not where you go, they are what you become able or unable to inhabit, and death does not rescue you from that structure. If anything persists after death it likely carries forward the degree of differentiation achieved, not moral status. Which is another way of saying: consciousness is the only thing that survives, if it survives at all. That is the coldest implication, and also the most honest.

5. What is the ethical stance that remains when neither Heaven nor Hell can be promised?

Once Heaven and Hell are removed as guaranteed metaphysical endpoints, ethics cannot be grounded in reward, punishment, or cosmic bookkeeping. What remains is not relativism, but something harsher and more demanding.

1. Ethics becomes custodial, not salvific. Under an Abraxian ontology no act is retroactively redeemed, no suffering is cosmically compensated, no injustice is secretly “worth it”, so ethics is no longer about earning anything. It becomes custodial: the care and preservation of differentiated consciousness in a reality that did not morally justify its own creation. In other words: you do not act ethically because it will be rewarded, you act ethically because collapse spreads. Cruelty, predation, ideological possession, and withdrawal are not “sins”, they are entropy accelerants. They narrow differentiation, flatten interiority, and convert complexity back into brute force. Ethics here is damage control inside an already-broken totality.
2. Responsibility intensifies when guarantees vanish. Under privatio boni, responsibility is softened by metaphysical insurance: God will sort it out, justice will be done later, suffering is meaningful because it will be redeemed. Under Abraxas, none of that holds. So responsibility sharpens: every act lands, nothing erases its psychic or relational trace. Meaning must be maintained locally or it disintegrates. This produces a paradoxical effect: less hope, but more weight. Not despair – weight.
3. As argued above, the reason not to act predatory is not moral purity, nor obedience, nor fear of punishment, it is fidelity to differentiation itself. Excess predation is not “evil” in a Christian sense, it is anti-Abraxian in a structural sense. And the cost of being anti-Abraxian is psychic contraction: narrowing of interiority, loss of symbolic depth, eventual ideological possession or compulsive repetition. Not damnation – impoverishment.
4. Meaning without redemption. Under this frame meaning is not given, guaranteed, or redeemed. Meaning is maintained against collapse not because the universe wants it, not because God commands it, but because without it differentiation rots. This is why ethics here feels colder but also cleaner. No lies, no moral alibi, no metaphysical outsourcing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Similar to the previous question, why should good be preferred over evil in this model?

This ontology explains why evil exists, but it is thin on why good should be preferred, except pragmatically or psychologically. That’s not a contradiction, but it is a vulnerability. In Abraxas good is not ontologically privileged. Preference for good must come from individuation, intuition, grace, or existential commitment, where good is structurally advantageous for maintaining differentiation. Societies built purely on predation collapse into simplified power loops (constraint 3, Q6), while interpersonal relations built purely on exploitation erode symbolic depth (constraint 1). This doesn’t make ‘good’ obligatory, but it makes sustained predation self-defeating at the level of consciousness-preservation. This means that ethics becomes post-metaphysical, which many readers will experience as a loss, not a refinement. That’s acceptable to some, but it’s a real cost. Furthermore, if grace comes from beyond Abraxas, is not guaranteed, and cannot be systematized, then it functions as hope without ontology.11 That may be existentially honest, but it will feel evasive to some, and those with “dog eat dog” ethics may see the individuation process as naive.12

Does one have to smuggle in a “higher God” above Abraxas to retain morality? This is the razor’s edge. If one simply installs “the Self comes from a higher, good God beyond Abraxas” then yes, privatio boni sneaks back in through the back door. But Jung’s move is subtler and colder. The Self is not morally good; it is teleological, not ethical. The Self does not say “this is good; that is evil”, it says, “this is necessary for your becoming whole.” Sometimes that aligns with compassion, sometimes it aligns with separation, sometimes with refusal, sometimes with sacrifice – yours or another’s. This is not redemption, it is orientation. So morality does not come from a good God, it comes from psychic coherence under tension. The Self is not omnipotent, not morally perfect, not redemptive, not guaranteeing justice. It is a local orienting intelligence, a teleological pressure, a directional intuition within finitude. That is not privatio boni, it is phenomenological orientation, not cosmic morality. Grace, in this model, is received, contingent, uneven unexplained, which preserves its integrity.

Does this mean people would treat each other better or worse under the limit condition of Abraxas? Both, and that’s the point. Short term many will become more predatory, moral cover stories collapse, cynicism rises, weakness is punished more openly. Long term (for a minority) relations become less ideological. Fewer lies, fewer crusades, more precision, fewer mass delusions. A colder but more honest compassion emerges – not universal love, but accurate regard. The system does not make people good, it makes hypocrisy harder.

8. What is Abraxas under this system – is it something to be worshipped?

Abraxas is not a god one worships, he is a god one survives understanding. As Jung writes in his Liber Novus:

You do not need to seek him. He will find you, just like Eros. He is the God of the cosmos, extremely powerful and fearful. He is the creative drive, he is form and formation, just as much as matter and force, therefore he is above all the light and dark Gods. He tears away souls and casts them into procreation. He is the creative and created. He is the God who always renews himself in days, in months, in years, in human life, in ages, in peoples, in the living, in heavenly bodies. He compels, he is unsparing. If you worship him, you increase his power over you. Thereby it becomes unbearable. You will have dreadful trouble getting clear of him.… So remember him, do not worship him, but also do not imagine that you can flee him since he is all around you. You must be in the middle of life, surrounded by death on all sides. Stretched out, like one crucified, you hang in him, the fearful, the overpowering.

The individuation path does not redeem suffering, it renders it intelligible. That is the consolation, it is not mercy, and this is why this work will relieve a very small number of readers, unsettle many, and be rejected viscerally by people who require justice to be ontologically guaranteed. They are not wrong to recoil, but they are wrong to think recoil refutes the vision.

One may ask, “why show loyalty to such a monstrous entity?” This question assumes something crucially wrong: that Abraxas is an entity who can be pleased, served, or denied. Abraxas is not Yahweh (see footnote 2). Abraxas does not want. Abraxas does not reward loyalty. Abraxas names a metaphysical condition, not a lord. You do not “serve” gravity, you do not “pledge loyalty” to entropy, you do not “honor” time. You recognize them. You do not “give Abraxas consciousness.” Abraxas names the fact that totality is indifferent, the fact that creation has no moral alibi, the fact that consciousness exists because of fracture. Loyalty is a category error here. What matters is how the differentiated being responds, not whether Abraxas is pleased. Consciousness happens within Abraxas as a side-effect of differentiation. The ethical question is therefore not “why should I serve Abraxas?” but “what happens to consciousness if I act in ways that collapse differentiation?”

9. If Abraxas is indifferent, why sustain differentiation at all?

Because we are not Abraxas. This is the crucial move that prevents nihilism – Abraxas contains everything, we do not. We are a finite locus of consciousness, and consciousness only survives under certain conditions: symbolic richness, restraint of compulsion, refusal of collapse into prey/predator, or numb withdrawal. One does not sustain differentiation for God, one sustains it because without it your interior world deadens, others become unreal, suffering multiplies without even being known. Meaning is not obedience, it is maintenance under conditions of entropy because otherwise everything rots.

10. Who is this metaphysics aimed at? Everyone or only a small subset of people?

A small subset. This essay is not for people seeking consolation, people whose moral orientation depends on reward/punishment metaphysics, people whose psychic stability relies on clear villain/hero partitions, people whose identity is organized around ressentiment and moral indictment, people who need the universe to mean well. It is especially dangerous for trauma-dominant readers without symbolic containment, readers already flirting with nihilism, readers seeking permission structures rather than orientation structures.13 This work is for a very narrow type: someone already crushed by contradiction rather than merely confused by it, someone who has lost faith in moral accounting but refuses nihilism, someone who cannot unknow the world’s predatory structure, someone who has already felt the crucifixion of opposites somatically, someone whose despair is not melodramatic but metaphysical. This work is for those already shattered by contradiction, those who have lost faith honestly, those whose suffering has made sentimental answers obscene, those capable of holding tension without acting it out. It is for survivors, not seekers. In other words: it is for people who need intelligibility more than hope. This requires a specific personality type with specific characteristics14, which I will delve into more in my next post on this topic. It must never be aimed at the resentful, the sadistic, the ideologically possessed, the spiritually immature, those looking for permission to dominate. In the wrong psyche, Abraxas becomes a license. In the right one, it becomes a burden.

11. How can one hold this God image without becoming cold oneself?

Three rules: (1) Never universalize it; this is not a mass doctrine, it is an initiatory lens. (2) Anchor it phenomenologically; return always to lived tension, not metaphysical abstraction. (3) Permit grace without guaranteeing it. Grace, if it exists, must remain unowed. Coldness comes from pretending you are above the field, while humility comes from knowing you are inside it, permanently exposed.

12. Why did Jung refer to these concepts only obliquely, never directly and simply?

Alchemy, quaternity symbolism, and the Self were pressure valves to Jung, not evasions. He understood that Abraxas annihilated hope – not sentimentally, but structurally – and that stating this too cleanly, too early, would overwhelm psyches still stabilized by inherited metaphysical forms. Symbolic indirection was containment, not cowardice. Myth was still doing real psychological work in his time.

What has changed is timing, not courage; the collapse Jung feared has already occurred. The moral, privatio boni Christian god-image no longer regulates behavior, meaning, or suffering, and it persists largely as rhetoric, instrument, or nostalgia. Nihilism is no longer a speculative threat but an intense, lived background condition, intensified by neoliberal feudalism, technological abstraction, and the exhaustion of moral language itself. The anesthesia is already gone.

In this sense, an explicit articulation of Abraxas is late, not premature – late because its effects are already everywhere, but timely because those effects have now become unmistakable. It names a structure already operating unconsciously, often in its most predatory and disintegrative forms, no longer as hypothesis but as lived reality. What once required symbolic mediation to prevent psychic rupture now announces itself directly through history, technology, power asymmetry, and the normalization of suffering. The danger today is not that this god-image will destroy meaning – it is already here – but that it will continue to function without being recognized as such, without consciousness, without individuation, and therefore without restraint.

I am doing what Jung refused to do publicly not because I am braver or wiser, but because the historical conditions that made refusal responsible no longer exist. To continue speaking only symbolically now would be a different kind of irresponsibility, one that preserves psychological comfort while abandoning coherence. The risk remains real, but it is no longer avoidable.

13. Where is joy to be found under this perspective?

Joy under an Abraxas God image does not come from resolution of opposites, moral reassurance, harmony with the world, salvation narratives. Joy comes from relief of false expectation, release from metaphysical protest, moments of coherence without demand, clean contact with the real. This is a quieter joy, it’s episodic, it’s bodily. It shows up as calm without hope, interest without compulsion, humor without superiority, affection without metaphysical stakes. Think less “happiness” and more “unclenched presence.”

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Conclusion

The Abraxas-shaped problem is being approached indirectly everywhere today. Across many conversations themes recur: frustration with privatio boni, rejection of naive moralism, exhaustion with political redemption narratives, suspicion of consolation metaphysics, fascination with tension, paradox, and irresolvable opposites. But most people stop just before Abraxas. They circle tragedy without ontology, pessimism without structure, shadow integration without metaphysics, ethics without cosmology. They sense the abyss but then avert their gaze.

Very few people can hold this god-image. Some partial precursors to this view include late Jung himself, Simone Weil (without resolution), Schopenhauer (without individuation), certain strands of Madhyamaka (without myth) and some post-theistic phenomenologists. Most contemporary Jungians do not go here. Modern Jungian discourse often psychologizes symbols, defensively treats individuation as personal wellness, evacuates metaphysical stakes, replaces crucifixion with “integration” rhetoric. Abraxas is mentioned, rarely inhabited, while Answer to Job is cited, seldom followed through. This is not accidental; Jung himself contained the insight because it is destabilizing. It is destabilizing because it requires all of the following simultaneously: tolerance for metaphysical horror without collapse, refusal of nihilism without consolation, capacity to live without guarantees, resistance to both predation and withdrawal, willingness to let hope become provisional rather than central. Most people need either a good God, or a bad Demiurge, a redemptive arc, or a final escape. Abraxas offers none. This work is not for the morally hungry, the justice-demanding, the salvation-seeking, the ideologically armed, the psychologically brittle. It is for people who are already living inside the contradiction and need to know whether the madness has a structure. Not to escape it, not to redeem it, but to stand inside it without lying. That is not a mass audience, but it is a necessary one.

Ultimately, this framework removes every metaphysical pressure valve simultaneously: there is no final justice, no moral arc, no cosmic apology, no guaranteed redemption, no righteous violence, no innocent spectators. What remains is consciousness, tension, responsibility without reward, grace without repair. That is why even brilliant thinkers recoil. It does not argue them out of hope, it outlives hope. And yet it offers something rarer: “This insane world actually makes sense.” Not morally, not redemptively, but structurally. That is not consolation, but it is a palliative. And for the very small number of people already crushed by contradictions, that may be enough.

Thanks for reading.

PS: I will discuss how my adoption of Abraxas as the new limit condition God image relates to the Neofeudal Review project in a subsequent post, but before that I will review my 2025 political/cultural predictions and make my 2026 predictions.

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1 The Seven Sermons to the Dead had been released by Jung privately in 1916, but the much broader Liber Novus was not released until 2009. Gnostic scholar Stephan Hoeller had written The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead in 1989 without having read the Red Book; his speculations were later proven mostly accurate upon its release, but he did update his understanding of Jung’s conception of Abraxas which this article delves into.

2 As soon as Jung finished writing the book in the form of a rant, very unusual for his style, which he cracked out with great rapidity when he felt called to do so after his heart attack, the sickness immediately vanished, and he said while he would rewrite all of his books if he could, he wouldn’t rewrite Answer to Job.

Yahweh in his story shares several overlapping characteristics with Abraxas, but is not the same thing: both are unconscious, use humanity as the vessel through which God becomes conscious, and both involve how the God-image evolves historically. Crucially, though, Yahweh is not the totality of opposites. He is one-sided, identified with power, sovereignty, and righteousness, split off from his own shadow (which appears as Satan), reactive rather than encompassing. Satan, in Job, is not integrated into Yahweh, he is externalized. That alone disqualifies Yahweh from being Abraxas – Abraxas contains Satan, Yahweh argues with him. That difference is decisive. Jung knew Abraxas early in his decades-earlier unpublished Liber Novus, but deliberately did not present Abraxas directly in Answer to Job. Instead, he staged a transitional myth that moves readers toward Abraxas without naming him. It destabilizes the privatio boni without removing the moral scaffold entirely.

3 He was reluctant to extend his arguments beyond the psychological realm out of legitimate fear of being labeled a prophet and worshipped by his followers and/or derided by the scientific establishment, along with fears of ego inflation and from a sense of civic responsibility – Abraxas is so horrifying that its effect upon an unprepared psyche could be catastrophic.

4 Jung was writing inside a Christian-European symbolic field, constrained by clinical responsibility and by the need to be publishable, constrained by his own fear of psychic inflation and madness (explicitly stated in Liber Novus), and deeply wary of building systems rather than symbolic constellations. So he approached Abraxas, circled it, translated it, retreated from it, reframed it mythically rather than structurally. Extending his arguments to the metaphysical realm here requires a post-Christian collapse of moral metaphysics (which has already happened), a post-institutional context, and a psyche willing to accept the absence of cosmic reassurance.

5 Every premise constrains every other premise. (1) If God is totality, then evil cannot be ontologically secondary. (2) If opposites are constitutive, then privatio boni collapses. (3) If consciousness requires differentiation, then unity must be unconscious. (4) If God lacks consciousness, then creation cannot be morally guaranteed. (5) If creation lacks moral guarantee, then redemption cannot be assumed. (6) If redemption cannot be assumed, then ethics cannot be outsourced. Remove any one of these and the entire structure breaks. Most systems secretly smuggle in reasons to behave well: heaven, karma, cosmic justice, historical meaning, divine reward, evolutionary progress. This system offers none of these. Ethics, if it exists at all, must arise after the metaphysics, not before it.

6 Observing a pattern: biological evolution → specialization, cultural evolution → symbolic proliferation, technological evolution → amplification of opposites, psychological evolution → internal conflict becomes conscious. Modernity is not morally worse than antiquity, it is more differentiated with more roles, more identities, more contradictions, more awareness of injustice without the power to resolve it. This is why Aquarian lucidity feels cold. It does not lie, it does not soothe, it shows the structure naked.

7 The idea of divine totality or the union of opposites is not unique to Jung and precedes him by centuries (e.g., Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Christian mysticism). However, Abraxas as used here differs in a critical way from its closest analogues. In Kabbalistic systems (including Chabad), the reconciliation of opposites remains embedded within covenant, law, ritual repair (tikkun), and hierarchical restraint; knowledge of totality does not dissolve moral asymmetry but redistributes it. Sabbatean and Frankist currents radicalized this insight by collapsing law and embracing transgression as redemptive, externalizing contradiction into historical or performative rupture. Antinomian mysticism similarly risks converting metaphysical insight into license.

By contrast, Abraxas in the Jungian sense is neither theurgical nor redemptive: it authorizes no covenant, no chosenness, no collective discharge, and no sanctified transgression. It relocates the entire burden of contradiction into individual consciousness, where predation remains metaphysically possible but psychologically corrosive. This distinction matters because Abraxas lacks built-in restraints at the level of power: when abstracted from individuation, it can be selectively adopted by elites as a cosmology of neutrality that justifies asymmetry rather than dissolves it.

Abraxas is psychologically safer than antinomian mysticism because it internalizes contradiction rather than acting it out, but socially more destabilizing than covenantal systems because it dissolves the moral asymmetries that sustain authority. An Abraxian god-image is uniquely threatening to traditions that derive moral authority from covenant, law, or esoteric hierarchy because it offers no privileged standpoint outside the crucifixion of opposites and it dissolves the claim that any group, lineage, or initiatory class stands closer to the Good. In this sense, resistance to Abraxas by those advancing a Yahweh God image is not only theological but defensive from their standpoint (to the extent they would acknowledge it at all): it protects structures of moral asymmetry that Abraxas renders untenable. This is why those advancing a Yahweh God image express authoritarian certainty, moral confidence without self-doubt, instrumentalized metaphysics, and psychic inflation masked as devotion. In Jungian terms, this is inflation plus moral authorization; Abraxas requires one to bear contradiction, authoritarian Yahwism externalizes it.

8 Jung in Liber Novus: “You have in you the one God, the wonderfully beautiful and kind, the solitary, starlike, unmoving, he who is older and wiser than the father, he who has a safe hand, who leads you among all the darknesses and death scares of dreadful Abraxas. He gives joy and peace, since he is beyond death and beyond what is subject to change. He is no servant and no friend of Abraxas.” But this passage reintroduces a softened, internalized form of privatio boni. Jung is attempting to re-stabilize the psyche after Abraxas without collapsing back into moral dualism – he installs a counterweight as a psychologist because Abraxas alone is metabolically unbearable for most psyches – but it is weak. The “inner star” is not above Abraxas, it is the capacity to remain conscious inside him.

9 Once you adopt privatio boni, an afterlife is no longer optional – it is logically mandatory. Why? Because an all-good God governing a world of manifest injustice creates an accounting problem. If God is good and sovereign, then unresolved suffering in this world cannot be final. It must be deferred, compensated, reversed or explained away. The afterlife is the balancing ledger that keeps God morally solvent. Structurally Heaven redeems what history destroys, Hell punishes what history rewards, meaning is backdated after the fact. This is not primarily about comfort, it is about protecting God’s goodness from empirical falsification. Without an afterlife God appears either weak, unjust, or nonexistent. With an afterlife God remains all-good, history becomes probationary, not decisive, victims are promised restoration without requiring justice here. This is why Christianity can tolerate centuries of horror without revising its God-image: the real story is postponed. Once Abraxas enters, this entire structure collapses. If God contains both good and evil there is no moral imbalance to correct, there is no cosmic apology forthcoming, thus the afterlife loses its compensatory function. It may still exist, but it can no longer justify anything.

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

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

11 Under privatio boni grace repairs injustice, corrects evil, makes things right. Under Abraxas grace does none of this. So what is grace? Grace becomes non-compensatory interruption. Not “this suffering will be redeemed” but “despite everything, consciousness is given again.” Grace is not justice, not fairness, not repair, but unowed continuation, appearing as insight that arrives without merit, restraint that arises without command, meaning that persists without guarantee, the refusal to collapse when collapse is cheaper. Grace does not vindicate the victims, does not punish the perpetrators, does not justify creation – it allows the work to continue anyway. This is why grace in this ontology must come from beyond Abraxas – not as a better god, but as a non-totalizable source. Not a moral God, not a good God, but a non-identical remainder that Abraxas cannot absorb. This preserves humility (no moral alibi), responsibility (no erasure), mercy (without metaphysical excuse). Grace becomes permission to remain human in an unjust totality. That is radically different from salvation.

12 The best version of their argument is as follows (because arguments should be grappled with steel-manned, not straw-manned): (1) Reality is structurally predatory. (2) Life requires killing life. (3) The Golden Rule is metaphysically impossible. (4) Therefore, innocence is an illusion. (5) Given this, moral asymmetry is inevitable. (6) Better to align consciously with power than be crushed by it. Yahweh provides a framework where predation is authorized, hierarchy is sanctified, obedience replaces guilt, and weakness is not romanticized. From this view, Abraxas looks naïve because it removes moral cover, refuses teleological justification, and asks individuals to carry unbearable weight. This is a serious argument. Where I part ways is here: Yahweh makes predation morally coherent. Abraxas makes predation existentially expensive. Yahweh says: “You are right because God wills it.” Abraxas says: “You may do it, but you will become smaller.” That difference is everything.

13 Jasun Horsley argues that humans behave better when they believe morality is externally grounded, the loss of “objective moral reality” historically correlates with collapse, and therefore such removal is dangerous regardless of philosophical elegance. His orientation prioritizes containment with metrics of social stability, ethical guardrails, historical pattern, and he fears mass destabilization, license, collapse, concluding that some form of objective moral grounding is functionally necessary. His is an argument about civilizational risk management and I don’t disagree with him, but this is a different project. I prioritize coherence with alignment between lived experience and highest-order belief, fear psychic falsity, projection, and internal contradiction, and conclude that false moral grounding corrodes consciousness even if it stabilizes systems. These are not refutable positions, just different failure-mode optimizations. He is guarding collective behavior, I am diagnosing psychic structure – the tension between those layers is not resolvable without choosing which risk you’re willing to bear.

14 Tolerance for abstraction, comfort with paradox, low need for social reassurance, high cognitive conscientiousness, high openness and low agreeableness, low suggestibility to authority, high internal constraint satisfaction. Historical figures with this temperament include Jung, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, various gnostics, and non-teleological metaphysicians.

This essay examines the theological dead-end created by the privatio boni model, in which evil is reduced to absence and God remains wholly good by definition. Jung’s system is presented as a radical alternative: a metaphysics in which opposites coinhabit the divine, the Shadow belongs to God as much as to man, and consciousness arises only through the crucifixion-tension of those poles. By reintegrating evil into the God-image through Abraxas, Jung resolves the logical contradictions and psychic distortions produced by the unstable, all-good God thesis.

Welcome back. In this post I would like to discuss Jung’s gnostic cosmology. Before getting into its structure, it’s worth saying what this piece is. Most of the recent posts have been phenomenological – written from inside the field of living, tracing the felt psychic pressure points, the contradictions, the ruptures. This one is different: it’s an attempt to articulate the architecture those experiences revealed, like a map assembled after the fact once the terrain had already rearranged me. What follows is that map, in its current form, which is always subject to future clarifications and revisions.

First, a note on “gnosticism”. Gnosticism is an umbrella term meaning a whole variety of things to different people which are often conflicting, overbroad, and used as a smear term against things the wielder doesn’t like, so one should be careful about how one uses it. Here, “gnosticism” means insight or knowledge gained which leads one to understand that this world isn’t what it seems, that this world is steeped in philosophical pessimism – one is either striving after objects or bored, nothing lasts forever, the structure of reality is based on predator/prey dynamics (one must consume other living creatures in order to live) so it’s impossible to meet the standards of the Golden Rule, and living is pain – and that understanding and acceptance of this is, in a sense, salvific.

Now, under the traditional gnostic conception this reality was created by a malevolent or bumbling Demiurge, who was born of Sophia / wisdom, and who has lower level Archons who do his bidding (discussed here and here). There’s a whole detailed emanation structure which I don’t find to be particularly insightful. The Demiurge wishes to torture the God souls within each of us as he strives to become God himself (he can’t), and he and his archons desire to keep humanity locked in a prison of ignorance as they continue their torture. The idea for traditional gnostics was to realize and understand this setup and then to materially withdraw from the world, to focus on one’s individual connection to the Godhood and not to feed the Demiurge or archons one’s attention.

This perspective, though, is not Carl Jung’s perspective, which surprised me when I read his Answer to Job after gnostic scholar Stephan Hoeller called him the greatest modern gnostic. I did a post on it which you can read here where I struggled to resolve the discrepancies between the traditional gnostic perspective vs. Jung’s, which was so alien that I am still grappling with it today. Yet I am coming to understand his approach not just intellectually but also phenomenologically, and it is such a radical departure from normal understandings that it deserves to be grappled with in a deep and sustained way.

To start with, let’s discuss humanity’s understanding of the God image. Under Jung’s conception, we cannot perceive God itself; rather, we have an image in our head of what God is, and this image evolves over time (and is, in his opinion and my own, impacted by astrological ages – i.e. under Taurus the God image was the earth deities, under Aries the God image involved warrior solar Gods, under Pisces it was Christ, and under Aquarius, which we are entering now, it is the water bearer). During the Christian aeon the Western conception of God involved the privatio boni, where all good was assigned to God and all evil was deemed to be a deprivation of God – the “good” was emanating from the Godhood into the darkness of nothingness and evil, basically. (The privatio boni is related to Plato’s idea of forms, where the forms of perfect good exist in the nether and the materialization of forms into particulars is always deficient – what is the perfect form of feces or a cannibal, though? There’s no reason why a perfect form has to be in relation to good, which Plato ignores). So under this conception people wanted to be associated with “good” in order to connect to God through the Church as intermediary, hoping to go to Heaven after death, and they suppressed their darkness or evil into the unconscious – because to acknowledge it would have meant grappling with one’s own evil, which would then impact one’s conception of God as all good and of the traditional understanding of Heaven and Hell.

The problem is that when the unacknowledged shadow of our personalities is suppressed, it bleeds out unconsciously into our lives in ways we cannot control or predict, often with devastating consequences. This applies both on an individual level and on a collective level (the Other as evil and must be destroyed, but the Other is often our projections of our own shadow side). This isn’t to argue that the God image in prior aeons was perfect; rather, the evolution of the God image is a result of the prior aeon’s God image deficiencies (and there are always deficiencies, because we are limited and finite beings) – in the Age of Aries, for example, those who were conquered or victims of the various manifestations of the sun God, whether Zeus or Yahweh, had a very rough go of things – it was very hard to live as conquered with no rights or inherent value or dignity, which then led to ressentiment and why Christianity caught on so readily, because it gave value to those suffering low class masses who otherwise had none.

Going back to the privatio boni, there is no way of dissolving our inherent evil, but this isn’t because of Original Sin – instead, it is because in this reality everything is defined by its opposite. There can be no good without evil, light without darkness, happiness without sadness, life without death. Good and evil, matter and spirit, love and hatred, greed and asceticism, short term versus long term, light and darkness, persona vs shadow, masculine vs feminine, rational/scientific vs irrational/spiritual, action vs. reflection, justice vs. mercy, order vs. chaos, hope vs. lucidity, these terms only make sense in terms of their opposites.1 Each of these energies is defined as a spectrum with its opposite (thesis/antithesis), and pushed to an extreme an energy will often flip into its opposite, a concept called enatiodromia. The idea is that these opposite energies are what powers reality itself, it serves as the driving force behind the will which seeks to resolve the pain of contradiction2, and because God is an infinite being – outside of space and time and yet permeating every aspect of it, not pantheism but panentheism – it means that God himself is the ultimate unity of opposites. The myth of the Fall, then, is the myth of a descent from the unity of opposites to a realm of split opposites. This perspective can be looked at from an apophatic (via negativa) angle: knowing or describing God by negation – saying what God is not, and he is not any one side of the opposites, or it can be looked at from a cataphatic (via positiva) angle: knowing or describing God by affirmation – saying what God is using positive statements, as the ultimate unity of opposites.

This is a conception of God that Jung called Abraxas in his Liber Novus, and it is a horrifying concept: God as not just all good but all good and all evil, everything – not a trinity but a quaternity: the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and Satan. What does Abraxas lack under this conception? Under this conception Abraxas lacks consciousness, because consciousness only arises from split opposites – he lacks a limited standpoint from which the opposites are not reconciled but felt as torment and therefore known. Abraxas is part of the pleroma, which is a space where the opposites are not yet differentiated, although Abraxas is also separate from the pleroma because of his action and effectiveness. This is what humanity is for, humanity’s role – and all living creatures, as there is a God spark within everything – it is God observing himself from a limited vantage point, with consciousness, which then adds to God’s infinity by increasing its own consciousness which it would otherwise lack. Under this conception everything that mankind or living creatures do adds to its infinity, no matter how good or how bad – which is horrifying, but it renders the problem of evil livable without moral falsification (grimly) which so insistently rears its head under the privatio boni.

This framework does not license indifference, cruelty, or despair. It removes guarantees, not responsibility. If anything, it intensifies responsibility by stripping away metaphysical consolation. Under Abraxas, no act is erased, no suffering is retroactively redeemed, and no injustice is cosmically compensated. What remains is consciousness itself – fragile, costly, and contingent – and the task of sustaining it without appeal. The refusal to collapse into predation or withdrawal is not obedience to a moral law, but fidelity to the very consciousness that makes meaning possible.

Something critical is lost when this all-good God collapses: Abraxas does not merely resolve the problem of evil; he exacts a cost. That cost is hope. Under the privatio boni, suffering is implicitly provisional: it is either punishment, test, or deprivation awaiting correction. Under Abraxas, suffering loses that narrative alibi. It is no longer justified by goodness, nor redeemed by outcome. It simply is.

This is why Abraxas is more terrifying than atheism. Atheism denies meaning and leaves rebellion intact. Abraxas preserves meaning while stripping it of moral reassurance. Everything that happens – noble or monstrous – adds equally to the fullness of being. God is not moving history toward the good; he is metabolizing experience toward totality. From this perspective, there is no promise that individuation alleviates pain, only that it renders pain conscious.

This represents a catastrophic blow to the human economy of hope. The crucifixion of opposites is no longer a passage toward resolution but the condition of consciousness itself. One does not individuate in order to escape contradiction; one individuates in order to endure it without falsification. Any spirituality that promises otherwise is quietly reintroducing the all-good God through the back door.

Under Jung’s conception3, then, it is our task as humans to try to resolve the contradictions within ourselves – pulled endlessly between competing energies, it is as if we are all Christ on the cross, crucified between the opposites. As Jung wrote in his diaries as discussed by Hoeller, “You must be in the middle of life, surrounded by death on all sides. Stretched out, like one crucified, you hang in him, the fearful, the overpowering.” To Jung (and to me), one simply can’t pick a polarity with our ego; rather, the idea is to hold the opposites consciously, to feel the crucifying energy of it, and if we hold it for long enough what he called the transcendent function will occur – where an intuition deep within ourselves will point to the answer provisionally, which comes from outside or inside of ourselves, not from the ego, and the result of which is often surprising. To do this process over and over again throughout life is the individuation process, where we become more of ourselves, and it never ends, a circumambulation around the center of the Self. The idea is to acknowledge Abraxas – one can’t escape from him, he will find us as he likes – but also to individuate away from him toward our own north star, hinting at a figure even beyond Abraxas, beyond the unity of opposites themselves – something totally unknowable.4 The one thing we possess which Abraxas doesn’t, consciousness, allows us to reflect on and even judge creation in a way that he himself is not able to do.

When one understands this world as conflicting opposites, that our goal is to hold them without collapsing into one polarity and to allow the transcendent function to decide courses of action, that higher level spirituality involves the unity of opposites, problems take on a much more multi-dimensional tone; inputs become also-and instead of either-or, because an issue can be hit on any number of ways along the polarity of the opposite energies. When one begins to see how many different ways a problem can be looked at, one may enter a field of what Jung described as numinosity – as I wrote in a Note, “This is what Jung called a numinous field, where the boundaries between psyche and metaphysics collapse. This is experiencing the psyche as alive. Living systems are ambiguous by nature; dead systems are not. The inner world is the place where biology, psyche, myth, physics, metaphysics, memory, destiny, symbol, and meaning all collapse into one undifferentiated experiential field. The ego wants to label it. The Self does not care – it operates regardless of what label one gives it. The deeper truth is that the process of individuation reshapes one’s interiority by something mysterious whose nature exceeds these categories. The ambiguity is the mark of authenticity. If it were clean, literal, and easily defined, it would be ideology, not transformation.”

Under this conception, the “evil” which has been suppressed in the Age of Pisces and projected outwards unconsciously and uncontrollably may now be integrated with the hope of approaching wholeness, which is what God is – a whole and complete being, minus consciousness anyway. Instead of withdrawing from material reality into asceticism, the idea is to engage meaningfully with reality with the hope of approaching wholeness in our lives – a critical difference which sets Jungian thought apart from historical gnosticism. There are two possible uses of the insight that evil belongs within the God-image: the powerful use it to justify asymmetry (“eat or be eaten”), but the individual may use it to dissolve the illusion that anyone can claim moral authority over another – as we are all crucified between the opposites along our unique journeys with the Self as mediator. Once evil is acknowledged as coextensive with the divine polarity, the old binaries can’t do their work anymore. They still exist, but the psychic charge is gone. The crucifixion between opposites becomes an interior fact rather than a story told about someone else. And the moment that happens, the world’s standard narratives – moral, political, eschatological – lose their ability to conscript the psyche.

This is where I see the God image heading in Aquarius, even though we are still in a centuries-long transition period. If there is any consolation in this view, it is not redemptive. It lies only in the recognition that the apparent madness of the world is structurally intelligible, that the contradictions are not accidental, and that consciousness itself arises from their sustained tension. Beyond that, there remains only the possibility – not the promise – that the Self is not identical with the totality of this system, and that what occasionally orients us does not originate from within the economy of opposites at all. Ultimately I, like Edinger, think that Jung’s conception of the individuation process, of Abraxas, and of the critical importance of the unity of opposites may make him perceived historically as the first modern being of the new age.

Lastly, I am aware this post raises urgent questions that demand answers: If Abraxas is indifferent, why sustain differentiation at all? If good and evil are ontologically co-equal, why prefer one over the other? What prevents this from licensing predation? What happens to Heaven, Hell, and cosmic justice? What kind of psyche can metabolize this without collapse? Who is this for, and who should never approach it? I will address these and others directly in the next post, including the framework’s strengths, weaknesses, costs, and the narrow band of people for whom this God image becomes necessary rather than destructive.

Thanks for reading.

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1 Even the distinction between conscious and unconscious belongs to this structure, though consciousness itself arises only when that distinction is lived from a limited standpoint rather than unified in the whole.

2 Hans Eysenck, who at the time of his death was the most cited living psychologist in the peer-reviewed scientific literature and whose research regularly contradicted the establishment and who I covered previously, and Ernst Junger – discussed here – both commented how they were crucified by opposing energies. Here’s Eysenck:

As an exile I ceased to identify with German culture and became a true European, with firm roots in English and French culture as well as German….I also became well acquainted with American history and culture, so that I feel at home in all four cultures without feeling attached particularly to any of them.

There is, of course, as always, a negative as well as a positive side. He who has four mother countries has none; being fluent in three languages I had no true ‘mother tongue’. We all long to have a ’local habitation and a name’; having more than one means we do not have a special one to call our own. To the English I will never be English; to the Germans I will never be German. In France and the USA I will always be a foreigner. Do I feel German, or English, or what? Thee answer is that I feel what I am: an exile with no true home.

And here’s Junger:

When viewed politically, man is almost always a mixtum compositum [hodge-podge]. Time and place exert huge demands upon him.

In this sense, when seen from the ancestral and feudal perspective, I am a Guelph, whereas my concept of the state is Prussian. At the same time, I belong to the German nation and my education makes me a European, not to say a citizen of the world. In periods of conflict like [World War 2], the internal gears seem to grind against each other, and it is hard for an observer to tell how the hands are set. Were we to be granted the good fortune to be guided by higher powers, these gears would turn in harmony. Then our sacrifices would make sense. Thus we are obligated to strive for the greater good, not for our present benefit, but for reasons of our mortuary practices.

3 Jung’s conceptions of Abraxas arise from his understanding of the human psyche; he was ambivalent about whether these concepts might extend beyond them, arguing he could only comment on the state of the evidence presented to him. In public comments he always insisted he was an empirical scientist focused on categorizing phenomenon, yet his Liber Novus and Seven Sermons to the Dead betrays a belief that may have extended beyond that. Jung was very sensitive toward criticism that he was founding a new religious movement, which, in the early 20th century focused on science and dismissive of religion, would have rendered him summarily dismissed as a crank. He stayed solidly behind, never crossing that line, although he approached it in old age with Answer to Job and his autobiography – and even if he had made the leap beyond it, he believed he would be considered a prophet and worshipped by his followers, which was (correctly) exactly the opposite of his intention – the individuation process was and is about discovering ourselves, not blindly following anyone else. This is why he famously said, “My grandfather, Carl Gustav Jung, founded a home for mentally retarded children. Now I am founding another one (the Zurich Institute), for mentally retarded adults [i.e. Jungian therapists].”

I will cover this in a future post, but I believe that the Gods never disappeared – rather, they have been reborn within the human psyche as these competing and oppositional energies, and it is up to us as humans to navigate between them. I think the modern era may be much more receptive toward such a message than in Jung’s time.

4 Jung in Liber Novus: “You have in you the one God, the wonderfully beautiful and kind, the solitary, starlike, unmoving, he who is older and wiser than the father, he who has a safe hand, who leads you among all the darknesses and death scares of dreadful Abraxas. He gives joy and peace, since he is beyond death and beyond what is subject to change. He is no servant and no friend of Abraxas.” But this passage reintroduces a softened, internalized form of privatio boni – Jung is attempting to re-stabilize the psyche after Abraxas without collapsing back into moral dualism. He installs a counterweight as a psychologist because Abraxas alone is metabolically unbearable for most psyches. But this is weak; instead, my conception of the Self is as an integrator toward deeper self-understanding and interiority, connection to deeper aspects of oneself via intuition outside of one’s ego choice, and which is often surprising. One may choose to trust the Self, within reason, because the alternative is ego identification/ego inflation and an inability to choose between infinitely contradictory opposites. It is possible that the Self lies beyond the infinite contradictions as a result, but it is not clear, nor do I want this ambiguity resolved – it is better as an indeterminate guiding star, because labeling and classifying it would lead to dogma and ideology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading, and see here for Part 2.

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

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

Welcome back.

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

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

Let’s delve into the tetrad.

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The Tetrad: McLuhan’s Fourfold Lens

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

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

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

Using the example of radio:

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

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

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

Television

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

The Internet

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

LLMs:

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

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

Thanks for reading.

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

But there is a paradox:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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King’s alter-ego

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

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

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

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The Running Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Comparing Benjamin to others

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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